California – at greater risk of earthquake that financial Armageddon?

via money.cnn.com

Not a great week for the Golden State.  Credit downgrade to BBB,  vouchers-as-currency proving to be a limited lifespan solution, and no legislative solution in sight.

Posted via web from jmckinley’s posterous

“True Grit” matters – on the raising of children in today’s self-esteem-over-performance culture

via incharacter.org

As a parent of two young kids, it was great to read this piece on the work of Angela Duckworth at Penn. It talks about what character traits you should be focused upon to help your children succeed.

In a world where we celebrate everything in a child’s life, the real lessons of hard work, persistent, and long-term payoff are often overlooked.

I am a huge fan of the belief that multi-year focus on some form of personal achievement, be it music, art, or sport is one of the most important true growth investments a young individual can make in himself/herself. It is not about comparative levels of performance. It is all about what you can personally achieve in life through concerted effort.

I talk to my son all the time about my own experiences to become a ranked fencer, and what it was like in my first years of of national competition (quite humbling at times), where I managed my definition of “success” by continuing to set personal growth goals each year. I came away from my time in sport with some invaluable lessons around focus and dedication – lessons I am now trying to pass on to my kids.

Through my venture investment work, I see lessons about grit everyday, When I see my friends in the startup space in action, I see the same common flame burns bright within them. They have “true grit”, and they inspire me each day, for which I am truly grateful.

To read more on Angela’s work, you can start here: http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=147

Posted via web from jmckinley’s posterous

Corporate IT needs to get on board with the “No SQL” movement – huge strategic benefits, paired with major cost savings longer-term

The large web players have championed (out of necessity) creative and highly scalable means of managing structured data (from Google's BigTable to Yahoo's Hadoop).  Now things have exploded, with great work from Amazon (Dynamo), Facebook (Cassandra), and others.

The performance stats are staggering.

Now it is time for corporate IT to take up the mantle and start using these innovations in their day to day operations.  In a world where lots of effort has already been expended on traditional cost-out efforts (LAMP stack migration, offshoring, etc.), it is nice to have a new page in the IT playbook that has real strategic benefit, beyond its near-term cost savings opportunity.

Here is a quick overview piece to whet your appetite.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9135086

Posted via email from jmckinley’s posterous

Trainwrecks along the way as local newspapers try to morph into profitable web businesses

via businessinsider.com

The before picture: 272 employees running the local Ann Arbor News (a paper with a 174 year history). The after picture: All employees laid off, and traffic (4K UVs/Mo) that a blogger wouldn’t brag about. I don’t remember another example of such a rapid decline across an entire industry.

Posted via web from jmckinley’s posterous

The destruction by experimental of the US Dollar

A must read piece by Arthur Laffer, about the irresponsible live experimentation regarding our money supply.

Here’s the key segment:

“About eight months ago, starting in early September 2008, the
Bernanke Fed did an abrupt about-face and radically increased the
monetary base — which is comprised of currency in circulation, member
bank reserves held at the Fed, and vault cash — by a little less than
$1 trillion. The Fed controls the monetary base 100% and does so by
purchasing and selling assets in the open market. By such a radical
move, the Fed signaled a 180-degree shift in its focus from an
anti-inflation position to an anti-deflation position.

The
percentage increase in the monetary base is the largest increase in the
past 50 years by a factor of 10 (see chart nearby). It is so far
outside the realm of our prior experiential base that historical
comparisons are rendered difficult if not meaningless. The
currency-in-circulation component of the monetary base — which prior
to the expansion had comprised 95% of the monetary base — has risen by
a little less than 10%, while bank reserves have increased almost
20-fold. Now the currency-in-circulation component of the monetary base
is a smidgen less than 50% of the monetary base. Yikes!”

OurParents.com launches – think of us as a free, unbiased “match.com” to connect families that have aging parents with senior care providers that can meet your unique needs

Here’s what we said to the press:

Millions of Baby Boomers are struggling to care for their aging parents. Many don’t know where to turn or even what their options are in making important decisions about senior care facilities for their parents.

Until now, the only online services in senior care were heavily biased towards providers paying to have business directed to them. Not anymore. Ourparents.com launched this week with unprecedented access to information about more than 65,000 senior care providers in the U.S.. The free service is totally independent and unbiased, providing ratings, price information and powerful online tools including the remarkable Care Options Advisor. The site is unique in that there is no charge to the consumer or the provider.

Ourparents.com matches aging parents with senior care solutions unique to their specific needs.

“My first-hand experiences with my aging mother showed me how broken the process of finding a senior care solution is,” said John McKinley, founder and CEO of OurParents.com. “I saw sites offering limited senior care options in my area, and little information to help me judge which ones might meet my needs. I felt that my mom represented nothing other than a sales lead that was being sold to only a limited set of senior care providers in that website’s network.”

When it comes to such an important decision as a parent’s long-term care, that bias is fundamentally wrong as a business practice, McKinley said.

“With the launch of OurParents.com, we are declaring war on the current business practices of the senior care lead generation industry,” he said.

Diane Carbo, R.N., a 35-year industry veteran and life care advocate, said that, in her work with families, it has been “frustrating” trying to find a comprehensive independent source of senior care providers.

“OurParents is the best source of senior care options I have seen,” said Carbo, owner of Aging Home Health Care in Cliffside Park, NJ. “I was also impressed by the Care Options Advisor tool. The survey was simple to use, and the responses were accurate and easy for a family to understand.”

OurParents.com has a simple but powerful search engine at its core, allowing visitors to quickly see and compare senior care options in their area. It provides immediate access to information about more than 65,000 in-home care providers, assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. It offers free detailed reports about each care provider – something currently for sale on other sites for $25 to $90. OurParents.com also incorporates the new Medicare five-star quality ratings. Families who are just getting started and unsure which care options make the most sense can use the innovative Care Options Advisor. This tool allows families to quickly describe their loved one’s current condition and the family’s senior care priorities, guiding them to viable care options that meet their needs. Ourparents.com then facilitates direct communication between the family and those senior care providers.

“We don’t charge the families or the care providers, meaning that OurParents.com will never have the problem of conflict of interest when it comes to this critical life decision,” said McKinley. “Our founding principle is that we are and always will be on the side of the consumer.”

We’re live today at www.ourparents.com!

Thanks to TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider and Killerstartups.com for the nice posts!

Why MapQuest has lost its way, and how to fix it

At times, it gets tiring to read the number of pile-on posts and comments written about AOL.  At this point, AOL’s destiny is in their own hands, and we will see what the future holds for them as they hunker down and focus on 2009 financial performance (as we all are).

One thing hit the wires yesterday, however, that caught my eye.  It was a post by Heather Hopkins about the latest traffic statistics about MapQuest and Google Maps, and where both where from an aggregate traffic perspective.

As backdrop, here are the latest stats from Hitwise on the comparative market share (based on UVs) for MapQuest and Google Maps:

As the chart shows, 2008 was a seminal year for Google Maps.  Their share gain,regardless of whose stats you use (Comscore, et al) has been nothing short of tremendous.  Unfortunately, that in large part has come out of the hide of the incumbent, MapQuest, an AOL property.

I have always been a cheerleader for MapQuest – the role they played on web-enabled consumer behavior change in the 90’s can’t be denied.  Seeing us reach a tipping point in the US market, in terms of share shift, really pains me.

I think there are a number of self-inflicted wounds that they need to address, but I also think MapQuest represents an opportunity to be a focused poster child of business transformation in 2009, and I will share my thoughts on that a bit later.

First, let’s deal with the pain.  It stares me in the face each time I use MapQuest as a consumer service.

Let’s look at the results of a request for directions on MapQuest and Google Maps.

Here’s the MapQuest experience (rendering for a 1024 by 768 display, the usual web design guideline):

Now, let’s see the same results from Google Maps:

This is part of the long-term issue with MapQuest:  At some point along the journey, it has lost its way, in terms of the primary mission it is meant to serve.  It is all about simple, informative directions.

The current experience is, as a friend of mine says, a dog’s breakfast.  I am not sure what my eye is supposed to be drawn to.  It sure the heck isn’t the actual directions – they barely begin above the fold.  This looks like a misapplied implementation of a tactical focus on short-term revenue (e.g., note the big slug of non-relevant sponsored links for Florida and Cancun smack dab in the middle of the page).

Now, look at the Google Maps display – it is all about consumer payoff. I see the turn-by-turn directions and the map rendered above the fold, and the first sponsored link is on the left rail after the directions.

I do understand the case for monetization of traffic, but when that starts materially impairing the consumer experience, you start putting the franchise at risk.  MapQuest has reached that point.

Unfortunately, in large part, AOL has its hands tied about changing course, in terms of how the property is managed. The market is hyper-focused on AOL’s near-term financial trajectory, and that means running the business for cash.  I am sure there are a number of smart people at AOL who recognize the issues facing MapQuest, but they don’t have the latitude to consider strategic investment in the property.

That’s why I think structural opportunities are the right near-term focus:

It looks like, from the press over the last year, the financial dialogs with third parties have been focused on large, macro-sized chunks of AOL (e.,g., the access business and Earthlink, the ad and audience businesses and Yahoo, etc.).  Unfortunately, the September market collapse took the wind out of the sales of lots of M&A dialogs, especially in the high-multiple sectors like technology.

Is the real 2009 opportunity for AOL to take great, more focused, franchise properties like MapQuest, and post their first win in creating a next-gen version of AOL, perhaps manifested as a holding company sitting on top of material stakes in properties spun out of the mothership?

In examining strategic options, let’s be sure to give credit for what MapQuest still is, in terms of aggregate traffic and as a brand.  It is an attractive franchise with real potential, but it needs the capital to play offense in the space.  With the billions of private equity currently parked on the sidelines, a major property like MapQuest could attract a good deal of interest.  I would engage a team today focused on a mission to actively pursue strategy options for MapQuest, in parallel to whatever other efforts are underway.

Now, assuming an option to infuse some strategic capital in MapQuest exists, what exactly should be done to change the slope of growth line?

I think there are a variety of things to pursue:

1. Fix the consumer experience ASAP – make consumers love MapQuest again

2. Find your voice in the market – maybe strive to be “the most accurate directions on the web”.   That takes work, and things like Google’s ability for me to submit address corrections to their database means your work is cut out for you, but that is a real pillar of value the consumer market might understand.

3. Find the platform play where you can win.  Maybe that starts with being the champion of things like OpenStreetMap.

4. Find ways to get more organic traffic.  Over 60% of Google Maps’ traffic came from Google.  They have  a natural advantage here.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t creative SEO/organic traffic opportunities.  You know the mid and long tail of  popular physical addresses and locations.  What next-gen location-centric pages could you generate that takes in all the great geo-coded data being added to the web daily?

5. Push the envelope more on your mobile experiences  It is not enough to just have sites render well on a phone’s browser.  They need to exploit GPS, accelerometers, electronic compasses, etc., to deliver a competitive experience.

6. Find the right local review play to leverage.  One of the biggest opportunities discussed over the years about MapQuest has been local search, and today that means access to local and location-contextual reviews.  Find out how to have a great horse in that race.  The sector doesn’t have to be ceded to Yelp.  Local reviews are, at some level, fundamentally broken (poor at long-tail items, subject to vendor rating spam, etc.).  There is a good niche acquisition opportunity in your future to jumpstart things here, in my opinion.

7.  Be the first to deliver a free Telenav-level consumer experience (real-time, text-to-speech, turn by turn) – that does means addressing the current Navteq pricing practices (hence the push to accelerate the open source mapping efforts).

These are just a few ideas.  I am sure people at AOL have a lot more.  The key is finding the structure to allow these ideas to be pursued.

The goal is simple – do what it takes make MapQuest the property it deserves to be.

True Innovation Sighting: The Mobile Man Machine Interface And MIT

At times, over the last two decades, we fall into a trap to believe that the major tech mountains have all been climbed, and that new thinking will be more of the incremental, not disruptive variety.

I am not sure why that happens – maybe, in our real-time world, where we share and publish judgements and observations an order of magnitude more frequently than in decades past, it takes more to get us to lift our heads up to observe true disruptive innovation.

That’s why I treasure when things like the iPhone and its ecosystem happen to fundamentally shake things up.

I felt the same excitement last week, when, at the TED conference, a team from MIT demonstrated a new approach for contextual environment augmentation, using about $300 of hardware and their invaluable collective smarts.

To start the dialog, take a look at one of the sample videos that the MIT team came up with.

The main components of what they demoed that I love included:

• The gesture interface, from using your hands to frame a photo, to the multi-touch implementation
• The way it addresses that “What’s in focus” issue, by using you fundamental positioning and viewplane to augment/complement what you are viewing
• How it employs text recognition within an image to further understand context
• The hardware the team employed, weighting in at a $300 pricepoint!
• The use of the physical world (the paper I am reading, the photo I am viewing, etc.) as the actual display, which was mind-blowing (e.g., seeing my real-time flight status displayed on the ticket I am holding).
• My favorite of all their examples (albeit impractical): Projecting the tag cloud of information about the person I am speaking to ONTO the person as we speak

Augmenting the physical object I am interacting with information with is one of those simple, but great ideas (done before, but here it has two attributes lacking in prior efforts:  portability and affordability)

There are other interesting interface options being worked on in parallel.  Some examples include:

• Smart clothing, incorporating passive sensors and active controls
• Heads-up displays in eyewear – Note:  Still LOTS of work still to do here to avoid looking Borg-like
• Contextual extension of existing devices (GPS, Accelerometers, Compass) – all now minimum-to-ship requirements for the smartphone players nowadays
• Flexible OLED display advances
• Pen-based interfaces (still plugging away after 8 plus years).

There are lot of blades in the Swiss Army knife of mobile interface options – the art is determining how they are creatively and cost effectively deployed in creating new user experiences.  A great example is the Augmented Realty for the Blind on the Android G1 Platform.

For me, while we have lots of efforts to re-create fixed location Minority Report solutions (from the Microsoft Surface to Johnny Chug Lee’s fun work while he was at CMU), the iPhone has shown that the next pervasive shift in man machine interface is all about mobile, and with great ideas like the one demonstrated by the MIT team last week, I can’t wait to see what will happen next!

Hey guys, I know of a great idea to show the reach of MySpace!

Somewhere, in the hallways of MySpace, one of the corp comm guys has the ultimate ephinay.  He grabs the exec team, and says:

“Look, I know we are all tired about all the press about the traction Facebook is getting.  Well, I for one am sick and tired about it!  It is time to show the real reach we have.  I’ve got an idea, and you guys will need to just trust me on this one.  but here’s the headline:

We have over 11x more that Facebook – 11x!

Just watch the coverage Tuesday!”

Ok, it is 24 hours later, and we finally get a real taste of the demographic he was referring to.  Welcome to MySpace!

Having a good mugshot is crucial nowadays!

LaunchBox Digital – Ready For Applications For Our 2009 Incubator Program!

Last year, when we launched the business incubator component of LaunchBox Digital, we weren’t sure what to expect.  How many applicants will our first program get?  What will be the quality of the ideas?  How much support will each company require?  It was a bit of a leap of faith, especially because of our decision to base the program in Washington, DC.

Now, looking back over the last eight months since the first program began, we couldn’t be happier.  We got around 250 applicants, ranging all the way from DC to Norway and China.  The ideas we saw were of good, and sometimes great, quality.  We selected a group of finalists to interview, and from there, we chose the nine companies that were our inaugural participants.  12 weeks later (fueled by lots of sweat equity and passion), each of the nine companies got to pitch their businesses to investors, bloggers and angels on the East and West Coasts, with some great early feedback.

