| Don’t “Pull A Patzer” And Other Lessons Learned On Our Trip Down Sand Hill Road Posted: 28 Feb 2010 08:30 AM PST 
Editor’s note: Earlier this month, BrightRoll raised a $10 million Series B for its video ad network. In this guest post, CEO Tod Sacerdoti shares some of the lessons he learned trying to raise that money in the current environment. As Peter Drucker once wrote, "The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that's unless you're trying to raise capital in these trying times. After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort. To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different than it was two years ago is a massive understatement. Saying it's night and day would be more accurate. As a year that was touched off by Sequoia's now famous "RIP Good Times" presentation, 2009 was highlighted by massive layoffs, significant cost cutting and many well publicized company failures. As a result, many VC firms, and their portfolios, are now fraught with uncertainty—walking a fine line between licking their wounds thanks to poor fund returns and looking for new opportunities to improve their fortunes as the market recovers. Perhaps the most important lesson gleaned from our financing is that over the last two years, the fundraising environment has become more complex. A still dormant IPO and comparatively sluggish M&A markets offer little hope for the future in terms of exits, while a handful of well-publicized scandals have led to more bureaucratic layers in the due diligence process and a new series of metrics are being used to gauge long-term prospects. It's a market in flux, with a whole new set of best—or worst—practices, depending on how you look at them. What follow are some highlights from BrightRoll's most recent trip down Sand Hill Road. 1. The Mint.com Acquisition Left Anything But a Minty Aftertaste in the Mouths of Many on Sandhill Road If you read TechCrunch, you undoubtedly know the story of Mint.com. The winner of the inaugural TechCrunch40, Mint.com's personal finance application lets users track and monitor their financials. The company grew by leaps and bounds following its debut and just three years after its founding was acquired by Intuit for $170M. By most accounts Mint.com's rapid rise to prominence and ultimate acquisition is the quintessential Silicon Valley success story. Yet, the Mint.com acquisition brought to light an interesting phenomenon, one I've coined the "Patzer Problem." Prior to submitting offers to invest, three separate VCs wanted to confirm that we had no intention of “Pulling a Patzer," modern-day Sandhill Road parlance for selling too early. Here's why: with large funds being raised on Sand Hill Road and returns from previous funds underperforming, investors are becoming increasingly desperate for that single homerun investment that returns $1B or greater. Even though Mint.com was a huge success for the founder and team, generating $60 million in equity value per year, many VCs believe they sold too early and left too much potential value on the table. 2. Fraud and Its Impact on the Due Diligence Process In addition to the challenge of getting a term sheet signed, new barriers have emerged that make closing transactions harder than ever. Chief among them is completing due diligence, which has gone from a relatively efficient and painless series of “check-the-box” financial and legal processes, to a full-blown corporate and financial audit. These changes can be primarily attributed to the alleged fraud and ultimate failure of Canopy Financial, a company that raised more than $85 million from FTP and Spectrum. Canopy is alleged to have falsified financial reports and auditing statements and its investors were left holding the bag, which means that other entrepreneurs seeking funding are now paying the price. To prepare for these changes, companies should make sure to negotiate a cap on legal expenses ($25,000 max) in all term sheets because there is no end to what can be attributed to due diligence under this new model. 3. Perception is Reality, So Prepare Your Third-Party Data As Mark Twain once said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." While both companies and venture capitalists often argue that internal logs are both factual and the most accurate source of online traffic data, this data carries little weight when there are millions of dollars at stake. At BrightRoll, we were amazed how many investor decisions relied on metrics provided by comScore and Quantcast, even when the same investors would simultaneously mock the validity of those reports. The lesson here? VCs act like public market investors and perceived leadership may be as valuable as actual leadership—don’t forget to put apples-to-apples measurement in place before making your pitch and understand how to explain any discrepancies that may exist between your logs and those of third-party providers. 