Technology in x-ray always looks cool to me.

(Via Gizmodo.)

I while back I ran across this slideshow by a local Boston social media expert Marta Kagan that I thought was pretty informative and entertaining. Been meaning to share for a while but I’ve been busy writing code.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Chrome, Google’s really interesting new browser, but why are they releasing a browser? I’ve been contemplating Google’s unique position in the tech space, and the fact that they make almost none of their money in that space.

If you take the perspective that they are not a technology company, why would they want to do this? If they’re not a technology company, then what? Google is in the business of advertising. Granted, their approach is very hight tech, but at it’s core, the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads.

Taking that view one possible motivation for creating their own browser comes into focus. What are the most popular browser plugins for Firefox? Ad blockers. If you control the browser, and you’re an advertising company, you can keep people from ignoring your ads.

I’m sure creating the “browser as OS” or possibly just improving the browser experience as a more stable platform for google apps, or possibly a development platform for Android were part of their reasoning for releasing Chrome, but at the moment they make almost no money from those types of efforts. The one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about, and that I wouldn’t totally discount is the control of the ‘advertising channel’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome either will intentionally lack a plugin architecture, or, at a minimum, will involve a vetting process that “for your safety” conveniently also disallows ad blockers.

It’s interesting to look at their actions in this way. Google is an advertising company and becoming more so each day.

I’ve had a series of posts I’ve wanted to write about the road that’s led us to this from our usual set of Grazr offerings. As usual, when working in a startup, inspiration comes from interesting and unlikely places.

…

Does your startup idea have “it”?

Would-be entrepreneurs are too focused on the initial idea. We like to believe that the big, hugely successful companies implemented some idea that had “it”. The “it” empowered the company with a kind of manifest destiny where all they had to do was “not screw it up” and success flowed from the power of the idea.

I worked in a big multi-billion-dollar-revenue “powerhouse” of an IT company. The history of this particular company is very interesting with respect to initial ideas. As far as I can tell the company didn’t even have an initial idea, being formed with the sole intent of forming a company. To make ends meet, the company started out as an office furniture reseller. Later it transitioned to selling after-market memory modules for minicomputers. Finally, after years of operation at various levels of success, they released the product that changed their destiny and put them on a course to become the computing juggernaut that they are today.

I can’t stress enough that it seems like the majority of companies achieve success with something other than their initial idea. Human limitations in understanding complex systems virtually guarantees that the founding idea of a company will be limited in some way, if not grossly wrong. I found this post, on the blog of the CEO of Return Path. In it he says:

If you had told me when we started the company that we’d execute on ECOA but also be market leaders in email delivery assurance (which didn’t exist at the time), email list management and list rental (a huge market by the time we started), and email-based market research (which only barely existed at the time), I would have said “no way!”

He calls this effect “You can’t tell what the living room looks like from the front porch.”

There are a lot of people who talk about starting a company, a disproportionate number of these people are waiting for the “perfect idea”. I think this love of the “perfect idea” comes from a subconscious social reaction to our “work ourselves to death” ethic here in the United States. Some people think that if they could just come up with the perfect idea, it would be akin to a winning lottery ticket. The power of the idea alone would generate success, a kind of entitlement for being clever and lucky.

If this is your image of starting a company, stop right now. I personally don’t believe there is a perfect startup idea, and if there is, the likelihood of it being yours is probably similar odds to winning the lottery (and please send me an e-mail with the details:) ). I like this quote from a talk given by Paul Graham

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

So if your startup idea is almost certainly flawed in some way, what is the value of the starting idea? The starting idea is a focus to begin implementation, a way to start the exploratory process to find your real idea. That quote is from a talk given by Paul Graham at his startup school. In it, he further discusses this same topic. I highly recommend reading it.

