SXSW Recap

Last week I attended the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin for the first time. Here's a summary of what I observed as well as some takeaways.

I was expecting a big crowd but 18,000+? That was the attendance figure I heard although I have not seen any official number. Regardless, it was a big crowd. Much bigger than recent years according to those who have attended in previous years. I guess it is a good indicator that at least in the Interactive world, the recession is over.

Another big trend for this year is that SXSWi attracted big business. Sponsors included Chevrolet, AT&T, Pepsi, and Miller. For example, Chevy had 30 cars on the streets of Austin providing free rides to conference participants. I took advantage of a free ride in a Chevy Cruz on my first day.

Social media was obviously on a lot of folks minds and was a dominant theme of many sessions. Interesting factoid, AARP, which is not an organization and demographic most would associate with social media, has a 6-person social media team.

As opposed to past years when there was a key new startup/technology launch (e.g., Twitter and FourSquare) that captivated the SXSW crowd, this year's big launch was the Apple iPad 2. Not exactly an unknown making a splash. Sure, there were a number of group messaging companies (GroupMe, Beluga, and Kik among others) trying to make themselves known. But the iPad2 was the new gadget that most SXSWi attendees coveted.

The Lean Startup movement had a big presence on Saturday with an all-day set of sessions. My big takeaway on this day was the size and passion of the crowd. The Lean Startup methodology has definitely caught on in the entrepreneurial community and it is definitely not confined to Silicon Valley. Here are some of the key slides from the day:
- Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup"
- Dave McClure, "Startup Metrics for Pirates 2.0"
- Steve Blank, "New Rules for the New Bubble"

Primary message from Christopher Poole's, founder of 4Chan, keynote on identity and authenticity: ""Zuckerberg's totally wrong on anonymity being total cowardice. Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way," Poole said, adding that the internet allows people to "reinvent themselves" as if they were moving home or starting a new job.

I attended a sparsely attended session on "Machines Trading Stocks on News" . It was an interesting session on text mining and semantic technology being utilized to scan news and social media streams to drive automated stock trading. Not sure if the technology is truly ready for prime time but it is getting closer. The technology can at least be used to greatly assist human traders in sifting through mountains of information. One of the key examples was commodities traders in Chicago following and trading on tweets from farmers in the fields exchanging info regarding weather and crop conditions.

"Apps vs. Mobile Web: Which to Reach Consumers?". Top brands (e.g., Google, FB, Yahoo, Fandango) are cross platform (i.e., offer apps and web content and services). If limited resources for development, platform choice becomes one determine by breadth and diversity of audience, desired user experience, and ability to monetize. For those going after the mass market, a multi-platform strategy is required (market still very fragmented). For a multi-platform strategy, providing a similar user experience on the various platforms seems to be the best approach (see FB and Fandango). Also, using the mobile and desktop sites to promote and drive user downloads of apps is a best practice.

"Your Data in the Cloud: Privacy, Ownership, Convenience". PogoPlug CEO Dan Putterman describes the value and challenges of personal cloud storage. While a lot of cloud data storage has been given away for the last few years, wholesale data storage (AWS) is approximately $2/GB/year. Average content/data in the home is approximately 2TB, quickly approaching 4TB. Cloud storage costs and syncing (upload/download) times are current challenges for private cloud. Average consumer is willing to pay only $5/mo for cloud storage whereas actual costs closer to $3000/year. Tiered storage options are likely required.

"Thunder in the Clouds", panel discussion on state of cloud computing for enterprises and individuals.

"David v. Goliath: Internet startups vs. Money Giants", panel discussion on whether financial startups can disrupt existing giants on Wall Street. Good discussion however it mostly focused on retail and small business banking. Panel is summarized by the moderator here.

Reid Hoffman on "Data as Web 3.0". Summarized here. Reid finished his talk with his 10 rules of entrepreneurship.