4. New Metric: Revenue vs. Money Raised (RoR) We all know that Rome wasn't built in a day and that venture investing is by nature one of the most risky investment classes. History has shown that companies pursuing billion dollar exits that VCs covet are often required to spend significant amounts of time and capital in their formative years to build out their product and gain market share. Yet, in what may be a harbinger of things to come, in multiple meetings I was asked to compare BrightRoll’s annual revenue to the amount of money it had raised in previous years. This is what I now call the Revenue on Raised (RoR) Ratio. If your RoR is greater than one, meaning you generate more revenue every year than your total capital raised, then you are in good health and outperforming most later-stage startups. Just a few years ago, the "Patzer Problem" and the "RoR" ratio would have seemed paradoxical. After all, how can a company be expected to pursue a multi-billion dollar opportunity, bring a product to market and generate revenues in excess of the funds they’ve raised fast enough? As difficult as it is, that is what companies must do. Savvy investors now realize that fast time-to-market, and massive market opportunities and significant revenue generation are all possible in today's online environment. 5. Revenue Growth or Profitability, Pick One There is a perception that in 2009 companies were either reducing head count to get profitable or gaining market share to grow revenue. Yet, in most of our conversations the concept of doing both—doubling revenue and getting profitable in a down year—was regarded as the gold standard. Is this thinking the fatal flaw in the venture model? Looking back to early 2009, it would have been a smart move to invest in companies at low valuations to enable them to deliver either revenue growth or profitability, not both. These results would have been achievable through a disciplined approach, focused on several factors, including: - Resisting raising too much money before the business was scaling so that achieving a desirable RoR was possible in the short term
- Only hiring where desperately needed, to preserve capital to hire through the recession;
Together, these small steps can pay dividends when it comes to raising follow-on rounds, particularly during tough economic times. I hope the above lessons help other companies looking to dive into today’s VC environment, as a little knowledge from the companies that have come before you can go a long way. Photo credit: Flickr/ Steven Damron       
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| How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown Posted: 28 Feb 2010 07:04 AM PST 
The coverage of the Winter Olympics on NBC has been painful to watch. In addition to the tape delays which ruined the outcomes for anyone paying attention to any other news, sports or social media outlet other than NBC, there are a lot of other complaints. In between the hard-hitting reports of polar bears in the Canadian North and life among the lumberjacks, NBC did manage to squeeze in some actual Winter games, which were matched in quantity by the constant loop of the same handful of commercials on heavy rotation for McDonald’s, Visa, AT&T, Diet Coke, and NBC’s upcoming shows Parenthood and the Marriage Ref. (Thank goodness for DVRs). 
We already know that NBC’s handling of its Olympics coverage sucks, if only because everyone on Twitter says so. Right now, Twitter Sentiment shows that 73 percent of Tweets about “NBC Olympics” are negative. But what are they complaining about exactly, and is it just Twitter? Some new data from Crimson Hexagon, another sentiment analysis service for brands, shows the breakdown of hate: Tape Delay Horrible: 19%
NBC Is Awful In General: 13%
Commentators Are Lacking: 9%
Not Enough Sports: 20%
Mobile/Web Lousy: 12%
Other Complaints: 12%
Happily Watching: 15% These numbers come from an analysis of nearly 20,000 Tweets and 5,700 blog posts and forum comments. On Twitter alone, the biggest complaint by far (25 percent) is the tape delay. But that’s what you’d expect from a bunch of realtime addicts. Overall when you count blogs and forums that complaint ranked second, barely nudged out by the lack of enough actual sports coverage. Notably, only 15 of people on the Web were happy with NBC’s coverage. Perhaps people just go to the Web to complain, and happy viewers had no reason to log on because they were enthralled by those polar bears. But something tells me the Web’s view reflects the general one. How do you rate NBC’s coverage?       
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| 19 Startups Showing Their Wares At TechCrunch Japan’s TokyoCamp Demo Event Posted: 28 Feb 2010 07:00 AM PST 
 A total of 19 Japanese startups were given the chance to show their services at TokyoCamp, a demo event held by TechCrunch Japan (one of the country’s biggest blogs) this Friday. The event, which was co-organized by hosting company KDDI Web Communications, was a blast and attracted over 200 people this time.
This was the third TokyoCamp (see here and here for my previous reports), and here are short profiles of all the startups that presented there. (Please note not all of the services offer English homepages.)  Demo 1:
AQUSH by Exchange Corporation
Launched by Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation in December last year, AQUSH is a peer-to-peer lending service that is similar to ZOPA in the UK. AQUSH aims to unlock some of the more than US$7 trillion of retail cash and bank deposits (that are earning nearly 0% interest) by offering individual investors access to the US$300 billion Japanese consumer loan market.
