TechAddress

Startups, it’s Time to Stop Calling Yourselves That

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:31:08 +0000

Photobucket has announced some new features for their online photo sharing service including the ability to add themes to albums and better album management tools.

You can now select themes from a large library of selections in categories like Sports, Nature, Holidays, and more. If you can’t find a theme that you like or just want a unique one, you can create your own customized theme. Just select an existing one and make it your own. The themes can be applied to your photo or video collections.

Photobucket has also improved photo album management with new tools. For example, you can organize your photos and videos with a drag and drop feature, and add titles, descriptions and tags to any item in bulk, which will save a great deal of time. You can also now sort the order of media in albums any way you want, and the search feature has been improved, allowing you to search albums based on title, descriptions and tag content.

These new features allow Photobucket users to express themselves in a more visual way. Being able to add customizable themes to albums and the enhanced album management features raise the game for the service. While these aren’t groundbreaking additions, they do improve the online experience and provide more fun for users.

Source:Mashable!

A startup, by (loose) definition, is a young company heading into uncharted territory. And, by that very definition, it needs funds to operate; these usually come in the form of investments from venture capital companies or angel investors willing to accept significantly higher risk for their investments, which occasionally yields higher rewards.

As you can all see by looking at the headlines of finance sites and stock market charts, the definition of “risk” has changed significantly.

Web startups, which comprise a great portion of what we cover here at Mashable, won’t go far without venture capital. Unfortunately, there has been quite a boom lately when it comes to Web startups, so the usual definition of startup has widened; sometimes, a team of one or two with a good idea and a proof of concept is now considered a startup, and expects - at the very least - money to rent an office, buy servers, hire secretaries, marketing people, finance people, more developers. Business plans, something no sound company ever wants to be without, are often loosely defined, and depend on a lot of factors which may or may not go as planned.

Unfortunately, it’s time to go back to the old drawing board for many. I can’t tell anyone how to run their business. But a company that makes no money, in a time of financial turmoil and crisis, is not a business. Therefore, one or three guys with a good idea and a proof of concept should not assume they’re running a business just yet, because a) they might not ever get funds for it and b) even if they do, they might burn through the cash very fast and never get a second chance.

You’ve got a great idea for a Web product or a service? Fantastic. It’s a project. By all means, develop it, work on it, find other talented people that are willing to work on it and if you can afford them, hire some. With time, your project might start earning money and your small team will start feeling too small for it. Wait some more. Maybe you’ll get offers and be very sure that it’ll keep earning more and more money and on the other hand your small team will really become overwhelmed.

Then it’s time to start a business.

Do it too soon, and you might find yourself in an empty office with bills to pay, no cash and a bunch of angry emails from employees to answer. Am I overly pessimistic? Maybe. You go check out that Dow Jones chart and be an optimist, I won’t.

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Some Startups Just Don’t Need Starting

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:30:04 +0000

Source:Mashable!

I’ve been scrolling slowly down the list of items mentioned by Paul Graham, a partner at the startup micro-financier outfit Y Combinator, in a piece titled “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” It’s an interesting write-up, and I think a whole lot of people should give it a look. Not necessarily because genius resides within. In fact, a lot of what Graham says will strike most any reader as fairly obviously wanting for the wand of progress.

There are some points raised, however, that either seem too vague or uninformative, or just plain unnecessary, to be worth a “new” attempt. Of course, I do recognize that Graham’s post is only a soft invitation for startups to submit ideas to Y Combinator. And, well, it would be pretty senseless to object to the inclinations of the firm. That’s not what I intend for here. Rather, I simply wish to parse some items that I consider superfluous and unnecessary. The kind of stuff that invokes the “been there, done that” adage, in other words. Ideas that already have solid representation on the Web, and don’t require major fixes or alterations.

First, there is the idea posited by YC (I’ll abbreviate it investor’s name from here on out) for a fresh startup to compete with Microsoft. Now, a plan to take on Redmond is all good and well. An admirable goal for sure. But others are already working toward that objective. Google is one. Zoho is another. Adobe recently introduced its own suite as well. And while they may ideally prefer to engineer a collective effort to bring down the software market’s reigning cash cow, they will no doubt look after their own health above all other concerns. Save for an acquisition, new rising stars aren’t likely to grow so tall, in other words. But with the tech sector feeling a few pangs of financial caution, the idea of buying only what you need would logically come to the fore. So at this point, I’ll short any newbies to this particular segment of the Web application market.

Photo/video sharing services are another group on YC’s agenda. Why that is is somewhat of a mystery to me. Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook are all solid examples. YC explains that “there may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing services, have of which remain to be discovered.” I’m not so sure about that. People like having reams of data at their fingertips. That’s part of the reason why industry’s giant have succeeded. Everyone likes a winner, right? As for serving the long tail of the Web, where photo and video users may prefer to take their media host service’s platform and adapt it to fit conditions on personal websites, that can already be accomplished. SmugMug is a nice example of this, actually.

On entirely separate note, while Y Combinator imagines there are “better” dating sites to come, I would say the life of those networks is finite. I sure hope so, anyway. To approach the concept in a different way, dating sites will simply be replaced by your run-of-the-mill social networking services. Mobile ones, especially. To keep perpetuating this idea of specialized matchmaking through ample profile metadata and the like is simply absurd. It may work some of the time, but it doesn’t work enough of the time.

I really wish Wikipedia alternatives much luck, because they’ll need it. Wikipedia may evolve, it may invoke new layers of security, it may open itself up to cool new (or old) sources of information. But the chance of Wikipedia actually being irretrievably challenged or supplanted in the foreseeable future is [insert dirty word(s) here]. Wikipedia is going to be the new encyclopedia. It may not be something taken seriously by [insert name of educational or professional institution here] now, but it shall. The fact of the matter is that Wikipedia has been built on a collective brain power similar in structure to that which built the Oxford English Dictionary. And how is the OED considered by academics, might I ask?

Lastly, I’d like to highlight an idea put forth by YC placed somewhere near the middle of its list of 30. This one is 16. It reads as such:

“A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn’t have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search….”

There are a number of things wrong with that statement. For one, Google may not seem to have any sense of design for some, but it does. It’s actually described in Paul Graham’s subsequent line. Indeed, sparseness is Google’s schtick.

That, and a super-simple color palette. Those appear to be the fundamentals for the company’s overarching design. And years and years of experience and trend setting and all other things that go into making an Internet company into a Internet giant and an Internet leader have shown that Google has largely been walking the right path. No, its engine doesn’t connote iPod-like elegance. Goodness sake, though, its primary businesses are search and advertising. How in the world do you make that visually delightful and retain a modicum of user friendliness?

An even more pressing question to ask: What makes one think that fantastic design alone is a prescription for beating Google? There’s already quite a visually attractive alternative to Google. It’s called Ask.com. Take a look. You’ll see. And it’s nowhere near #1.

To end, I would say that, taken as a largely suggestive request for fresh ideas, Graham’s solicitation definitely has its strong points. If some number of startups manage to develop something that addresses many of the weak spots in the Internet market currently afflicting users - particularly the non-tech-savvy - and those startups happen to take the route of YC, the firm’s partners could be riding some serious gravy trains. New ideas are what will let milk and honey flow. Companies which try to address the topics parsed above, however, aren’t likely to reach such grand heights.

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