Like many entrepreneurs, I’ve been faced with the unsurmountable odds one always bumps into when trying to get a new venture off the ground and, like most startup founders, I’ve presented a rosy picture of of how my company was doing when others might have thought it wasn’t doing well. And like a few successful entrepreneurs, I’ve managed to get through the tough spots and get to the point where things are starting to look up again. And that was just on Monday… between 4pm and 415pm…

The world of startups is one of quick ups and downs. The wins, the loses, all seem to be tremendous at the time and all are handled in a consistent way, along with the consistent belief that there are no barriers, only problems that haven’t been fixed yet.

And the kind of optimism that comes along with this idea that no matter how unsurmountable a problem can seem, it can be figured out is what drives most hackers.

Optimized optimism

I call the phenomenon optimized optimism, which I would define as the most efficient way to handle a problem being that you hang on to the belief that the problem can be solved. For example, many have often derided Steve Jobs’ ability to will things into reality as being part of a “reality distortion field” but the truth is that the field may exist and may be powered by a willingness to let go of traditional bounds and estimate that whatever is keeping an obstacle in place is the ability to find a solution that will help one move the obstacle.

Having worked in both the large corporate world and the startup one, I’ve noticed a substantial difference between the two in addressing an obstacle. People in large corporation look at obstacles as things that lower the probability of success of an effort. People in startups look at obstacles as opportunities to create barrier to entry for future competitors. Same object, different frame.

The result of such different viewpoints is that a large corporation will worry about protecting itself against any risk and, as thus, avoid exploiting opportunities they could easily exploit.

Big corps vs. startups

That thought first came to me as I was discussing the passage of the recent JOBS act, which could make raising money through crowdsourcing substantially easier, with someone who’s considering building a property in the space. His question was whether he should go to a big bank and build it with them? While I spent the better part of the last decade building innovative technology businesses within big banks, my recommendation was to actually go out and raise money to build things on his own. The reason is that it appears the larger, more fundamental disruption generally happens outside of established players. If you look at most consumer-facing innovation to happen in the financial space, the vast majority happened from startups that did not see limitations in the space and exploited areas banks were afraid to exploit because of the potential risks assumed with such ventures.

The same is true in most spaces: large media companies have seen new entrants disrupt them with lower cost structure around consumer-generated or pro-sumer content. Telephony and video providers (ie. cable and satellite TV) have seen the emergence of the VoIP and online video on demand  companies that disrupted their business not from the internal division of their competitors but from new entrants in the markets. Big box stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, were not undone by their traditional competitors but by players in the online space that offered similar wares delivered to your house.

I suspect that if you look through the history of disruption, you will find that seldom does disruption come from incumbents. So why is that the case? I’d warrant that the main reason is that once it grows big, a large company worries more about protecting the core that allowed it to grow big than displacing it. This is why Microsoft has had a hard time untying itself from windows; why Google has a hard time untying itself from adwords advertising; why Zynga has a hard time untying itself from Facebook; and why Facebook will have a hard time untying itself from social when the next thing comes up.

To hold on to your monopoly means that anything that could possibly loosen it is seen as a threat and not an opportunity. And anyone that hacks around to poke hole into the monopoly is seen as a potential enemy. By comparison, the startup mind says that poking at existing challenges may be the best way to find a better approach. For example, looking at the holes in a dam, a startup person may think of a different way to hold water while a large corporation person may feel that the loss of water is acceptable and thus nothing should be done.

Is it age?

Many people have attributed startup success as being correlated with age: the younger the founder, the higher the chances a startup will succeed. Many attribute the boundary breaking to youthful behavior that leverage its lack of understanding of a field to look at it with different eyes, and thus fail to understand limits that may exist in that business.

But looking at companies large and small, age may have little to do with optimism. Steve Jobs biggest impact was with products he developed after his return at Apple, in his early 40s; one of the most disruptive companies today is Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, is currently 48. And some of the common traits one might find among them include intellectual curiosity that is satisfied through playing with their own products and an uncompromising optimism that some may see as naive but that ultimately leads to finding new doors to new markets where others have only seen walls.

I am pretty sure that Steve Jobs was aware that limitation existed in the markets he was targeting; and I’m sure Jeff Bezos has been told countless times that certain things he tried to do were just not achievable (eg. Amazon getting into the consumer electronics business by manufacturing its own kindle device; or Amazon getting away from its retail background by offering cloud hosting long before anyone else did; or Amazon getting in the tablet market were it was clear that it would be defeated by Apple).

Where others see the impossible, the optimist sees a new reconfigured world and that has nothing to do with age.

What about death?

Whenever the idea of pushing boundaries is brought up, the counter-argument is that certain things in the world cannot be bent the way I described. The example most often given is that, for example, death, cannot be overcome. But here, once again, it comes down to a matter of problem definition. Death may be the end of life (or depending on your religious beliefs, a phase shift from mortal life to something else) and, as such, represents something final. However, what if the focus stopped being on death but started being on life extension?

How long does someone live? In the west, a couple of centuries ago, reaching into 40 might have been considered old (interestingly, the distribution curve seem to point to people either dying relatively young or living into their 60s or 70s). Today, 40 is considered mid-life, with a large majority of people in developed countries living into their 60s or later. Diseases that were once fatal can now easily be cured, thanks to advance in medicine. So the frame of when death happens has shifted as time as evolved and the idea of someone living into their 50s was replaced by the idea of someone living in their 60s, which is replaced by the idea of people living into their 70s and so on (an interesting side note on this is that retirement age of 60–65 set by most governments were assumed as a benefit that would not cost that much as only a relatively small portion of the population would live to collect, creating the current entitlement crisis for a lot of countries).

So one could argue that life was extended, by almost double, over the last century. And, based on that assumption, one could assume that there may be ways, as yet undiscovered, to double the length of life over the next century. Under such a new model, one where people live to 140, death at 80 could be rare and thus, the concept of death has to evolve. In other words, it becomes a problem that hasn’t been fixed yet.

When and how, not if

Ultimately, I suspect that the reason hackers, and other optimists always succeed is that their worldview is ruled by when, not if. Too many people create conditional statements before making the leap into areas that they are not comfortable with. Their lives are dictated by a world of “if this happens, then I’ll be able to follow that passion” and they end up dying with many regrets, wrapped in “if I had done this thing, then my life would have turned out differently.” The truth is that IF is one of the most destructive word when thinking about one’s future. Try a simple exercise, take something that you want to do if something else happens and change the statement by simply replacing the if with when. All of a sudden, your world stops being about an externally controlled one to an interesting question: How will I make the when happen?

Even something as ridiculous as “if I win the lottery, I will… ” becomes “when I win the lottery, I will…” which then begs the question “how will I win the lottery?” It refocuses one’s energy on bypassing the obstacle instead of leaving it in control of others.

… and a simple recontextualization like that is all one needs to really get moving and changing the world.

So WHEN you decide to change the world, what will you do next?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Optimized optimism. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Methodology

To get at the size of the Facebook credits market, I first pulled the revenue number for non-advertising related revenue from Facebook’s S1 filing. I pulled the user number for Facebook from the same document.

The gaming revenue came from an interesting story on how Android and iOS are beating our traditional game devices as gaming stations.

Gas consumption info from a recent report about wasted energy by the treasury department.

GDP rankings came from the 2011 monetary fund report, as presented on Wikipedia’s list of countries by GDP.

The Empire State building is 1250 feet tall and the Eiffel Tower is 986 feet tall. Apparently, a million dollar stack of $100 bills would be 43 inches tall.  There again, simple arithmetics.

The rest was me just having fun.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Facebook Credits: Living Large. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Let me first say that I would favor his removal for lying. Simply put, there is no wiggle room when someone makes a demonstrably false statement a number of times and evidence that has popped up over the last couple of days has pointed to that being the case. Spoken of more broadly, however, is the question of what lies are.

Who’s lie is it anyways?

Once lesson I learned from the corporate world is that truthful and honest behavior is substantially rarer than one could expect it. I’ve always worked hard to be truthful in my statements, whether they were positive or negative but have been often told that some things are better left unsaid. So if one thinks that an idea is going to fail and can demonstrate how it’s going to fail, that message can only be delivered if the political conditions are right (ie. the messenger is powerful enough to make the comment or is endorsed by people who are and will give him/her coverage). My personal view is that this less-than-forthcoming view of the world is what’s rotting many companies from the inside.

However, what happens when such truths emerge? Are the reason behind something making its way through the public opinion fully clear or are they obscured by other deeper motives. The facts in the Yahoo case seem to point to two different things: it seems pretty clear that Yahoo CEO Scott Thomson is guilty of lying on his resume and in interviews about his background; it also is pretty clear that Dan Loeb, the activist shareholder who first levied the charge, has for a long time looked to get some changes in the way Yahoo is lead so one could argue that his motives are less than pure in exposing this information.

However, the bigger question, and the one that makes this story particularly interesting, is how often does this happen? I’ve encountered tons of resumes over the year that provided not necessarily as big a fib as this but smaller, easily challengeable one. In fact, it seems that over-inflating one’s achievements, whether academic or work-related is that unique talent that is required to get ahead in a number of fields. When working on Wall street, I learned that many people in banking had gotten ahead not on the weight of their deliverables but on their ability to “massage the message.”

A lie is a lie, plain and simple

I’ve often been asked why I still carry my association with Boo.com, one of the biggest failures of the dotcom crash, as a badge of honor. My answer is generally that I want to ensure that people are aware that I’m not infaillible and that I’ve also learned some very hard lessons from the process. The truth is actually a little deeper in that I would not be able to sleep as well as I do if I lied about who I am and what I’ve done.

The path to success is riddled with errors and mistakes but as one moves up the chain, a lot of one’s previous failures get airbrushed and surgically removed. Look at the short biographies most leaders in today’s business, political, sports, or art world and you generally see the picture of an arrow that moves up and to the left, with no in betweens, no setbacks or mistakes made along the way. The truth, however, tends to be substantially more complex: very few people move forward in a perfect path (and no person I’ve ever met has had a perfect career) but few talk about the mistakes or errors they have made. In a way, these are lies of omission and they are a darn shame as they fail to reveal some more important truths about people.

In a time of crisis, the most salient points of individuals come out and the lies that have been told along the way fall off by the wayside, revealing the true nature of the individual. I use to counsel counterparts of mine in Asia, where to admit to a mistake is to lose face, that errors happen and that admission of error does not make you weaker but stronger. When one is forced to admit a mistake, one must look deeply into his/her soul and find the personal reason that has led them astray.

I’ve always been fond of Esther Dyson’s words on mistakes “always make new mistakes.” Implicit in that permission is a willingness to fess-up to the old ones, analyze them and ensure that they are not repeated. But, by contrast, mistakes that are lied about don’t get fixed and sometimes turn into major crises.

A culture of lying

But in our current culture, lies seem to be increasingly accepted and tossed as “honest mistakes”. When the financial crisis happened, many were surprised by the magnitude of the damage that derivatives could do. However, along the way, many in the banking sector knew that CDOs were not a great deal and that someone would eventually be left picking up the pieces. As long as money was being made, however, bringing the risks up was not considered polite conversation and failing to pretend that everything was OK was seen as an unwillingness to be a team player. So small mistakes that could have easily been prevented became big crisis that took us to the brink and left our whole economy in tatters. Should the lies have been accepted? Should the people who were involved in willfully turning their heads the other way be rewarded or punished? To date, the signal we appear to have sent is that the later is OK.

How would we establish a different way? My view, and the view of my co-founder at Keepskor, is that the best way to deal with this is to create a culture of ownership. When one owns the product and company that produces the product, one has a responsibility to ensuring the longer term prosperity of the enterprise and that means highlighting problems before they become crisis and admitting when a mistake is made.