Lenders set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. AQUSH loan applicants are screened based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores. The service has been in operation for 2 months and so far the average annualized ROI for investors is 10.58% after fees. AQUSH says for borrowers, interest rates range between 25% to 50% cheaper than available from specialized consumer lending companies. If you can read Japanese, there’s an in-depth (and fairly recent) article on AQUSH on TechCrunch Japan.  Demo 2:
Maysee by Mogura
Japan is business card country, which means that your average salary man collects hundreds of these cards in any given year. Maysee is a service that scans business cards for clients, corrects OCR errors manually and makes the data accessible via PCs or mobile phones through a web app (for $20 per month per user/$0.35 per business card). The company is currently looking for business partners overseas.
 Demo 3:
Sketch Piston by Team Lab
Sketch Piston is the name of a “new game genre” created by Tokyo-based Team Lab. There are two “Sketch Action” games available at the moment, Sketch Piston 3 and 4 (both of which were made for Team Lab clients). Players can interact with characters in the Flash games by “sketching” various objects with a virtual pen, stamp and eraser. The games have no goal per se, but users can make and share creative gameplay videos on a dedicated platform.
 Demo 4:
Cacoo by Nulab
Cacoo is a what appears to be a powerful online drawing tool that allows multiple users to create designs collaboratively and in real-time. The designs can be shared with certain users or published on the web, for example on blogs or wiki sites. If you make changes to the designs in Cacoo, the blog or wiki the designs were pasted into gets updated automatically and in real-time, meaning there is no need for another upload.
Mainly made for technical illustrations (wireframes, software design diagrams, network diagrams, UMLs etc.), Cacoo is completely browser-based, free and available in English.  Demo 5:
Link Knowledge by SAN SAN
Link Knowledge is an SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). Much like Maysee (profiled above), Link Knowledge digitizes information found on printed business cards, puts the data into context and stores it in the cloud for customers who can then access their data from anywhere they want.
 Demo 6:
Wishcovery
Wishcovery aims at matching people who have the right skills with those who have uploaded requests or project proposals on the site. The service is scheduled to launch in alpha in April. TechCrunch Japan covered Wishcovery just last month after it won the “TechCrunch Japan Award” at the first Startup Weekend Tokyo event.
 Demo 7:
Conyac by anydooR
Dubbed “social translation service”, Conyac is actally based on a virtual currency called “Conyac Points”. The way it works is that “requesters” need to pay a certain fee upfront, upload a text and indicate which languages the text should be translated into. Registered translators (who don’t need to get screened or examined) translate texts they think they can handle to earn Conyac points. Those points can then be converted into real money via Paypal, with the service itself getting a 20% cut.
 Demo 8:
LIFEmee
TechCrunch50 demopit company LIFEmee presented a revamped version of their eponymous life management service that will go live early next month. Expect less clutter, a simplified UI, fresh features (i.e. a scheduler) and a new mobile version (scheduled for release next month).
 Demo 9:
Mangaroo by Mobakids
Mangaroo is a free, social manga service that allows comic artists (amateurs and professionals alike) to upload and share self-created works with other users. Readers can just read the comics, leave comments, bookmark their favorite manga or rate them.
Here's how a typical “e-comic”, submitted by a Mangaroo member, looks like (click to enlarge): 
Each manga is based on Flash and can be embedded in other websites.  Demo 10:
meme memo by meme design
meme memo is a free, Flash-based “pin board” that can be covered with “virtual Post-its”. Each user can set up to ten pin boards (folders) and embed up to 1,000 Post-its (“cards”) to scrape, organize and share various information. Some cards require work by the users themselves (i.e. the ToDo card or the address book), but others get updated automatically once you add them to your folder (i.e. the Twitter card or the RSS card). Apart from pure text, it’s also possible to add videos (YouTube card), images or audio files to the pin board.
 Demo 11:
TwitCasting Live by sidefeed
As one of the few iPhone apps that were shown at TokyoCamp, Twitcasting Live (iTunes link) is a free Twitter client that lets you broadcast (video and audio) live through your Twitter account. The app splits the iPhone screen in half: You can see what you currently broadcast on the top and access your Twitter timeline on the bottom. When you start the recording, Twitcasting tweets a link to your followers who can watch the live broadcast on their PCs or iPhones. The app works with both 3G and Wi-Fi and supports the 3G as well as the 3GS (click here for a demo video).
