Venture Geek

I am told I have the distinction of being the first person to blog about the fantastic (and free) service OpenDNS (created by the inimitable David Ulevitch). If you aren’t using OpenDNS, you should be — it will make your Internet browsing faster and more secure.

Tonight I heard about yet another reason to be a fan of OpenDNS: shortcuts. Shortcuts in OpenDNS allow you to, for instance, set your OpenDNS account to send you to the Wall Street Journal web site when you type “wsj” into your browser. You can also set up shortcuts that take an input — for instance, I have the shortcut “domain” set up to check for the availability of any domain (where I type the domain I want to check for after I type “domain”). I have used shortcuts in Saft for a while, but I am often using several different browsers on more than one computer throughout the day, so it’s great to now have this functionality built right into my DNS.

I think the shortcut feature could really be interesting going forward if the OpenDNS folks allow people to expand it to a richer command-line interface ala yubnub because it’s “right there” in your network no matter what browser you are using.

I wrote last August about the launch of Yardbarker, a social-media sports site created by my friends Pete Vlastelica and Jack Kloster (along with Jack’s brother Jeff and Mark Johns). This week Yardbarker announced additional financing from such notables as Russell Siegelman, Ron Conway, Steve Blank, and several others.

I have worked with Pete and Jack on a previous startup effort, and I can say that Yardbarker is a business that comes from the heart. They were kind enough to let me write a case about their very early days as part of my post-graduate gig at UC Berkeley this year, so I can’t help but give them a little link love.

I have been spending a bit more time on Facebook lately, mostly out of curiosity — every time I go there I feel old. I seem to be on the cusp of the Facebook generational divide, and that seems to be mostly because I happened to have been back in school over the last couple years. If I had been out of school I may not even be in the gray area.

The Facebook generational divide can be summed up easily: If you are in college or graduated college in the last two years you are very likely to have a Facebook account. If you graduated college more than two years ago you are, on average, not that likely to have a Facebook account. Now, this is based on purely anecdotal evidence, and it seems to be changing a bit as Facebook gets so much attention in the “mass” media.

In my world, LinkedIn is much more popular — on Facebook I currently have 9 “friends”, but on LinkedIn I have over 200 contacts. And that’s not because I haven’t bothered to connect with those same 191 people on Facebook — most of them simply aren’t there. But, for the people I know under 25 or who are still in school, Facebook is an integral part of their daily lives. When I look up my college or my high school or other interest groups I might associate with, the vast majority are people basically of college age. Even in my MBA class, only a handful of my class of 2006 classmates seem to be on Facebook, but nearly all of them are on LinkedIn. But, when I look up the MBA classes still in school today, the numbers go way up — that single year makes a huge difference in Facebook adoption, and that’s why I feel I’m on the cusp of the generational divide.

The fact that all of those people are unlikely to just jettison their Facebook accounts after they graduate is a big part of why the valuation of Facebook is often quoted as a ten figure number. To me, the question is whether Facebook can maintain its dominance as THE place to be for the college and high school crowd, or whether it will suffer from the all-to-common issue of the next generation wanting something fresh and new.

The concept of population pyramids is how I think about this. I first learned about population pyramids in a geography class in college (yeah, they actually taught a geography class in college). Here is what a population pyramid looks like:

In brief, a population pyramid shows the distribution of age groups inside a broader population, where the two sides represent males and females. The question is can the Facebook graph stay triangular (or least rectangular), growing the total population over time, or will it look more like a diamond, as the next generation falls off in their adoption in favor of the next new thing?

I say, let a billion diamonds bloom.

There is a broader question here of whether the low barriers to entry that made Facebook possible in the first place will continue on the Internet, or whether increasing expectations of the kinds of experiences we expect combined with any number of market-based or regulatory hurdles make it tough for the next group of kids with an idea and a computer to create something millions of people use. The whole Net neutrality debate plays into that question in a big way, but that’s another post for another time.

Two friends of mine, Jack Kloster and Pete Vlastelica, have been working their asses off (along with their excellent team) to start Yardbarker, and today they went to their first public beta. I have been an occasional advisor to Pete and Jack, and I am writing a case about them for the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, so I have to give some link love.

Yardbarker is a social media site for sports enthusiasts — “Sports 2.0″ as they like to say (though, I suggested they don’t say that, but what can you do?). The site is pretty slick, and given that it was built almost entirely by one person in a very small number of months is doubly impressive. I’m going long on Pete and Jack and their team — one to watch….

Sphere is a relatively new service for searching and understanding what’s going on in the blogosphere. Now, you might say that the world hardly needed Yet Another Blog Search Engine — and in many ways you’d be right. But, Sphere has some interesting twists, most notably they seem to focus on notions of time — the ability to get up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening and search based on time frames.

