wync

"That's not a company, that's a feature..." Well, now it's a company...

On Thursday, I was fortunate to be at the Facebook F8 Keynote and Hackathon. It was an amazing event, where Zuck gave a keynote with a Jobs-esque flair for pacing and drama.

He announced the launch of Facebook Platform. As it has been covered in detail elsewhere, I won't give a detailed explanation; suffice to say, it allows developers to build new applications (music players, dating services, etc.) within the Facebook environment, giving Facebook users quick and easy access to these new services. An important element of Facebook platform is that developers get to keep all of the ad revenue from the Facebook applications.

I found this interesting, because in Silicon Valley you are constantly exposed to entrepreneurs who have great ideas that aren't sustainable businesses by themselves. The question venture capitalists often ask is, "is that a product or a company?". More recently, with the emergence of web 2.0, the problem has gotten worse. For example, I might have an idea for a much better, simpler way for online invitations to work.  VCs have been asking "is that even a product? or is it a feature?" A great idea isn't such a great idea if nobody knows about it and nobody is signed up. 

Until now. Facebook's platform will allow many of these cool product ideas to actually become businesses in their own right by leveraging Facebook's platform of users. Facebook users won't have to learn a new interface, visit a new web page or change their current behavior.

Pretty cool, I think. Look for my Facebook apps to be launching soon ;)

Advertising, We Need to Break Up...

The Break Up

I've changed, you haven't. I mean, we don't even hang out in the same places anymore...

A cute parody produced by a marketing manager about the current state of the relationship between advertisers and consumers. It is partially inspired by David Armano’s Business Week story It’s The Conversation Economy Stupid.

[via ExperienceCurve]

How to Recruit Star Employees, example #1

A very cool, innovative recruiting effort with a personal touch by Red 5.

DuckWithGlasses - A search engine for t-shirts

Hey everybody, check out a sneak preview of the alpha version of DuckWithGlasses. It's a search engine for t-shirts. Yep- it turns out that it's rather hard to find t-shirts online using Google. You might even notice something familiar in the graphics... Any feedback is much appreciated!

Human Computation

OK, this is admittedly a bit nerdy, but I can't resist posting it. Above is a video from a Google TechTalk series with Luis von Ahn. Here's what Luis talks about: some tasks are easy for you and I, but enormously difficult for computer programs. For example, looking at a photograph and identifying the objects. Sounds easy, but try to get a computer to do it accurately! So how do you get humans to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve? The elegant answer: construct "games with a purpose." This makes me wish I was doing a CS degree. [via Benj, thanks buddy!]

Interviewing at the Red Herring Conference

Through an interesting series of events, Red Herring magazine asked Julio and I to be the official video interviewers at their conference in Monterey. Julio and I drove up tonight and will be conducting interviews all day tomorrow and Thursday. Should be a lot of fun. I don't have our final list of guests, but first up is Max Levchin (co-Founder Paypal, CEO of Slide, Chairman Yelp). The interviews are supposed to be featured on Red Herring's website, so stay tuned and I'll send the link when I get it.