Copyright is cool

This morning the highly affable Michael Geist spoke at the informative Mesh08 conference in Toronto. Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor and copyright expert, made a very persuasive case that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Web 2.0 tools are very effective at influencing governments, companies, and communities.

Geist asserted we are in the midst of a “New Normal” where advocacy empowered by mashups and social networks is impacting public policy. But despite this New Normal, politics drives policy even as politicians are increasingly paying attention to the political ramifications of online advocacy. Geist cites the Canadian blog Angry in the Great White North, Fair Copyright for Canada, Wikileaks, and Open Net Initiatives.

Geist argues that people are interested in copyright because it impacts their daily lives, whether they use the Web for general use or as consumers. For example, hyperlinking to content is potentially libelous, as Geist himself found out last year (Geist v. Crookes), and the use of orphan copyrighted material (or material seemingly out of copyright) can also bring legal challenges.

More significantly for music and other digital media fans, Geist is on a Richard Stallman-like crusade against DRM. He managed to convince many Canadians to oppose the government's anticipated copyright legislation (Fair Copyright for Canada – the FaceBook global group he formed has 40,000 members) and government officials ended up withdrawing the proposed law. DRM isn't dead yet, though.

With all these activities, and especially his fair copyright work, Geist looks like the Larry Lessig of Canada. I suspect that’s a moniker that he would embrace.

Twitter: Where’s the pony?

Make no mistake: I love Twitter. I blogged about it here. Since then I have used Twitter religiously on my BlackBerry, via Web clients, and on my laptop through FaceBook. It’s fun, stimulating, and informative.

With marginal revenue and no apparent business model, Twitter recently sought a $150 million valuation (that's "pre-money"), but seems to have settled for $60 million. According to several well-placed sources, that was good enough to get the company another another $15 million in a third round of VC funding. Last summer it raised $5 million on a $20 million valuation.

So where is the pony from a enterprise value and VC point of view? That remains to be seen, especially given Twitter's considerable challenges with revenue generation such as online advertising. Still, some VCs see gold in them thar hills, believing that Twitter's buzz will turn into bucks sometime in the near future.

For a few more thoughts about valuing Twitter, see here, here, here, and here. Some analysts talking about Twitter have resorted to arguing that business plans and early profitability are overrated. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds suspiciously similar to the arguments dotcom investors made around 1999. And just how many of their beloved Web startups are still around in 2008?

Nantucket Conference 2008

The final agenda for this year's Nantucket Conference has been published. As a prior participant, I wanted to make sure that readers knew about it. Highlights of this year’s agenda include IDG CEO Pat McGovern, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, Maven Networks CEO Hilmi Ozguc (a General Catalyst company that was recently acquired by Yahoo), Bob Metcalfe, and EnerNOC CEO Tim Healy. The sessions are always well organized and moderated but the networking over drinks and dinner is the best year-round in NE. I like this year’s “Game Changers” orientation and mix of cleantech, software, Internet and other companies, VC, markets and entrepreneurs. Too bad industry events that week will keep me on the road. Check it out here.

My love affair with the OLPC's XO laptop

I have to admit I’ve fallen in love. (Sorry ladies, it's not that kind of love: I’m as constant as the Northern Star with respect to Susana.) My love affair involves a laptop. It happens so infrequently because there have been so few great breakthroughs in personal computing technology since I hauled around the Compaq Luggable in 1987.

I'm not saying that because I’m a curmudgeon; I can fall in love with technology. To prove that point, let me admit that I’m a little bit giddy while writing this.

Here’s why: For the last week I've been using the “$100 laptop” by the folks at the One Laptop Per Child foundation (OLPC). OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte gave one to Susana and me. Nicholas invested in MessageMachines, and I greatly admired him as an entrepreneur and an IT intellectual before he gave me the XO.

The XO laptop -- it's called the XO because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child -- runs on Linux with a wide-ranging suite of open source applications for basic laptop users. The combination of an open source operating system and applications is the best means yet of lowering the total cost of ownership, which is open source software's (OSS) primary consumer benefit. Then there's the built-in wireless connectivity that helps bridge the digital divide by giving children worldwide access to a network-ready laptop. This fact alone makes Negroponte worthy of a Nobel Prize.