I have no affiliation to Sphere, but they recently won me over with some excellent service, so I figured I’d share that story.

One of the features of Sphere I like is the custom RSS feed — I can set up a standing query and get a feed of results for that query. Thus, I can work it into my existing habits of RSS consumption. In my case, I was curious to know when people blog about Nicenet, the small non-profit I started many years ago with my friend Ben. Nicenet is a side project for us, but it’s a labor of love, and it grows purely on word of mouth — so, you can see why I might be curious to see when and how it gets mentioned on various blogs.

But, the custom feed I set up for Nicenet was getting an inordinate amount of spam. And worse, it was all porn spam. RSS spam — what is our world coming to? Anyway, needless to say it was upsetting to click through to a site thinking that some teacher was praising our little pet project only to be presented with hardcore action shots (and my wife was left wondering what exactly it was that I was doing on my computer that evening). Now, why porn sites are using the term “Nicenet” in order to attract people to their site is the subject of another post, but it pisses me off.

So, I wrote to Sphere. Not only did they get right back to me, they hooked me up with their experimental anti-spam filtering feeds, where you can set how strict you want your filtering to be. That feed got rid of almost all of the sites promising me hot stud-on-stud and barnyard action (I can’t wait to see the kinds of new Google searches that turn up this blog with that sentence on the page).

Of course, small companies are more able to address individual complaints because they don’t have to scale to thousands of such complaints. But, it’s surprisingly hard to even get a response to a query out of many web companies, so it’s always nice to see a new company take the time to give personal attention to an end user, and I think it’s worth giving a virtual pat on the back with some link love.

3 years ago I was pointed to EveryDNS.net, and I have been a big fan ever since. EveryDNS is a free service for domain holders to use to host their DNS entries (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, and you care, read about it here, but basically it’s a necessary part of having an Internet domain that, absent something like EveryDNS is either going to cost you money at a domain registrar or will require that you have access to your own DNS server). Not only is EveryDNS damn useful, it really captures the spirit of the Internet (or, at least, the spirit of the Internet I remember from the early-mid 90s).

Well, the founder of EveryDNS, David Ulevitch, is at it again. This time with a new company called OpenDNS. The service is currently in a closed beta, and David asked that we not spill the beans just yet, but you can sign up to be notified when they launch. If you’ve ever messed with the DNS settings on your computer you probably can see where he’s going…

By the way, David Ulevitch and David Weekly (who is no fan of blogs but does run a great service called PBwiki) started the California Community Colocation Project, a free colocation hosting service for non-profits that Nicenet, the small non-profit that I started, has been using for a few years, so I have lots to be thankful for.

I had the pleasure of visiting Onomy Labs today, as part of a small group of folks from the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club (of which I am an alumnus). Thanks to Seth Familian for hooking it up.

Onomy was born out of Xerox PARC — when they were downsizing a group of researchers looking at interaction design left to start their own thing, and Onomy Labs is the result. Chief Technical Onomist, Scott Minneman showed us three demos of the kind of work Onomy does. The first was the Tilty Table, which provides a unique tactile user interface experience. They shine an image onto a table top, and you can then pan and zoom on that image (in the demo we saw they were all birds-eye images of cities) by tilting and twisting the table. A+ on the wow factor here, though the real-world usability was questionable for any application that isn’t built around showing off that wow factor. But, we talked about how you could layer on other UI metaphors, like some kind of touch screen to make the whole thing more versatile (and it would definitely provide an awesome experience for the right kind of games). The next thing we looked at was The Interactive Digital Wall. The example they have in their office is one used at TED in 2003. Picture a wall, with, in this case, the various days of a conference and the names of the speakers on those days. Now, picture a large monitor (in this case a plasma TV turned to be in portrait perspective) that rolls on rails along the length of the wall. As you move the monitor along the wall, the content you see on the screen reflects what’s on the wall behind it (here’s a picture of what I’m talking about). Last time I was at The Tech Museum (about a year ago) they had one of Onomy’s walls that had two dimensions of movement of the monitor. The last demo was a rig that could “read” text out loud using cameras, OCR, and speech synthesis, but it was all put into a character of a dog — the idea was to help kids learn reading, I think. The point was that it was the total design of the system, made to appeal to a particular audience rather than just the raw underlying technology, which is often boring at best and intimidating at worst for most non-geeks. In short, Onomy’s core strength is imagining and building unique interaction pieces for museums, businesses, and, well, anyone else with such interests. Pretty cool stuff.

Onomy is a small shop, and they seem to like it that way. Their average project sounds like it’s in the mid-five-figures range, and they are only 7 people on staff. But, with high-profile appearances at places like TED and the upcoming Foo Camp, I would look for Onomy to continue to build a strong reputation with lots of influential people, and hopefully that should bring them much success.