Anil Dash

Mechanisms of Exclusion

2010-08-16T20:41:15Z

There's been a recent re-emergence of the perennial tech industry conversation about how the venture capital industry can stop excluding women from both joining VC firms and from having their businesses funded by VCs. Fred Wilson covered some specifics about what it would take to make an incubator for women-run startups, and ReadWriteWeb's Audrey Watters offered a broader overview of the declining participation of women in the tech industry.

But of course, this conversation comes up every year, and the people who haven't been excluded always say "The tech industry's a meritocracy! Anybody who wants to participate isn't barred from doing so!" So I thought it'd be useful to illustrate exactly how exclusion happens — not through a malicious, deliberate act, but through men not realizing they're doing it.

Here's a Quora question thread asking how one could get to meet ubiquitous tech investor Ron Conway. Quora's heavily populated with tech industry insiders, including many with extensive experience in venture capital. The answer I've linked to there is the consensus favorite, with an answer that begins:

The best way to get a meeting with Ron and the SV Angel team is through referral. In fact, we haven't invested in any company without a referral from someone we know, ie, a fellow investor, an entrepreneur that we know, someone at a big co, etc.

I acknowledge that this is an imperfect filter and may not be the most equitable way, but like many investment firms, we receive a high volume of opportunities and it would be virtually impossible to speak to all the founders without some initial filter. Another filter is sector focus - for example, if someone referred an opportunity in consumer internet, that would be 'higher in the queue' than if the same person referred something in the biotech area.

(One analogy is the NFL draft. It would be virtually impossible to evaluate ALL players who want to play in the NFL - scouts usually look at the same players since the top prospects are known quantities and "diamonds in the rough" are found through word of mouth, ie, referrals. For example, Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots, is known to draft only college players that are referenced highly by college coaches that he knows. Sorry, I analogize everything to sports.)

Now, I'm privileged enough to have a lot of access, but just a few years ago, I certainly didn't have a social network that connected to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, despite having a relatively large network. And I still don't know the first thing about sports, so a sports analogy only emphasizes that I'm not part of the cultural assumptions baked into interactions with some parts of the VC world. So even somebody like me who's male, connected and willing to cross cultural barriers can't get in. And that reality isn't just accepted, it's known. Known well enough to be documented by others, in an industry where perception is as important as reality.

How It Works

The best answer for how to get access to the man who's arguably the most powerful angel investor in the tech industry is an example of an explicitly closed network that's illustrated with an implicitly closed analogy to a sport that women are prohibited from playing. "Hey, I'll fund anybody. I meet entrepreneurs in the ladies' restroom outside of screenings of Eat, Pray, Love. All are welcome."

I'm not maligning the person who wrote the answer on Quora — he's accurately describing reality. I'm not maligning Ron Conway — I don't think he intends to exclude. What I am maligning, explicitly is closed networks that, while arguably reducing the number of unqualified solicitations for funding, also serve as de facto mechanisms of exclusion. It's a broken, inefficient, short-sighted system.

Let's look at it like a usability problem, like a website with a front door that has more than 50% of visitors failing to complete the simple task of being able to join the site. Maybe one of the new wave of "super angels" is going to get enormously higher returns by simply ending the process of eliminating half of the potential successes out of the gate. Maybe not.

Ability Maps, #deaf Mayors and $1000 Strollers

2010-07-30T07:40:00Z

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and among many observances was an event at the White House that was co-sponsored by the FCC and the Department of Commerce. There's a pretty good overview on the FCC blog and a great detailed review from the folks at Purple.

I was fortunate enough to participate, not merely representing Expert Labs but also as someone trying to articulate how innovations from the world of startups and web technology could really make an impact in making more areas of society truly accessible to all.

The analogy that I kept coming back to during the whole day of conversations at the White House and at the Department of Commerce's brainstorming session later in the day was that the ADA is famous for being the inspiration behind curb cuts, the accessible ramps we see on every sidewalk at every street corner. But curb cuts didn't just enable those who were in wheelchairs to get around more easily. They're also a major reason why a market exists today for Bugaboo or McLaren strollers. They're the reason that Samsonite suitcases 20 years ago didn't have wheels on them, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece of luggage today that doesn't have wheels. I'm not saying the highest purpose of the ADA was to enable people to buy thousand-dollar baby buggies, but making things accessible for all has the side benefit of yielding tremendous benefits (and, not incidentally, opening huge new markets for business) for everyone regardless of ability.

Ability Maps

Which leads to the specific request I have for my friends and associates who've got some time and tech talent on their hands: Ability Maps. One recurring theme from the advocates I talked with at the ADA anniversary event was that it's hard to know which physical places are truly accessible to people with various disabilities. Some municipalities have information about individual facilities like transit systems, but it can be hard to find or out of date, and even in the best cases often doesn't cover private businesses or shopping and recreational areas.

But we're in the middle of a huge revolution in location-based services like Foursquare, right? Isn't everyone from Facebook to Twitter to Gowalla clamoring for a way to distinguish themselves in the race for places?

Well, here's an idea: Let users of a service like Foursquare log in to a site and identify themselves by any accessibility concerns that they have. A user could log in with his social network identity, check a box that says he's visually impaired or has difficulty climbing stairs, and then give the site permission to log his check-ins to various venues. The terms of service could specify that no individual information would ever be shared, only aggregated data.