In today’s corporate world, many employees are so disassociated from the actual impact their work has on the company (they do not see rewards if the company does well nor see punishment if the company fails) that they just look out for their own advancement, sometimes taking risks that are dangerous to the ecosystem and often covering up the negative things that have been done. Until that is resolved, we will see more cases like that of Scott Thomson and unless severe punishment is meted out at all organizational levels in the economy for lying, we will continue to encourage the development of a culture of lying. Maybe our industry, the technology industry, as it is assessing greater power over the economy, can start looking at itself and beginning that transformation. If it does, it will impact the world in an even greater way than it has to date and that would be just amazing.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title How to get ahead in business without really lying. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s been almost 20 years since the internet reached the mainstream and while it has been an economic force that has disrupted several industries, its political impact is just starting to have its effect. This week, in New York, Fred Wilson organized a fascinating discussion around hacking society.

The 7 internet principles

Looking through a lot of conversations and efforts by internet activists, one can start discerning common traits, fundamental principles that appear to apply to most causes that have taken hold on the internet. They are

• Technology is the solution: Often underly discussion of the internet as a political force is the view from its supporters that technology is the solution to most of the world’s problems. Techno-utopia runs far as many internet activists see the lack of technology or the lack of transparency provided by technology as the source of most of the world’s ills. This works as a superset of the other principles as the other owns are mostly about protecting the technological underpinnings of the internet.
• Internet sovereignty: For right or wrong, many on the internet look to the internet as its own sovereign body. They see local jurisdictions as not applying to the internet and place servers in location that are more favorable to what they are trying to do. This can be seen, for example, in the Wikileaks efforts and how they argue that, as a publisher located outside the US, they are not under US jurisdiction.
• A common good: This concept is that the internet is a common resource and that governance of the internet, as such, is the responsibility of all parties who have access to it and not necessarily of a central authority. This principle was established by the founders of the internet when they created a technical review model called the RFC (or Request for Comment) which gave right to voice opinion on a new piece of technological infrastructure to anyone who felt they were qualified to do so. The input would then be melded into the final product if there was consensus that it was a valuable one. The same concept can be witnessed in the open source movement, where every contributor is given the same right to submit new additions to a code base.
• Personal actions, collective power: Embedded in much of the internet philosophy is a strong libertarian sense of the power of the individual. As such, suspicion of established command and control structures runs high. This view is however held along with the seemingly contradictory concept of network power, which puts an emphasis on the power of connecting individuals in powerful collectives that can take on individual issues before disbanding and forming in different configurations again when a new issue arises. The power of the network is generally viewed as the glue that ties the internet together and its looseness is viewed as a strategic advantage as it allows for coalition creation and disbanding at a very rapid rate, which then allows for rapid responses to threats.
• KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): To a large extent, the internet population has mostly flexed its muscle when a particular issue threatened it. Groups that have tried to present more than a single pithy message and idea have failed to get any kind of substantial hold in the internet hive mind. This seems to point to internet ideas needing to remain simple when presented instead of being grouped as part of a wider agenda.
• Freedom to communicate: This principle is embedded in the continuous fight over control of access to the internet and to the internet content. It can be framed by discussions such as net neutrality, which looks to ensure that every site or person on the internet is given the same opportunity to express opinions or share information, regardless of their financial weight offline.
• Show me, don’t tell me: There is an old adage among internet circles that “working code wins arguments.” Due to the first principle, there is a fairly large do-it-yourself ethic to the internet and, as a result, a substantial part of gaining trust and establishing thought leadership is to actually do things. When an idea is showcased with working examples already in place, it gains substantially more traction than when it’s talked about as a concept. As a result, there’s a bit of rearview mirror effect when aligning ideas: implement first, then generalize seems to be part of the larger ethos.

Populist movement or Galt’s Gulch?

Starting a couple of years ago, the first major clashes between these internet principles and those of the established world started being felt around the world. Dissidents around the world have increasingly taken to the internet as a way to communicate when the government controls the traditional media. The green revolution in Iran, the arab spring, and many other movements have looked to the internet as an infrastructure that can be used to disrupt and organize. Along the same ways, in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its sub-groups have leveraged many of the internet core philosophical principles and are still working on merging them with some anarchistic ones in an attempt to highlight economic inequality along with a number of other issues that may appeal to more populist individuals.

Meanwhile, the more libertarian strain of internet philosophy has people looking to move more of the economy under internet sovereignty and away from traditional jurisdictions. In a sense, we may look to those individuals as trying to reject some of the ways in which developed countries operate and create their own virtual version of Galt’s Gulch, after the fictional place in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Those two pulls on internet ideology are consistently at odd with each other and help maintain a balance towards the center that allows for attracting more members to it. Whether that balance helps internet philosophy turn into a movement is only a question of time but how that manifestation will turn into a political force is a question that may become central to many elections in the near future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 7 internet political principles. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Signaling: “We’re not sure Android is a critical asset”

Android has had a fantastic run over the last couple of years and was positioned as the best alternative to Apple’s ambitions in the space, which makes recent comments by Google’s new leader somewhat disconcerting.

During this week’s proceedings surrounding Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over use of Java code in Android, Larry Page made a very curious remark: he said he wasn’t sure that Android was a critical asset to Google and saw it as mainly a vehicle to get Google products to run on mobile devices. This was an odd bit of signaling as it seemed to imply that support for Android as a platform is far from guaranteed. As a developer, this could be a cause for substantial concern: if I develop for Android today, what kind of guarantees do I have that the OS will still be supported tomorrow.

We’ve already seen Amazon taking the Android core and turning it into another product (ie. the Kindle Fire). It wouldn’t surprise me if Google’s plans for Motorola were to create a new version of Android that only runs on Motorola devices. If that happens, what would developers who have invested time and effort in the current versions of Android do?

The coming OS war

By contrast, Apple appears to be going all in on iOS, even going as far as bringing iOS features into its traditional computer business. Looking at Apple’s future roadmap, it seems increasingly clear that the company intends to merge iOS and OSX so the same OS runs on all the products it offers and the company is investing heavily on making that merger a reality. Along the way, they are sending a clear signal that iOS is Apple’s platform for the future and a key part of their business.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has always seen its Windows operating system as one of the pillars of its business. With the release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft made it very clear that the operating system they were selling in that space was an important one for them and one that was targeted solely at phones. This allowed them to focus the operating system for a specific kind of use, with a different operating system being available for tablets (the disastrously named Windows RNT). The radical new Metro UI interface they brought to their phones is also slated to make it into desktop version of their flagship operating system as well as into the Xbox interface. This points to Microsoft sharing Apple’s view that a single integrated experience between all operating systems they offer is where the future is.

This clearly sets up the mobile landscape for a repeat of the desktop OS wars of the 1980s/1990s with a key difference. This time, there are two strong players  looking to leverage their position on one end of the spectrum to get a larger slice of the overall pie: Apple will leverage its success in the mobile world to help increase the footprint of its computer offering while Microsoft will come at it in the reverse direction, trying to leverage its desktop footprint to get at the mobile market.

You’re either all in or you’re out

Apple and Microsoft are going all in. Apple will continue to succeed, having developed a fairly strong head start. Meanwhile, Microsoft has tempted others into joining its coalition. On the device end, Nokia has gone all in on the Windows platform, staking its future on its success. The Finnish company know what the mobile game is, as it once was the leader in the space, and now has to prove that its strategy of going all-in with an operating system many thought of as an also-ran will be successful. In a way, the Microsoft Nokia partnership can work as a reminder of the Microsoft Intel partnership of the past, with Microsoft providing software and a partner providing hardware.

Apple’s own Steve Jobs has long seen the world as one where hardware and software practice ought to be integrated along a single stack: his view was always that Apple should produce both the software and hardware to define the complete experience. Over the last year, Microsoft has worked hard with Nokia to develop what amounts to a tight integration with a preferred partner. With few other companies betting the farm on Microsoft’s new OS, this allowed the two partners to stay focused on making the partnership work. Microsoft has also made it clear in its integration guidelines that the user experience (ie. how user interact with their operating system) was something Microsoft controlled, not the hardware manufacturer.

By contrast, Android is now spread across anywhere between a dozen and half a dozen manufacturers, each with a slightly different look and feel. Pick up an Android phone from HTC, Motorola, or Samsung and you end up with experiences that are similar but also not completely alike. In its attempt at domination, Google has focused on the guts of the software but not on how individuals work with it. As a result, Android is the type of operating systems engineers love but the general public tolerates. Meanwhile, the inconsistent upgrade cycles from device to device has creating an environment where there are more Android devices but also one where there are more flavors of Android out there, making it difficult for developers to manage.

For example, look at the Android phone of a non-technical person: most likely, the phone comes with the stock apps, and whatever other apps have been downloaded are probably not been updated in a while (a quick way to evaluate that is by launching Google Play (an unfortunate name in itself as it seems to focus on apps that cannot possibly be about business); in most cases, people will be asked to agree to the terms of services because they haven’t really launched what used to be called the Market since they initially got their phones. Complicating things even further, Google has now acquired Motorola, which may mean the company is going to produce its own phones but also unsettles its hardware partners as they may now found themselves in a situation where they have to compete with their own software providers.

A big push

Verizon, one of the largest mobile providers on the American market, recently announced that it would throw its support behind Microsoft to create a third major player in the space, even though it is the company that has benefited the most from Android’s growth. Meanwhile, AT&T is working very hard to make Windows Phone a huge success, pushing the platform with a strong marketing campaign that  has already led to early shortages in the US market.

The pricing of Nokia’s Windows Phones is also interesting, with devices that are about $100 cheaper than their competitors in the space: the market they’re going after is not the more gadget-centric crowd but rather the mainstream that has heard of smartphones but not yet made the jump (and that mainstream represents about 60% of all phone users right now). A lot of those users may go for an iPhone because of its elegance or might go for a Windows phone because of its price. This leaves Android devices in the odd situation of neither being the best devices from a user experience standpoint nor being the value devices from a price one.

So without a strong marketing push by partners and a value proposition that is hard to figure, what to make of Android? That question is one that may hobble future sales for devices from the company.

“Developers, developers, developers”

One thing Microsoft understand more than most is that the future of any platform is contingent on developers supporting it. In fact, the company’s CEO scream about developers has become its own meme. Apple, on the other side, has long managed its developers relations through it annual developers’ conference and related online center. The two companies listen to input from their development community and respond by bring forward features that help those developers succeed.

By comparison, Google is a company that sees itself as developer led and thus does not feel it needs to take outside input. Instead, it queries its internal people and based on that brings what it feels is best for the development community. This has led to a decrease in the interest developers have in the platform. That decrease could spell trouble in the future.

Some claim the decrease is related to the increasing fragmentation of the Android market. But more troubling is that the monetization of apps on the Android platform seems to present a substantially larger climb than on other platforms. iOS has won the race on that end but interestingly enough, Microsoft may have an opportunity to come in in second as it has a better  understanding of how to support third party developers. With less than half of what iOS has in terms of apps with in-app purchase capability, Android has a long way to go to make monetizing on the platform something good for developers and Google’s DNA being all about advertising will not help when it comes to that model.

So if you’re a developer, what should you do? First, the obvious thing is to start developing for iOS. Start with the iPhone and go to the iPad. But once you’re done, take a very serious look at the Windows Phone. It may be a smaller market today but I would bet the future of apps rolling out on Windows Phone is brighter than that of similar apps rolling out on Android

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Windows Phone to beat Android. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

One of the strange thing that happens when you decide to move into the startup world is that every person out of that world assumes that you’re in it just for the money. There is  a general assumption that people go do startups only to get rich.

But the truth is much more complicated and ultimately comes down to a simple fact: it’s not about the money.

Is it about the idea?

As I’m now on startup number 6, with 4 of the previous 5 being pretty successful, people often ask me about why I keep going back to the startup well again and again and the truth is that I don’t go back to it as much as I’m drawn back to it by an idea.

I’ve often told people asking me for advice about making the jump that there is a simple truth to doing a startup: it’s hard and unless you’re truly passionate and truly believe that you should not do something else, you might want to rethink jumping in.

Startups are about somewhat crazed devotion to the fact that you can make a difference in the market you’re looking to address. Some would say that it’s a crazed devotion to a particular idea but the fact is that the initial idea one kicks off with rarely turns into the final product that enters the market. Through refining and careful iteration, an original idea gets more polished and, along the way, iterates into some variation of the idea to eventually become a product.

