Subject Matters

Tom Foremski continues his brilliant posts @ Silicon Valley Watcher about new Internet era. Read how the Internet 2.0 damages media business:

With a common foundation of communications technologies, the internet plus the web browser became a fantastic publishing/media platform.

And it is a disruptive technology, but it is a disruptive media technology. The web browser allows for cheap and easy publication of pages of content, and their distribution.

The train wreck is occurring in the printed media sector (and soon—in the older “new” media sector–the online news magazines formed 5 to 10 years ago.)

Layoffs continue to be announced almost every quarter by newspaper groups. My profession has probably suffered the worst of any sector since the dotcom dotbust…

…Internet 1.0 produced media technologies that continue to disrupt print media, and that disruption will accelerate in Internet 2.0 because of the new media technologies such as blogging, wikis, and related technologies/tools/applications.

Internet 2.0 media technologies provide a two-way web, a readable and write-able web, as some call it. (Or if I were Dr Dolittle, a PushMe-PullMe type of web.)

Paul Graham published great essay called How to Start a Startup:

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that’s kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

It is full of practical advice of techy person who jumped into internet business. Especially I liked this paragraph:

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder. But you don’t want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo. Partly because you don’t need a lot of people at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you’ll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. You don’t want mere voting; you need unanimity.

Tom Foremski writes at Silicon Valley Watcher:

There is a new kind of dotcom company that will emerge during Internet 2.0—this current and very distinct emerging phase of the Internet. I’m not sure what to call the new dotcom but I know what it is…

…The first rule of the newrules enterprise is that it is new, brand spanking new.

The second rule is it is staffed by a small group of executives that know the most efficient business processes for what the venture will produce.

The third rule is to stick as much open source/industry platform software and hardware onto the business processes as you can, creating a highly automated highly-efficient business venture with virtually free IT.

The fourth rule is to use as much web services IT as possible.

The fifth rule is you do not use venture capital–you and four others throw your credit cards into a bowl and work free for six-months to create the nucleus of the venture. It’s an atomic ventures world. It’s the $40k startup. When IT, and other infrastructure costs are so cheap and available to everyone then knowledge capital becomes the competitive differentiator—who is on your team.

The sixth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.

The seventh rule is the venture does not go public, it stays private. It will have private investors/owners and those investors would be paid in dividends. By staying private newrules enterprises are a blackbox corporation. Competitors cannot peek inside because it is private and thus cannot benchmark their business model against it.

The eighth rule of the newrules enterprise is that there will be a lot of intellectual property that is not patented but is kept secret.

The ninth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.

The tenth rule, and the most important, is that the newrules enterprise uses blogging techniques and technologies to market research/help produce and sell products and services that near-perfectly match the needs of their customer communities.