Notes from Potomac TechWire Venture Capital Outlook 2010

Today I attended the annual Potomac TechWire Venture Capital Outlook 2010, in Tysons Corner this morning. The speakers were:

Phil Bronner, General Partner, Novak Biddle Venture Partners Thanasis Delistathis, Managing Partner, New Atlantic Ventures Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures Tige Savage, Managing Director & EVP, Revolution LLC Harry Weller, General Partner, NEA Moderator - Paul Sherman, Editor, Potomac Tech Wire

Here are my random notes, paraphrased from the speakers:

Trends:
- More transparency, you can't fool customers anymore. Too easy for customer to share with each other.
- More mobile, more social.
- Phil B is most excited about mobile. Shift from gaming and advertising to utility (similar to web shift from content to commerce in the 90s).
- 'Starbucks user testing & feedback' (grab potential customers in a Starbucks to get feedback on designs and ideas) is big, using iPads and gathering direct user feedback

VCs are hearing from entrepreneurs:
- "We're the 'GroupOn' for ..."
- "We're the 'Facebook' for ..."
- "We've added the ability to 'check-in'"

Interesting new media company:
- Stitcher: Pandora for news and talk radio

Commentary on the venture/entrepreneurial market:
- Generally upbeat about entrepreneurial opportunities. Customer acquisition costs are low, infrastructure startup costs are low, talent is available. Big shifts in customer habits are happening.
- Investors are putting more emphasis on people than idea. Entrepreneurs need the ability to pivot when initial idea may not work.
- VCs are looking for founders who see the world a little bit differently and are very passionate about their idea or target market.
- Still figuring out what works best in mobile given the use case: apps, text, and mobile web. Mobile space is still early stage.
- Big opportunities to leverage mobile devices on the go. Take advantage of ability to make decisions & take actions in real time. Take advantage of the mobile device capabilities: geo-location, camera, text alerts.
- Still opportunity in innovative eCommerce
- Health care sector is huge, huge changes, companies looking for new ways to keep costs down
- Cloud computing: significant new spending in this area. A big a shift as shift to client-server, 3-tier, and web architectures.
- Focus not on protecting your idea but on out-executing everybody. Get the best experts for your space.
- Silicon Valley is overheated. Too more focus on capturing 'eye balls'
- NY is real hub for social and media and ecommerce. Surprised at how quickly it has become a dominant hub.
- DC is a hub for ??? Seeing uptick in Internet and media. Expect to see more cloud stuff. Education. Homeland security and cyber. Large scale dbs and Analytics.
- In DC area, all startup activity is happening DC (city/urban). Young talent wants to be in DC, wants access to public transportation.
- In DC area, defense contractors suck up a lot of good entrepreneurial & technical talent.
- Local VCs are currently spending a lot of time elsewhere. DC due for a burst of entrepreneurial and venture activity.

CTO Roundtable - Consumer IT and Cloud Computing

Last week, I attended the April meeting of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable. The topic was "Consumerization of Enterprise IT - Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud" by Doug Neal of CSC.

The main theme of Doug's talk was that consumer-oriented and cloud-based technology are significantly impacting enterprise IT. CTOs and CIOs ignore it at their peril. The basis of Doug's presentation was a study tour he and CSC held last fall.

Here are my rough notes from Doug's presentation:
- Employees are very tech savvy today
- Business execs are aware of consumer tech and cloud computing and want key questions answered. CTOs/CIOs better get prepared.
- Cloud computing is a series of layers (infrastructure, platform, software (saas), business process) plus orchestration
- As you go down the cloud stack, you get flexibility and greater ability to customize
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google App Engine are SAS70 compliant
- AWS is PCI compliant
- Cloudbursting - the cloud approach to share compute chores between local and cloud resources, using the cloud to handle peak loads
- Cloud is especially good for things that can be turned on and off, a big source of cost savings
- Cloud computing makes it easy to be wrong at capacity planning
- Speed to deployment is key cloud advantage
- Cloud adds considerable complexity although management services are emerging
- Cloud promotes easy collaboration with 3rd parties - easier to provide secure access to a 3rd party in the cloud than to a private network
- For redundancy, you can have a redundant array of inexpensive clouds (Cohesive FT and quagga provide routing technology)
- there are now AWS options in US and EU
- New cloud vendors:
-- 3Tera - platform as a svc
-- GoGrid, Flexiscale, and Mosso are alternatives to AWS
- Use case: by shifting cached data from Akamai to EC2, CSC realized huge savings @ 95% performance
- Legacy support: BP migrated SAP R3 to cloud