To try to build a product otherwise, getting overly attached to your idea because it’s yours, is to create potential issues further down the line. On the other hand, to start with a strong idea and, while listening to feedback from people in the market, refine it so it gets a more solid reception from customers is the beginning of a life-long dialogue that will create fantastic products.

The Steve Jobs Exception

There is, of course, the Steve Jobs exception. Many people will say that Steve Jobs did not really listen to the market and just built products that he thought would resonate with consumers. There are, however, two facts to consider when you’re throwing in the Steve Jobs exception:

1. You are not Steve Jobs
2. Even Steve Jobs listened to the market

The first one is self-explanatory: Steve Jobs had this rare mix of marketer, product manager, and market listener that few people get naturally. We can all strive to become as good as he was but he had a natural facility that does not come easily to most of us. One can hope to near that genius but it may not be necessary to be successful.

Furthermore, one can look back at Steve Jobs’ work and realize that even he would listen to the market. The iPod and iTunes used to only offer DRM-protected music but when Jobs realized that the market was starting to develop an alternative with DRM-free music, he quickly jumped in front of the bandwagon, endorsing the trend.

While the iPod was initially a music device, Jobs famously claimed that there was no demand for video on a device in that kind of footprint. He later reversed himself by introducing the video iPod and then allowing video on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. In fact, video is an increasingly important part of Apple’s business, with the focus on increased screen resolution being part of that push.

So ideas, along with an ear to the market are a key to success.

Is it about independence?

Some people would argue that having to listen to the market means that the independence that has been claimed as a landmark of startup does not truly exist, that while one is no longer beholden to an employer, they are now beholden to customers and I would agree with that position. Independence does not exist in any ecosystem as the actions of a player in the ecosystem always has an impact on other players.

When one looks at any environment, there is no true independence. For example, as I write this column, I may feel that I’m working in complete independence; but my publishers, as well as you the reader, have a say as to how successful the column is: if you don’t read it, it fails.

In the same way, in a startup, one is dependent on the market accepting the startup’s product or on external partners providing appropriate services. Inside a startup, the product person is dependent on the technical people to help refine the vision (even as a technical co-founder, the limitation of your own knowledge need to be filled by other people); the technical person is dependent on the product person articulating their vision clearly; the product person is dependent either on a sales team or on customers (if the role of product and sales have been collapsed) to help define the way the product ought to move forward; and all parties are dependent on their own ability to attract appropriate talent as the company grows. Ultimately, the company may also be dependent on some investors to help it run through times when savings and bootstrapping do not cover costs.

So going into a startup is not about independence but rather about accepting a different set of dependency.

 So what is it about?

Ultimately, doing a startup is about scratching an itch or realizing that there is something you really want to explore behind a certain hunch you have. It’s about having your dreams haunted by certain concepts you have to corral. It’s about feeling distracted, first in your spare time, but increasingly when other things ought to be done, by what-ifs, how-do-Is, and let’s-fix-its. Eventually, it’s about giving in to trying to solve a problem because it is easier to do so than it is to resist.

Initially, it is difficult to articulate why you make the jump. You know you have to make it but it’s not clear as to why you know that. And then, progressively, as the product or service you’re building starts taking shape, a simple realization comes in: it’s about creativity and about birthing a new idea. It’s probably the male equivalent to carrying a baby for 9 months and seeing it come into the world (and note here, that startup life can often be punctuated by the same hormonal ups and down and the same level of lack of comfort that pregnancy appears to have).

What about the money?

At the end of the day, it’s about that thing you’re building.

When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he didn’t sit down and say “I’m going to create a web site that will be worth $100 billion.” Instead, he sat down and felt he had to build something interesting with a social component.

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page built Google, they didn’t set out to build a better way to advertise; they built a search engine because they were curious about who was referencing their papers. They sat down and built a cool search engine, and eventually realized that they had a new model for online advertising.

Creating a successful startup is difficult and doesn’t need the diversion of thinking about what money could be. Based on what I’ve witnessed over the last 20 years or so, the people who set out on the startup path with the concept of making a lot of money are seldom the ones who succeed.

Money comes and goes but good products tend to develop strong followings and strong followings are the root of establishing solid businesses. So go out, build something significant, make the appropriate modifications so that customers start begging for it and don’t worry about the money. If you build stuff people don’t want, you won’t make money anyway and will have to find a better way to adapt and present your product. And if you build something good, the money will take care of itself.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title It’s not about the money. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Which begs the question: why aren’t more people having fun in their job?

What is fun?

Fun depends from person to person and I suspect it is tied to the concept of doing something that one feels is worthwhile while at the same time finding some kind of fulfillment out of doing that thing. It is, ultimately, about finding the right fit between what you love and what you do.

One of the questions I usually ask of potential recruit for any job is “if I gave you $1 billion dollars right now with no strings attached, what would you do?” The answers vary from person to person but the most fascinating thing is really what happens in the first couple of seconds after I’ve asked the question: some people either freeze as their brain is trying to figure out what the right answer should be (there isn’t one specific one) or people are afraid to tell what they would do; others have probably pondered the question for a while and have a ready answer for it, usually giving me a sense of what motivates them.

A few years ago, someone I hired told me that this question was what had convinced him that he wanted to join my team. While he had not thought about it before, his view was that any manager who asked that type of question was probing for how to make a job more fun for his/her employees. There was some partial truth to his analysis as my goal in such question is to really get a sense of what people are most enthusiastic about and part of it was understanding what type of work would be most fulfilling to someone because when people feel their job is having an impact, they tend to find the work more satisfying.

Enjoy

But this is not something that is limited to the office work. Think back to when you were a kid. Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you probably had to do some house chores; and for some reason, as a kid, those seemed fun (while, if you were to compare them to what you do as an adult, they might seem horribly dull.) Part of the reason is that, as a kid, the work you’re given around the house is empowering: it’s something big people do and thus something that must be important. The perception of the impact of the work (having set a dinner table or cleaned up an area) by a kid is that he/she has contributed something important and the simple reward of appreciation via a thank you from a parent creates the necessary validation to empower the kid.

In the same way, as a manager, demonstrating how important a particular task is within the whole machine of work, and thanking employees when they perform great work goes a long way towards making a work environment more fun. For example, let me compare two large corporations I worked in that were in the same line of business. In one of them, a chart showed what the chairman’s goals where, and then how his direct report’s goal aligned to that, all the way down to your manager. When your manager came to you to set up goals, you had to work together on establishing goals that aligned with everyone up the line from you, all the way to the chairman. In the other bank, you set goals based on different criteria and didn’t have the visibility into how your work aligned with that of the people at the top of the food chain. Later in the year, the first company would pass down reports on everyone up the chain from you relating to performance against the stated goals. This extra visibility gave you a strong sense of ownership in the direction of the company and made the work you were doing more rewarding than in the second environment. Here, transparency made work more fun.

I use the example not to beat up on the second company but to highlight another important factor of fun: at its core, fun requires some level of trust. Many people say the hierarchic model of command and control is how old corporations were setup but in the example above, I was dealing with two organizations with centuries-long corporate histories and approaches within those settings that showed the “fun” corporation as more trusting of its employees than its competitor. The kind of transparency provided gave more meaning to employees’ work and showed that management trusted them to do the right thing in terms of aligning with the longer term goals of the corporation. By empowering employees with the knowledge of how they could impact (either positively or negatively) things all the way to the top, a company could increase the amount of enjoyment an employee can take in a task.

From enjoyment to fun

But enjoyment alone is not necessarily fun. So how does one make the leap? Having established an environment where every employee understand the relevance of their work, how does one go from the employees knowing that this is important to making sure that time just flies doing that work (because we all know that time flies when you’re having fun).

Here, the first thing is simply to ask employees what may make the environment more fun. For some, it’s adding some stress release elements. For example, many tech companies have nerf-balls guns employees can use to vent frustration or use to defuse situations when things get overly stressful. Creating the environment that allows for such stress release makes the workplace a more fun environment.

Other places use social gathering to create increasing bonds amongst employees, allowing them to get together in a setting where they can learn more about their co-workers and find areas of common ground that can be useful when brought back into a work setting.

But to truly create a fun environment, one has to select strong employees, show them what needs to be done, provide some stretch goals, and mostly step out of the way. The employees themselves will find a way to codify what makes the office more fun and ask you, as their manager, to support such efforts. When you do, you will create the conditions that will work magics in terms of productivity.

The Fun imperative

Most corporations today may look at fun as frivolous but in a world where top talent gets a choice as to where they can work, the ability to attract and retain the best employees will be driven in large part by the kind of environment a company creates. Today, large corporations may feel they still have the luxury of attracting employees exclusively through monetary rewards but, at a certain point, such rewards lose their allure and employees discover they can find equivalent pay at a competitor that will also provide a more fun environment.

A growing body of work exists highlighting how leading companies are incorporating fun into their workspaces, a trend that is starting to accelerate, as more employees look for more playful environments. As such, it creates a fun imperative for most that can be expressed in the following way:

If you do not make your work environment a more fun one, your best employees will leave for the competitors that do.

So the only question that one many ask himself as a manager is “do I want to be the one to explain to the people above me that I failed at the fun imperative or do I want to be the one that grabs the best employees on the market because my competitors failed at this?”

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Fun Work(s). You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Edge cultures

Hacking and gaming have both been cultures sitting largely on the edge of society, away from the mainstream until relatively recently. While the communities themselves grew substantially into groups of millions of people, the mainstream of society looked to them as mainly fringe elements, with no real impact on the world at large. But slowly, bit by bit, both groups started seeping into the fabric of our society, the product of both demographic and technological changes.

While hacker culture is much older, the roots of both hacker and player culture can be found along the same ancestral route, with roots going back to MIT’s celebrated Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) where play and hacking initially collided around model trains. Model trains have long been seen as toys but this group proved that toys can be a model for discovery and modification that can lead to new technologies being envisioned and birthed.

Exploration

The kind of exploration and modification that came out of the TMRC created some of the basic tenet for both hacking and gaming cultures where playing around and hacking around have worked as interchangeable terms for the type of playful exploration that has led to huge technological breakthroughs. On one side, hackers worked on developing new approaches to hooking up networks, creating new hardware, developing and distributing applications, and even running companies; on the other side, gamers discovered a new creative medium allowing to reintroduce play at the center of their lives, first through the use of computer games as a form of entertainment that sits next to music and movies and then getting into the education world, with not only software methods but also approaches that show the true value of play as an educational tool beyond pure software.

The reason hackers and players have been growing on such parallel tracks is that below each of their approaches sits a much more fundamental elements that most of society seems to have been driving away: the idea that experimentation and exploration for he sake of satisfying one’s curiosity has value. However because much of this experimentation is done by amateurs (per its original sense, people who love what they’re doing, from the latin amor, to love) the mainstream has tended to look at these efforts as not worthy because they could not result in immediate financial wins.

To hack or to play has long been seen as a waste of time by the mainstream because it is seen as the domain of slackers and diletantes, and presented as such in traditional media. Because those subcultures did not conform to a proper mold of what “should be done,” they were marginalized (see the concept of the overweight gamer or the dirty smelly hacker) until the point where they could no longer be ignored. At that point, the marginalization was replaced by some deep-seated suspicion about motives and some fear of the what these cultures could do to the established order of things.

Cultural suspicions

The work hacker itself has been weighted down in the mainstream with so much negative connotation that it has required a substantial amount of effort by the tech community to present it as something different: to many people outside the technology world, hackers are still seen as the crackers that break into computer and telephone networks with nefarious plans. The mainstream sadly still looks at hacking as an illegal activity focused solely on breaking the security of large corporations and government organizations in order to steal what’s sitting on those corporate or government computers.

A lot of this image is due to one of hacking’s worst enemy pushing the message again and again through its available product: Hollywood, feeling threatened by the technology industry and the radical changes to its established business models new technologies can enabled, has been working hard to paint a picture of technology as mostly evil. This is not a new phenomenon as new technology has always been regarded with some level of suspicion, even going back to the early days of electricity, when the Frankenstein monster was brought to life through electrical sparks.