Once a few users had signed in and check-ins started to be recorded, it'd be possible to ask "Which venues in this area are popular amongst people who've identified themselves as blind?" If there's a restaurant with a disproportionate number of check-ins from blind diners, then odds are, they're doing a decent job of accommodation. Found a theme park that's popular with patrons who use a wheelchair? It'll probably be suitable for other folks on wheels, too.

In short, users label themselves with self-descriptive tags. Then they check in to venues as normal. The site that's tracking them aggregates their visited venues by tags, and allows maps (or simple search queries) by tags to show patterns or popular venues. Voila: An imperfect, but perfectly usable, map of the places that welcome people of all abilities. And nobody is individually trackable to the places that they hang out.

Does it already exist?

Interestingly, this sort of thing is very nearly possible right now. Twitter users can tag themselves on sites like WeFollow already. Foursquare's venue pages already show who has checked in lately, but a separate list could tell us about the self-identified traits of those who did. Our ThinkUp app (formerly ThinkTank) from Expert Labs does a great job of aggregating social networking messages on Twitter and Facebook; It could be part of the toolkit for this sort of thing, too.

But maybe we could go even simpler. If we find places that are accessible (or maybe ones that are inaccessible) we could just use hashtags as part of a shout when checking in to a venue. "I just ousted @somebody as the mayor of Starbucks on @foursquare!" could evolve into something far more powerful simply by becoming "I just ousted @somebody as the mayor of Starbucks on @foursquare! #wheelchair".

I'm certainly not expert enough to know what the hashtags should be, or all the ways that people could identify themselves appropriately in an ability-aware check-in aggregator. But we're definitely very close to a lightweight way of identifying and rewarding the places that allow everyone in, and making clear which places don't. It doesn't require any new regulations or onerous processes, just a simple set of conventions and some good word-of-mouth amongst those who want to make the world a more accessible place. And this sort of scrappy, rough-around-the-edges imperfect solution is the kind of thing that government just can't do very easily for itself. That makes it perfect for us to do for each other.

If you build it, I promise I can help bring it to the attention of the folks who regulate these sorts of things, and will shout from the rooftops about your new site and its ability maps. Got a promising start on this? Let me know and I'll help you make sure it succeeds.

The "Yes, and..." Culture

2010-07-06T22:29:21Z

In improvisational theater and comedy, one of the first rules of participation is allowing co-creation. Basically, instead of saying "No, wait!" you respond to your collaborators with "Yes, and..." to continue the conversation and start to create something great together.

That principle of collaborative and cumulative creation is a fundamental aspect of modern culture in general. Remixing, rebooting, remaking and re-imagining culture require a "Yes, and..." aesthetic. When a moment of online inspiration blossoms into a full-fledged meme, communities from 4Chan to YouTube are demonstrating their embrace of improvisational culture.

But this doesn't just apply to goofy web memes. This could be an interesting, even important aspect of how society and policy evolve as well.

Yes, and...

Take, for example, the recent Citizens United case at the Supreme Court. The ruling states, in effect, that companies can now spend an unlimited amount of their funds on political campaign ads for various candidates. People who prefer humans to corporations are, naturally, concerned about the pending completion of the corporate takeover of elections.

So, opponents of the decision are reacting as you'd expect, by trying to pass legislation to undo this damage to our democracy. But trying to roll back the clock on this sort of thing tends to get into the usual long, expensive, unproductive cultural-battle-masquerading-as-political-battle that makes so many of us get turned off by politics.

What could it look like in a "Yes, and...." culture, though? What if, while acknowledging that spending is not speech, we decide to forgo trying to roll back the law, and instead roll it forward? Yes, corporations can buy political advertisements, but what if any employee of the corporation could submit the content of the advertisement? The last video in before a TV station's programming deadline would be the one that went on the air, privileging those who are nimble with media, instead of just corporate officers.

Or if we struggle with Arizona's new law which allows police to detain suspected undocumented immigrants, instead of merely fighting to repeal the policy, we should extend it. Any legal resident or citizen of the United States who is wrongly detained by the police should get a free gun, perhaps one of those confiscated by the police. In that way, when we abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of someone, we make it up to them by supporting their Second Amendment rights. You want to protect the rights of Americans? Yes, and... we do too.

While the particular examples might be polarizing, the key principle is that you don't change culture by trying to stuff the cat back into the bag. I'm writing this up mostly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully some of you will find it useful, too.

Three Weeks in Three Videos

2010-06-24T00:58:28Z

Been busy running around doing a bunch of fun stuff lately; Here's some videos with highlights!

The Personal Democracy Forum invited me to talk about what we've been learning at Expert labs, which I summarized in a talk called "Startup.gov" which talks about bringing startup-style principles to government.

Ignite NYC asked me to take five minutes to show twenty slides on any topic as part of Internet Week here in New York. I decided to try to defend the indefensible:

Finally, yesterday we finally announced our first public project at Activate, the work we've been doing to help Condé Nast launch Gourmet Live. Though we've just started to explain the concept to everyone, the fundamentals of an awesome new business and some truly impressive new technology are all laid out in the introductory video:

Phew! More on all of these projects as soon as I get a little bit of time to blog about them, but thanks also to everyone who came out to the internet Week interview and all the great folks I met at Blogging While Brown last weekend. Nothing's more inspiring than the talented people I'm lucky enough to meet at all of the various events I get to attend.

(And yes, as the videos make clear, I really do have a whole closet full of dark suits and pinkish-purple shirts.)