What's interesting is that this OSS-based laptop will absolutely lead to proprietary software and hardware sales. While the XO doesn't come preinstalled with Microsoft XP or Vista, children and their teachers will need more sophisticated software applications, networking and hardware capabilities over time, so they'll graduate to higher-end hardware. There’s no CD/DVD drive in the XO at all, for example, and no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. As the children grow up, they'll naturally migrate to proprietary products, which are fine with me. To adapt a phrase from Richard Stallman, I believe “the future is hybrid,” as opposed to purely open.

More on the XO's openness: I discovered a button located on the keyboard that allows children to view the source code (what XO refers to as the “programming”) behind certain applications. The XO laptop’s highly accessible and flexible user-interface, called Sugar, also promotes sharing and learning. This makes the XO a true OSS machine, from its philosophical underpinnings all the way through its uncomplicated functional capabilities available with one touch of a keyboard button.

My favorite feature is The Neighborhood, which provides, to quote the documentation, a

View of all the connected XO laptops within a child’s community, and what activities they are sharing. Each child is represented by a different color. If there is a shared document or activity being collaborated on by a number of children, it will show up within this view.

The Neighborhood provides an easy-to-use view of the network meshwork in the neighborhood, but it also helps facilitate interactions with immediate “friends” and the building of a community. When combined with The Friends, The Home, The Activity views and Browse, XO provides all the elementary functionality of a desktop plus a means of stepping up to more advanced applications, such as SynthLab a mini-lab for acoustic- and electronic-circuit construction.

For an adult, it takes a short time to adjust to XO's looks. It has a shiny green-and-white plastic outer cover, a handle and two leaf-like antennas. It looks like DreamWorks went out to create Shrek’s personal laptop based on a Fisher-Price design.

The XO is spill-proof, rainproof, dustproof and ruggedized for impacts due to being dropped. There is no fan on this little wonder, it’s as silent as a Caribbean wind gust and it weighs just 3.2 pounds. It gets six hours of heavy activity or 24 hours of reading battery life from one charge. (The battery is made of innovative lithium ferro-phosphate, costing $10 to replace and is good for 2,000 charges, compared to 500 for a regular laptop battery.) It has a nifty built-in video camera and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration. It also has a microphone, memory card slot, gamepad controllers and graphics tablet. The XO is the complete personal computing laptop for children and adults.

There's just so much to love about the XO laptop. I look forward to seeing how it will give new hope to the children of the developing world. In 10, 20 or 30 years, I believe we'll witness a new generation of IT leaders who are getting their start even now on these small green-and-white machines.

I really hope the Nobel Foundation is paying attention.

All a-Twitter

In the last three days I have added Twitter to my blog, Facebook, BlackBerry and Firefox bookmarks. You can send a Twitter message, or "Tweet," from any of your registered devices or webpages.

So far Twitter has not changed my life. I was hoping to be able to quote “Sam” (Natalie Portman’s character), who famously said in the movie Garden State that The Shins "will change your life." Sorry, not this time, but Twitter is cool.

The buzz around Twitter is significant among the “highly mobile-Web 2.0” or “mobile Web” crowd. It’s like a new form of instant messaging about tiny chapters in your life. The Twitter website says it’s a “social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface” that answers the question, “What are you doing?” Every time you see something interesting on the Internet or in life, you Tweet it. It’s very ephemeral.

The buzz around Twitter has invited rabid technology comparisons (some say it is a microblog, others say it is SMS, or IM, or a Web 2.0 communications vehicle). I think it’s most like IM from a communications standpoint because you are sending a short messages to a public audience through a small text box by pressing the submit button. This is one of its strengths. Also, there have been a lot of blog posts written about it (see here and here) and discussions at Web 2.0 events. There's a “newbie’s guide to Twitter” here. Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users here. And so on.

Here are two weird things: The heaviest Twitters in the Boston area are PR people. This has no doubt contributed to the buzz. Also, the demographic for Twitter is not the classic F-book crowd. It’s an older demographic. (See Chris’ blog post for more data.)

Suffice to say that I like Twitter because it informs a whole bunch of people who I care about and who care about me. I also like it because it is the next cool thang.

Black Duck Software on Wikipedia

Today there's a new species of black duck on Wikipedia: The African Black Duck, American Black Duck and Pacific Black Duck have way cool and interesting entries but now you can also read about Black Duck Software.

TechCrunch Boston -- A Happenin' Networking Event

Around 7-800 people attended TechCrunch Boston on Friday night. It was the best party of the year in the 128 startup-land. There was an army of entrepreneurs in attendance who offered great convo’s, lubricated by lots of beer, martinis, other drinks and great food.

