Category: Random, But Interesting

The Book Lives On

Faithful readers will recall that about three months ago, I announced my return to FM as CEO. I also mentioned that the projects I’d been working on – notably OpenCo and The Book, would have to be retooled given my new commitment to the company I started back in 2005 (when I last wrote a book). In the post, I wrote:

I love the book I’m working on, and I don’t plan to abandon it (I’m bringing on a co-author). And I love the conferences I do, and I’ll still be doing them (though I’ll be hiring someone to run them full time). But my first love is the company I started in 2005, whose story is not only unfinished, it’s at the height of its running narrative.

I’m very, very pleased to announce that I’ve found that co-author – her name is Sara M. Watson, and she’s simply the perfect partner for me to be working with on this book. You can read her post about it here. Sara and I met over Twitter, after she noticed the theme of the CM Summit – “Bridging Data and Humanity.” We spoke on the phone and I learned that the intersection of society and data was her passion – and that her background was an awful lot like mine. She started her career as a liberal arts major from Harvard (during the time Facebook was just a dorm room project), toiled in the narrative fields of enterprise IT, became fascinated with the story of information, and decided to head to graduate school to study it (she’ll finish her Masters from Oxford in a few months). After Oxford, Sara has some amazing plans lined up (I can’t talk about them yet) that dovetail perfectly into our shared work.

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Mary’s Annual Internet Trends

Waaay back in the late 1990s, I started a conference called the Internet Summit. My co-producers were Bill Gurley, who remains one of the giants in venture over at Benchmark, and Mary Meeker, who was at that point the best analyst in the Internet space, at Morgan Stanley. The Internet Summit had its last event in July of 2001, and the space was taken over by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who went on to launch All Things Digital, which has thrived to this day. I went on to launch the Web 2 Summit in 2004, and it was at that event that Mary started presenting her annual Internet Trends deck. I put her in one of my typical “High Order Bit” slots, ten minutes max, and each year Mary would lobby for more time, and cram more and more data and insights into her alloted time (by the last time Mary did it with me, it was 15 minutes and about 90 slides).

I stopped doing Web 2 in 2011 (OpenCo is the new black, natch), and Mary migrated her job to Kleiner Perkins and her presentation to All Things Digital, both great moves. Last week she unveiled her latest work, and I notice it’s gotten up to 117 slides. I missed All Things D due to a client event at P&G, but I bet she got more than 15 minutes to present it!

This deck is always worth the time to review. You can download it on KPCB’s site, and I’ve embedded it below.

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A Berkeley Commencement Speech, Some Years Ago…

Last week LinkedIn asked me to post a commencement speech, if I had given one, as part of a series they were doing. Turns out, I’ve given two, but the one they wanted was at Berkeley, my alma mater. If you want to read the one I gave at my high school, I’d be happy to post it (I think it’s better), but since I already have the Berkeley one at the ready, here it is. I want it to be on my own site as well, just for the record.

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Back in 2005, as Web 2.0 was taking off, I was honored to be asked to give the commencement address at UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management, or SIMS. It was a perfect day, and the ceremony was outside at the base of the Campanile, which is Berkeley’s proudest monument. As a double Cal graduate, and three-generation legacy, this was a crowning moment for me. Below are some excerpts, edited for clarity given the time that has lapsed since.

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Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem

I’m very proud to announce “Behind the Banner“, a visualization I’ve been producing with Jer Thorp and his team from The Office for Creative Research, underwritten by Adobe as part of the upcoming CM Summit next week. You can read more about it in this release, but the real story of this project starts with my own quest to understand the world of programmatic trading of advertising inventory – a world that at times feels rather like a hot mess, and at other times, like the future of not only all media, but all data-driven experiences we’ll have as a society, period.

I’m a fan of Terry Kawaja and his Lumascapes – Terry was an advisory to us as we iterated this project. But I’ve always been a bit mystified by those diagrams – you have to be pretty well steeped in the world of adtech to grok how all those companies work together. My goal with Behind the Banner was to demystify the 200 or so milliseconds driving each ad impression – to break down the steps, identify the players, make it a living thing. I think this first crack goes a long way toward doing that – like every producer, I’m not entirely satisfied with it, but damn, it’s the best thing I’ve seen out there so far.