Ignoring It Won't Make It Go Away

2010-06-07T21:32:52Z

Michael Arrington argues, over at TechCrunch, that the startup community should ignore the current administration's entreaties for feedback on tech policy, and instead shoo policy makers away and hope for this best. This advice is naive, misguided and short-sighted and if followed, will yield less opportunity and potential for startups in the future. If the tech industry's innovators ignore government policy, it will instead be decided entirely by those who are uninformed about policy, in cahoots with the monied forces of legacy technology and media companies. Insulting government and dismissing it won't make it go away, and ignores the potential it provides for supporting new opportunities.

The Ostrich Technique

Adobe ignored the fact that Apple could regulate the app store market, and ended up wasting tons of time creating a new release of Flash that would generate iOS apps that Apple would never approve. TweetUp ignored the fact that Twitter could regulate the Twitter application market, and ended up potentially wasting tons of time creating a service that might not be able to build an advertising product that Twitter would approve.

And today, Michael Arrington suggested that startups ignore the fact that the U.S. Government can regulate the entire technology market, putting them at risk of wasting tons of time creating products or services that might be unintentionally or intentionally impacted by policy changes. Worse, he's shortsightedly advocating that there not be a dialogue between startups and policy makers, which might lead to startups missing the potential for building billlion-dollar businesses on open government platforms. Startups from Garmin to Foursquare rely on government GPS data, the Weather Channel turned government weather data into a billion dollar business, and I'm pretty sure health data is next. But not if everybody in Silicon Valley puts their fingers in their ears and says "la la la la la I can't hear you!"

There is no "The Government"

Look, I get it. Tech geeks in San Francisco always want to play more-libertarian-than-thou, and it leads to silly things like saying "the government" as if it's a monolithic entity. That's the same as talking about "the technology industry" as if somebody stringing ethernet cables in Tulsa is the same as Steve Jobs. Michael's lead example of why the current administration shouldn't engage with the tech community? Chris Dodd's cluelessness about venture capital. You'd have be unaware of the distinction between the legislative and executive branch, convinced of the not-quite-proven concept that venture capital is an unmitigatedly positive force for innovation, and ignore the fact that the tech industry is successfully fighting against the legislation in order to make even the most tenuous case that this example has anything to do with the President's agenda.

People in D.C. don't look at the crappiness of the web browser on their Blackberries and make broad declarations that "the tech industry is clueless", they say "This one product has a flaw. Let's find a better one." People in San Francisco need to be at least that thoughtful when looking eastward.

What's my agenda? Well, obviously, I'm the director of Expert Labs, which has as its mission the goal of helping policy makers make better decisions by tapping in to the expertise of citizens, especially experts like the people who start new technology companies. But we are not part of the government — we're an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organization specifically because we think that we can get people engaged in improving policy without having to work for government. Surely even the most diehard libertarian must want to support the idea that as citizens, we don't have to work for government or be a lobbyist in order to positively influence policy.

Now, I don't know Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcer that Michael had such issue with. But I do know folks like Todd Park, who is part of this administration, as CTO of Health & Human Services, and the startup he built is making hundreds of millions of dollars more revenue than, say, the last half-dozen web startups that TechCrunch has covered.

But, most importantly, not liking government doesn't mean it will go away. It just means that only big, slow, customer-hostile tech companies will be the ones influencing policy. In the 90s, Microsoft ignored the entire realm of policy, thinking their hyper-competitive market couldn't possibly be of interest to regulators. Facebook's making that same mistake about privacy right now, not realizing that their continuous missteps and shoddy communications are going to doom not just Facebook, but the entire social media industry, to onerous regulations if they don't get their act together quick enough. And our ostensible voices of leadership are advocating "close your eyes and hope they go away" as a plan of action? It's clearly time for leaders who are in tune with reality when it comes to regulation.

Inevitably, people will point to failures of government as "proof" that government can't do anything right. These same people never point to corporate abuses as proof that corporations can't do anything right. And they'll use the fact that over 90 percent of venture-backed startups fail as a credential. I think all these systems and economies run the way that they do for a reason, and while I won't claim to be the best educated person in the world about all of these topics, I am someone who's worked at a venture-backed startup, started a few businesses, been involved in public policy discussions, and helped lead an effort to involve thousands of people from all walks of life in substantive policy discussions with policy makers in the White House. Talking about policy makers from a position of authority when you've failed to engage with them is even more egregious than simply judging a book by its cover; It's judging all books by one shoddy book's cover.

Quitting Is Not A Strategy

If you care about startups, get involved. Do you think the AT&Ts and Verizons, let alone the Halliburtons and BPs of the world, are going to just let the government leave startups alone? If you have a cool new music startup, and the RIAA sends 100 lobbyists to DC to crush you, and the current administration asks "What can we do to help you innovate?" and your answer is "STOP PISSING ON OUR FLOWERS YOU SOCIALISTS!", how do you think it's gonna play out?

Here's a hint: It doesn't end up with you sitting happily in a rose garden. AT&T is, (as detailed in the video below) funneling millions of dollars into fighting network neutrality, and the inventors and founders who could articulate why that's a bad thing are in danger of forfeiting the game instead of even showing up and trying to play. Stop listening to the people who've already got millions of dollars in their pockets, who already have control over tons of startups, when they tell you not to talk to your government. And stop believing the myth that the innovation and opportunity of Silicon Valley happened because "government didn't intervene". Instead, what you had was a relatively smart set of regulations that formed a framework where some small number of people could get very rich. There's no reason that system can't be expanded and improved, unless the startup community decides that there's no room left for any innovations in policy in the future.