 Demo 12:
Bang Me! by DigitalNomad
Let me explain the name first: Bang Me! is a wordplay of sorts on the Japanese word for “program” or “show”, which is pronounced “ban-gu-mi” (seriously). Provider DigitalNomad is marketing the downloadable software as a dead-simple video editing tool for beginners or online businesses that don’t have the budget to produce flashy promo videos.
Bang Me! was featured on TechCrunch Japan last month and appeared to be much better than the name suggests (I was told they will change it when the software goes on sale internationally).  Demo 13:
Hanashirabe by Knowledge System
In case you ever stumbled upon a flower whose name you either forgot or were interested to know, Hanashirabe is the solution for you. Just upload a picture of the flower in question, crop it, specify when you took it and the “flower recognition engine” will reveal the name of the flower in a heartbeat (demo video).
Demo 14:
Talknote
Pitched as “Yammer for private use”, Talknote is a micro social communication service that has yet to launch. The main selling point of the service is that it enables multiple users to text-chat across a number of different devices – virtually in real-time. Talknote will be the first service that allows iPhone users to communicate with owners of regular Japanese handsets this way (PCs, Symbian, Blackberry, Android etc. will eventually be supported as well). The conversations are stored as “talknotes” and can be accessed again anytime later. I was able to play around with the iPhone version, which looked pretty nifty already.  Demo 15:
Qlippy by SpinningWorks
Presented for the first time at TokyoCamp, Qlippy is an iPad application that extends to the web in the form of a social network for book lovers. The app will let users download EPUB-based ebooks off the web to read on the iPad. Provider SpinningWorks says readers will also be able to clip pictures or texts on the iPad to create their own scrapbooks. The clipped elements and scrapbooks can be shared with other people on the Qlippy website (demo video).
Here is an early screenshot (click to enlarge): 
Demo 16:
waarp by Waaotn
Korean transplant Dong Yol Lee has presented a very early version of waarp, his 3D audio augmented, “eyes-free” social network system that eliminates the need for a visual UI.  Demo 17:
Video Analytics by sus4
Video Analytics is a freemium-based “Google Analytics for video” that’s especially geared towards e-commerce and education sites. The tool helps to analyze how visitors view videos by breaking down which keywords from search engines are the most effective, how many times a certain video was accessed, how many users watched it from beginning to end, at which points users pushed the stop button etc. All data is visualized online through a Google Analytics-like dashboard.
 Demo 18:
mindia
mindia wants to be the online “encyclopedia of your mind”. The main idea behind the service is to provide a platform for people to share their viewpoints on any given keyword with the world (in Japanese, at least). Unlike Wikipedia, mindia encourages users to post what they personally think and makes all discussions public, with every member having a specific profile page (example). In other words, mindia is like Wikipedia with a social network built on top of it. The platform is free to use, but there’s also a solution for enterprises.
 Demo 19:
Fastweet/Fastweet Live by Glucose
Tokyo-based startup Glucose presented three Twitter apps for the iPhone. Fastweet is one of the many, many Twitter clients out there and is available in the App Store as a free version (which stores just the latest 200 tweets) or as Fastweet 2K (for $1.99), which keeps the latest 2,000 tweets. Fastweet Live (iTunes link) is a good solution if you search for specific keywords or hashtags. The app then displays just the relevant tweets dynamically, which makes sense during an event or if you want to stay informed continuously on a current hot topic or a specific news item (demo video).
The next TokyoCamp will probably take place in April. Thanks to all attendees, startups and co-organizer KDDI Web Communications, and a sorry to the many people who couldn’t make it on the guest list this time! Go to TechCrunch Japan’s Flickr account to see more pictures of the event.       
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| NSFW: Cherchez la fame – or why the media’s obsession with Twitter campaigns will make customer service smell French Posted: 28 Feb 2010 06:10 AM PST  Time was, companies knew how to keep track of their important customers.