Meanwhile, the gamers themselves have had to deal with Hollywood which has had a love/hate relationship with the concept of electronic gaming. On the one hand, movie studios keep trying to develop film properties based on game character and game properties based on movie characters; on the other hand, the same industry likes to use the gaming industry as a convenient scapegoat whenever something violent happens.

The average household is exposed to hours upon hours of violent acts in movies and TV shows but it seems that if there is a shooting or other violent act on a school or college campus, these have had less impact than the hours the perpetrators may have spent in violent videogames. Yes, there are violent videogames but I suspect that they are no more or less responsible than violent TV or movie programming.

Once again, what is happening here is that Hollywood is trying to paint an image to the mainstream that a competitor (for videogames increasingly compete for attention with movies and TV) is evil and should be stopped.

Socialization

But in the last few year, that image has eroded. The rise of games aimed at a more mainstream audience and delivered in easier to use fashions (mobile devices, tablets, the Wii, Microsoft Kinect) have made gaming a more mainstream activity and have reintroduced the concept of play at the center of people’s life: an increasing number of people steal away minutes from boring meetings by throwing in moves in word with friends or pass the time waiting in line at the DMV with some other video game.

Meanwhile, the concept of play as important to our society has been gaining growing currency. Over the last few years, playing has increasingly been seen as essential to every facet of a successful life and trends like gamification have tried to address by tacking on point and reward systems to tasks (At Keepskor, we decided to take a different approach because our view is that points are not the point of play: play is the point of play), bringing the concept of playing further in the corporate world.

At the same time, since the 2008 crisis, society’s faith in existing institutions has been shaken up. This has resulted in an increasing amount of people looking for alternatives to the current model and discovering that the hacker community has been working on figuring out some of those issues for decades. The result has been a growing acceptance of hacker’s approach as there is increasing evidence of its success. When Mark Zuckerberg, in Facebook’s public offering filing, talked about the Hacker Way, his statement was not so much a revolutionary one as an acknowledgment that this movement was ready for the mainstream.

Ideas like iterative development and the type of exploration that comes out of hackatons as slowly entering the corporate world.

Mainstreaming

Because both groups had developed mostly outside of the mainstream, they have developed their own societies, complete with hangouts and codified social mores. As the mainstream accepts them, there will be a tension between culture purity and merging into the wider culture.

That tension is healthy as it will slowly bring elements of both the hacker and gamer culture into the mainstream. Along the way, however, there will be a challenge as to which elements ought to be brought in and which will be discarded. There will also be a rise in the number of sub-cultures that will re-form as a result of the mainstreaming.

This decade is indeed the decade of play but it is a decade it will have to share with being the decade of hacking. And that marriage will make our society substantially better overall.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Hackers and Players. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Today, most of the efforts surrounding the importance of play have focused on highlighting how little play time children are getting, with concerns that the push for more academic efforts is driving an important developmental component away, with potentially larger scale damage a generation from now. But little attention has been paid to the disappearance of play time among adults, as people get driven to more focused efforts around increased productivity and away from things that have impact that cannot be immediately measured.

Yet when one looks at the difference between a startup and a large corporate environment, the sense of fun and playfulness seem to be more apparent among the more creative world. We can therefore assume that playing and creativity are directly related.

What do we mean when play?

But what does playing mean? Does play in the corporate world mean having employees spend more time on World of Warcraft? or handing out government sanctioned versions of Angry Birds and requiring that everyone clock in a number of levels? Or adding point systems to existing tasks so they look more play-like?

No. Play, when I think about it, is the ability to engage into a task purely for the fun of it. Working on Wall Street, I was shocked by the number of times I heard people say that no one in their right mind would think of working there for the fun of it, leaving me with a feeling that the majority of people in the banking world are not only given a tremendous responsibility in ensuring that the flow of credit and currency goes on so the rest of the economy can be productive but that they are doing so without having any fun at it. For the decade that I spent there, I was having fun, finding new ways to be creative within an environment that was increasingly dealing with regulatory and compliance oversight. Those boundaries created some interesting rule-sets that made the playing and the ability to create interesting products that much more challenging but also made the ability to create and launch such products that much more rewarding.

However, to most people in the corporate world, the idea of playing is to send a few senior executive in a corporate retreat, generally along with a play specialist that helps them run through a game in order to establish team bonding. Once that retreat is over, it’s back to the real world, with no inclusion of play into the everyday work routine.

In the tech world, though, play is becoming more common: whether you are talking the 20% time instituted at Google (or as a Google employee described it to me “hours 41 through 60 of the workweek”) or the concept of hackathon that is growing increasingly popular, the idea of free exploration just for the fun of it has taken a hold of company from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley.

Hackathons as a form of play

Hackathon are an interesting idea. The basic concept, born in the early 2000s, was to provide the challenge of building something over a given period of time (either a day or a weekend) in a competitive setup. Employees are either asked to develop a solution on top of a particular platform or framework or work within the confine of leveraging certain datasets as part of their offering. The great thing about such a model is that it gives employees some level of ownership over a particular solution and challenges them to think and develop ideas they think might contribute to a company. While the concept is easily applicable to computer code, which can be presented as a working application after the set period of time, I’d warrant that one could create a hackathon around any product or service offering, asking employees to leverage existing company resources to develop new products, services, or even full businesses.

But to do so, companies must first let go of the idea that the closer you are to the top, the more you know about what’s good for a business. To develop something like a hackathon requires that a company first trust its employees and that employees understand they are being entrusted with company resources.

Trust and Play

And herein lies the challenge. The reason play does not exist in the corporate world largely has to do with a lack of trust. In order to play, one has to trust and such a leap seems difficult in a lot of corporate environments. Command and control structures have generally been established to create check-gates that ensure tight control and looks to ensure that the company leadership sets the direction and the employees follow.

When one looks at a playground, kids play together because they don’t assume any agenda from the other kids: they trust them implicitly. When people participate in a hackathon, they come in with ideas to leverage an API or platform but the companies providing the API or platform do not have any control over the product those individuals create.

Don’t forget to play

Playing allows for free association and free exploration, which are key to innovation. As a result, individuals that play end up being more creative. This creativity can help in fixing broken processes, products, or services. As a result, it seems essential that every individual find time in their schedule (and, that every company that wants to succeed find a way to give their employees some of that time) to go out and play.

Of course, play can be constrained to certain rules. To make time for play does not mean to authorize all employees to spend more time on solitaire or Angry Birds. It does, however, mean giving employees a chance to do something that is not part of their day job and explore something related to work that they might not be able to explore if they weren’t given the time to do so.

By making play and integral part of the work cycle, companies could discover and tap new source of creativity that would improve their products, services, processes and workflows, ultimately leading to greater revenue and happier employees. And who could possibly be against that.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Why you must play. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Back in June 2010, when he unveiled the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs also presented a new video-conferencing technology called FaceTime. The technology allowed for easy face to face communication over a video-conferencing network, similar to what Skype has offered for a long time. As mister Jobs himself put it then, “this is one of those moments that reminds us of why we do what we do” and it was indeed impressive. He then provided a stunner of an announcement by adding “Now it’s based on a handful of standards… but this is going to be an open industry standard.”

Apple had an awesome technology and, on the morning of June 7, 2010 at 11:39am, it announced that it would make it an open industry standard. This was great news for our industry (with the possible exception of Skype, which found itself in the awkward position of seeing its own proprietary technology being upstaged by a new open industry standard) and it was the perfect way to shut down any question people might have about the Apple platform not being open.

Apple’s offerings have now gone through a complete round of refreshes since that promise was made. Whether it is the iPhone, which was upgraded to iPhone 4S the following year, the iPad, which is now in its second iteration since the announcement, AppleTV (which also just saw a recent refresh) or OSX, which will incorporate FaceTime in its next version and was refreshed at least once since Mr. Jobs’ announcement, or Macs, which have seen their own upgrade cycle, there isn’t a product in Apple’s offering that has not seen an upgrade since Mr. Jobs announced that FaceTime would be an industry standard.

Honor thy founder

I thought that maybe Apple had quietly rolled out a version of the FaceTime API under its open source initiative, a place where the company puts an impressive amount of material in the public domain. But unfortunately, it was not the case.

Apple has established a substantial amount of leadership and goodwill by opening up webkit, their web browsing library, thus making it possible for them to have a substantial impact on the development of web browsers for mobile devices (today, the vast majority of mobile devices use a webkit-based browser, with the exception of the Windows Phone platform).

Its support of unix-based operating systems over the last decade as it aligned with OSX was also invaluable to countless numbers of computer geeks. The support and alignment of a number of technologies like CUPS (for printers) made it easier for the unix and linux community to get more hardware to work properly with those operating system, thanks in large part to Apple’s endorsement of the technology.

Apple’s leadership in supporting and contributing to the H.264 video standard helped catalyze the video industry around a set of compatible offerings, removing the need we had earlier in the century for multiple plugins to handle multiple video formats in a browser. That effort carried over to mobile devices, where H.264 is increasingly becoming the way in which video is being recorded.

Because Apple has had a long tradition of supporting open standards, and because it also has a long tradition of keeping things it doesn’t consider an open standard fully closed and proprietary, when they announce that they are going to open something up, they generally do.

In fact, I could not find any evidence in Apple’s past of the company announcing they would turn a technology of theirs into an industry standard and then recanted on doing so.

However, I realize that things have changed since Mr. Jobs made his announcement. He has since stepped down as the company’s CEO and was lost way too young to illness. But much has been made about the fact that his spirit lives on at the company.

If Steve Jobs’ spirit does live on at Apple, it then logically goes without saying that one of his last wishes, the wish that FaceTime be made into an industry standard, be respected. Anything less would only mean that when the company lost its founder, it also lost its sense of contribution to the industry, respect for the users, and love for truly magnificent solution, turning it only into a greedy profit-focused machine that can barely be distinguished from a Wall Street bank.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title When will Facetime be an industry standard?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A nearly 40 CEO with one successful company under his belt can still find himself in the presence of those words. They hang in the air, hovering awkwardly over the room, making everyone present a little more uncomfortable. This is the first time I meet Steve Jobs (and the most time we spent one on one) and here were are at the moment when the most devastating words one can say to a founder are uttered.

Sure, the product is still some time away from release and this courtesy call should be returned with some helpful feedback as to what works and doesn’t but the word “suck” has the instant impact of putting a freeze on the meeting. What happens next, though, is even more interesting.

Seething, the product owner still goes through the demo, his eyes burning through the person who has uttered those words. He shows how the product is going to make things easier for a whole slew of users. He does not talk about the competition but focuses on the bigger picture and on how his product is going to make development that much easier.

The listener doesn’t buy it. I know that because I’m the listener.

The meeting was in 1995 and Mr. Jobs was then CEO of NeXT, a software company that was about to unveil WebObjects, a suite of tools to make it easier to build web sites. I was the editor of a big online publication and also wrote for a couple of internet-related magazines. All of 24 at the time, I thought I was on top of the world and had the kind of swagger and bravado that only comes out of being clueless… and I had just told Steve Jobs that his product sucked.

In 1995–1996, Jobs was mostly seen as the guy who had built up Apple and then was thrown out of it. So he had to reboot and built a company that would eventually be acquired by Apple, serve as the root of Mac OSX and help bring Steve Jobs back to do what is probably one of the most significant business turnarounds in all of history.

But at the time, he had to deal with people like me. As one of the folks that had capitalized early on the rise of the internet, I had developed a following and thought I could render judgment on anything that touched the internet. So when a minor player in the internet field came around (no matter how important they had been outside it), it came to me to do the interview and write the review of the products.

The takeaways

Had I not been so set in my opinion and had I been more mature, I could have taken substantially more away from what happened next. In rapid succession, Jobs went over  my objections, challenged or exposed why they were flawed, took note of some of the things that didn’t work, and positioned my argument in a light that was radically different than where we started. He did all that while seething and served me a whole education in product marketing and product management to wrap things up.