Still not convinced? Please watch Susan Crawford articulate the challenge we all face, in her presentation on rethinking broadband from this year's Personal Democracy Forum.

The Health Graph

2010-06-02T07:55:58Z

Over the past two and a half decades, the Weather Channel built itself into a $3.5 billion company on the strength of information that's largely available for free from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But starting today, if I had to pick the next area where somebody's going to make an enormously successful and valuable business built on top of open government data, I'd put my money on health data. Because the Department of Health & Human Services has just launched an unprecedentedly ambitious release of public health information. Even better, one of the effort's key leaders is Todd Park, a real startup guy who understands how to make a business that's worth three quarters of a billion dollars, and he's putting his (truly extraordinary) energy into helping people generate real value from the data.

In short, I think Health & Human Services data sets released today could be considered a "Health Graph", something parallel to what the social graph has become for Facebook, acting as an enormously valuable set of connections and data sources that will let developers, entrepreneurs, and individuals make amazing new applications that will yield both big business opportunities and, even more importantly, healthier people in America.

"Apples to Apples" by Regina Holliday

I've been following this HHS data project, called the Community Health Data Initiative, for some time in my work at Expert Labs, but there's a real public unveiling today at a live event that's being broadcast live on the web starting at 9am.

Frankly, at first I was a little confused or even intimidated by the idea of getting involved with health data. I know very little about how these government agencies work, and even less about how the healthcare system works. But as it turns out, all I needed to know was what was intuitively possible with really valuable data sets. Imagine what we'll eventually be able to do when we know this kind of stuff:

Which neighborhoods have the highest number of liquor stores
Which zip codes have the lowest diabetes rates
Which hospitals have the worst rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Average wait times at medical clinics
Which zip codes in America have good access to grocery stores

We're already used to weather reports talking about the air quality index, can you imagine what will be possible when we have all of this information? There's tons more on the way, and suddently the idea of someday having a Health Channel (or a Health Data app in the app store) that gives personalized and timely insights into this info, seems downright inevitable.

But it's also striking to me because the people who have control over this data, from the White House and Health & Human Services to individual groups within the NIH and CDC and Medicare and Medicaid and the USDA have done an amazing job of learning what it is the tech world needs, and how they can be helpful to innovators. Today, these are data sets, but by the end of the year, they'll be data services. And they're available under really open licenses that let you do interesting things with them. They're even blogging about this new data to try to explain it to geeks who aren't familiar with the health world at all.

Nobody typifies this more than Todd Park; Todd's a guy who walked away from a company he co-founded just to work as CTO of Health & Human Services, and still literally jumps up and down with excitement at the idea of people building great new apps, services, and businesses on top of this health data. These aren't faceless bureaucrats, these are exactly the people you'd hope would be in charge of making our healthcare ecosystem run more efficiently, even separate from the debate about health care reform.

This new mountain of health data is already yielding some cool apps. The folks at Sunlight Labs just awarded a prize to County Sin Rankings, which uses the new data sets to show you how your county ranks for each of the seven deadly sins. (Here's New York!) Meanwhile, Salubrious Nation makes a game out of trying to guess the health of various counties around the country.

There's lots, lots more, but though I'm more focused on getting our voices heard by policy makers than on just getting data out of government agencies, I have to say that this is one of the few projects I've heard about where I immediately saw a huge opportunity from new data sets being released.

Here's What's Up

2010-05-26T06:26:08Z

When there's no time for original content, we link! These are the places I've popped up lately, or things that caught my eye:

We published our initial results from the Grand Challenges initiative over on the Expert Labs blog, including a full data set of responses. If you're a data hacker and can think of ways to analyze or present this data, please help out! Gina Trapani has also been leading the community in making huge strides with the ThinkTank platform; It's well worth checking out and joining the mailing list if you haven't.

Alex Howard reports on how government works better with social media, offering five ways that the U.S. government is using social media to deliver services or engage citizens in making better policy.
Mark Drapeau also described the three phases of Government 2.0, including the transition from today's experimentation to tomorrow's solutions.

Both of those pieces were written in anticipation of this week's Gov 2.0 Expo, where I'll be making an appearance on Thursday afternoon to talk about crowdsourcing and participation, and how we bring startup-style innovation to the government realm. I'd also recommend Susannah Fox's list of what to see at the conference.

I'll also be expounding on the topic of startup-style innovation for government at the Personal Democracy Forum next week. Between Gov 2.0 and the PDF event, I'll be providing a lot more insights into what we've learned from our first initiative at Expert Labs, beyond just the data set I linked above.

Finally, I was really pleased with how well my talk at Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored event went a few weeks ago. You can see a summary of the conversation on the link there, or just watch the highlights here (though you'll sadly miss some of the gratuitously baroque animations I'd littered throughout my presentation):

One More Time: No NDAs

2010-05-08T03:55:46Z

By unusual coincidence, this week I had a number of different folks ask me to sign NDAs about the new projects they're working on. It's great that we're in such a fertile phase for the tech industry that lots of people have new ideas, and I'm very flattered that people value my input or ideas enough to want to share their projects with me. But signing an NDA? It's a bum deal, so I don't do it.

I can explain why, but if you saw what Brad Feld or Alexander Muse or Fred Wilson or Joel Spolsky or (my favorite take) Andrew Warner write about why they don't sign NDAs, you can skip the rest of this post.

