Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Vodcasting

The Vodcasting wars have begun.

Estonia: If It Works, You Can Break It

Fantastic story on entrepreneurship and technology in Estonia in Forbes by Joshua Levine.  "If the Internet was reborn as a country, it would be Estonia," said a UNDP administrator.  This quote from Linnar Viik sums it up nicely: "People like to say, don't touch things that work, but Estonians like to look behind the thing and wonder whether there's anything we can change about it. In Estonia you might say, if it works, you can break it."

The poster boy on cover is Sander Mägi, who dropped out of school to work for me.  We later co-founded InterIris, a web software development company.  Sander gave me my first exposure to extreme programming methodologies, which was a tremendous gift.  His latest venture is doing great:

...The two founded Aqris Software, and introduced RefactorIT in 2002. Refactor basically works like a kind of spreadsheet for programs written in Java code, automatically remodeling an entire application to reflect changes in parts of its code. The benefit here is speed, saving the thousands of man-hours it would take to reprogram manually.

The biggest customer is Zed, a digital content supplier for mobile phones. Small sales have been made to Nokia, Philips and Fujitsu. Aqris has pretty much doubled every year, earning $1 million cumulatively. Last year it made over $400,000 on revenue of $1 million and won an award as Estonia's best technology developer.

Last time I visited, I also got to re-connect with Allan Martinson, who has just launched Martinson Trigon Venture Capital.  While its not a country full of Skypes, there are opportunities.

"I can see tons of interesting products in Estonia today, but they've stopped their development at €2 million and ten people...It's a good time to be in VC in Estonia," he says, "but it remains to be seen whether Estonia can be a truly global player. It's not just about IT, it's about attitude."

Just ask Steve Jurveston:

"After Skype, we saw tons of opportunities here to follow up. It's like the entire country has this eager, immigrant mentality. Except that in this case they immigrated back to their own country."

The article concludes on a note that the reserved nature of Estonian hold them back from promoting their economy and own brand of innovation.  Perhaps that's why I am so keen to talk about the little country that could.  Because it has, in its own small way.

Follow Your Passions

Great profile of our VP of Business Development, Rick Klau, who has followed his passions throughout his career.

Google Opens the Stacks

A number of major libraries are opening. Ed Vielmetti tipped me to how University of Michagan Library is digitizing its colllection onto Google, to be announced tomorrow, as is the Harvard and New York Public Libraries.

John Battelle points out Project Ocean traces its roots a Stanford founding.  The depth of this project extends into montetizing the long tail by bringing out of print back in to fair use.  Wandering the stacks without the wandering.

Wikis in Forbes Best of the Web

Nice article on wikis in Forbes Best of the Web, here's an excerpt on Socialtext:

One firm already focused on trying to apply wiki technology to the enterprise market is Palo Alto, Calif.-based SocialText, which offers a simple wiki interface that allows Web log-style posting, as well as integration with e-mail. Ross Mayfield, co-founder and CEO, says, "It's a platform for unstructured, ad hoc collaboration. If I want to form a group, I can give a group a workspace name, click a button, and then invite people in, using their e-mail addresses. Suddenly I have a group of people I'm collaborating with in a private password-protected Web site that's made up of wiki pages."

At Ziff-Davis, a group of 50 team members, who used to receive about 100 e-mails a day, were able to eliminate all of those e-mails by putting information on their SocialText wiki instead. According to Tom Jessiman, general manager of Ziff-Davis's 1up.com, it has resulted in soft-cost savings of perhaps $1 million because of the time that team members saved by getting the same information directly, bypassing email.

Mayfield says that SocialText, which charges $30 per user per month and offers volume discounts, currently has more than 50 customers, and has had two consecutive cash-flow positive quarters.

The article describes wikis as an evolution of blogging for the enterprise (Extreme Blogging, that is).  We, of course, see it as a complement.

I have a plaque on my office wall from the last time one of my companies was in Forbes Best of the Web.  The yellow cover is beginning to fade and the headline reads "An Economy on Steroids."   Ah, headlines.

Home-Brewed Ad

Wired points to a home-brewed ad for the iPod Mini as the future of advertising.  Steve Rubel is right to say this may be the first pure pro-am TV spots and that "The question is, what will the marketers do? Some will embrace it but some will shun it.... I hope (Masters) gets a job in Apple's marketing department. He certainly deserves it. But I'm surprised Apple hasn't shut it down. They can be very persnickety about their brand and trademarks."

Today Majestic Research is holding an event on sell side advertising.  This ad is a prime example of the creative market that populates the directory for the sell side.

Weight of Words

The 10 ten words of the year according to Merriam-Webster, based on lookups: with del.icio.us and Flickr tags.  Also links to currently blank wiki pages and Wikipedia articles.

1. blog: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
2. incumbent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
3. electoral: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
4. insurgent: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
5. hurricane: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
6. cicada: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
7. peloton: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
8. partisan: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
9. sovereignty: del, flickr, wiki, pedia
10. defenestration: del, flickr, wiki, pedia

These are, of course, very different from the most popular tags.  I would love to see a visualization of the relative weight of these words.

The Network's Interpretation of Islam

An outtake from this morning's Open Affordances Panel:

Ziauddin Sardar: The most profound impact of the net will be on Islam.  Until now, the tools for education and interpreting Islam have been in the hands of a select group of scholars that have a criteria for being able to interpret text.  Now an individual can empower themselves very quickly, offer interpretations and make arguments.  The power to interpret is being given widely. Relgious scholars will loose power and we will get communities of interpretation -- an opening of Islam that we haven't had in hundreds of years.

Ulises Mejias: Perhaps thats why some why some countries, like Saudi Arabia, are clamping down.

Stephen Downes: Things change not specifically when the tech changes, but when people's attitudes change.   We have always had these capacities, but its like when people suddenly get opposable thumbs and say, hey, maybe I can open a door.  People take the attitude of free agency in the workplace vs. master and servant.  Islam doesn't change until individual muslims change.

Ziauddin Sardar:  Precisely my point, individuals use the net as a catalyst for change if there is a personal desire.  An availability of resources that have been not accessible in the past -- a catalyst that invites me to change.  Change begins in people's minds. saudia arabia fear of internet isn't just porn. You cannot bring in non-approved translations of the Koran through an airport.  They want to censor the availability of interpretations.

The Mouse

The very first mouse, at Doug Englebart's dining room table during the Blue Oxen 2nd Anniversary party.  Something like 1.5 Billion sold and the word adopted by every language.  The beauty is simplicity: X, Y and one button.  The next prototype had three buttons.  Why?  "That was as many as we could fit on it."  Notice the rounded curves.  This moment in history isn't in a museum, yet.
  The Mouse 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

Dan Gillmor Leaving the Merc

Wow. My hometown paper hero has moved on.

Congratulations Dan.  Whatever the future holds, I'm sure you will not only get it, but possibly now shape it.