Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

I will be engaging in a friendly debate with Don Dodge, Microsoft, on Thursday, as we take to the Research Triangle high-tech stage together, along with Eric Auchard, Reuters, at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development Tech 2007 conference in North Carolina to address “Technology Trends of Today and Tommorrow.”

Focused aroud “The Tech Demo Room” where 40 Southeast-based breakout companies in the making will showcase the newest entrepreneurial applications in med tech, digital media, mobile communications, clean tech, IT security, and more, Don, Eric and I will wrap up the day with a high-level look at what is working now, and what will or will not be leading edge over the next five to ten years.

Don jumpstarts the conversation today by suggesting “failing fast is a good thing,” be it in the entrepreneurial life-cycle or the sales cycle:

When you are rasing money, selling a customer, or tyring to get a deal done, it is the long drawn out process that never ends that will kill you, It is the same thing with startups. Being successful is always the goal, but if it is going to fail, fail fast.

In good co-panelist fashion, however, my counterpoint is the old adage, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

In other words, perserverence is perhaps the greatest asset an entrepreneur can have, as successful web 1.0 entrepreneur Steven Krein attested to in launching his new Web 2.0 venture last week at the NY Tech Meetup, OrganizedWisdom Health.

Krein recalled his orginal Web glory days: 1996 Co-founder and CEO of the first Internet promotion technology company, Promotions.com, which went public on NASDAQ in 1999 and was acquired by iVilage in 2002.

When asked at the tech meetup for the single most valuable lesson he had for startups, Krein advised that perserverance is easily the greatest asset an entrepreneur in the making can have. Krein shared that he had personally made the rounds of 1000 funding sources, and recieved 1000 NOs before a yes. For Krein, the greuling investment process helped him refine and focus his product and business model so that it evolved into a success-prone venture.

Sometimes, in the entrepreneurial process, “all we have to fear is fear itself.”

ALSO: YAY! Twitter, NOT Jaiku, Can BE the Next Google

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Is Paul Graham sending the right message to our young men? How about the NBA?

Just as every LeBron James wannabe hoopster should NOT be hyped into believing who needs college, every Sergey Brin wannabe hacker should not be spun a Google billionaire fairytale.

LeBron is a moneymaking star machine, Kwame Brown is not. Brin is a high-flying cash machine, the Zenter (now Googler) developers are not.

Quinnipiac University student newspaper on why “NBA’s age restriction adds maturity and talent to rosters”:

The age restriction forces inexperienced players to take a year to develop rather than sit on NBA benches. Such development would almost certainly have helped Brown more than sitting on the bench in Washington. Clearly, James needed no additional development. Yet, wouldn’t his already phenomenal resume look even better if he had played in a Final Four in the 2003-04 season?

And wouldn’t basketball fans have benefited from witnessing James possibly go for a national title that year, rather than play for a developing Cavs team?

YCombinator’s Graham on why “leaving” college, rather than graduating with a degree, is potentially a very  good thing:

If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree?

Right, and if you are going to be the next Michael Jordan, why do you need to even pretend to care about college?

BUT, how many Michael Jordans might there ever be AND how many Brin billionaires might the world sustain?

Just as the Internet’s “court jester,” Esther Dyson  led would be startups astray in June when she cajoled to hackers “throw out your development, go use Facebook,” YCombinator is NOT serving the nations future hackers well by validating that it “matters less whether students get degrees.”

Who needs college? Who needs business plans? are NOT the right questions for startup hackers: WHO NEEDS GOOGLE is what truly savvy entrepreneurial coders will say to themselves, just as paper billionaire Mark Zuckerberg apparently says to himself every day!

While Graham hails Google for “standardizing” startup acquisitions so “they’re little more work than hiring someone,” I lament that brilliant deveoplers of proprietary software IP are selling themseleves short by selling out on the cheap to Google.

The latest prime example: Sami Shalabi, of not quite Zingku fame.

Read my Insider Chatter exclusives: Zingku Backstory: Founder Sami Shalabi Newest Google Engineer? and Zingku Flips to Google: NO Dodgeball Hacker Lessons Learned!

Also, before signing on the low-ball Googley dotted line, read the Googleplex-centric startup advice of Google’s star biz dev guy, Chris Sacca, who proudly calls himself a “corporate sellout interloper.”

In Sacca’s actual words, “STAY CHEAP”:

I see too many entrepreneurs these days feeling the need to build an entire company to support what is essentially a feature of a larger search engine. It depresses me to see creative people wasting productive cycles on the mundane aspects of building full companies. Y Combinator gets this.

But Mr. Sacca, HOW can emulation of a rule the world for bilions strategy as followed by your chief, Sergey Brin, ever be deemed “mundane”? Was Brin “wasting” his creativity by building out his global vision to pocket billions for himself?