In case you missed all of those, here's a couple quick reasons I will probably decline to sign your NDA:

When you ask me to sign your NDA, you're basically saying, in writing, that you don't trust me. It's your prerogative to say that, but it's a pretty lousy context in which to ask for a favor.
I have to pay a lawyer to review a document without having any idea why I'm making that investment. No, I won't "just sign it" without having a lawyer look it over, because it's a legally binding document whether a lawyer reads it or not.
If your idea's that good, it's probably not that rare. I hate to be the one to point it out, but protecting your idea in general is a fool's errand — good execution is hard to find, but good ideas are cheap.
I could get screwed through no fault of my own if some other random person walks up to me and blurts out the same idea that you've had. Being exposed to the risk of a lawsuit even if I haven't done anything wrong sucks.
If I couldn't be trusted with your idea, you'd already know about it. There are folks who don't like me, or who are annoyed by me, but if I'd broken somebody's trust in regard to their work, I guarantee it'd be just about the first thing you'd find when you Google my name.
The biggest value I can probably offer you is that I would talk about what you're working on. If I honor your NDA, and I meet a great investor or potential employee or valuable partner for your new venture, I wouldn't be able to tell them about it.

Most other folks are too nice to actually mention it, but since I'm not a VC or big deal business tycoon, I'll just say the most important point outright: Asking for someone to sign an NDA also often makes you look amateurish. Not always, but too often.

Now, I've had clients ask for an NDA, which makes perfect sense, and I might ask contractors working for me to do the same. Or some big companies just have a boilerplate NDA that they throw in front of people as a matter of course. But for individual entrepreneurs who just have a good idea and big dreams, it's easy to be misled into thinking that walking in the door with a fancy legal document makes you look professional or "serious".

Frankly, though, you should only share your ideas with those whom you trust, if you're at a phase where disclosing an idea could negatively impact its success. Most ideas gain value when more people know about them and are rooting for them. If you can, design for circumstances where, once you're ready to start talking about your idea, you're encouraging people to "disclose" your efforts. And that shouldn't require a contract at all.

Know Your Shit: Ten Years of Twitter Ads

2010-04-21T15:30:33Z

Last week, Twitter announced its new advertising system, called promoted tweets. I was at Twitter's Chirp conference as a speaker, so I got an up-close look at the reaction to the big news, along with the (frankly, more interesting to me) announcements for developers and media.

But from the New York Times to CNBC to the dozens of other media channels that covered the story, there was no mention of the essential fact that Twitter's senior executives have all made similar advertising and monetization systems in the past.

Why does it matter? Because looking at the decisions Ev, Dick, Biz and other senior Twitter execs have made in the past could provide valuable insights to anyone trying to understand the roadmap of how the company got to this point, and what they're going to do next. And because innovation happens in the tech business not because of who you know or how much money you have (though those things help, of course) but because, fundamentally, you know your shit. The tech trade press wants to focus on personalities and funding, but for the developers I met at Chirp, or who are making their way to Facebook's F8 conference today, success comes from recognizing industry patterns.

So, some examples:

PyRads, launched in November 2001, was a self-service text ad system built by Pyra CEO Ev Williams, now Twitter's CEO, to provide an advertising system for users of Pyra's signature application, Blogger. (Trivia: PyRads was named by Jason Shellen, now CEO of Brizzly.) PyRads actually launched between Google's rollout of AdWords and its later introduction of AdSense, alongside similar efforts like Matt Haughey's TextAds and Phil Kaplan's HttpAds.
SpyOnIt, launched in 1999, was led by its CEO Dick Costolo, now COO of Twitter, as a realtime notification system for changes on websites. In addition to sending instant messages when a site had updated, the SpyOnIt team stayed at 724 solutions after it acquired their company, with one area of focus being the delivery of realtime notifications through partnerships with mobile service providers. Dick and his SpyOnIt cofounders would later go on to create Feedburner. You know, that thing that does realtime delivery of feeds with ads in them?
A bonus one: Xanga, launched in 1999, was one of the earliest large-scale blogging services, and its initial marketing efforts were led by Biz Stone, now Creative Director of Twitter. While Biz was at Xanga, they launched one of the first pages to aggregate media consumption in a blogging community, creating an Amazon shopping portal of the most popular books, music and movies amongst their users.

There are dozens more examples, but if you are going to compete or succeed in the Twitter ecosystem, shouldn't you know exactly what choices these men made when in nearly identical circumstances a decade ago? Because I'm friends with these guys, I can just ask them. But none of the developers I've talked to at events like Chirp seem to know this legacy, and they don't have the access and privilege that I do to ask questions directly. That's not really a criticism — a lot of them are young or inexperienced or simply arrogant and don't think history matters, so they are disinclined to listen to an old-timer like me rant about ancient times when they were in junior high school.

And while the brashness of youth can be a powerful driver of innovation, a blind devotion to the narratives as presented by today's tech press is incomplete at best. Without the whole story, today's startups are going to be sitting around surprised when industry cycles repeat themselves. It doesn't have to be that way. All you have to do is Know Your Shit.

Don't worry, I'm not 100% Grumpy Old Man yet; Here's video of me improvising a PowerPoint presentation to slides I'd never seen at the close of the first day of the Chirp conference. Caution: The jokes are nerdy.

Update: The video works now.

Our Biggest Challenge Yet

2010-04-12T20:54:09Z

The White House tweeted that they want feedback on the Grand Challenges in science and technology that face our country. That's not so new. But today, if you reply to the White House's tweet to share your ideas, the White House will actually see your response.

Wait, what?

