Yoick - Hightechwire

Brisbane, Australia based Faraday Media has announced its received seed funding for its personal meta attention filter, Touchstone. Marshall Kirkpatrick  from Techcrunch agrees that this product, which is currently in alpha is a great example of our shift into the Attention Economy.

Marshall explains what Touchstone does:

It’s a desktop app that integrates several sources of incoming information, runs them all through a set of filters that you administer and then notifies you automatically when important events have occurred. That notification will come in a variety of ways, depending on how important the event is relative to your prioritized filters.

What does that mean? It means you can set Touchstone to pull in RSS and atom feeds, POP emails and Gmail, filter the incoming items for keywords you’ve set to varying priority levels with sliders and tell the system how you’d like to be notified of events of different levels of importance.

I’m interested in what Ed Batista over at the Attention Trust thinks of this product. It certainly looks interesting to me. I wonder if Chris Saad, co-founder of Faraday would be kind enough to get me onto the alpha. I’d also love to know which one of my angel friends in Brisbane put cash in…

Cyworld, the social networking site that so successfully tapped into the South Korean gifting culture that it has totally dominated the space in that country has set up in the United States.

I knew they’ve had their bus dev scouts in the US for over a year now, but setting up an office in San Francisco is a sign they are confident enough that they can crack the US market.

The big question has and will continue to be, for me, whether the South Korean formula can translate into other cultures. It will also be interesting to see how they morph as a result of US influences.

I’m always excited when I hear of Aussie startups making their path and presence felt in the Valley. While it has become a relatively well established path, I still don’t believe it is one trodden enough. So, you can imagine how good it is to hear of a regional Australian company that has raised its angel funding in the Valley and set up a presence here.

Omnidrive, set up by Nik Cubrilovic, seems to be doing things right. This online storage company was founded in Wollongong (about an hour south of Sydney and affectionately known by locals as the Gong) and now has Menlo Park offices and development taking place in India. You can read more about the company here and also visit their blog .

Here’s the rub…against a backdrop of thousands of new brands appearing daily, you decide to take your destiny into your own hands and create a new online brand. Your friends call you crazy, after all, how can you be heard above all the noise in the marketplace, how can you think anyone will become an evangelist for your brand.

Rest easy, there are 5 rules to creating contagion. Follow these rules and you will be well on your way to getting a strong following and building brand success.

RULE 1: Embrace Messy
The real world isn’t a clean, ordered place. So why should your brand be? Embrace the messy bits, do things when you have yet to perfect them, release alpha. Get out there, push the edges.

RULE 2: Release Control
Don’t think of your brand as a fragile newborn that you need to hold onto tightly and nurture closely without giving it any room to grow unchecked. Instead look at your brand as a sprightly teenager that needs a level of freedom to go into the wide world, explore new avenues and grow in ways you never imagined. Give up some control in your brand to your users, let them evangelise for you and you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.

RULE 3: Back fires
OK, you’ve got your site up and have regular users. Some of them are innovating on your site, but you’d also like to do some really big things on the site. Wisdom says rather pour small amounts of gasoline on the fires your users have already started, than pumping gallons onto large logs that no-one has tested. The analogy is that a fire with a small amount of gasoline on it will be boosted, whereas a log with gallons of gasoline will simply be a …wet log.

RULE 4: Scare yourself
Look for issues that would take you way out of your comfort zone and tackle them. If you go right to the edge and really scare yourself, it’s easy to then deal with the smaller issues closer in to your comfort zone. Continually challenge yourself.

RULE 5: Solve small
Give your users small problems to solve. This gets them used to working with you on building your brand. Once you have established a pattern of problem solving you can ratchet up the size of the problems you open up to your users.

Build these rules into your daily mantra and go build your brand!

Following on from an earlier post about Silicon Valley magic dust, I’ve had a few conversations in Palo Alto the past few days with VCs, entrepreneurs and innovation ambassadors from places like Denmark.

