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On 12 December 2009, I spent the day at Add-On Con ‘09 in Mountain View, California. The format was similar to last year’s event, again being held at the Computer History Museum just around the corner from Microsoft’s main Silicon Valley Campus, as well as just down the street from high-buzz browser upstart, Google. Mozilla and Windows IE8 provided Platinum sponsorship, but it was Gold sponsor Google that probably generated the most excitement during the event.

This was to be expected: earlier in the week Google had announced an extensions platform for its Chrome browser—news that, along with a number of other tidbits like Chrome surpassing Apple’s Safari browser in some key usage metrics—made for a pretty positive week for the company.

IE had some good sessions on solving extensibility issues in IE8, but the clear attendee favorites were both Chrome’s extension efforts as well as Mozilla’s Firefox Jetpack, a new project that, in the words of Mozilla, “enables anyone who knows HTML, CSS, and (I presume they mean or) JavaScript to create powerful Firefox add-ons.”

Perhaps the most interesting session for me was “Distribution Choices for Add-on’s,” in which Ryan Weber from W3i, Adam Boyden from Conduit, and Chester Ng from OpenCandy discussed a wide range of techniques—including their own offerings but going well beyond those—for increasing the reach of browser add-ons.

I was happy to see the IE team trying to remain engaged in this community, which, to be perfectly frank, is highly oriented toward Firefox and Chrome. I hope that the IE team is able to continue its efforts to help developers succeed using IE, but I also suspect that some fundamental decisions regarding the future of add-ons within IE need to be clarified and communicated so that developers have a clear understanding of where IE is heading in relation to the major competing browser vendors. It is clear from Microsoft’s own recent PDC event in Los Angeles that work is well underway for IE9, and progress around speed and acid3 test matrices is being made. Taking the long view, however, there are now clearly multiple elephants in the browser and browser add-on room.

Published: 12/19/2009 4:40 PM

MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest Startup DEMO ... Shocking Results from Aquapulser

Dec 19, 2009 at 7:00 pm.

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Sparks flew—literally—at last week’s Startup DEMO event put on by MIT Forum Northwest. The six finalists had already made it through multiple screening rounds, and I think that all event attendees got a great slice of Northwest entrepreneurship’s broad range of backgrounds and interests.

On 10 December 2009, The MIT Enterprise Forum, Northwest Chapter held its semi-annual Northwest Startup DEMO event at the One Union Square Boardroom in Seattle. BizSpark was one of the primary sponsors for the event. This event was a first, in that all six of the primary angel investment organizations were represented on the judging panel: Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum, Puget Sound Venture Club, Seraph Capital Forum, Tacoma Angel Network, and Zino Society. In addition to these investors, I participated as an event judge during both the screening round in November but also in this final presentation round.

The following startups made it through the screening rounds by presenting a combination of not only an interesting startup concept but also an entertaining demo that really showcased the value offered by the startup. Finalists for the event were:

Competitors

Aquapulser Engineering: Offers an add-on ignition module that converts weak sparks into a high-current plasma
Basic Athletic Measurement: Builds the world’s first athletic testing platform to drive consistency, reliability, and validity into global athletic performance measurements and ratings
Exponential Entertainment: Provides HollywoodPlayer™, a multi-platform games service for users to discover, share, and play with real scenes from Hollywood movies
Limeade: Supplies cross-platform mobile and social wellness tools
Pharaoh Software: Develops a system which controls Windows applications through a UI to provide automated technical support
Zooppa: The world’s largest source of user-generated advertising

Now, in most startup competitions like this, the judges are asked to evaluate startups based on overall viability, potential impact, business model, etc. But for this particular event, the judges were asked to really place emphasis on the quality and impact of the demo itself—in part to showcase Northwest technologies but also to provide attendees with a compelling exhibition.

Each of the competing startups did a fine job of presenting, and the results might have been different if they were being judged purely on investment potential, but in the end Aquapulser Engineering, with its live demo of its plasma ignition system enhancement technology—along with the founder’s smart, informative, and humorous responses to questions from the judging panel—was the overall winner. The voting was not unanimous—the quality of these six companies was very high relative to many other startup events I’ve seen in the past—so congratulations to the Aquapulser team for doing a fantastic, informative demo!