These days, I often sound like a skeptic or a curmudgeon when it comes to the technology industry. But ultimately, I'm profoundly optimistic about what the Internet can be, and today is one of those days where I hope we can demonstrate exactly why so many of us love the web.

For the past several months, I've been leading an effort at Expert Labs to help policy makers use social networks to collect feedback on policy. Today marks our first experiment. To participate, all we have to do is suggest ideas as ambitious as the moon landing or the human genome sequencing, or like the X Prize or the Netflix prize — ideas so inspiring that they prompt a ton of new innovations.

So do it. Just reply to the White House on Twitter or Facebook, and they'll hear your suggestions and if you've got a good idea, they'll use the feedback to help shape policy. The President has eight items on his list of Grand Challenges but there's no reason your idea couldn't be number nine.

This is just a first step, but it's a pretty good one.

How'd We Get Here? Where Next?

It's been a long, interesting road to get to this first tentative experiment in broad-scale policy feedback on social networks. Fundamentally, one of the biggest opportunities has been that the current administration has embraced the President's Open Government Directive, encouraging public feedback using every avenue possible, with a special focus on new technologies.

But if you dive in to the specifics of some of the plans, it's even more remarkable what's going to be possible in the future. For example, the White House's Office of Science & Technology policy posted its own open government plan, which includes a specific nod towards Expert Labs, acknowledging that we can be a small part of their overall effort to allow for public feedback.

And we've been working like crazy to step up to the challenge. Gina has been leading an amazing community that's built one hell of a little app called ThinkTank. It aggregates all those tweets and Facebook replies and will collect them for sharing back with the White House and with the public. It's even matured quickly enough that we're a Google Summer of Code project, with some fantastic proposals coming in from students who want to make ThinkTank even smarter. Gina describes the potential brilliantly in her post on Smarterware, too.

How You Can Help

Here's the thing: I need your help. This is a complicated, unfamiliar new idea to explain to people. So I need help in telling people a few things:

The White House wants to hear policy feedback through channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Expert Labs has built tools that will let them do this.
The success of this first question about the Grand Challenges in science and technology will do a lot to demonstrate how every part of government could use these tools.
This is just the start; We're going to be doing this in bigger and better ways in the future.

So, if you've got a blog, or a Twitter account (and if you don't, what the hell are you doing here?!) please share the word with your readers. Reply to the White House's tweet using hashtag #whgc, and then stay tuned as we start to share our findings with the world.

Out and About (Again!)

2010-04-06T02:52:05Z

Just a few weeks ago I made a list of some places that I'm speaking or appearing in the coming weeks and months, and here's an update on a few of those. I hope folks will come up and say hi, or find time for a conversation, if you plan on being at any of these events. (And a special thanks to Clay Shirky; having a chance to speak with his ITP class on Friday night was inspiring and invigorating, making all these other presentations something I'm really looking forward to.)

Tonight! The NY Tech Meetup. After six years, I'm finally doing my first-ever presentation of an app at the Tech Meetup, unveiling ThinkTank as an introduction to the mission of Expert Labs. If you can't make it, this TechPresident interview I did with Nancy Scola should give you an idea of why I'm so excited.
Twitter's "Chirp" developer conference on April 14 in San Francisco. We'll be talking about how to use platforms like Twitter as a power for social good, and I couldn't be more delighted to be a voice for that concept. (Psst... I might be doing some improvisational presentationizing at Chirp as well.)
Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored conference, April 21 in NYC. Finally, you get to see me and Ashton at the same event. Magical and revolutionary!
I'll be speaking at the USA India Business Summit in Atlanta on May 10-11. This one's really a change of pace for me, but I'm really optimistic about this new event providing a much-needed forum for a truly fascinating new era of business between my parents' home country and my own.
A keynote at Gov 2.0 Expo, on May 26 in Washington, D.C. I'm thrilled to be talking about how we can bring startup-style innovation to the service of public good, and there's no better place to have that conversation than the Gov 2.0 event.

There are a few other events that I know will pop up on the calendar; I'm looking forward to Blogging While Brown and to catching up with a bunch of folks at Foo East, though I guess it's bad form to mention that? I dunno. I also don't think I'm going to the 140 Conference, Google I/O or Facebook F8, unless somebody lets me know that I should be there. Regardless, I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of you in person! As always, email me at anil@dashes.com, send me an @anildash message or DM on Twitter, or leave me a message at +1 646 833-8659 if you'd like to get hold of me when at an event.

Tomorrow's Adas

2010-03-24T14:30:19Z

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a wonderful idea that was started to help us celebrate our heroes in technology and science, and to identify female role models. I'm using the day instead to talk about how the women I know (or don't know yet) in the tech industry can pursue some interesting opportunities in the future.

Nearest and dearest to my heart is ThinkTank, the open source social network insights application that we're creating at Expert Labs. Besides being created by a woman, we've been able to start up an active, vibrant community that is supportive and inclusive of new members. I think that our habit of mentoring our newest contributors is part of why we were one of the youngest apps to be selected for Google Summer of Code students to participate in, and I think it also explains why we have a mailing list and community that's never had a single flame war, personal attack or ego battle. It also helps that we're doing meaningful work that helps government make better decisions every time we fix a bug in our application. Even if you've never considered yourself a coder, there are instructions on how to participate that make joining the project as easy as editing a file in Google docs.

Put simply, at Expert Labs we'd love for ThinkTank to be the most woman-friendly open source effort that exists.