The perennial topic du jour continues to be about “what makes Silicon Valley special”, ie what’s the magic dust that circulates through its, currently, rather warm air and fosters innovation like no other place on the planet.

John Hennessy, keynote at this evening’s opening of the Always On Innovation Summit @ Stanford and Stanford President, hit upon a key factor that makes his university a continual success…it’s not about scientific siloing, but more through cross/multi-disciplinary activities that innovation apparates.

In discussion with Tom Byers, John referred to the great work being done by Ellen Levy’s Media X program. Having met with Ellen for breakfast today I will most unequivocally second that…she is a fireball of positivity!

My daily epiphany came later this evening through a comment by one of the panelists - the nub of Silicon Valley is attention. So… the money washing around Sandhill Road is great, Stanford plays a key catalytic role, industry is indispensable, but… its the mix of these factors that provides the magic: it’s all about the Valley’s ability to drive attention like nowhere else on the planet.

I’ve riffed on this before, and it’s great to get further confirmation of my thoughts in this regard…think Skype: think how much media buzz and customer adoption they were able to generate post being introduced into the network via Draper Fisher Jurvetson….now you’re getting the picture.

I am chairing one of our fun Innovation Bay dinners again on the 7th August.

Our special guest this time is Graeme Wood, CEO of Wotif.com. Graeme founded this online accommodation bookings site in 2000 and recently listed it on the Australian Stock Exchange. Wotif sells accommodation in over 35 countries and has over 1 million users per month.

It should be a great evening with much Web 2.0 and beyond discussion.

US venture capital investing stats are in for the first half of 2006 [Ernst & Young/VentureOne].

The good news is that the investment quantum is at its highest since 2001 and a 13% increase on 2005: $12.97 billion was placed into 1,213 companies.

Information-technology investments rose 8%, while health-care investments grew a whopping 25%.

This augurs well for the tech space.

Just as MySpace reportedly goes down, so we discover yet another music-centric social network: Amie Street.

However, this one is different…it has a neat demand driven pricing and user-incentivised business model.

Michael Arrington explains how they work over at Techcrunch.

Kevin Maney recently wrote a column in USA Today regarding crash hot Sydney company Animal Logic, which a colleague introduced him to on his recent trip to Sydney. Animal Logic, which creates digital effects and is moving into building its own photorealistic movies, is one of those unique Aussie companies which confirms for me time and again why Australia is such a great place to hang out: it punches way above its weight. Don’t take me word for it, read Kevin’s article.

As I posted on Kevin’s blog – this is just the tip of the iceberg (yeah, yeah Happy Feet is about penguins in the Antarctic) — next time he comes over we’ll show him some more companies of the same ilk. 

What’s it take to get to the Crazy Sunday inflection point, the point where you are serving 100 million videos a day and have 20 million unique visitors a month. Well first off, it seems there is consensus that you need a ’strange attractor’ catalytical event. In YouTube’s case that was Lazy Sunday.

Secondly, you need some pedigree. Investment from a tier one VC like Sequioa will do that for you. Not because they are Sequioa per se, but because it creates great buzz build. The press cottons onto it and starts techwagging, the blogosphere buzzes and joevideo comes over to visit and brings along his mates. Viola, a brand is born.

Like everything born on the Internet is can grow very quickly, and it can die very quickly. One of the most asked questions about YouTube is what’s their business model? Their burn rate continues to rise with their popularity and currently it would seem is not being matched by revenue growth.

Sure they may simply be born to flip into the hungry mouth of a mega acquirer, aka Google, but for me the big question is whether they can migrate to a tiered content model (and keep their community). What do I mean by tiered content? Users paying for top quality video produced by brand names (either Hollywood built or YouTube built), and higher cost for ads on the Top 100 videos.

One thing is certain, YouTube is simple to use. My eight year old son and his friend shot their first video on Saturday night and posted it on YouTube the next day with ease. Now that was a real crazy Sunday.