I think it is important to note that IDG Ventures sponsored it and Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch folks organized it. With parties like this one, we can stem the tide of university grads seeking employment and a social life in the Silicon Valley. There was a strong consumer Internet presence, thanks in part to the IDG folks, who recognized the importance of addressing this area of historical weakness in Boston venture funding. Among the IDGers there, I talked with Michael Greeley, Chip Hazard, Jon Karlen and bloggers Jeff Bussgang and David Aronoff.

Others from the finance community in attendance included Michael Skok from North Bridge Venture Partners, Lucy McQuilken from Intel Capital, and Charley Lax from Grandbanks Capital, and John Prendergast from Jefferies Broadview. Also, there were a lot of PR people in attendance, including Ross Levanto, Maura Fitzgerald, and others.

From the blogosphere and related spheres Steven Woit, Pito Salas (his company is BlogBridge and blog), Chris Herot (his company is Zingdom and blog), Scott Kirsner (Boston Globe), Doc Searls, and my good friend, Don Dodge from Microsoft. These guys are heroic bloggers because of the fresh, original content they bring to their blogs.

Kudos to the party givers.

Scott Kirsner Event

Held a fireside chat with Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist for the Boston Globe, with a great audience of entrepreneurs and VC held at the Vilna Shul.

We discussed Scott's article on why Facebook was funded in California and cultural differences between Silicon Valley and the Boston-area. At one point David Aronoff complained about the level of whining by members of the audience.

Dan Bricklin blogged the event, including a podcast.

The new face of social networking in business

I joined Facebook recently and already have lots of new friends.

I’ve used LinkedIn for years but derived very little value from it. I've found that startups and small technology companies use and get value from LinkedIn for sales purposes, and recruiters use it to research and fill executive job openings. In effect, it's a networked version of a resume library.

Facebook is my new LinkedIn. It’s easy to make friends who are not in the technology industry. I discovered quickly that going directly to a friend’s Facebook profile is a springboard for virally expanding my network. It's fast and simple.

By contrast, it has taken me years to create a LinkedIn network of 400 professionals. LinkedIn requires an extensive profile, an invitation, and an interrupt-driven process in order to build a network. Opting into someone’s LinkedIn network involves approvals, forwarding, and more approvals in order to build a network. Posing questions and getting leads on people to fill open jobs is not as organic or viral as Facebook’s wall writing, message sending, and application-centric processes.

Facebook’s historic and current user base is teenagers. But recently Facebook's professional user base has been expanding rapidly.

Teenagers already know the Facebook (aka “Fbook”) lexicon, but here's a primer for as-yet-uninitiated adults:

• Friending – A request to become a “friend” occurs after a viewing of a profile or photo, responding to an invitation, attending a meeting, etc. “Friending” occurs most commonly the morning after a teenager’s party when you can “bask in the new acquaintances” you met the night before.

• F’Book Stalking – Using Facebook to scrutinize every aspect of a particular friend’s or potential friend’s profile, posts, wall, friends, network, postings, etc.

Example: At a party you meet someone and say, “I know you from somewhere.” (In actuality, you “met” this person in Facebook earlier in the day via their profile.)

• Poking – Used in an innocent sense, this is when someone wants the attention of another. Used in a more romantic sense, this is when there’s an attraction between people. It’s an easy way to carry on a conversation and keep in contact. It’s also a way to “hook up” -- which, coincidentally, was the founding mission of the founder of Facebook when he was a freshman at Harvard.

• Poke Wars – Whenever you sign into Facebook, you have to respond to the poke. This could lead to protracted period of poking friends back and forth. There is often no sense to Poke Wars (just like that other war in Iraq).

• Wall-to-Wall – Checking the histories of walls.

Example: Let’s say X has been friends with Y for a long time. One day X notices that her friend Z is also friends with Y. She then proceeds to check the wall-to-wall between the two and discovers that Y and Z have had a previous relationship.

Two concluding points on Facebook terminology: (1) the meaning of terms varies somewhat depending on the person. A good example of this is poking, which can easily be misunderstood. (2) These terms are going to take on ever-new meanings in our culture.

Its youthful pedigree aside, Facebook is not just about “hooking up.” It’s about a new form of business communication and network building using a social network. It’s yet another instance of how a toy designed for teenagers – Macintoshes, iPods, and DVD players, to name a few – can work great in the business world.

So if your idea of social networking is hitting the hotel bar or playing eighteen holes with the bank vice president, it's time to look the future square in the Facebook.