Open For Submissions

As someone who's been on the Advisory Board for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC since its inception, I'm also eager to point out that the call for proposals is currently open, with just three weeks left in the window for submissions. Make a note to spend some time this weekend to write up a proposal — don't put it off and then kick yourself for not submitting! My contact info (phone number and email) is right on this page if you want to get in touch with any questions about how to make your proposal better. I'd be eager to have much better representation on stage this year, and O'Reilly has committed to this goal as well.

A side note: I've been highlighting on my Twitter account when events that I participate in make diversity a priority, as with O'Reilly's statement, Kevin Werbach's Supernova event, and others. Previously, my policy had been to simply decline participation in events that had speaker lists that weren't representative of our industry. Instead, I've decided this year to accept some of these opportunities to speak, but use some of my time on stage to (respectfully) mention the issue to the participants at the event. I'm still not sure whether boycotting or speaking up will be more effective, but clearly it's time to try some new strategies.

I've also been following the PHPWomen open source project partnerships, which provide another set of mentoring and guidance opportunities for projects that want to encourage women to participate in their work. It seems like a good model that more open source efforts should embrace.

Finally, J-Lab and the McCormick Foundation are sponsoring a New Media Women Entrepreneurs challenge, to offer $12,000 to a female entrepreneur who has a great idea for a media business. There's only three weeks left to apply to this challenge as well, and while I'm not involved in it and have no connection to the organizers, I'd be happy to volunteer my help to anyone who wants to submit a proposal as well.

Why It Matters

In all, there is a ton of opportunity for the brilliant and talented women in our tech industry to excel despite the pervasive and persistent obstacles in the way. I urge everyone to support these efforts, and am always happy to be a resource to point out that the reason I embrace diversity and opportunity for everyone in our industry is because it leads to the best, most innovative, and most successful new creations. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

YouTube and the Million Mixer March

2010-03-08T00:40:02Z

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?

Over the last half-decade, it's become obvious that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to ignore copyright law and to upload copyrighted material to sites like YouTube without getting permission to do so. Technically, it's illegal. Practically, it doesn't matter. Politically, it's fascinating.

In the past, when an enormous number of people chose to willfully and blatantly disobey laws that they considered unjust, we called it an act of civil disobedience. We understood the social significant of their collective demonstration, and as a society started to reckon with the implications of their actions.Today, we instead see it as an odd quirk of online culture, and outside of some eggheaded discussions about the future of intellectual property law, we largely see it as unremarkable. And that's true despite the fact that traditional political demonstrations in the context of political activism are increasingly ineffective and anachronistic.

Putting the "Party" Back in Political Party

The open culture movement that's expressed through uploading content and remixes crosses conventional political lines and eludes identification with any traditional political affiliation. The sheer number of participants dwarfs movements (or perceived movements) that have attracted much more attention, such as the tea party efforts. Any given march on Washington these days ends not in policy reform or change in any enacted laws, but in pointless and contentious debate over how many people showed up and whether they represent an actual movement. But part of the reason this new online form of political demonstration is so effective in recruiting active participants is because it's made participation as easy as taking part in the existing social networks that so many of us contribute to every day.

For generations, political activists have said that the prerequisite to getting significant participation in a movement is to make the political personal. And nothing is more personal than the entertainment and media we consume and create on our social networks every day. Remixing is an increasingly political act.

So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice? Sure, we've had people disregarding marijuana usage laws for decades, but that kind of disobedience was practiced behind closed doors, not in an environment that's inherently public and social.

More importantly, what are the political efforts we can catalyze if we specifically design them to be as easy to participate in as social networking is today, and if we make sure they're not aligned to the traditional structure of political parties but instead are defined by communities of interest?

I don't know the answer, but it seems increasingly likely that even the most technophobic, regressive policy makers are going to start to understand the implications of large numbers of people in loosely-defined online communities choosing to remix and reform laws on the fly without any granted authority to do so. I can't pretend to know what this development implies. What I do know is that we've seen it as a sort of odd aberration for half a decade now, but soon we'll be obligated to see it as a new political tactic to be reckoned with.

Related: The Power of the Audience, about the sense of common experience on the realtime web.

Getting Activated

2010-02-25T18:48:44Z

Even more fun news! Today, I'm thrilled to announce the other big project I've been working on: Activate. It's a new consultancy, founded by Michael Wolf (you know him not just as one of the most established names in tech/media consulting, but also as former President of MTV), where I'll be joining as partner.

The compelling thing to me is that we'll be advising firms at the intersection of technology, media and entertainment. You don't have to have been reading this blog very long to know that's an area which is near and dear to my heart, and getting to work with the folks who are merging those disciplines at the highest levels of business and culture is pretty exciting. It took me the better part of a decade to figure out that I'm obsessed with how culture is made, but once I had that realization, it very quickly became clear that those of us in the technology world were the ones driving the transformation of these businesses.

But right now, most of the companies that do this kind of consulting for big media or entertainment firms operate from what I'd consider a fear-based standpoint: Oh no! Technology is happening! It's going to be scary and destroy you! The old-school consultants are good at slashing costs (and jobs), but I think it's a lot more interesting to figure out where new growth and opportunities are going to come from.

Which is important, because some of what we think of as traditional media or entertainment companies will figure out how to take their past strengths and turn them into huge new businesses that work in the modern world, and that respect the way people use technology today. Those businesses are the ones we're working with at Activate.