First, they set up loyalty programs: computerised systems that tracked the monetary value of everyone who shopped in their stores or flew on their planes or ate at their restaurant. When a high spender made a booking, the company was alerted to their status and they were treated accordingly. Frequent fliers got upgrades and champagne, frequent diners got a visit from the chef at their table – that kind of thing. Anything to ensure that the money kept flowing. And then there was the other way of measuring worth: celebrity. It was understood that if you were (in order of importance) in movies, or on television or a journalist with a significant audience then you would get special treatment too, often for free. Brad Pit doesn’t have to mingle with the plebs in the American Airlines lounge, Courtney Cox doesn’t wait in line at the bank, and the New York Times restaurant critic never has to wait a month for a table at Le Bernardin. If you’re a business, all of this makes perfect sense: high paying customers are the ones who keep you in business, and celebrities are the ones who guarantee positive mentions in the press. No one messes with Oprah. And for decades the system worked. Sure, the rest of us often found ourselves treated like crap but what were we going to do about it? Write a letter to the company’s complaints department? Write a furious blog post? Post a negative review on Yelp? Ooooh – scary! The fact is that, even with Google making it easier than ever to find negative reviews, most large companies couldn’t care less about individual complaints. The average customer simply didn’t have the value, the cachet or the audience to cause more than the tiniest PR blip. A $10 gift certificate and a form letter from the head of customer services was enough to make everything better. Frankly, I had absolutely no problem with this system. In fact it suited me just fine. For a start, I’m a journalist, so people are generally nice to me. But more importantly I’m a Brit and, as such, any reminder of our old class system – hereditary peers making the rules and peasants knowing their place – makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. None of your Thomas Jefferson ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ colonial bullshit. So can imagine how horrified I was when I picked up a newspaper and realised that something was starting to go very wrong with the established order of things. Two weeks ago, Kevin Smith – the film maker who brought the world Clerks, Chasing Amy and the character of Silent Bob – was flying from Oakland to Burbank on Southwest Airlines. Smith, as fans will know, is a big guy to the point where he frequently books two seats when he flies. On this occasion though, there was only one seat available on his flight, so he booked that. Which is where the problems started. Despite having checked Smith in and allowed him to board, the Southwest flight crew suddenly decided – just before takeoff – that he was (in his words) ‘too fat to fly’. In front of hundreds of passengers they escorted him off the flight. None of the crew realised he was a celebrity – he’s really only famous to stoners and people who have watched Die Hard 4 – so to them he was just a fat dude who needed to be dealt with. In response to his treatment, Smith did what you’d do, and what I’d do: he Tweeted about it. Not once, but a billion times. Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated? Wanna tell me I'm too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR.
So, @SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no "safety risk" (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was..wrongly ejected from the flight Thank God I don't..embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don't sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.
…and on and on, to his 1.6m + Twitter followers, many of whom of course retweeted each and every message. But it didn’t stop there: before long, a host of major news sources had picked up the story – including many who would never normally write about a cult film maker getting bumped from a flight. The LA Times headline summed up the angle most of them took: Kevin Smith’s Southwest Airlines incident sets Web all a-Twitter. And that’s when I realised something interesting, and terrifying: Smith’s involvement wasn’t the reason the story was deemed newsworthy; Twitter’s was. Don’t believe me? The following week, across the pond and at the other end of the follower spectrum, my friend Robert Loch, founder of the Yes And Club, started his own Twitter fight. His target: One Alfred Place – a members’ club in London that offers work space for entrepreneurs. The club has recently brought in a new CEO to revitalise its fortunes and her first act was to start axing members who were using facilities too frequently. One of those members happened to mention to her friend Robert that she’d been booted, prompting him to go into battle on her behalf – writing a scathing blog post about the club and tweeting the URL… My thoughts on One Alfred Place’s appalling treatment of its members. http://tinyurl.com/yds97lm