- On APIs:
-- Identi.ca - an open source implementation of Twitter with Twitter-compatible API (based on Laconi.ca)
-- Open source AWS APIs are emerging - Ubuntu (Karmic Koala, successor to EUCALYPTUS)

- on user tech independence, BP now offers users tech choice if user volunteers, passes test, and agrees to not need Tech support (signs agreement) and provide $1000/year tech stipend

- If need to scale up/down quickly use cloud but encrypt
- Major savings come from turning off instances
- Recommendation: move at least dev, test, and DR environments into cloud
- Approximately a 20:1 cost advantage on cloud storage
- Use cloud tech for private clouds

Issues:
- Federated identity is needed
- Security authorizations
- Change propagation

Think of Cloud Computing as compute resources with an on/off switch.

Internet Outlook 2009

In February I attended Potomac TechWire's Internet Outlook 2009. It is an annual event that invites local DC area VC's and entrepreneurs to discuss the state of the web. This year's event was well attended and had a lively panel discussion.

This year's panel:
Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director, Amplifier Networks
Phil Bronner, General Partner, Novak Biddle Venture Partners
Luis Derechin, CEO and Co-Founder, JackBe
Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-founder, ClearSpring
Mark Walsh, CEO, GeniusRocket
Moderator - Paul Sherman, Editor, Potomac Tech Wire

Below are some notes I took on the panel discussion.

First topic - major Internet trends today

Phil B:
- mobile
- leveraging broadband
- shift back to B2B
- over-hyped trend: social networking

Hooman R (remarks also on his blog)
- web as a platform for services. Not longer just a website - now must deliver multi-platform, multi-channel service. Noted that mobile is big consumer channel. E.g., ESPN.com is seeing faster growth for its mobile web channel than tradition website.
- social network as web foundational service
- mobile as a channel to deliver services

Mark Walsh:
- privacy is dead, start living like it is
- traditional advertising is dead. Word of mouth, 1-to-1 marketing is the future. People don't trust and don't pay attention to traditional, non-tailored ads.
- virtual reality
- over-hyped trend: green tech, now but not in the future

Second topic - Internet business models, what's working
- focus on vertical market
- video is big, especially premium video (Hulu, $100 million in revenue)
- user pay models (e.g., iTunes)
- Facebook: virtual goods, $400 million/year
- iPhone apps, $100-200 million/year
- advertising: message categorization and customization, contextual ads
- data exchanges
- "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid"


Third topic - recommendations for success
- Use everything that is free (e.g., open source)
- be an early player "on an empty hockey rink", partner with other early strong players
- if you engage the customer, they will pay you
- as transparency grows, reputation matters


In:
- iGoogle
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Hulu
- LinkedIn

Out:
- Yahoo
- MySpace
- FriendFeed

New Federal CIO

Last month, President Obama announced the appointment of Vivek Kundra, as the new Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). There have been plenty of articles about the announcement over the past month. Mr. Kundra also got a lot of press in recent years about his role as CTO of the Washington DC City Government. I had the opportunity to hear him speak back in January at a meeting of the Washington DC CTO Roundtable. Here are a few notes I took from his presentation.

