Another day another video blog post. And I’ll say it again… however Vimeo selects the static frame… not working for me… what am I catching flies!!!

UPDATE: Well great, my first complaint with Vimeo – they totally hosed this when they encoded it… video/sound way out of sync. Sorry about that folks – this is a work in progress.

Well, good news. I’ve upgraded to Vimeo plus and I can now set the static frame (so I don’t look like I’m sneezing) and control the video size/framing. Enjoy.

Video: VMware Fusion Developer Tips and Apple after Steve Jobs from Brian Roy on Vimeo.

UPDATE: 10/17/08 – I’ve set up a FriendFeed room enable everyone to live blog the event – see this post for details.

The whole reason I’m going on vacation tomorrow (back next Tuesday) is to rest up for Phoenix Startup Weekend… well not really…

If you have not checked it out – you should. If you aren’t already signed up… you should.

See you there:

Marketers, Web designers, legal experts and others will convene in PhoenixOct. 17-19 to pull off what sounds like an impossible task: develop a product in one weekend from scratch.

The event is called Startup Weekend. It’s the brainchild of technology entrepreneurs Andrew Hyde and Michael Gruen, who operate Startup Weekend LLC. The company organizes the collaborative events in cities across the U.S.

Startup Weekend has a Web site set up for details of the Phoenix event, but it’s currently down.

details of the Phoenix event [From Want to build a product in one weekend?]

Louis Gray was kind enough to share what he heard at a MIT/Standford Venture lab panel on lifestreaming.

You can find Louis’ full entry here.

Here are the parts I found the most interesting… both in terms of FriendFeed’s strategy and the lessons they teach us about creating a startup.

Bret’s presentation stated that FriendFeed, which currently supports 43 different Web services, and is now tracking greater than 100 million individual entries is designed primarily to enable content discovery and social media consumption through a shared experience with friends and peers.
…
As he said yesterday evening, “The discussion parts of our site have been almost the sole driver of our growth. It’s been interesting to watch, and in retrospect, it was obvious. It was initially one of the underdeveloped parts of our site.”
…
“We’re not interested in selling. We wanted to forge our own culture, to create a sustainable company,” Bret said. “We have different perspectives on how to build a company of scale, and we want to build a company that scales.”
…
While Swisher coyly teased some of the panelists about their being “pre-revenue”, Bret said one of the keys to launching a successful business model in the Web 2.0 atmosphere would be to not do so too early, and when they do, to do so in a way that is both quantifiable and analytical. “It makes no sense to try and monetize when you have only 2,000 users,” Bret said. “It’s too early and the early adopter audience does not reflect the behavior of mainstream users.” He cited the early successes of Overture and Google AdWords as forging the quantifiable advertising market, but admitted they weren’t yet sure how ads on FriendFeed would work. “We want to experiment enough to not run out of money before having to raise more, or we will have a sustainable business,” he said.
…
One thing you can expect FriendFeed not to do is to immediately give in to the demands from the early adopter tech geek set, who can at times be very demanding. While Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur said the “tech geeks and geek press would have you make products for the geeks,” Kara Swisher helpfully added that group was pretty small to begin with. “It’s 14 slightly-overweight white guys,” she offered.

The single biggest barrier to innovation is a lack of imagination. The second biggest barrier is the failure to commit to your imagined future state when everyone else tells you that you’ve got it wrong; that you are not making sense; that investors “won’t get it” or some other variation on the theme.

As Seth Godin put it today:

When an engineer has a proven ability to ship stuff, to keep things humming and not crashing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of rejecting anything that hasn’t demonstrated that it can work, that hasn’t proven itself in the market.

Competence is not the same thing as imagination.

PS the marketing elite have precisely the same problem.

[From The small-minded vision of the technology elite]

Imagination

Sounds simple, but it is why have we so many things touted as innovation that don’t pass the sniff test:

• We innovated our data center infrastructure by moving our data center to Washington state.
• We innovated voice communications by sending voice over an IP network.
• We innovated <insert sector here> software by creating online <insert sector here> software.

It is also why so many of the exciting new products (yes, I’m talking about TechCrunch50) are, well, underwhelming:

• Twitter for corporate use – THE WINNER
  • Apparently just presenting Twitter + an actual Business Model is enough to be best of TC50
• BlahGirls – Really?
• iCharts

more after the jump…

To be perfectly clear… many of the TC50 presenters had nice products. The problem is I’m not sure there were more than 3 or 4 viable companies in the whole bunch. And the reason for that is the same lack of imagination.

As Seth points out – the small-minded vision of the elite (i.e., the ones who grant you access to TC50, DEMO, Invest Southwest, etc) inexorably leads to derivative, incremental products and services. That is simply because it is very difficult to persuade the elite to imagine the innovator’s future state. It isn’t that they are ignorant, it isn’t that they willfully fail to imagine (as a matter of fact, many will tell you that if they can’t “see it” no one will), it is just that it is easier to do what you know.

As importantly – understanding someone else’s imagined future state is a time consuming process. You have to commit to listening. When is the last time you found an elite who wanted to sit with you for three hours and listen? Not talk, not pontificate, not explain why they are smart and you aren’t… just listen?

The real question is – why are you (the innovator) limiting the scope of your imagination by the scope of the elite’s?

My opinion is simple – no innovation has ever been immediately recognized by the domain experts. As a matter of fact the domain experts are generally domain experts not because of their ability discern the innovations that will disrupt the domain but because they understand the current state of the domain and have some insight into the next incremental products/services.

So what is the innovator to do.

1. Remember – you are the market maker.
   1. Simply put, this means that relying on the elite to make the market for you (that is what you want them to do by validating your imagination) is foolish. You have to do it.
2. You only need one
   1. What you need is access and funding to prove your imagined future is valid. That only takes one person who shares your imagination. Find the one.
3. Focus on the value
   1. People recognize innovation as innovation only after you’ve won market share. Focus on delivering value for your customers you’ll win market share.

Do those three things and you’ll have more elites to talk to than you’ll know what to do with. But more importantly, you’ll have employees, shareholders, and customers – and a real company.

I use JQuery… it is the JavaScript framework at work at cosinity.

I can categorically state that – while not perfect – JQuery lives up to it’s tag line – “write less, do more”.

There is a wonderful tutorial over at WebMonkey entitled Get Started with JQuery that can help you get started.

What I’m reminded as I write this is that the real value of any application is the value it brings to the user. The real value is in solving important problems OR giving users a capability that did not exist – or could not be realized. While there is something to be said for the coding purist who wants complete control over every line of code used by his/her application… there is more to be said for re-using as much as possible in a well architected way, to quickly solve those customer problems.