And yep, I'm still totally committed to my work as director of Expert Labs as well. (As I write this, I'm in Washington, D.C. trying to refine our next project.) I was very fortunate that the Expert Labs project was set up from day one to give me the flexibility to put my skills to use in all of the areas that I find interesting. More importantly, I'm learning in general how to help huge institutions evolve. Whether it's media companies, government agencies, or entertainment businesses, I am truly optimistic that many can transform themselves for the technology world that we live in. In fact, I think those are the only ones that will survive.

Honestly, I feel like the community of innovators and tech minds that I've been part of has earned the right to help determine the future of everything from governance to culture. We've made tools and platforms that have made some fundamentally new things possible. So I'm gonna do everything I can to help make sure our community has a voice at the highest level of the institutions that shape our lives. And Activate is an exciting new part of that work.

For more details:

Activate.com: Not much here yet, but don't we have a kick-ass URL?
Some early coverage of our goals, from The Wall Street Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Post, Paid Content and All Things D.

Expert Labs, ThinkTank, Gina Trapani and our Grand Challenges

2010-02-17T17:44:08Z

A few months ago, I started as director of Expert Labs, a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public. We're part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and because our goal could have seemed a bit nebulous I've held off on explaining the full vision of the effort until today, when we're announcing our first project, platform and project director. Here's the highlights:

We'll be collaborating with the White House in support of the Grand Challenges initiative. The President has defined a list of the biggest scientific and technological challenges facing America, as part of his Strategy for American Innovation. But they need our help, especially from those of us in the scientific and technological community: What should our highest priorities be for the biggest technological challenges of our time? What items have been omitted from the President's list of priorities? In short: If you had to pick the next project on the scale of the moon landing, or the human genome sequencing, what would you suggest? And how would you find the leadership and community that would achieve that goal? These are the questions we want to help answer.

To help get answers for these questions, Expert Labs will be sponsoring the development of a technology platform that allows policy makers and community members to ask questions across the existing social networks that exist on the web. My guideline for the technology platform was that it be free and open source, make smart use of existing technologies and APIs, have a thriving developer community, and be appropriate for use in cloud environments for easy deployment by government agencies, private industry, and even individuals. So I'm excited to announce that we've selected the ThinkTank application as our first official technology platform project at Expert Labs.

And, as you might expect since we've agreed to sponsor her application, I'm ecstatic to announce that Gina Trapani is joining Expert Labs as our Project Director for the Grand Challenges project, overseeing our technology efforts around ThinkTank and making sure that the platform is a good fit for the community of policy makers, scientists, technologists and the general public that it's designed to serve. Gina is of course the founding editor of Lifehacker and publisher of Smarterware, a best-selling author, and a co-host of This Week in Google, one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet. She's also an incredible talent and a woman of remarkable character and I couldn't be more excited to have her on the team.

Phew! That's a lot of great news. Since I announced my role at Expert Labs two and a half months ago, we've been hard at work meeting with folks across the Federal Government to find out how we could be of the most value. The truth is, when I started this project, I really only had a hunch that there was something amazing happening at the confluence of technology and government. But the months since have shown that my optimism there is well-founded, even if it is still just early days for this kind of effort.

The Startup Mindset

You see, Expert Labs sits at an interesting intersection. We are not part of the government, don't take any money from the government or any tax dollars, and don't take orders from anyone in the White House or any other part of the administration. In the early days of refining Expert Labs, I saw us as something like a "gCombinator", creating technology that serves government needs, but with a model that looks a lot more like an entrepreneurial technology incubator.

And while we're proudly independent, we've also been given a remarkable amount of access. The federal government as a whole is making an incredibly rapid evolution towards becoming more open and accessible, particularly to technologists. You can look at something like the OpenGov Tracker and see the results of this in real time. That's not to say things are ideal; Only 611 ideas for improving government have been submitted in total thus far. But I think that we can get orders of magnitude more Americans to participate in, and suggest ideas for, better governance if we make it as easy as just using Twitter or Facebook. And I think we can provide great motivations for them to do so if we show that their ideas and inspiration have direct impact on the policy decisions that are made.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the tech industry that I have spent my career working in. I'm just a regular guy, who was working just a few years ago as a PHP coder building content management systems. Today, I've been able to go to the White House and help make the case that a better technology platform, connected to the social networks we already use, could have the same transformative effect on policy making that it did on the world of media or business. And they were ready to listen, not just to me, but to our entire community. (I'm not saying that to name drop; In the new world of open government, things like visitor records for the White House are actually easily accessible.) I mean, hell, I got excited just knowing that my project's website got linked to from the White House blog — imagine when that's a two-way conversation for all of us!

And if you're a web programmer today, you can have a huge impact, even if you don't know the first thing about government or policy. You don't have to work for the government to work for your country. All you have to do is follow the ThinkTank project and make submissions of any code fixes or improvements that you have. Or join the mailing list and become part of the community. Or simply run the app for your own business and submit your feature requests about how it could be better suited to answering large-scale questions on various social networks. Simply by playing with new technology, participating in an open source project, and sharing what you've learned about what works in crowdsourcing ideas online, you can make a huge impact in our government's ability to listen to our ideas.

Just Getting Started

I'm incredibly excited to get started with our first official project at Expert Labs, and there are more to come in the future. Today, I hope you'll read over the Grand Challenges Request for Information from the White House and understand a bit more about what this project is about. Then you can visit the Expert Labs site (or follow @expertlabs on Twitter) and keep up to date with us as both the technology platform and the overall Grand Challenges effort progress.

Check out Gina's own announcement of coming on board with Expert Labs.
We also have an official announcement on the Expert Labs site.