Of course, it wasn’t until a few years later that I was able to fully appreciate any of this. With the tables now turned, I’ve been in countless meetings across many of my own product offerings where I found myself the recipient of such words. Receiving them never gets any easier and is sometimes even more biting when you know, deep inside, that the product you have on your hand does indeed suck.

The challenge is not to let such words keep you from plugging in. It certainly didn’t stop Jobs when he heard this. I suspect he heard it a lot more over that press tour, because the product was far from perfect. But each time, he took it as an opportunity to gather feedback and demonstrate how the other person’s perception may have been flawed. The first part is essential to making a better product; I’m sure that the second was Jobs’ way to release steam instead of grabbing your throat from across the table and would not advise anyone but the truly masterful to attempt it.

Over the years, I’ve launched tens of products and if there is one thing that has been consistent with them, it is that the first version has failed to live up to my expectations. And that seems to be the case for any creative endeavor. As Ira Glass said in an interview on the creative process:

For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good? It’s not that great; It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. Like you can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.

And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short, and some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves.

But we knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing what to do is… Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.”

Where it is a blank page, a song, a video, or a software product, everyone goes through this but there are two critical points that Glass makes here:

The first is that most people quit when things are crappy. And I would say that over 95 percent of success lies in that demarcation line. The people who are crazy enough to keep plugging away when things are crappy are the ones who eventually break through. Recent examples include Dennis Crowley, of FourSquare, who has plugged away at the location and social problem for over a decade now, or Evan Williams, who went from Blogger to Twitter in a continuous search for easier way to share content.

The second part of Glass’ statement, though, is about doing a lot of work. Most products are a lot of work… but when you have gotten your first offering out, it’s only the beginning. And that’s an important point because many people underestimate the amount of work needed to go from a first sucky product to something good.

And that’s another part where people get stuck.

A lot of people think that the first outing with a product is the product but the truth is more complicated. Whether you are going out with a minimum viable product or something more complex, there comes a point where one has to make the call as to a product being “good enough” for the marketplace. And “good enough” for anyone who has poured sweat and tears into a product is seldom what comes out of that first product.

What comes out is generally more in line with the “release candidate” definition provided in the devil’s dictionary for high tech:

Release Candidate:n. Like a political candidate, far from perfect, but likely to annoy the least number of people.

However, realize that those annoyed people can be a resource. Listen to them, listen to their concerns and work on addressing those. And remember that they want to help.

One thing I didn’t realize on that fateful day with Steve Jobs is that I really wanted the product to succeed (as I wanted every product I saw to succeed) because success from anyone I met meant success for the internet and in those early days of the commercial internet we were all pulling together. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there might have been better ways to address the situation: first and foremost, I should have listened more closely, improving my own skills in product marketing and product management; but also, I could have delivered my message in a different way.

Sucks doesn’t mean anything, unless you’re talking about a vacuum cleaner. But detailed analysis and feedback on a products deficiencies can help improve it and would generally be received in a better way while making the product owner more comfortable in demoing to you.

I never got another face to face demo from Steve Jobs after that day (and let’s be honest, who could blame him) but what I learned from blurting out a few useless words was how I should react when I’m on the receiving end of such language.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Your product sucks. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I killed the internet.

It wasn’t something I had planned but it was the net result of my actions. And I’m going to explain how it happened.

The Internet

There used to be a time when there were a lot of private networks. That time, in the days prior to the rise of the Internet, meant that if you wanted to talk to users of a particular online service, you had to have an account on that service. The different services were operating in their respective silos and had developed their own culture: some were more business focused (eg. CompuServe), others were more consumer focused (eg. AOL); Some were backed by large corporations (eg. Prodigy), others by new upstarts in the computer world (eg. eWorld). But none of them were really talking to each other.

Meanwhile, a different type of technology and approach was slowly building up. Born out of the cold-war fear that centralized communication could be destroyed if a nuclear bomb destroyed the servers that hosted the communication, Internet technology was built to create connection between different networks, allowing to travel from one network to the other without hitting a wall (hence the term inter net, which means between the networks). Along the way, though, it brought a different ethos: in order to participate in the network and have other networks carry traffic to and from you, you had to agree to do the same for all the other networks, with no discrimination as to where, when, and what the traffic that was running on the network was.

The internet first grew as a military project but the research was done by private companies in conjunction with educational institutions. As such, those groups started interconnecting in the late 1960s and engineers brought more and more technology on top of the network that made it more and more useful, moving from exchanging files to supporting email, discussion groups and eventually, the web.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, he didn’t think of getting a patent for it but instead decided to share his invention of http, the web browser, the web server, and HTML (pretty incredible that he invented and presented all those parts in one package) with the rest of the internet community. Over the years, the community made improvements on it, improvements that they, in turn, would share with the rest of the internet. Those that decided to build proprietary models for their offerings were generally shunned and those ideas failed to gain traction.

The golden years

With a graphic layer on top of it known as the world wide web, the Internet started growing at an accelerating speed, forcing all the previous walled gardens to open up or die. Compuserve was among the first to do so, followed by AOL and Prodigy. AOL’s ease of use made it possible for millions of people to now access internet resources while the more technically difficult to use Compuserve interface left it behind (to eventually be acquired by AOL) and the late entry of Prodigy in the internet world left it open to get acquired by Yahoo, which eventually shuttered them.

The next two decades would turn the internet from a place only geeks hung out to the central communication framework we know today. In 1995, AT&T introduced a flat-rate online service called Worldnet, forcing every single internet service providers to convert to a model of unlimited access to the internet for a flat fee. The move was intended both as a differentiator and an attempt by AT&T to choke off its competitors because it already had a substantial infrastructure it could leverage and thus ensure it had lower costs when it came to carrying internet traffic than any other ISP.

Meanwhile, different services provided inexpensive infrastructure to host a website, allowing anyone with basic skills to create a domain name and offer their wares online. In this level playing field, money was never the object to get started and a site like TNL.net was given the same rights on the internet as large corporations like IBM, General Electrics, Exxon, or Microsoft.

So from 1995 on, the assumption of the internet has been that all internet resources were available to everyone for a single flat fee and that anyone who was willing to work hard could become a hit on the internet and build a successful business from there.

Dark clouds

But such carefree idealistic days are seldom too far from being exploited by people who prefer the balance of power to shift in their direction. Innocently at first but with increasing frequency, some new silos started appearing.

At first, those silos seemed unthreatening because they were small and the rest of the internet was substantially larger than they were. But just as a small hole in a dam seems relatively irrelevant at first, the pressure started building up and eventually led to an increasing number of areas around the internet where traffic would flow one way only, coming in from the community but never leaving back. For example, on Facebook, the following became more common when trying to get to the web:

… or in other cases, Facebook has decided that it is better to interup a link to a news story with an attempt to get you to install an app that would keep you within their walled garden as is the case with a lot of “social reader” type apps:

Every time someone installs such an app, they now move any sharing they do of stories from that site to the private silo of Facebook. Here, you are given two options when you click on a link: you can either install the app and therefore become a party to slowly dismantling the web, or you can decide that you don’t want to read that story. Facebook has successfully made the idea of sharing link outside of Facebook a large enough inconvenience that it will ensure that traffic will grow for Facebook only.

But let’s not assume that this just a Facebook issue. For example, when I receive a LinkedIn message, I’m asked to click a link to “View/Reply to this message”. Why is that? The message is in my inbox, I can view its content fully there, and I can reply to it by hitting Reply in my mail client:

The value of that link is to LinkedIn, not to me as a user, as all the functionality I need is right there in my email client.

Or take Path, the new darling of the social media set. Path is a social network for mobile devices (think Facebook for your smartphone) and its site offer a login button (for more on why there’s no link to Path in this entry, see “Will you revive it?” below). But when you login, the Path universe is very limited. This is, I kid you not, the page I land in if I log in on their web interface:

No content there, beyond my setting. I can’t access content I created on my mobile device, or content other people created on theirs. I also cannot share the content I created on my mobile device from the web… and most people seem to be OK with this.

How I killed the Internet

When I first saw this a few months ago, I didn’t think about it much. I figured it was a feature of a beta that it didn’t have any of the content yet available online. And so I kept on using the service. But eventually, the inability to share over the web started grating at me as I realize that I was trapped in Path’s trunk. I stopped using the service.

But what I didn’t do is stop using a number of other apps running on my Android phone (the same would be true if I used an iPhone). Instead, I felt OK continuing with the use of an app for the Amazon Kindle, or one for the Amazon MP3 player, or one for Google Currents, or Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, etc… I felt OK with getting only little bits of the web packaged in small digestable experiences on my mobile. I didn’t ask those same sites to develop an open web version that would just run on a browser so I could choose which device I would use to access the content and not have to worry whether an app was available for the device.

I didn’t flinch when I had to reinstall those apps on another device when I switched device. And when I saw a device that didn’t support the app, I didn’t blame the app maker but I blamed the platform for failing to support the app maker. I opted for more fragmentation in what was available to everyone because I had to have the latest shiny toy instead of demanding that everyone do the hard thing and work together.

Whenever the web missed a feature, I didn’t look at a way to fix it to provide similar capabilities to what devices offered but I looked away and said let’s abandon the web and move to apps instead. I didn’t push for some more dialogue to figure out issues around latency, camera/accelerometer/microphone/WiFi/GPS/Bluetooth access. Instead, I did the easy thing and focused on developing for only one platform (or a limited set of platform) .

Whenever I bumped into a silo like Facebook, I may have grumbled but I didn’t leave. In fact, I pushed more content into it, not asking that it push content back out. I did that because that’s where the readers were, where I could get more users, etc…

When my smart phone provider decided to put a cap on how much bandwidth I could use on my unlimited plan, I didn’t leave because I had to be on a network where I could continue using my iPhone/iPad/Kindle/Whateverdevice. I grumbled on Twitter and may have done a tumblr post but I didn’t walk away.

When the politicians started talking about things like Net Neutrality or other weird acronyms like PIPA/SOPA/ACTA/etc I may have pushed back for that law but I didn’t make it clear that anything that attacks the Internet attacks the people and thus undermines democracy.

I think you may realize that I’m not alone in these behaviors and the truth is: I may have killed the internet… but so did you.

Will you revive it?

So how do we bring it back? How do we, sitting on the brink, help the internet continue growing as a place where anyone, no matter whether they are a large corporation or an individual, has equal chance to develop and build the next big thing on the internet?

Well, the way I look at it is that we fight back with the tools we have and the best tool we have is the Internet itself… and our wallets.

You want our money? Well, you will have to be open for it. You want to advertise to me? Great? Make your whole site a part of the internet and I will stop my adblocker from blocking your ads. I will even click on the ads if they point to open internet site but will block the ones going inside silos. You want to offer me a subscription to something? That’s fine but you can’t be indexed by search engines.

You want me to install an app? OK only if the functionality of the same app is available on the open Internet? And if it is a limitation of Internet technology, then make it clear to me and show me who I can complain to so it stops being a limitation.

You want me to share a link to your app or site? OK, but how can I share links from other sites or apps INTO your app? How do I make the traffic flow both ways (and can search engines or people not registered see at least some of the content I share?)

You’re a device maker? Jump in. But you must work with other device makers on ensuring that there is a standardized way for the web to access some of the new hardware you’re introducing.

You’re a telco and have a hard time covering the cost of bandwidth? Maybe we can help. Share ALL the data (anonymized, of course) about the traffic patterns of your users and some network geeks will be happy to work with you on finding ways to optimize things.

You run a search engine? Great. If you find out that some pages are siloed, just refuse to index the whole site. Work with your competitors to ensure that a blacklist is created, similar to the spammers’ blacklist. If a company doesn’t want to play on the internet, it doesn’t have to but it shouldn’t reap the benefit of being near the internet.

You want to write a law relating to some nefarious behavior on the Internet? OK but you must put it up on a public internet site and publicize it the minute   the concept is discussed. Maybe you can have it as a Wiki so public participation can ensure the best dialogue.