Published: 12/19/2009 4:00 PM

icanhazcheezburger Launches New Site on Windows Azure

Nov 17, 2009 at 2:01 pm.

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I’ve been working with Seattle startup Cheezburger Network—creators of humor sites like icanhazcheezburger, failblog, thisisphotobomb, and others—for a while now, so I was especially thrilled at today’s kickoff of Microsoft PDC, our Professional Developer’s Conference. Martin Cron, a lead developer for the startup, was part of Ray Ozzie’s keynote address announcing Azure support for WordPress. In addition to WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg, who prefaced his own Azure demo by saying that he first looked out the window to make sure pigs weren’t flying, Martin announced a new Cheezburger site, running live on Azure, called OddlySpecific.

OddlySpecific emerged from a number of submissions to failblog that, while funny, didn’t really qualify as “fails.” Many were about oddly specific signage, so thus was born the theme of the new site. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the Cheezburger crew—it never hurts that part of my job includes LMAO on a daily basis.

For a video stream of the event, as well as recorded keynotes and sessions, check out Microsoft PDC.

Published: 11/17/2009 11:01 AM

TechStars 2009 Reunion was a Blast

Nov 05, 2009 at 6:54 pm.

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This post feels a little weird, because there was some personally relevant and surprising weirdness around Microsoft yesterday, as a quick review of yesterday’s TechCrunch will show. But I don’t want that to detract from something that was a blast yesterday: the TechStars 2009 Reunion in Seattle.

Brad Feld and David Cohen brought the whole gang, including the always entertaining Andrew Hyde, along with a cadre of TechStars graduates from 2007, 2008, and 2009, citing his idea to have the reunion in a town other than Boulder or Boston, the current homes of TechStars programs.

The day started with a loosely defined “unconference” among mentors and mentees, with a manageable group of maybe 50-60, of whom probably 1/3 to 1/2 were startup founders. Three general tracks enabled attendees to pick where they wanted to participate: topics, decided the night before, included “Board and Investor Management,” “Customer Acquisition Strategies,” “Pricing,” and a half dozen more.

I found the “Pricing” session especially interesting: about half a dozen entrepreneurs/TechStars graduates were exploring (read: re-assessing) the Freemium model. The point I tried to make was that, rather than assume (as several of them admitted having originally done) that the Freemium model MUST go hand in glove with Web 2.0, social, SaaS applications, each startup should think about its own product or service and how various business & pricing models might be applied. In one case, a founder had decided to “just charge something” ($8) and found zero resistance. Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack observed that if you aren’t getting some pushback on your pricing (either directly from customers or visibly in your metrics) then you are clearly undervaluing your service. In many cases, the only “free” component of your business model should be a free trial; in other cases, a true Freemium model may make sense. But getting those confused can leave a lot of money on the table. Buzz Bruggeman from Activewords also offered stories from his company’s several pricing experiments.

Lunch saw about three or four groups self-forming and wandering off to eat around Seattle; after succeeding in getting our group to eat Top Pot doughnuts as an appetizer (!), Brad Feld suggested sushi, so I lead us all over to Wasabi Bistro for some great rolls, including a few more interesting options that Brad ordered just to challenge the mettle of the diners.

Our topic over lunch was “raising the second round of funding.” Kudos to Filtrbox’s Ari Newman for sharing his very current experiences, and for picking up part of the lunch tab along with Brad. After taking down a few boatloads of raw sea creatures, we ambled back to the Palace for an afternoon panel of investors and a series of 10 startup pitches from TechStars graduates, many of whom are raising their next round of funding (and one—Everlater, which didn’t pitch—announcing new funding today on TechCrunch).

I had to leave before the final few pitches and the reception that followed, but it was just amazing to me how a relatively small group of motivated people can create a fun, valuable event with the most minimal of scripts. Kudos to the entire TechStars team—and the entrepreneurs—for bringing a ton of great insights and some great fun to Seattle.

Published: 11/5/2009 3:54 PM

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