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On Google Glass and OpenCo NYC

In case you have any interest, here’s a short clip of me opining on Google Glass and the upcoming OpenCoNYC, which is going to be HOT. More on that soon.
http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?embedCode=lzY29mYjorGoTyV6rTL7VQ7jNNEwMqqL&playerBrandingId=8a7a9c84ac2f4e8398ebe50c07eb2f9d&width=640&deepLinkEmbedCode=lzY29mYjorGoTyV6rTL7VQ7jNNEwMqqL&height=360&thruParam_bloomberg-ui%5BpopOutButtonVisible%5D=FALSE

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The First 60 OpenCos in NYC, Visualized

Just got this up on our site, which is close to opening general admission (free to the public). So proud. Many more to come, but the deadline to sign up is soon, so if you want to be part of the movement, head here. More on OpenCo NY here.

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How I “Crack” My Inbox

Over on the LinkedIn Influencer network, I’ve revealed how I manage my often-overflowing inbox. It’s not exactly rocket science, but enough people have found it interesting that I thought I’d share it in a professional context. If you’re interested in stuff like this, give it a read and let me know what you think. From the post:

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Whenever I hear a friend or colleague complain about how their email inbox is “out of control” I take the opportunity to toss out a humblebrag: I never go to sleep before getting my inbox down to ten or fewer messages. Every so often, I even get it to zero.

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On Coming Back to FMP

Starting a business is a journey, as any founder will tell you. When I started Federated Media Publishing almost eight years ago, I did my best to collect all the lessons learned from Wired, The Industry Standard, and Web 2 Summit, and apply them to my new venture. One of those lessons was that it’s OK to step away when the time is right. Several years ago, I did just that, becoming an “active Chairman” at FMP and handing the operational reigns over to an accomplished executive, Deanna Brown.

Since making that decision, FMP has grown dramatically, but it’s also had its challenges. Last year, for example, we made the difficult but important decision to rethink the company so as to lean into our two most promising lines of business – content marketing (which we lay claim to inventing as “conversational marketing” some seven years ago) and programmatic marketing (which we invested in heavily last year, after acquiring a very fast growing business in Lijit Networks in Fall of 2011). It meant stepping back from something we had been doing for some time – directly selling standard display banners  – but it proved to be the right choice. FMP is having a great first half of 2013, and I couldn’t be more excited about our roadmap and potential for the rest of the year and beyond.

The funny thing is, even as I became “just the Chairman” at FMP over the past two years, I never stopped thinking about the company. It woke me up nearly every night, tugging at my sleeve, asking me questions, demanding my best thinking. Deanna and I would meet every week to talk strategy, review numbers, or just plain chew the fat. Running a company with hundreds of employees, top notch investors, and a big top line revenue number is damn hard, and Deanna not only ran the place, she made it hum. I am in her debt.

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That Guilty Pile of Outdated Technology

(image Wired) Way back in the day when I was making magazines, I was buried in print. I subscribed to at least twenty periodicals, easily twice that many came my way without my asking. It made for a huge pile of printed material on the end of my desk (stuff I really should read), and it creeped into the horizontal spaces behind me (stuff I think I should read, in case I get the time), or on my shelves (stuff I can’t throw out yet), and the damn things even spilled onto my floor (stuff I probably will never read, but feel too guilty to toss out).

I dubbed this mountain of print The Guilt Pile. Every so often, usually when it was time to move offices, I’d take inventory of the pile, and toss most of it. It always felt so good – a fresh start, a new day, this time, I promise, I’ll not let that pile accumulate again!

Then digital took over my print life, and the pile vanished.

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When It’s This Easy To Take Someone’s Money…

Earlier in the month I wrote about fraud in the advertising technology ecosystem – a post which has spawned dozens of fascinating conversations that I will continue to write about here and elsewhere. But this past weekend I encountered another kind of scam – a combination of time-honored phishing (online identity theft via social manipulation) and good old-fashioned wire fraud.

My family has been going to a small island off the coast of Massachussets for my entire life – my grandparents are buried there, my great grandmother moved there around the turn of the century (1900, not 2000!). My mother owns a cottage near the beach, a cottage that my great-grandmother purchased nearly 100 years ago.

Suffice to say, I have a deep history with the place. But with a bevy of kids and friends descending upon us each summer, my family has outgrown the cottage, so we’ve started looking for a larger place to rent. Like most folks these days, we turned to the Internet. We fired up VRBO.com, a popular marketplace for quality vacation rentals. It’s a great site for checking the market, and my wife and I figured we might get lucky and find just the right place.

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