Why DO Sacca and Graham evangelize startup sellouts the faster the better? So they can get THEIR big money returns the faster the better.

Graham disses the “stigma of inadequacy” in quick startup flips. If he was really looking out for hackers’ long-term best interests, though, he would push his stable of ramen noodle funded coders into trying to BE the next Google, rather than hoping to be the next hackers to sell themselves to Google, on the cheap.

MORE: Got a Tech Startup? Google is NO Angel and Zenter: Google Product Development on Spec

ALSO: The Real Madison Ave: Before (and after) Google and Social Fireworks Alert: LinkedIn vs. ‘Loud Mouth McClure’?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Google declares itself to be “Search, Ads AND Apps” now, but all of its real innovation is in the advertising part of the slogan, NOT the applications tack-on. GOOG, after all, continues to be stubbornly 99% Adwords pure!

Today’s Gadget Ads fanfare case in big ad innovation point, versus yesterday’s Google Apps presents “Presentations,” which is not even a Microsoft PowerPoint wannabe, let alone “killer.”    

Advertising IS the Google DNA; software is NOT, despite Eric Schmidt’s belief that the company is fueled by engineering rocket scientists.

What does Google really have to show for itself on the in-house software technology front? Google Apps is OpenOffice inspired and reinforced by add-ons done by rocket scientists OUTSIDE of Google: JotSpot, Writely, Zenter…

For the somewhat heavy tech lifting, Google acquired Positini, at high cost.

What’s more, Google’s applicaton integration pace is glacial, given the Google executive suite’s demand for product inovation “blizzards” and faster than the speed of light development tracks. PLUS, Google does not appear to greatly enhance the technology it acquires.

Google does excel at advertising leadership though, as its profit margins attest to.

Google’s latest declaration of intent to sell ALL the Web’s advertising, Google Gadget Ads:

New interactive ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities enable advertisers to target audiences in a flexible and timely manner via regular updates within the ad unit and allow users to engage with ad content in a way static ads haven’t facilitated in the past.

Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale. Gadget ads are also built on an open platform, allowing anybody from individual advertisers to agencies to set up and run ads on the Google content network, the world’s largest global online ad network. Plus, gadget ads will not command any serving or hosting costs.

Once again, Google makes online advertising hard to resist. So irresistible, that adveristers will even fight amongst themselves to bid up their own rate cards for the pleasure of giving Google more money, lots more.

ALSO: Web 3.0: Madison Avenue Money Trumps TechCrunch40 Cool Apps and Battelle’s FM to Google: Let’s Get the Conversational Marketing Party Started!

PLUS: Now Kevin Rose Wants to be Friends! Digg Gets Social

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

There you go again, Google: Flashing around your spare pocket change. This time, you are pretending that by dangling $20 million dollars you will get the credit for landing a robot rover on the moon before 2013.

Doable? NO! Just the latest “eye-catching publicity stunt” for Mountain View.

Fly Me to the Moon? It was my wedding song!

I danced with my newly minted husband to the uplifitng romantic classic fifteen years ago, when we said our “I dos” at the top of the original 1964 World’s Fair “Top of the Fair” building in Flushing Meadows, New York.

Despite being inspired by Bart Howard’s exhortations to “play among the stars,” we were never able to “see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”

Will Google change all that? NO!

The latest Googley attempt at shock and awe is to inspire other rocket scientists to go to the moon with a $20 million prize as the carrot.

Google Lunar X Prize? If Google “loves space” so much and thinks space exploration is so “cool,” why doesn’t it go to the moon itself!

Google teases the world with the unused power of its cash kitty, first with a threatened multi-billion dollar wireless spectrum bid, now with a flashy, but not meaningful, Moon race prize.

Google is soliciting the way a virgin might taunt an aroused prosepctive partner.

Google: $4.6 billion Google Phone Wireless Cheapskate I said of Google’s spectrum auction games.

BUT, why doesn’t Google put its real money where its wireless mouth is? After all, why doesn’t Google just get in it to win it? Google need not be held back by an arbitrary $4.6 billion “cheapskate” bid. Google is well versed in how bid up your own price auctions work!

Google now says “great things can happen when you reach for the stars.” So, reach for the stars, Google: MAKE IT HAPPEN YOURSELF!

Stop playing around and acting like the perpetual bluffer at a high-stakes poker table.

PUT YOUR OWN ROCKET SCIENTISTS TO GOOD USE, ERIC: BRING US THE MOON, SPONSORED BY GOOGLE!

PS: The man that swept me off my feet is Lyle Seltzer AND I am still dancing with him, 15 years later. SO the most important, and down to earth, part of “Fly Me to the Moon” came true for us:

In other words please be true,
In other words I love you.