Kundra is big on data transparency and openness, using consumer technology, and project portfolio management. Below are a few notes on how he used those principles at the DC Office of the CTO:

Data transparency and openness:
- government has lots of data, unfortunately, most of it is unavailable to or difficult to access by the public.
- DC OCTO pushed many datasets to the web. It created a public, web-based data warehouse
- created APIs and held an Apps for Democracy competition that promotes allowing 3rd parties to create mashup applications using DC government and 3rd party data and services.
- created a new portal for citizens to access DC government and community information, http://dps.dc.gov/.
- tried to create transparency in and improve the government procurement process but unfortunately he was not entirely successful

Use of consumer technology:
- shifted departments to consumer-oriented and cloud based services such as Google Apps
- switched some first responders from expensive radios and hardened PCs to iPhone and Blackberries

Project portfolio management:
- Tracked projects using the following information: budget, project schedule, project team happiness, project news (milestones, changes, etc.)
- Had regular project review meetings
- instituted a buy, sell, or hold project status indication
- for projects with 'sell' statuses, the project team would have to defend the project in an Oxford-style debate with one of Kundra's deputies. If the project team loses the debate, the project loses funding.

It will be interesting to watch Kundra in his new role and see how successful he is in bringing his DCOCTO principles to the federal government.

Career Night Talk

Back in January I gave a talk to the local ND alumni group and current ND seniors on career management and success. Below is a recollection of my remarks.

For the current seniors, how many of you have no idea what you want to do after graduation, haven’t written a resume (or have a clue how to write one), and haven’t gone to any on campus interviews yet? Hopefully, no one. Well, that was the situation I found myself in back in January 1987. I was woefully unprepared for my job search because I had assumed that I would spend at least the first four years of my life in the military. I was on an ROTC scholarship and expected to pay back my scholarship with 4 years of service of active duty. Suddenly in December ’86, due to military budget cuts, my class was given the option to opt-out of active duty service and instead go into the Reserve. After some consideration over the Christmas break, I decided the Reserve option was a good one (I had more control over my future) and chose it. However, this decision left me in a very poor situation for finding a non-military post-graduation job.

Lesson One: Take advantage of unexpected opportunities

That’s the first lesson learned I have to share – as much as you think you have your future figured out, things can unexpectantly change and new opportunities arise. Expect that to happen and be prepared to act –it may lead your career into a new direction (which could be a good thing). Unexpected changes and opportunities have happened more than once in my career. I’ve been fairly successful by not trying to plan my career too far into the future, evaluating new opportunities as they arise, and sometimes choosing a career move that was unexpected but ultimately paid off.

Lesson Two: Utilize all of the resources available to you

Take advantage all of the career/job resources that available to you – some which are not immediately obvious. Going back to my story, early 1987 was not the best time to be looking for a job and the interview opportunities were far and few between. I ended up graduating without a job. My folks lived in FL but I had a couple of prospects in the northeast. So, I moved to DC and slept on a friend’s couch for a few months while I searched. I sent cover letters and resumes to companies that sounded interesting, responded to help wanted ads (i.e., the 1987 version of Monster.com), and went to job fairs. It was getting me nowhere. I soon was almost 3 months after graduation, had virtually no money, and was getting desperate. I bumped into a classmate of mine and told him about my situation. Rather than being sympathetic, he asked me whether I had spoken with the local alumni club yet. Either I had been too clueless or too stubborn to ask for help. I told him “no I hadn’t”. I believed I could find a job on my own and didn’t need help. Obviously, I was wrong. So, the next Monday, I got in contact with the club, found out about the jobs committee, met with the jobs committee head, and by the end of the day had 2-3 immediate job prospects. By the end of the week, I had an interview and a job offer from the DC office of a small engineering consulting firm headed by a fellow ND alum. I happily took the job and my career was off and running. I was amazed how quickly things started happening once I took advantage of the resources my alumni network afforded me.

Lesson Three: Persistence – don’t accept defeat

After I had worked at that first job a few years, I realized I wanted to get into IT consulting and was able to get an interview with Andersen Consulting (pre-cursor to Accenture). I really wanted the job and prepared very hard for the interview. The day of the interview, things started off well and near the end of the day, I thought I had the job in the bag. But the last interview of the day was with the managing partner. I didn’t realize the importance of this last interview. I guess I took the interview too casually and didn’t use the opportunity to really sell myself. Anyway, he must not have been impressed because I received a rejection letter in the mail a few days later. I was devastated. I really wanted that job. My devastation turned into anger (mostly at myself) and eventually became my motivation. I called up the head of recruiting and told her that they had made a mistake. I told her how much I wanted the job and how perfect I was for the job (basically what I should have told the managing partner). And I told her that I wanted a second chance – I wanted another interview to prove myself, prove that they made a mistake, and convince them to hire me. She told me that no candidate had ever done what I had just done – asking them to reconsider – but that I had made a compelling case (at least to her). She said she would see what she could do. To my surprise, she called me back and said that I would be given another shot – a second interview, this time with the # 2 partner in the office (and apparently someone who was notoriously tough on job candidates). Well, I went in extremely focused, nailed the interview, and got the job. So, my third lesson is don’t always accept defeat, be persistent and you can often get what you want.

Lesson Four: Be patient but don’t sit still

I’ll jump ahead to 2002 when I was departing my position as VP of software development at a financial start-up. I assumed that my next position would be a step up to CTO or CIO of another start-up or a tech-savvy firm, but instead I ended up making a lateral move. I can blame the poor job market for why I wasn’t able to land that type of job but on reflection, the real reason was that I wasn’t ready. I was able to get interviews for those senior executive positions, but I couldn’t close the deal.

I could have gotten frustrated but instead was patient. However, that did not mean sitting still and waiting for the perfect job to land in my lap. I read more, networked more, and got in better physical shape. Then, I decided to go back to school - grad school. I realized that what got me to this place in my career was not necessarily what would allow me to get to and succeed at the next level. So I went and got a master’s in IT management. The program emphasized the importance of learning and speaking the language of business and focused on the business value of IT. The next time a CTO/CIO opportunity came along, I would be much better prepared.

Lesson Five: Build your reputation, integrity, and network (over time)

After being fortunate to have survived the dot-com meltdown earlier this decade and despite a couple of sideways career steps, I have now ended up in a very good position as the CTO of a great company. There is a long explanation of how I got here but it boils down to this - my reputation, integrity, and personal network. At all stages of your career, but especially later in your career, your reputation, integrity, and network will be what will open up opportunities for you (at least the good opportunities). In my case, the company ‘discovered’ me through its and my network. We had a mutual contact – a former company employee who still spoke with the CEO on periodic basis. This mutual contact also had worked with me, knew me, my work, and my reputation, and spoke highly of me to the CEO. The CEO then reached out to me, I interviewed, and I got the job. Obviously my interviews with the company were important, but I was in a great position with them to begin with based on the person who recommended me – a person that the CEO knew and trusted. And, as the company checked my references (both ones I provided and ones they found on their own), they presumably heard a similar story about me from them. So, the last lesson is that your reputation, integrity, and network will reflect the work that you’ve done and the relationships you’ve developed. Pay attention to these. These things take time to develop, so be patient, but there will be a pay off in the long run.

These lessons - take advantage of unexpected opportunities, use all resources available to you, be persistent, be patient but don’t sit still, and build your reputation and network over time - have worked out well for me. I wish the same good fortune for you. Good luck on your own careers.

Looking back at 2008

It's been over a year since my last post. A lot has happened since then. I accepted a great new job as the Motley Fool's CTO last April. It's been an interesting, exciting, and challenging 10 months. I plan to provide more frequent updates on tech-related issues as well as on my personal interests. Look for a more detailed post soon. In the meantime you can check out some recent press that include some quotes from yours truly:

Computerworld's Top IT Schools to Watch, University of Virginia

IBD Phones Keep Investors Connected to the Market