But suddenly, right after the end of the program, the US (and subsequently, the global economy) went into the tank.  Here were entrepreneurs, excited and energized, sitting across from potential investors who were watching the book value of their investments decline day after day.  I don’t think there could have been a more daunting challenge for our companies:  Each company really needed to close on a new round of funding, if they were going to take their business to a new level, and they found themselves competing for attention in an incredibly stressful investment environment.

Angels were seeing 30-40% declines in what they considered their low-to-medium risk index and stock investments, and wondering if they were too far out on the efficient frontier with their private equity investing.  Venture funds, even ones in the top quartile of performance, were watching their own fund raising efforts run into a community of LPs who were collectively reeling from their own hedge fund investing.

Now imagine throwing a bunch of early stage companies into this maelstrom, and you might expect a real train wreck.  What we got, however, was the exact opposite.

In really early stage investing, it is all about investing in the people, and, as a collective group, the LaunchBox teams were as creative and dedicated a group as we had ever run across.  They all kept the faith, used the same aggressive cost management that they had operated with all summer, and pressed on with both their fund raising and product development.

Now, sitting here in January, we have six of the nine companies funded, and all are focused on changing the world in their own unique ways.  As people who played a small part in their journey, we couldn’t be happier.

With that as background, we are happy to announce that we are now open for applications for the 2009 incubator program, LaunchBox09.  We are really excited about the new ideas that we’ll see this year.  We think there are a number of new catalysts and opportunities for startups that have emerged over the last year:

• Government 2.0 – looking at the agenda of the new administration, and seeing interesting spaces to help drive the efficient re-invention of government-funded processes and programs
• Healthcare – taking a fresh look at outside-in innovation around patient care and personal health monitoring and management
• Plays within the new mobile ecosystems, including new ones centered around Palm’s webOS and Android
• Opportunities afforded by powerful netbooks soon hitting the $150-200 price range (and that $20 India netbook we’ll see Feb. 3!;)
• Products riding the infrastructure plays like Twitter and delivering complementary new services.

With the continued support of both our great group of advisors and our first alumni group, we can help first-time entrepreneurs navigate that crucial first year of existence and succeed.  In spite of what we see each day on TV and the web about the macro-economic picture, too many new opportunities exist for people to play defense here – we are looking for bright, bold, and dedicated folk to help lead the way to a brighter tomorrow.  You can learn more about our program (and apply to participate) at www.launchboxdigital.com.

Waiting For Godot, or Damn, Do I Love What I Have Seen About The Palm Pre!

There is a nice new video, taken back at CES, of the Palm Product VP showing off the great elements of the new Palm Pre and its fabulous new webOS.

Well worth a look, if you are tracking what’s going on in mobile this year:

I’ve been thinking about all that’s been revealed so far, and there are seven things I love about the Palm Pre:

• A great, pocket-sized form factor
• A hybrid capacitance touchscreen / keyboard design
• A development environment that leverages readily available existing skills
• An intuitive gesture vocabulary
• The cards metaphor for managing multiple activities
• The socially-aware address book
• The alerting mechanism (and its implementation).

Of course, like any product, there are flaws – here are four things I hate:

• Sprint as the launch carrier (although give them credit for being a Palm distributor through good times and bad)
• A closed source play – they are missing out on leveraging other creative folks’ use of your bits (look at Android ports to  netbooks as an example), and it is ALL about developer communities in mobile today
• Being a sole source player for handset creation.  I love the first device, but look at the Android device launches at Barcelona in February and see what you are up against.
• An unknown launch date.

What does that math mean?

I am a buyer!  Too much goodness not to give it a try.  Of course, that means I will be a dual Android (not on the G1, however) and Palm Pre user, but, heck, we all need to pitch in to keep those T-Mobile and Sprint subscriber counts up!  I, for one, am not ready to cede all things mobile to Verizon and AT&T.

Call the Police! SongSmith redoes “Roxanne”

By far, the most interesting community achievement of 2009 has to be the use of Microsoft’s SongSmith to remake popular titles into something truly surreal.

Finally, I have a version of Roxanne I can relate to.  Maybe if the band had agreed to the artistic intent Sting expresses here, they’d still be together (playing somewhere in Montego Bay).