ALSO: Google Privacy Hoax: Battelle and Sullivan Duped and Google Global Power Grab: Aussie Politicians in Tow

ALSO: CNET Rains on Yahoo and TechCrunch 40 Parades

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Once the venture capitalists start crying over spilled Facebook milk, it is time to take a peek into the Facebook crystal ball. NO, not the multi-billion dollar Mark Zuckerberg IPO riches success story the world believes is a foregone conclusion, the Facebook vaunted “social graph” command and control platform cold shower that may very well be in the twenty-something’s cards.

FYI, Facebook groupies, the Facebook-centric Developers Terms of Service are there for good Zuckerberg reasons.

Facebook Application terms are indeed “worrisome,” a venture capitalist “source” has confirmed to me, for any business that follows the Web’s court jester–aka Esther Dyson–advice to forget proprietary, destination Web services and build your new Web business at Facebook!

Hey, just as you would seek out second opinions prior to any contemplated major medical procedure, READ THE FACEBOOK FINE PRINT before you pledge allegiance to Mark Zuckerberg.

To whet your prudent business development appetite, here are some not so tasty Zuckerberg disclaimer tidbits:

NOt CONVINCED FACEBOOK IS RISKY BUSINESS?

Mr. Z himself has set his sights on overtaking Google, the very Google that the blogosphere has famoulsy believed to be old media’s best digital friend but is now proudy directly competing with every single Web-based media and publishing property for direct news consumption traffic at their world leading number one search engine.

Mark has learned a few Web domination things from Sergey and Larry: How to be the Web’s Wolf in sheeps’ clothing is undoubtedly one of his multi-billion dollar lessons.

ALSO: Social News Fraud: Digg Scams Even Fool Pew Research

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

The GigaOm derivative blogging weekend hype machine carries on.

Last holiday weekend, the Om himself misleading headlined “Five Facts on Google Phone,” to regurigate third-party rumors previously published elsewhere AND pile on with his own “sources say” conjecture.

This weekend, GigaOm staffer Wagner James Au presents “The How of Habbo Hotel.” A cutting edge, GigaOm original exculsive? Not quite.

Christian Nutt, Gamasutra, was on the Austin Game Developers Conference scene last week for extensive, direct coverage of Sulka Haro’s keynote on Sulake Labs’ Habbo Hotel. GigaOm’s Au subsequently piggybacks off of Nutt to announce a gaming “crime.”

The GigaOm Weekend piece notes “last week, Sulka Haro of Sulake Labs flew all the way to the GDC to explain how the teen-oriented, Shockwave-driven Habbo Hotel has grown from a tiny 2.5D space of two rooms into a masive place that last year made an estimated $77 million in revenue.”

Au goes on to say, “Gamasutra was on hand to take great notes, which is a good thing, because very few developers reportedly attended Haro’s talk.”

Really? Apparently ”very few” blogging network ‘reporters’ attended Haro’s talk as well. Which is undoubtedly a “good thing” for the GigaOm network because it can now “scoop” in to scoop “The How of Habbo Hotel” without the fuss, bother, expense, or first-hand origination required of journalism.

YAY for derivative blogging!

Au, however, sells “Gamasutra’s coverage” short. First off, Au never once directly credits the reporter that was actually on Austin scene to yield all the “great notes” for him to use free of charge (FYI Wagner, Chrisitan Nutt is his name). Moreover, the Nutt piece is not accurately defined as “great notes”; Nutt’s work is an in-depth, first-hand, case study report of a business model presented by a CEO. So in-depth, that Nutt’s original work is the foundation of Au’s “own” weekend story.

What’s more, Au declares a “phenomenal success of Habbo Hotel” as being “criminally under-appeciated by the game industry.”

Where is the purported crime, though? To back up his assertion, Au says Sulake Labs’ Habbo Hotel is a “massive place” that “last year made an estimated $77 million in annual revenue” with a staff of 300.

Using Au’s figures, the “criminal” Sulake game industry success story is a $250,000 revenue per employee one.

The Nintendo success story may be even more criminal then, as analyzed by Fortune magazine’s Jeffrey O’Brien:

The company’s 3,4000 employees generated $8.26 billion in revenue last year, or $2.5 million each. Over roughly the same time frame, Microsoft employees generated $624,000 each; Google’s peformed 50% better, at $994,000, though still less than half as well as Nintendo employees.

In other “criminal” Nintendo words, ten times the amount of revenue per Sulake employee.

ALSO: Poor Misunderstood Facebook: NOT the White Pages, NOT Google Poking Heaven 

PLUS: Twitter: Lifelogging Platform or Self Promotional Tool? and Jaiku Rules: Facebook Addict Kicks the Zuckerberg Habit

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN