Ajax Girl

Yesterday Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo (and, full disclosure, our partner at TechCrunch40), wrote a blog post titled “How to save money running a startup.” Boy was he attacked. Bloggers lined up to take their shots at him. Examples are here, here, here and, especially, here.

Our own Duncan Riley also wrote a post criticizing Calacanis and a firestorm of comments blew in. He took a more humorous approach to make his points, but his opinion on the matter was clear.

I happen to disagree with Duncan and the others criticizing Calacanis, though. Our writers have complete editorial discretion, and I would never ask him to change his overall tone or message. But I do want to chime in with my own thoughts because this is an important cultural issue and worthy of further discussion.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.

I’m not that interested in analyzing each of his 17 suggestions - some I agree with, some I don’t. But I am interested in adding my thoughts to what I believe is (or should be) his underlying messages:

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/248012233/

If yesterday’s cushy Fortune article on Hulu in Fortune is any indication, Internet TV site Hulu is getting ready to leave private beta and launch to the public. Press like this doesn’t just happen without company asking for it. They’re preparing for the big show.

Hulu was expected to launch this month anyway, and the article mentions an “early March” release. And apparently they’re gathering analysts for a Monday briefing.

And as much as I respect both of the writers (David Kirkpatrick and Adam Lashinsky), the article is way too generous in its portrayal of Hulu and its history. An example quote: “But the secret of Hulu’s initial success - the thing that made believers out of the skeptics - is the power and simplicity of the website itself.” Another: “The result is the elegantly transparent interface that has wowed even its biggest detractors.” Fortune seems very appreciative to get this exclusive level of access. While they mention that bloggers were highly critical of Hulu prior to launch, they fail to talk about the very good reasons behind that criticism.

Good thing I’m here to remember.

Hulu: A Very Troubled Start

In the months following the company’s March 2006 initial press release, we gave the joint venture a lot of grief for failing to pick a name for the project, eventually settling on a name - Hulu - that meant “cease” and “desist” in Swahili (ironic, given that Hulu’s parent companies send out so many of them), copying Google’s mission statement, and receiving not the greatest vote of confidence from NBC Universal’s own chief digital officer (one of the joint venture partners).

Behind all of this criticism was a high degree of doubt that NBC and News Corp. were ever going to get Hulu out the door before the joint venture became irrelevant. In September, NBC had even announced a video downloading service that appeared to cannibalize its own joint venture with News Corp.

But all that changed when we saw the beta product. Hulu did a lot of things right. The video quality was acceptable. The controls were intuitive. And there was some great content on the site, including a few movies and some archived television shows.

So yeah, we changed our tune on Hulu once the product actually launched, but that’s the point. The product spoke for itself. Two months ago, users even voted Hulu the top video startup award at the Crunchies, beating out Joost and others.

Here We Go Again?

The problem with Hulu was the sheer amount of hype and unfulfilled expectations the company generated a full eight months before it went into private beta. Early messaging was terrible (a focus on respecting copyright, and the fact that they were creating what they called “the largest advertising platform on earth.” instead of talking about user features). A product was promised by Summer 2007 but was delayed repeatedly. Eventually they had to acquire a Chinese startup to get to the finish line.

The product still has issues - I regularly find that streaming is jumpy, for example. That shouldn’t happen at all given their resources, and certainly not in a controlled private beta. They have also been very slow to get archived content on the site - even though it would have been a great way to fight the writer’s strike that resulted in an absolute halt to any new stuff. People outside the U.S. still can’t view the content.

In short, Hulu is far from perfect. And if the Fortune article is a signal of a new round of hype around the service, don’t be surprised when bloggers criticize them for not meeting those sky high expectations. And it’s not too late to start calling this thing Clown Co. again.

My suggestion would be to skip all the hoopla this time and let the product speak for itself. Burn those marketing and PR dollars on a few more servers to keep the streaming steady. Don’t hold analyst briefings. And let the users find you because their friends can’t stop talking about how great the service is. See here for an example of how that’s done.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247902851/

Today rapped up Microsoft’s annual Mix Conference in Las Vegas. The event is Microsoft’s web focused get together where they talk coding and development with mostly white, geek guys (the only women seemed to be the Microsoft/ events staff), then there’s the occasional press person thrown in for good measure.

The coverage the event gets pales into significance to say an Apple event (Apple could open a door and probably still get more coverage) but the coverage doesn’t do it full justice because there were some interesting things (see our coverage as follows: keynote 1, keynote 2, Web 2.0 session, Mesh networking).

What I did see at my time during my time at the conference was the stark contrast between the old Microsoft and new Microsoft. The new Microsoft is embracing web standards, providing support for OS X and Linux, and listening and responding to customer feedback. The tech might not always be the absolute best in the market, but its coming ahead in leaps and bounds. I got 20 minutes with Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie (interview here) and the talk was refreshing.

And then there was the old Microsoft. Steve Ballmer at keynote two made fun of Apple products, joked about Apple’s market share, and constantly justified Microsoft’s position based on its domination of the market. No serious talk about moving forward, improving the end user experience with Windows….as long as Microsoft has the dominant market share the rest doesn’t matter much to Ballmer. The fact that Apple is selling more Macs then ever because of Vista’s issues means nothing to him. Old arrogant Microsoft.

Then there’s the other products that are completely lost. As part of my press accreditation I received a free 8gb Zune. They don’t sell Zunes where I come from so I had no negative expectations for it because I’d never seen one before. So I bring it back to my hotel room and on the screen it tells me I have to visit the Zune site to make it work. Great, get to the Zune site, tells me I have to download software to make it work….which is only available for Windows, not OS X (my laptop doesn’t have a copy of Windows on it). There’s an open source alternative that lets you get into the Zune, but doesn’t provide any decent functionality…and it doesn’t unlock it from its default opening state. Zune=brick to me. On one hand people like Scott Guthrie and others are talking cross platform support, the department in Microsoft which makes the Zune has decided that cross platform support isn’t important. The Jekyl land Hype side of Microsoft once again.

Microsoft is a company with a lot of good people doing amazing things, but those people are like a horse that has been handicapped out of the race with the baggage of Microsoft old. They are putting up a good fight to be seen and listened to, but it’s a hard ask. Microsoft is clearly a company that is changing, the only remaining question is will the whole organization transform into the new Microsoft quickly enough to survive the rapidly changing way companies and individuals interact with technology.

disclosure: Microsoft Australia arranged the trip, thanks to Nick Hodge for organizing it

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247798431/

New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).

Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.

The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/247784761/