Robert only has a little over 1300 followers, but – as with Kevin Smith’s Southwest embarrassment – the story struck a nerve with enough of them (me included) that we began to retweet it. As did people who saw our retweets, and people who saw those, and so on. By the end of the day, Robert’s tweet had spread far enough that he was contacted by reporters from most of London’s major business publications, all wanting details on the “Twitter revolt” that he;d sparked. Again, it didn’t matter that Robert wasn’t himself particularly newsworthy: Twitter was the angle that interested them. You don’t have to look far for dozens more examples of this journalistic trend. Just type “twitter sparks…” (no quotes) into Google News and you’ll find dozens of headlines where Twitter’s involvement in an otherwise mundane corporate failing has propelled it to the pages of the mainstream media. A random, recent example from those results: “Artist sparks Twitter campaign against Paperchase over disputed design” – another UK-based story, this time concerning ‘Hidden Eloise’ an artist who noticed that the upscale stationery company ‘Paperchase’ had apparently ripped off one of her designs. She took her fight to her 1,000+ followers and before long the story had been retweeted enough times to become a trending topic. The Guardian quickly picked up the story and forced Paperchase into issuing an embarrassed apology to the artist, and taking steps to make things better. Two years ago, none of this would have been news. A cult film maker was kicked off a flight? So? What was he going to do? Make a film called ‘Jay and Silent Bob hate Southwest airlines’? (Admittedly that would still have been better than Jersey Girl). An entrepreneur’s got quietly kicked out of a members’ club to make way for more profitable clients? Tough shit: that one’s not even newsworthy enough for the most desperate trade magazine. A little known designer gets ripped off by a gigantic retail chain? Boo hoo. Tell it to someone who cares. Without a major celebrity angle, there was little to no chance of the media picking up a run-of-the-mill intellectual property complaint and forcing the company into action. But today it doesn’t matter who you are or how many fans you have. You can have 1.6m like Kevin Smith or you can have 1000 like Hidden Eloise. All that matters is that a) you have a story that tweaks people’s ‘David vs Goliath’ nerve and that b) you get enough people retweeting it that the mainstream press can paint it as a ‘Twitter campaign‘. In the past few months Twitter has been promoted daily on network news shows, it’s been name-checked by Hollywood A-Listers – hell, it was even mentioned in Dan Brown’s latest book; wedged in right at the end to keep da kids interested. The result: Twitter itself has become an A-list celebrity. And like with any A-list celebrity, any story that even tangentially involves it is automatically newsworthy. This presents an enormous problem for companies. If Twitter campaigns are inherently newsworthy then anyone with a Twitter account and a gripe against you has the potential to become your biggest global PR nightmare. Pissing off Joe Twitter User is just as dumb, from a PR point of view, as upsetting Will Smith or Donald Trump. Sure, I can hear the response from CEOs and heads of PR. “Oh, it’s ok, we’re on Twitter already – if anyone complains we reply to them straight away. We have an intern dedicated to it.” Yeah. No. Southwest Airlines is on Twitter, One Alfred Place is on Twitter – even Paperchase finally dragged itself on to the bandwagon a couple of weeks ago. The problem is, official responses, even if accompanied by some kind of grand gesture of apology, do little to quell a Twitter storm once it has started. The phenomenon of mass retweeting means that – to paraphrase Churchill – a complaint makes it half way around the world before the official company response has time to put its pants on. Or as the CEO of Paperchase put it to the Telegraph: “I am sure it can be beneficial but if you get an untruth (on it) it can be very dangerous." Really there’s only one answer – and it’s one that strikes at the very heart of the established hierarchy of customer importance. Companies are going to have to start treating every single customer like a VIP. Actually, no, it’s worse than that – consider the Hidden Eloise example; she wasn’t a customer, but just a humble designer. Companies are going to have to start treating every single person in the world like a VIP. In all areas of their business they’re going to have to make sure they’re purer than pure; they’re going to have to examine every one of their processes to ensure that no one is getting screwed over. Moreover, they’re going to have to treat every complaint like it’s the most important complaint they’ve ever received, lest the complainer take their fight to Twitter. In other words, if you’re going to kick someone off a plane, you had better be sure you’re kicking them straight into the VIP lounge with a huge gift certificate and possibly even a hot stone massage. Because all of those things are cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Of course, as a Brit, this horrifies me. I mean, the idea that everyone, regardless of their wealth or fame, should be treated equally by companies just smells a bit… well, French. Quelle horreur! But as a customer, I have to admit that it’s about bloody time.       
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| Wordle In Trademark Trouble, Seeks Legal Advice Posted: 28 Feb 2010 04:45 AM PST 
I have much love for Wordle. I’ve used the text cloud generator dozens of time for use in presentations, TechCrunch posts and random stuff ever since I discovered the tool. But as of yesterday, the application is no longer available, and the website only displays the message copied above. In a notice and a blog post, Wordle developer Jonathan Feinberg says he’s been forced to take the service offline due to a trademark claim against his use of the word “wordle” and states that he’s looking for pro bono legal advice from IP lawyers to fend off the infringement claim. Update: the free service seems to be back online now – meanwhile there’s some sort of Twitter campaign going on dubbed #savewordle A quick search on Trademarkia reveals that there is in fact a live trademark for ‘Wordle’, owned by Mark Jordan Koeff, a photographer from Orange County, CA. Any intellectual property lawyers out there who want to provide the developer with some free counsel? The tool is loved by many and it would suck for the service to have to be rebranded, considering the name awareness Wordle has built up over the years. There are similar tools out there, e.g. WordItOut, but they’re not as good as Wordle. Feinberg, a programmer who works at IBM Research, can be reached on the e-mail address shared on the Wordle placeholder website and his personal site or via Twitter. (Via @jackschofield / @digitalmaverick)       
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| The Pitter-Patter of Little Features Posted: 28 Feb 2010 03:46 AM PST  I was out of the country for much of 2009, so it wasn't until I spent two months back in San Francisco that I noticed a big change in the Web community. Babies. I’m not talking about whiny Millennials coming out of college and demanding venture capital for their iPhone app. I’m talking about actual babies. The ones that crawl around the house wearing diapers.
In 2006, I co-wrote a BusinessWeek cover story on the then-burgeoning Web 2.0 movement, and one the hallmarks of the scene was a sense of having been burned by the dot com boom and bust. That was when many of the leaders, investors, and foot soldiers of the Web 2.0 movement had moved to Silicon Valley and had their first taste of startup life. As a result many of them, like Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide or Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter, had lived a rollercoaster of wild life experiences when it came to business—takeovers, ousters, commanding millions in venture capital, but not much in the way of traditional "life experiences." You know marriage, kids, and the like. Despite having net worths in the millions of dollars, many of them didn't even own a house. Many didn’t think they had time. My, how that has changed. The 30-something Valley generation that moved to the Valley fresh after college, stuck out the crash and got in early on the Web 2.0 movement are now married and having babies. Lots of them. Examples include not only Levchin and Williams, but Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path and now Small Batch, Narendra Rocherolle of WebShots and The Start Project, James Hong of HotorNot, Jason Calacanis of "the Jason Nation," Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and now Hunch, Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart and more. At a recent dinner party at our house, my husband and I looked around the table and realized for the first time in a decade in the Valley we were the only ones without a babysitter. Recently married Phillip Kaplan of FuckedCompany.com/AdBrite/Blippy told me he had big news at lunch the other day and my immediate question was, "Are you having a baby?" “No," he replied. "But given my friends, good guess!" (A few others are expecting but I’m not outing them here. That’s private. RIP Valleywag.) I've asked a few people what caused this about face, at a relatively late stage of life compared to elsewhere in the US. Many said it'd taken them a while to find "the one" and once they did, a baby felt right. Many others had gone through the insanity of the dot com bubble, the brutal crash, and then jumped back on the treadmill for Web 2.0. Now in another recession, it just seemed like there should be something more. This kind of thinking would be anathema a few years ago, but several entrepreneurs have said in private conversations, "This current company could go under, but I still have my family." To anywhere else in the US, this may sound "So what? People have babies all the time." But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space. Perhaps it's just the reality of this generation getting older. After all, the still early-20s Mark Zuckerberg isn't having kids, neither is the still-acting-in-his-early-20s Kevin Rose. But given the supernova of the late 1990s, it's a big population of Web influencers and taste-makers that are all of the sudden cooing and speaking in baby-talk. What does this mean? For people like me, who live here, lots of little things, like kids birthday parties and chats about diaper rash. But for the Web, it means something too. This generation has always designed out of need, they've built things they'd like to exist. My bet is that in the next five years we're going to see a boom of baby and kid Web and gadget ideas, as the people with the most clout (and in some cases, money) in the Web world start to realize how the rest of 30-somethings in America live.       
