RoadsAfar

It’s Monday morning and the startup weekend buzz is starting to wear off. I actually got more than three hours of sleep and a home cooked meal. It’s really amazing to check out idre.am and see what we were able to build in only a weekend. I have to thank Peter, Oscar, Daniel, Don, Chris, Sudarshan, and Joe for helping to build a kick-butt site in so little time. Those folks are great.

This was my first StartupWeekend, but I’ve been following it since the first Boulder weekend and have really wanted to attend one. It was even more fun than I expected. I met some great people, learned a ton, and got a great thrill out of collaborative work. And that was really the best part of startup weekend for me: the people. I’ve said it before, but it’s really becoming a mantra for me: you build a company around good people, not good ideas.

The other intriguing part of StartupWeekend is the social experiment of self-organizing groups. Conflict happens. Put hard-working people in a small room together and throw in some profit incentive and conflict is bound to happen even more. Peter, Erica and I discussed group organization as the weekend wound down and I realized my inclination is to shepherd, to guide with a firmer hand. But I don’t think that’s a good solution. I think the “teach a man to fish” cliche applies here. If you lead too actively, you destroy the chance for spontaneity and lucky surprises. Plus, maybe the that conflict arises is also useful.

It’s possible that StartupWeekend (and other self-organizing conferences) reveals who you really are. If you have a tendency to sit back and let others do all the work, that’s probably what you’ll do at StartupWeekend. If you’re a control freak that can stand to share the glory or let others have input on an idea, you’ll probably alienate everyone in your group. If your only interested in profit, you’re probably severely misguided because I won’t even begin to discuss the odds of building a profitable business in a weekend: that’s missing the point. But if you favor collaborative work, are eager to encourage others, enjoy sharing of yourself and your ideas, and like getting things done, you’ll have ample opportunity at a StartupWeekend.

If that’s really true, if StartupWeekend reveals how you relate to others, then maybe the purpose of StartupWeekend is not to start a company, but to learn about yourself. And that’s something all of us could learn more about.

Dryad is a new tool from the Stanford Virtual Worlds group for creating trees intuitively. The demo is very polished (particularly for something worked on by graduate students) and the idea is promising in its application to other domains. Vladlen Koltun gives an excellent demonstration of the technology in a presentation.The technology works according to the following steps:

1. Create an algorithm to generate a tree according to a set of predefined parameters.
2. Build an editor that allows the parameters to be modified by some intuitive controls (sliders, drop-down menus, etc.)
3. Turn over the editor to users and track which trees the user saves or exports (this counts as a “vote” for the “goodness” of the tree).
4. Generate new random trees, favoring random trees with a lower distance to “voted” trees in the high-dimensional space.

There are several promising aspects of the technology that are worth mentioning in particular:

• User-defined design space exploration- As Vladlen mentions in the video, the vast majority of trees in the design space are simply not tree-like. As users played with the program and created their own trees, the trees that are saved are used as votes for the trees goodness. This is reported to be similar to the way that voting will happen using the editors in Spore, Will Wright’s new game that is built around several procedural editors. It’s a powerful idea for determining the pockets of goodness in a sea of procedural randomness.
• Map analogy for space exploration- After the space has been parameterized and the areas of the design space containing “good” trees has been determined, the user is allowed to explore the space on a two-dimensional map-like landscape similar to Google Maps. This analogy is familiar to users. Furthermore, as the user zooms in on an area, they are exploring more closely a particular region of the multi-dimensional design space and the trees in that space resemble each other more and more closely the further the user zooms in. Others should take note of this method of design space navigation.

Kudos to the Stanford group on the tool and the polish behind it. I look forward to seeing what objects are explored next. 

I picked up Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days the other day and started reading through it for inspiration. I had always noticed Jessica’s name at the bottom of Paul Graham’s essays in the acknowledgements section. Paul’s essays have been like a shot of startup adrenaline: whenever I need a little bit of entrepreneurial fuel, I read (or reread) one of the essays to get pumped up. I suppose it’s kind of like listening to Metallica before a football game or something. Anyways, The book contains a series of interviews with startup founders. The first one is an interview with Max Levchin, cofounder and CTO at PayPal. A couple of things jumped out while reading the interview with Max that I wanted to touch on.

1. Startups are about people. Finding good cofounders really matters. Finding good employees at the start really matters. “If you have a good team, you are halfway there.”
2. Determination matters. Max was absolutely determined to get his technology to work. He pulled all-nighters. He coded until it got done. 
3. Naivete can be a strength. Max wasn’t aware of the technical challenges they were going to come up against in dealing with fraud, but was confident they would solve the problems as they came up. “People like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well–they knew from years of practice that this was going to become a huge problem–didn’t really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. … We thought, ‘we don’t know how to do this; let’s just invent it.’” Sometimes not knowing how hard a problem is can be a blessing. You may approach the solution from a different angle or try something that others had been unwilling to try because it appeared to daunting.
4. Entrepreneurs just want to start something. Perhaps my favorite quote was about his drive to start a company: “I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is … you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is.” I know exactly the feeling. There is something empowering about working at the startup level. It’s like programming in assembly–you have access to the bare metal, no abstractions or obstructions.