You run a site on the open Internet? Well, first of all thanks. But remember that the tools we have is the Internet: Just don’t link to the public-facing pages of siloed sites. In fact, it might be best not to mention them but if you have to, make it hard to find them.

You’re just a user? Awesome. Just start demanding the internet remain open. You came out (or at least thought of doing so) when SOPA threatened the Internet. When your Telco decides to close things up, walk away from it and to a provider that promises to remain open. When politicians try to abuse the Internet, call them on it. And when a provider tries to lock you up, walk away. You can do it again and again. The fight is going to be a long one but it’s well worth it.

Don’t do it for me. Don’t even do it just for freedom. Don’t do it because the previous generation of Internet users fought hard to make this work.

Do it because the Internet is awesome.
Do it for the next generation.
Do it for your friends.
Do it for yourself.
Do it for the kittens:

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title I killed the Internet. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Big target

Since it became the largest corporation in the world, Apple has increased its chances at becoming the target of all kinds of lawsuits and disapproval. The recent issues around treatment of workers at the Foxconn plants are only the beginning and one can expect Apple to fall to more and more scrutiny which begs the question as to how long it will take before the company becomes the target of an antitrust lawsuit and there may be a number of reasons for which the company could be targeted.

With near-control in spaces like digital players (the iPod), tablets (the iPad), online music (iTunes), and ultrabooks (the Macbook Air), Apple’s position as a monopoly based on technological superiority and economies of scale. But majority ownership of a market does not a monopoly make. If it did, many more companies would be investigated for monopoly power at one point or another. What generally leads companies to being accused of being a monopoly is when they act in a way that is hurting their competitors.

… and competitors are starting to make the case for abuse of power.

Gathering clouds

There has long been concerns on the part of the music industry about the power Apple has gained over it. The iTunes store represents the majority of online music sales and has, as a result, been able to essentially get the music industry to agree to pricing terms that have made many artists complain. It is generally assumed that the US$.99 price that has become the standard for online music tracks was something that Steve Jobs kept insisting on and that the music industry had little say in the matter. There is already a case wending its way through the California court system on this.

Then last year, in an attempt to muscle in on the e-books market, Apple leveraged its position of strength in the tablet market to get the the publishing industry to change the way it is handling pricing of e-books, prompting the US Department of Justice and the European Union to start investigating the company on potential monopoly grounds.

Then came the revelation, through his official biographer, that Steve Jobs swore to destroy Android. At the time when those comments were made, the iPhone was the dominant phone in the smartphone segment so this unfortunate statement could end up being the equivalent of Microsoft’s claim that it should be allowed to bundle a ham sandwich with Windows if it felt like it. This was followed by increasing legal battles with many of the companies offering Android-flavored phones, the largest one of which is the on-going country-by-country fight between Apple and Samsung.

The dangers of being called a monopoly

Roll the tape back 15 years and the largest tech player was Microsoft, which also was the largest company in the world in terms of overall market capitalization. When Windows 1995 came out, the first calls regarding monopoly power came along but most people felt that the company was doing a good job. Then Netscape starting failing and decided to complain to the US Department of Justice about the fact that Microsoft was bundling its internet browser with its operating system.

This idea of bundling served as the basis of complaint and the claim that Netscape was failing because of the fact that Microsoft could crush competitors by just adding similar applications to its platform and bundling them in for free. From a logical standpoint, it may not quite be the case: for example, on the consumer end, Microsoft bundled an online service (MSN) but failed to gain traction against America Online; on the server end, Microsoft bundled the IIS web server with their server offering but Apache and Linux continued to thrive.

Similar arguments will be made around Apple’s power and its bundling of the iTunes store and the app market with the iPhone and iPad, as well as its integration of OSX and AppleTV into a complete Apple ecosystem. The claims of this being the reason for their competitor’s failures will hold about as much logical weight as the ones against Microsoft did but the problem is that it will not matter.

Once Apple has been convicted in the public court of opinion, no matter what the verdict on an antitrust case it, it will push the company to be more tentative and more hesitant, losing some of the swagger it currently holds. For Microsoft, what it meant is that the company became a lot more worried about appearing like a monopolist and its bureaucracy became heavier, ensuring that the company would not do anything that would get it into legal hot waters. The net net is that the company’s own hesitation in entering certain markets and its insistence on not playing a very heavy hand when it did enter new markets made it an underdog in most of the areas where it needed to go.

Can it avoid it?

The big question is whether Apple can continue growing and avoid being charged with any form of antitrust or monopoly crimes. As it grows bigger, it might become increasingly difficult to navigate. The company is current doing a good job in terms of managing the Foxconn crisis and it looks like the capable people in the management team may be able to navigate through the minefields of monopoly lawsuits.

Pointing to how most of the money in the app market goes to developers will go part of the way in helping them counter critics but they may have to watch out if the music, TV, movie, or publishing industry  decide they need more power in the relationship. Managing the right balance of power will probably be but one of the greater challenges Apple will have to face in the future.

Today, Apple sits at the top of the technology landscape but tomorrow, after the antitrust and other monopoly related lawsuits start popping up, the company may grow more hesitant and could eventually lose some of its power as a result. I fear that top is getting closer: with no real competitors but itself left, Apple gets to look at the rest of the industry and savor the moment when it is king but the question remains as to how long it still has in this position before the revolutionaries call for its head.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Apple Monopoly. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

This week, I’d like to present some models that could help the industry evolve and leverage the internet in the same way as it has other media in the past.

Subsidized vs. Paid

For many years, there’s been talk of a long-tail of content on the Internet, with lots of back-catalogs being available to smaller and smaller groups. The reality the data shows, however, is that such a long tail does not exist when it comes to video content. TV and movies from the past are not readily available and a substantial part of the back-catalog of video-based content is simply not available in a legal fashion on the internet. Some communities have filled the gap by posting streams on YouTube but those things are considered infringement under the current state of copyright law.

Why not put some changes in place to ensure that content is offered in an unlimited fashion. I would suggest some changes to copyright law to enforce this: the basic idea would be that copyright needs to go back down to the 20 year limit that is currently enforced around patent law but with a slight change. The right to put something in the public domain would be given to anyone after those 20 years are up but 20% of any revenue that is made on making said content available would have to be sent back to the previous holder of the copyright. Call it a 20/20 rule.

Such an approach would ensure an explosion of availability as communities that care about pieces of content would make them available online. Old TV shows and movies could thus be made available in a legal fashion either by individuals or companies and the only crime would be failure to pay the copyright holder, with penalties being set at a maximum based on the amount of views a show/movie has had (and the prosecution would have to prove its numbers).

It would also help with the “advancement of learning” clause in existing copyright law. Currently, by locking things away, copyright holders are actually keeping new learning from happening by making content inaccessible to anyone but the people who want to pay a high sum for it. One could argue such behavior is criminal in itself but few have made the case. Restoring access to content after a set period of time would restore that balance.

Killing the release window

As many parents know, the cost of going out to a movie is not just the price of the ticket. Often-times, it includes the availability of a baby-sitter and the cost of having that baby-sitter take care of one’s kids. So a $10 per-movie-ticket easily becomes a $50–75 night.

Today, the main reason one would go to a movie theater is availability. The movie industry has decided that there is an order to how movies are released: they are first made available in the movie theaters, then roughly 6 months later, they become available for purchase on DVD or BluRay, then about 1–2 months later they become available for rental on those media, then about another month after that, they become available for online and TV Video on Demand rental, followed by availability through premium cable TV and regular TV. This is called the “release windows” model.

Some smaller movies, like “Margin Call,” have tried a different approach, going for a same-day release everywhere. Generally, those movies tend to be smaller independent pictures but the model seems to make sense. Today, there is pent-up demand for first-run movies to become available on the same day as they are in the movie theater for roughly $20–30. The reason for that price point is that it is the perceived price of two movie tickets. By offering movies at that rate for online VoD, the movie industry could easily augment its revenue with few extra costs. Since most movies are already shot in digital format, the transformation to VoD would just happen earlier in the cycle and Hollywood would see its box office swell.

Do movies need to be seen in a movie theater? In an age of larger TV screen and surround sound systems combined with multiplexes offering smaller screens, the gap between the movie theater experience and the home entertainment one is shrinking. By making movies available on the same day as release, Hollywood would put a final nail in the “convenience piracy” argument and would gain wider support if (or when) it does go after pirates.

Live on-demand

Recently, the National Football League, which is responsible for American football signed a blockbuster TV deal with 3 networks, charging them an average of $1 billion per year for the right to broadcast up to 19 games per year. This means the networks are paying an average of fifty two and a half million dollars per game to broadcast the most popular game on American television. That translates roughly into an extra dollars on everyone’s cable bill.

But the question is: does it matter to most people? And how long will people be willing to pay for services they do not use?

A better model would be for TV stations to start offering streams to their station on a subscription basis, ranging from day-passes for $20 (for special live shows) to monthly subscriptions for $8–10. For most station, this would represent substantially more revenue than what they get today from cable companies.

Shaking up the system

The main challenge in getting such approaches to become reality is that some people in the current distribution chain will be disrupted.

For example, movie theaters may have to find new ways to cover their costs as increasing numbers of people would opt for watching movies at home. On the other hand, the theaters could have new opportunities in offering different types of communal experiences by tapping into the same streams as at-home individuals. With little reconfigurations, they could start providing things like subscriptions that would give one access to the movie theater at any time (in a way similar to a health club). They could also look to provide other types of experiences by bundling movies (eg. when the new installment of a movie series or when a new sequel comes out, show all the previous movies alongside it, making it possible for fans to re-experience a whole series).

On the TV end, cable companies would be disrupted by the changes initially but, as most of them are already offering internet access, they could look to re-packaging their offering over the IP stack, thus lowering their costs, and offer TV packages that are independent of the lines they are carried on. For example, Comcast could offer a TV package that is carried on Time-Warner Cable or vice-versa.

There is ample opportunity for changes in the content industry but the only players that appear missing at the table are the incumbents. When they finally wake up and realize that complaining about piracy will not achieve anywhere near as much as finding new ways to provide their offerings to customers, they will find their industry turbo-charged to new levels. Now the question, a week before Oscar-night, is how long until they are willing to make those changes…

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title TV 2.0. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

How I did this?

Last year, I did some research that served as the basis for this series. In it, I detailed the availability of  the top 50 shows of 2010 as legal online streams.

This year, I pulled the list up and assessed whether things had changed. For each show, I pulled up the wikipedia entry and checked what show seasons ended in 2010. I then checked which of these seasons were completely available (as in every episode of that season) on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and iTunes. In the case of Amazon and iTunes, I noted if the season was available for purchase or rent, a distinction that sometimes has an impact on price.

If only part of the season was available, I did not tally it up as available in the final tally.

The list

So without further ado, here’s the list of top 2010 TV shows available for streaming on the internet:

What can be rented?

The Netflix and Hulu business models are largely predicated on a single-fee, all you can eat approach. By comparison, Amazon and iTunes have generally been more focused on a pay per view model but some surprising things popped up in the research.

First, the entry of Amazon Prime in the market seems to signal to that company preparing for a single-fee all-you-can-eat approach to augment its pay-per-view model. Secondly, one show (The good wife) was available for rent on iTunes at the time of the research (it has since moved to a Purchase only offering). Whether this was the product of error or a test trial cannot be assessed but it was an interesting development.

So does the rental picture look better this year for shows that are 2 years old? Let’s look at the data:

Netflix here is the big winner, reflecting what has been guessed at but never proven empirically until now: the company’s focus on getting older TV show collections seems to appeal to its customers and the company has been aggressively growing its catalog in this area.

Surprisingly, however, Hulu has lost considerable ground here, losing about 10% of the content it was offering only a year ago. This appears to reflect a strategy whereas Hulu works as a catch-up TV model but once shows get older, they are dropped altogether.

While only a few months old, the Amazon Prime offering has been playing catch-up in this area, and is apparently aggressively going after the Netflix model. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were to see a match in the catalogs of those two companies next year.

Meanwhile, iTunes has mostly gotten out of the rental market for those shows, opting instead for a sales-focused model.

Can I buy a show?

For people who prefer purchasing complete seasons as online streams (probably the same people that used to purchase those as DVDs in the past), the story looks really great. Both Amazon and Apple have made strong headway in making that content available. However, surprisingly, there are still a few holdouts who are making their shows unavailable for online streaming even over a year after those seasons ended.

The distribution of shows actually seems to shrink when you go further down the catalog. This could be because the studios don’t feel like investing further into shows that were not at the top of the list. While this is an interesting concept, it completely goes against the idea of long tail availability of content on the internet. Even in a word where the marginal cost of putting a show online is very low, the studios are deciding that the low cost is not even worth it, leaving potential audiences without a legal way to get to that content. If I were an online streaming service content acquirer, I would offer a revenue sharing deal on this content in exchange for unlimited exclusivity to it. I might even go as far as taking care of the digital conversion, with the idea that costs would be covered  under the revenue sharing agreement, with the first few dollars required for conversion going back to the party that did the conversion. This model would allow properties that had only a niche appeal to find new life as new people joining that niche could now get access to that content.

Conclusion

The first thing one notices is that older TV shows are still hard to find on all-you-can-watch subscription based types services. While Hulu seems to be focusing on the catch-up TV model and fails drastically on keeping longer terms archives, Netflix’s offering is still relatively weak, with less than half of the top TV shows of 2010 being available over a year after they ended. TV studios seem to have opted for selling this content to consumers, an option that may end up producing less revenue to them in the long run as the cost of such shows is still relatively high (between $20 and $40 per show season).

While the TV studios may look at streaming as equivalent to DVD ownership, the consumers are still considering streams as a cheaper alternative to the plastic disks and thus will probably not go for the same price levels on streams as they do on DVDs. This kind of price pressure is pretty common in digital media and has already been witnessed in music and books.

As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, availability of recent content is relatively limited when it comes to legal streaming. What is more worrisome is that while time has some impact on available content, a lot of shows still are not made available as legal stream.

In a world where TV studios complain about their shows being made available online by pirates, they should first look at why people are pirating these shows: by failing to provide a legal alternative, the TV studios are partly responsible for the piracy problem and should first focus on providing legal ways to access all old content before complaining that individuals are making that content available.

Piracy will always exist but consumers may be more inclined to support the people fighting piracy if legal alternatives to piracy are avalaible. It is thus incumbent on the TV studios to make all their content available online for people who are willing to pay for it.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Is The 2010 TV seasons online yet?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The big news this week is Facebook’s announcement that it would take the company public, in one of the largest offering in history, raising an expected US$5 billion in the process. As this is the largest tech IPO since Google, it is time to run the number and assess whether similarities or difference exist when it comes to base numbers. What appears there seems to justify the $75–100 billion valuation some see the company getting at IPO while providing a few points of concerns about the future growth of the company.

The topline numbers

The first numbers everyone is looking at are how much the  company is raising, how much it’s making and what its profitability look like. If we compare the 12 months preceding the offering for Google and Facebook, the picture looks like this (all figures are in thousands of dollars, unless otherwise stated):

Looking at those numbers, the Facebook IPO seems relatively cheap compared to the amount of money Google was looking to rise when it went public. However, since we don’t know how many shares Facebook is looking to sell for those US$5 billion, it is impossible to assess how much the company should be priced at.

Using Google’s market cap at its strike price and at the close of its first day, we could look at the multipliers for revenue and net income as possible hints as to how much Facebook could be valued at on its first day:

So if revenue and income were to be considered as the only indicators for what value to give Facebook, the valuation range of US$75–100 billion for the company doesn’t seem totally incredible. However, one would have to consider whether Facebook could grow its revenue at the same rate as Google did. While it starts from a substantially higher number, it also means that the company is probably in a more mature stage and may not be able to grow its revenue at the same speed as it has in the past.

Revenue

While Facebook’s revenues are impressive, we should see how they break down in order to get a better sense as to whether a comparison to Google makes sense. Digging into the S-1, we find interesting numbers such as the percentage of revenue that comes from advertising, the percentage change from the prior year’s ad revenue (and from the year before that, giving us a sense of what growth looks like) and highlights as to the percentage of revenue coming from significant external parties. I’ve summarize this data in the table below (dollar values are in thousands):

While Facebook’s ad revenue are substantially larger than Google’s were at IPO time, its reliance on advertising is 10%, showing that the company may be more successful as diversifying its revenue base. This appears to be a good thing as the last 2 years of ad revenue growth seem to have been slower than what Google was experiencing when it went public. Another sign that we may be dealing with a more mature growth curve when it comes to the company’s ad revenue is the fact that it seems to have already been fairly successful in ensuring that its revenue base was no longer just a US one, with only 56% of its ad revenue coming from the US, while Google was deriving 74% of its advertising revenue from the US when it went public.

Much has been made about the mention in Facebook’s offering that it derived 12% of its revenue from deals with Zynga, the company that has successfully provided a number of games for the Facebook platform. However, one must realize that such reliance on an external party is not so unusual and that Google was warning that 21% of its ad revenue were generated by managing the ad inventory of external partners.

So all and all, the revenue picture for Facebook looks pretty strong but advertising revenue may be decelerating, with question as to whether the other sources of revenue are growing at high enough a speed to counter that deceleration.

Costs

On the other side of the financial register, one has to look at whether Facebook is as efficient on managing costs as Google was when it went public. Fortunately, here again, the S-1 filings provide us with usable data (all dollar figures in thousands):

The first thing that jumps out when looking at those numbers is that Facebook seems to pay substantially more for its revenue than Google does. In fact, if you look at the multipliers on cost of revenue (7.06 times) and actual revenue (3.86 times), it seems that it takes almost twice as much for Facebook to make a dollar as it did for Google when it went public. Some of this has to do with R&D costs, which are substantially higher as a function of revenue than the ones Google had at IPO time. Sales and market and overall costs and expenses seem to be lower, as a function of revenue, than Google’s were at the time of its offering. This may be a sign of an organization with more mature cost control metrics.

Keeping an eye on the cost of revenue may be an important factor in assessing where Facebook is heading revenue wise. If that number keeps rising, the company’s margin may erode, making it a less attractive business. In its offering document, the company is reporting a US$.43 net income per diluted share: this is slightly better but mostly comparable to the US$.41 per share Google had reported in its offering documents.

How much revenue per employee?

Both filings provide information as to the number of employees each company had. When it filed to go public, Google had 1907 employees; by comparison, Facebook had 3200 as of its filing. This is a useful number as it allows us to compute revenue per employee, a common measure of how effective a company is. When it filed, Google was making US$504,391 per employee; by comparison, Facebook is making US$1,159,688 per employee.

This is pretty significant as Facebook appears to be making twice as much revenue per employee as Google does. But how profitable are each employee?

Using the same approach, we can find out that Google made US$55,400 in net income per employee when it filed while Facebook makes US$312,500 in net income per employee as of this filing. This is a pretty impressive number but it is in league with what Google makes today (US$336,297 as of a year ago) and ahead of the rest of the computer industry, with the exception of Apple and Google.

If we were to look at Facebook by this measure, it most definitely earns a spot in the US$100 billion market-cap club.

Methodology

For the purpose of getting this data, I pulled all the numbers from the respective S-1 documents for Facebook and Google. Because the numbers in Google’s S-1 were in thousands and the numbers in Facebook’s S-1 were in millions, I have normalized all numbers to be in  thousands. All numbers were pulled directly from the respective S-1 filings or computed from the numbers I’ve exposed.

Conclusion

I’ve looked at a number of ways to quantify how big Facebook is from a financial standpoint and compare it to what was the last IPO of this scale in the tech world. The Google IPO was the launch of a company that had been dominating a large part of the discussion in tech circles over the previous 5 years. The same is true of Facebook, which has managed to grow from a project in a Harvard dorm room into a company that is serving around 800 million people. From a metrics standpoints, this company also appears to have a very strong business that compares favorably with other tech giants and the numbers bandied about in terms of valuation do not seem to be particularly outrageous when put in the greater context of the rest of the industry.

Of course, this does not mean that it is a business that is guaranteed success in the future. Some questions still remain around the cost of its revenue and the company’s ability to continue on the same growth curve as it has in recent years.

If you were to ask me if the Facebook IPO represents a new level of froth in our industry, I would be tempted to say that, based on the core numbers, that does not appear to be the case.

Update (May 18th, 2012): Facebook priced and closed unchanged $38, giving it a revenue multiplier roughly equivalent to that of Google’s first day close (Facebook was worth $104.18 billion at close)

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Facebook IPO vs. Google IPO. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve looked at availability of movies and TV shows that came out in the past year. But what about movies that came two years ago? Are those more available today than they were a year ago? Let’s look at the data.

2010: Box Office Winners availability

A year ago, I went through the list of box office winners and looked at their availability online. I pulled the information again in January 2012, a full year after the initial data set. The 2012 data looked like this:

Aggregate Rental data

When you tally it up, the rental only chart (excluding movies you can purchase) looks as follows:

The data seems to show that hits from over a year ago are still difficult to get. Netflix fares best, capturing 26% of the titles but pay-per-view services like Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu turn in a paltry offering with only 15% of the 2010 box office winners being available for rent on these services.

So, having run the data for 2 years in a row, are we seeing improvements in the market?

The picture here actually shows something fairly disastrous to people who hope that things are improving in terms of availability of movies along the long tail. While Netflix turns in a stronger performance, more than doubling availabilities of 2010 box office winners from 10 to 26, all other online services are seeing availability drop by 31% or more. This means that almost one third fewer 2010 box office winners are available this year as rentals as compared to last year. The strategy here seems to call in question the existence of a long tail in terms of media availability as far as rentals are concerned.

While the cost of storing a movie is a marginal one, it appears studios prefer to not make titles available as rentals online. There is some humor in the fact that whatever corner DVD rental place is still in existence near your home probably has a higher selection of available titles from 2010 than could be found last year because ALL 2010 box office winners are now available on DVD.

Aggregate Rental and Sales data

So, with a strong suspicion that sales numbers may be better, let’s see what happens if we had movies that may not be available for rent but can be purchase (ie. are more expensive to get)

The first one notices here is that the number of titles legally available online is still relatively low a full year after all the titles have been released. While DVDs have come out, legal online streaming services online offer a bit over half of the 2010 box office winners, with Amazon having the most extensive catalog. The availability of legal movie streams, when compared to DVD, is still a challenge.

But have things improved since last year? To figure that out, let’s look at the availability of the same titles over the last couple of years:

My initial hunch was that we would have seen improvements in the sales of legal streams from one year to the next, just as we would would have seen for DVDs because of availability.

But the picture is actually surprising as the availability of legal streams for 2010 box office winners has dropped in the last 12 months. On their face, one might expect sales of legal online streams to see patterns similar to sales of DVDs, even if they would trail the plastic medium. But what’s surprising here is that it appears studios have decided to pull their movie catalogs back offline.

There is still a long way before legal online streaming matches DVD sales as it appears movie studios are still addicted to selling pieces of plastic than they are to selling movies in any form available.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Streaming held back. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Last week, I looked at the availability of 2011 movie box office winners as legal internet streams. The results seem to incense Netflix supporters, who pointed out that the comparison was unfair because Netflix was more focused on TV fares. This week, I turn my attention to availability of popular TV shows as internet on-demand streams.

Approach

As I did a year ago, I pulled the data from Deadline.com’s Broadcast series ranker and cleaned it up. I took out every live and reality TV shows as the archival value of such show is limited since they are primarily marketed as “events” and, as such, loose most of their value to the viewer after the initial broadcast.

Where part of one of the seasons was available, I gave the service a partial availability. Where seasons prior to the 2010–2011 years were available, I did not give credit if the 2010–2011 season had no availability because I was focusing the effort on availability of last year’s shows.

From a service standpoint, I focused on services that allowed for streaming to most internet-enabled television. This meant that Netflix and Hulu were the main subscription based offerings and Amazon on-demand and iTunes were listed as pay-per-view services.

The list

With­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2011 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

While it is fun to check if your favorite show is available or not, the real interesting trending data only comes when you re-group the information. For this purpose, I looked at two different sets of data: first, I looked at whether all the episodes of the 2010–2011 season were available for a given series. Then I re-ran my research, giving full credit to the service for having “some” episodes from that season.

The results were as follows:

As one would expect, the pay-per-view services are doing better than the subscription based ones but what is surprising is how little content is actually available on the subscription-based services: Hulu only offers some episodes of half of the most popular shows, while Netflix barely has any offerings, clocking in with just above a third of the shows having some kind of stream.

When trying to access full seasons, the data is even worse, as Netflix offers full seasons on only 9 (or 18%) of the top 50 shows, while Hulu gives you access to the 2010–2011 season for 18 shows (or 36%). The amusing thing is that Hulu appears to give you access to as many full seasons as Netflix has as partial ones. The data shows that if you want access to popular TV shows via subscription, you’re better off going with Hulu than you are going with Netflix.

What seems to be hurting those services is the fact that CBS, one of the large TV networks has decided to go it alone when it comes to their own shows and show them on their own sites instead of making them available to stream aggregators.

Another interesting thing is that Netflix seems to pick up cancelled shows more readily than any other service. In my research, I found that if a show had been cancelled over the last year, it was more likely to be available on Netflix than on any of the other services.

On the pay-per-view side, Amazon and iTunes have now reached parity, as both service offer 43 (or 86%) of the shows on either per-episode or per-season fees. Their pricing seems to be roughly the same, with shows average between $.99 and $3.99 per episodes and full TV seasons passes going for $20.99 to $40.99. I would not be surprised if next year, we saw those services having the full set of shows available for instant streaming.

Breaking it down

Looking at the distribution, one might wonder how each of the services fares on sub-sets of the overall group. Furthermore, in terms of getting a better sense of trends, if is useful to overlay this with last year’s data and see whether progress has been made:

Overall, it looks like top 10 shows are less available onall-you-can-eat  subscription-based services this year than they were last year, while there is an increase in availability on pay-per-view services.

Netflix continues to trail other services in terms of making full seasons available and it seems it is a gap that will not narrow any time soon as Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes continue to aggressively grow their catalogs. In fact, the big story in this graph may be the big push Amazon is making in adding new titles to its streaming library. It has now matched Apple’s iTunes store in terms of offering, closing the gap it had last year.

When looking at partial availability, we are still seeing some differences:

Here, Netflix appears to have actually list some ground when it comes to the top 10 list, while all the other players have made substantial progress. This may point to another weakness for Netflix moving forward. Also of note is that while Apple used to be the go-to source for all TV series, Amazon has closed the gap in the last year, establishing itself as a strong second player in the market.

Conclusion

Many people look to online TV streams as the key to increasing the number of people cutting the cord from their cable companies and moving to internet-only offerings. This year’s data seems to indicate that it is now possible to do so but that the costs associated with such a strategy may not necessarily represent a huge saving for people who consume a lot of TV content.

The greatest amount of available content in terms of legal online streams can be found on pay-per-view services and subscription-based services like Netflix and Hulu still have some ways to go before providing a TV-like selection (this may explain why both of them are starting to turn further in the direction of producing their own content). However, viewers who watch only a few select show may be able to get this content from services like Amazon and Apple iTunes for a fee.

People watching this space should pay closer attention to Amazon’s aggressive push in this arena. As the company continues to expand its digital offerings, it seems to have earmarked video as one of the areas in which it is willing to go big and it has quietly grown its catalog over the last year.

Meanwhile, while Hollywood is trying to push for laws against online piracy (things like SOPA and PIPA), creating frictions with the tech community in the process, maybe it should focus on making content available through legal channels first, before complaining that people are stealing content. One of the reason people may be drive to piracy is the lack of availability of the content through legal means. Fill that gap, and you will see substantially less piracy of content happening on the internet.

Next week, I’ll take you through last year’s box office winners and how available those are. There are more surprises there, I promise; so stay tuned.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Legal streams for 2011 TV hits. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A year ago, I looked at the availability of recent blockbuster hits in online stream and discovered some interesting patterns in online stream offerings. This year, I’m doing the same with the 2011 list of box office hits. The great news is that we appear to see some progress.

2011: Box Office Win­ners availability

For each movie of the top 100 movies at the box office, I pulled data on for streaming info on Netflix, Amazon on Demand, iTunes, and Vudu. I also pulled up availability of DVDs to use as a yardstick in terms of overall movie availability. The final chart looked like this:

But the information, in a raw form, doesn’t really tell us much. To get a better sense of where we are, we need to re-aggregate the info.

Aggregate rental data

Looking at the rental market, we can now see the aggregation providing us a clearer picture

The data shows that Netflix appears to be missing the Flix part of its name when it comes to streaming, as it offers only 5 of the top 100 box office winners of 2011. By comparison, pay-per-view seems to be doing a better job at making top hits available for streaming, with the numbers declining as you go deeper into the list. So top movies seem to be widely available this year (in fact, 64 percent of the top 25 movies were available for streaming only 9% short of what’s available on more traditional formats like DVD).

Another interesting thing to note here is that the data seems to be relatively consistent across online pay-per-view services with Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu apparently getting access to the same movies, leading one to think that there is little differentiation between those products (of note: Vudu has actually tried to differentiate on offering by providing 7.1 surround sound and 3D movies to available TV sets.) With prices across those services being roughly the same (movies are renting for $3.99 to $5.99 on average), there is a question as to how those services will be able to provide a differentiated experience in the future.

But the big advantage of doing this again this year is that we can compare the information against last year’s data and see if progress has been made:

The story here isn’t that pretty for Netflix, which has lost substantial ground from last year’s position, offering less than half of the hits it used to offer last year. If you think of their recent moves towards creating original content, it appears that Netflix is slowly moving away from its initial strategy of providing online streaming of movies on a subscription basis and moving more to a model more akin to that of a TV network.

Another interesting development here is that online streaming seems to be some losing ground compared to DVDs. One could assume that, as a new technology, online streaming would be gaining ground on DVDs but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Granted, we only have a couple of data points so next year’s data will provide us with a better understanding as to whether hollywood is trying to slow down the progress of online streaming.

Sales Data

If we are witnessing such a slow down, one of the reason may be that movie studios are looking to maximize revenue coming from sales.

The first interesting item to show up here is that we are now seeing remarkable consistency in availability of titles on streaming services. However, the availability of legal movie streams is still trailing the availability of movies on DVDs. This gap seems to be less pronounced when it comes to the top of the list than when ones goes further back into the box office records.

Once again, looking at how availability this year compared to last year’s availability provides some interesting information:

As opposed to online rentals, sales of streaming movies seem to be gaining on sales of DVDs, with an increasing parity in availability of movies as bits (streams) or plastic (DVDs). This appears to confirm the suspicion that movie studios are trying to protect their sales revenue at the expense of promoting pay-per-view.

Conclusion

The past year has seen an increasing alignment in the libraries of titles offered by online streamers in an on-demand basis. At the same time, we have seen Netflix apparently abandon its strategy of offering popular movies on a subscription basis. Next week, I will look at whether Netflix’s efforts are getting more focused on television streams or whether we are seeing them pull back across the board in terms of availability of more recent content.

We are also seeing Hollywood now treating online as more equivalent to DVD sales, offering titles for sale online at roughly the same rate as they do on DVD. Let’s hope that this trend continues to hold and that the industry sees the wisdom of providing online streams in an earlier release window. A few independent movies have done simultaneous releases online and in theaters this year and Hollywood has a potential to increase its revenues if it were to increasingly go in that direction.

Two sets of data only provide a small view into an overall trend but I promise I will continue growing the data set and revisit those numbers next year, giving us a better sense as to whether there is any changes in this segment of the media distribution puzzle.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Where the hits are streaming in 2011. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I covered on 2011 as I still believe many of those represent important trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual prediction list (and closed it out with a review) and was surprised by how many of the themes I highlighted ended up making their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to create a framework that allowed me to do so efficiently. My process is to capture simple ideas in a backlog and then dig through them once a week, sometimes tying the story to a recent development. Every Friday night or Saturday, I then crank out a post that covers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a better sense of my own thinking on a topic and then get feedback on how wrong (or occasionally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strategy behind Keepskor and get a better sense of where our industry is heading.

While I never set a narrative for what is being covered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I produced over the last year.

An emerging New York

I kicked off the year by making a bold prediction about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York technology scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I highlighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I suspect that, within a generation or two, New York has a chance to displace the valley as the center of the US tech industry (note that the longer view is something I articulated later in the year but has been a dominant theme on this site for a decade).

The series created quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most trafficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traffic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relocate south of San Francisco to make it. New York provides an environment that rivals San Francisco and has a few extra advantages I had not covered in that series. For example, being halfway between London and the Valley, New York is the perfect place to manage a business that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feeling from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direction of thinking about the broader trends relating to startups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that startups are risky, expensive, idea-based, smooth rides where everyone makes money.

My reason for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to people when they brought up those myths (and as someone who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Financial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been trying to make sense of the financial markets and get a better understanding of the overall economic picture. This first led me to analyze whether internet valuations were getting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As internet companies started testing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was overvalued and highlighted some concerns around the GroupOn offering and later in the year, I started thinking writing more about digital currency.

The Internet War

The concept of digital currency is but one of the hot flashpoint between the current world and the internet one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activity from hacker groups and the rise of the internet as a political philosophy. Calling for an end to apathy on the part of our industry when it comes to policy making, I tried to make the case for the creation of a new set of definitions and protocols to control the internet of the future.

This is in reaction to an increasing privatization of large parts of the web, balkanizing the open web,  as companies try to monetize their user base to return value to their investors or counter suspected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those companies are redefining identity ownership through surprising terms of service agreements.

A resurgent Microsoft

Meanwhile, another story that has made its way through my narrative has been a massive comeback: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a symbol of technology decline. But 2011 has shown us a resurgent company, first in its agreement with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its placing on the web as a core component of the next version of Windows; and then through the success of its revolutionary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Windows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoying wider support and new technologies like WebGL are bringing the web to new levels, levels that could be matching native apps soon. I will probably write more about these trends in 2012.

Internet and TV Colliding

Another item I have covered extensively in 2011 is the merging of television and the internet. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office winners were streaming, how available popular TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in availability.I also looked into why live TV streams were not available online, explaining how some of the missing pieces of the puzzle could fit together. This provided readers with a stronger understanding of where the market stood. At the time, the results showed that availability was getting better but still had a long way to go.

I will start revisiting a lot of this information next week to gauge how much progress has been made in making movies and TV shows available on the internet.

My interest in this as a trend is that it provides us with a better view into whether internet TV is ready for primetime as a new internet channel (Netflix getting into the content production business was a major event in that direction, opening the door for other internet companies to offer something on that third screen… and for a few players to become new gatekeepers if we are not careful.)

I suspect this collision is part of the reason we have seen the entertainment industry rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book industry getting impacted in radical ways as media increasingly become mobile and can be consumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

However, I was surprised that I had not spent more time covering some other trends I’m seeing emerging.

My archives did not include any mentions of bitcoin, though I think that virtual currencies are one of the hot topics currently sitting below the surface. While I am not convinced that bitcoin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increasing traffic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new manufacturing age is upon us. The revolution behind 3D printing, 3D scanning and more customized and micro-produced materials is something that we will see on the edge this year and probably in the mainstream by end of year or early next year. This will have a substantial impact on our economy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

While I have deliberately chosen not to focus my writing on a narrow area, it appears there are broad topics that I return to on a regular basis. The intersection of media, technology, business and politics are part of the broad trends I follow around here and generally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writing as being about culture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to establish a few foundational posts from a trending standpoint. But as we become more public about Keepskor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its creation and some of the thinking behind it. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing a dual life as blogger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m working on but I’m sure that readers will be interested as it taps into some of the trends highlighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very exciting year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accomplished in 2011.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011: The year that was. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.