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| Twitter To Add “Nifty” Site Features That May Make You Forget Third-Party Clients Posted: 27 Feb 2010 05:29 PM PST 
Twitter appears to be on the verge of some big changes to its website if a tweet that Twitter engineer Alex Payne sent today is any indication. In fact, the new features may be so good that they could make some people re-examine their use of desktop Twitter clients, apparently. As Payne writes: If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)
Not surprisingly, that tweet had a few third-party Twitter developers worried. “@al3x as a developer, i’m not sure how to take that looming tweet….,” wrote developer Chad Etzel (who actually used to work part-time at Twitter). Payne immediately repsonded, “@jazzychad I don’t mean that developers won’t be able to compete with the site. We still release most everything API-first, of course.“ While I dabble with both Brizzly and Seesmic Web, I still mainly use Twitter.com day to day, so the prospect of these new, more powerful features excite me. The reason I never got into one of the desktop clients is the same reason I only dabble with Brizzly and Seesmic: The lag in the API (and the rate-limit) annoys me. But that should hopefully change soon with the new Twitter firehose of data. Last year, Twitter added two huge new features to Twitter.com: Lists and Retweets. It’s hard to imagine what else they’re working on for the site now. One definite possibility is baked-in geolocation, which Twitter currently offers through its API, but not on the site itself. While new features are great, Twitter has to be careful not to make things too complicated. The core of Twitter has always been its simplicity — if you start tacking on features, that goes away quickly. That said, there is still room for improvement. Certainly, search is one area on the site that could use an upgrade with more options. The upcoming Twitter ads are thought to be built around Twitter Search, so it’s likely a candidate for an overhaul sometime soon. It’s worth noting that Twitter also recently hired a new UI guru away from LinkedIn. This was the guy largely responsible for LinkedIn’s nice iPhone (and other mobile platforms) app. Could Twitter be getting into that game too? And should third-party developers be worried by these moves? Twitter Lists in particular encroached a bit on what services like Brizzly were doing (though they now play nicely together). Any more encroachment and Twitter’s upcoming developer conference, Chirp, could be very interesting. Update: More from Payne: Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.
And: I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.
      
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| Facebook Buzz Exists! It’s A Stream… Of Beer. Posted: 27 Feb 2010 04:35 PM PST  Since Facebook started on a college campus, it makes sense that they celebrate kegs. But did you know they actually have a Facebook application dedicated to the keg in their office? And they like to have fun with it.
While Keg Presence isn’t an official Facebook app, it was created and is maintained by Facebook employees. So what does it do? The app is a steady stream of information about what’s going on with the Facebook keg. For example, Keg Presence sends out notices to let users (other Facebook employees) know what type of beer is in the keg. And when the keg is empty, it posts pictures of BevMo, where Facebook employees apparently go to refill it. Anyway, the application isn’t new, it has been around since sometime last year, but a humorous update from Keg Presence was recently brought to our attention. Announcing the “launch” of Keg Presence 2.0, one Facebook employee jokingly named it “Facebook Buzz”: At Facebook we move fast and have already launched Keg Presence 2.0 which we have named Facebook Buzz.
80-some Facebook employees gave the update a thumbs up “like.” This is of course in reference to Google Buzz, the recently launched social stream feature that now resides inside of Gmail. Following its launch, much was made of Buzz as a potential “_____ killer,” including, naturally, Facebook. The social network doesn’t seem too worried though if their response is a keg application. Update: As former Facebooker Ryan Merket notes in the comments: You forgot one key part of Keg Presence. Employees swipe their RFID badge when they get there, which snaps a photo of them pouring their beer and updates their Facebook status.
That’s just awesome. Viva la Facebook Buzz. 
      
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| Bill In UK May Disallow Public Wi-Fi Posted: 27 Feb 2010 02:00 PM PST 
Good luck sorting this one out, short-sighted lawmakers. An upcoming piece of major legislation in the UK, called the Digital Economy Bill, would essentially force all public wi-fi points offline by requiring impossibly high levels of copyright protection. The bill, which bears some similarity to the controversial DMCA here in the US, is ostensibly aimed at providing copyright holders the means of controlling their content online.
But while an ISP may detect a violation by one of its subscribers and send a nastygram to the appropriate party, it’s difficult to do that when your “subscriber” is a pub or café that offers free wi-fi to customers. If someone buys a cup of coffee, downloads a few songs, and then leaves and never returns, who is at fault? According to the Digital Economy Bill, the café. Read the rest of this story on CrunchGear…       
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