Max has continued to show his drive for starting something as he has moved on to work on Slide and Yelp.

So the iPhone SDK was released yesterday to much excitement. I’m downloading the SDK right now and have a couple of apps in mind. Michael Arrington on TechCrunch collects some of the limitations on third-party apps, stating that “for now, whole classes of applications are useless, or are significantly less useful than they otherwise would be.”

The major restriction that seems to be getting attention is:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)

There are only two types of interactions that this limits that I can think of:

• The iPhone needs to do some processing in the background, for example, triangulating coordinates to see where you are and storing that information for later.
• The iPhone needs to check the internet in the background for periodically updating information, possibly notifying the user. Examples include an IM client notifying the iPhone owner of an incoming message.

While annoying, I think some common applications can still be implemented but what will have to happen is the paradigm will have to change slightly. In the case of an IM client, rather than having a constant signal represent “being online”, someone will have to create an iPhone-Online mode where messages sent to the user are queued up on a server somewhere until the iPhone user opens the application and pulls down the most recent messages. This could be done as a layer that sits between the iPhone and AIM or the IM clients themselves could implement this functionality.

In the case of a lot of applications, the actual processing can take place on the server or only while the application is open. When the user opens the application, processing can take place on the iPhone and the state can be saved in a local sqlite database or on a remote server. When the application is reopened, any additional processing done server-side can be downloaded.

For example, for a time logging application, the user can open the iPhone application and “punch the timecard” so to speak. The application can store the punch time on the phone and the user can then turn the phone off. Whenever the user is connected to the internet and the application is opened, the time log can be synced with a server.

This limitation isn’t a deal-breaker, but it will force developers to rethink the concept of “always on” that we’ve gotten used to with normal applications and web applications alike. The solution will end up being something similar to Google Gears.

I’ve been working with some close friends on a business called JustNeem. The idea is simple: make high quality body care products out of this awesome plant called the neem tree and then sell them here in the United States. Buy the neem from Mauritania, Africa at fair market prices, providing jobs for Mauritanians. Finally, plant a tree in Africa for each soap we sell.  It’s a great product with a great purpose.

We put together a JustNeem page on Facebook tonight for the company where we intend to post events, pictures, videos, and comments on our progress as a company. This is something of an experiment to let people see what goes on behind the scenes at JustNeem as well as what life is like in Mauritania. I’ll be writing about how this experiment goes over time.

So that site I announced I was working on way back in October? We finally launched the alpha. We’ve done our best to get something functional and orderly out there for you guys to play with, but we have a way to go before it’s really where we want it. If you’d like an invite, just ask. And send us any and all feedback you may have.Winedrip. Discover wine with your friends, your way. 

I’m currently out in North Carolina working on yet another web startup. It’s been a wild week of work so far and I still have about a week left. We’re hoping to launch a beta on October 29. I’ll post it here when it goes live. It’s gonna rock.

I’m happy to announce that my new Facebook application, SpaceLift, has gone live. SpaceLift allows Facebook users to browse any public profile on MySpace from within Facebook while converting the profile to the wrinkle-free Facebook layout. We’re hoping to reduce world-wide exposure to animated GIFs by 10% by the end of the year.

It’s still “Pending Approval” so it can’t be searched for in the Facebook Application Directory yet. Fortunately, since you are reading this, you can go there directly and start browsing MySpace.

Writing and launching a Facebook application has been an easy and pleasurable experience so far. We’ve gotten a decent amount of press from the likes of Mashable, Valleywag, and even a French and German blog.

Enough blathering. Go forth and make MySpace a cleaner place. Add SpaceLift.

So it is no secret from my last post that I’m not a big MySpace fan. To work on the Facebook application that I’ve been cranking away on, I had to sign up for a MySpace account and set up a profile. I found MySpace even more repulsive through this experience. And yet it is enormously popular.

What would happen if you could somehow bridge the gap between MySpace and Facebook? This is something I’ve been thinking about and hacking on for the last week. And I’m just about ready to share my work with the world. It could be pretty interesting.

So I started tinkering with the Facebook Application API just last night and was surprised how quickly one can get an application up and running. The documentation on Facebook’s developer wiki and website are remarkably complete given that this service has only been available for a short time. Facebook really gets it. They have a great network with a lot of users, but they also realize that attracting developers is very important. The Facebook Platform goes a long way towards making life easy for potential developers.

MySpace, on the other hand, is a very different story. The Facebook Application that I’m writing, which I’ll talk more about later, is pulling data from MySpace. It is absolutely appalling the amount of disarray that makes up MySpace profiles. Not only does MySpace not offer any sort of public API, but the profiles themselves are a mishmash of haphazard CSS and HTML that make the US Government look efficient and lean. I’m shocked that they are still the largest social network out there at around 100 million users compared to Facebook’s 20 million. Even so, I’m still placing my bets on Facebook.