Too many people, interested in starting a company, are paralyzed with the fear that their idea doesn’t have “it”. I would argue, that “it” is really just experimenting with your idea, tweaking it when necessary, and completely changing it when called for. The experimental feedback is the market and customers. This is similar to the business advice of “give the customers something they want” but because market systems are so complex, even the customers don’t necessarily know what they want. My approach is a little more like “Here, customer, do you like this? No? Why not? How about this? What if I tweak this piece?” In the end there’s no “it” in it.

Gotta love beaker.

It clicked for me when I read one of the comments on the “rules for startups” post on GigaOm by a fellow named devon :

@ the skeptics… When Logitech introduced the Scanner 2000, sales were tepid. Then they renamed it to the ScanMan, and sales doubled in 18 months without any additional advertising. That’s one example of what a strong brand name can do.

A great brand name will not make a bad business model succeed, nor will a bad brand name cause a good business model to fail. However, when all other things are equal, going to market with a powerful brand name is like sailing with the wind at your back. It makes marketing easier and cheaper, because it takes fewer repetitions for the brand promise to sink in with the target audience.

emphasis mine

How often are all things equal in a startup? By saying startup X has a better name then startup Y you’re drawing an equivalence (all startups are equal, but X is such a strong name). A startup, unless it’s a “me too” endeavor is all about creating something wholly new. Is the market space the same? Is the product the same? Does it have the same features? Is the technology the same? Is the team the same? Is the user experience the same? Most importantly, does the startup serve exactly the same user need? Unless the startup is brain dead, the answer to at least one, and probably most, of those questions in comparing startups is a resounding no.

So, for all things being equal, an array of equivalent (or mostly equivalent) products, scanners, white bread, etc, a good name can be tremendously important. But arguing the name is a critical component for success in a startup is akin to saying you have a choice between a bathtub “the flugglubernator” and a race car “the Zip2000!”. If a user wants to get clean, the fact the race car has a cool name is irrelevant. The point I was trying to make before is that the name in a startup is a second order effect on success. So I guess my new hypothesis for startup names is: The importance of the name as a component for success is inversely proportional to how unique the startup is.

I can’t find the source but I always like this quote: “Marketing is the wonder in Wonder Bread®”.

Since the inception of our company this is the single piece of feedback we’ve consistently gotten. Usually it’s someone looking at the name, never bothering to check out the service, and giving a reaction tainted with web 2.0 cynicism.

ZOMG it’s like totally web2.0! Worst company name EVAR! Total Flickr RIPOFF! I’m, like, so tired of these, like, missing vowels and stuff.

Originally my hope was that people would ask why the company was named grazr, then we could move into describing “Grazing information instead of drowning in it”, the basic philosophy the company was founded on. Domain squatters forced us to drop the ‘e’ but we also thought it would be kind of funny. In hindsight I guess we should have suspected that the “dropped vowel” company name would become popular then unpopular.

I thought this inability to see past the name was a major factor contributing to the friction we’ve had to gaining users. The truth is, I fell into the same trap as these commenters, it’s easy to focus on the name because it’s “simple”. It’s easy to do “drive-by critiques” without thinking of all the factors involved. Counterintuitively, I think that because there’s so much focus on names it actually indicates that success is not, or only slightly, related to the name choice. Since startups are so hard, and name critiquing is so easy, there is a disconnect there. Trying to bring a new product, code, service, and company to life is very difficult and usually we focus on the easy stuff.

I think the name of a startup has substantially less effect than what would seem to be indicated by the disproportionate amount of energy and effort we put into devising them and critiquing them. We are obsessed with expert rules and guidelines for naming a companies. Even when those rules are overly simplistic, contradictory, and mostly about a “subjective feel”. As startup founders we’re desperate to gain any edge we can, and we’re always on the lookout for tales of experience, rules of thumb, and other things that can help us avoid mistakes. Most naming rules come from a basically flawed process: look at successful companies, assume somehow the name had some serious impact on their success, come up with a rule to fit those names. Unfortunately these rules always contradict themselves because: the name is not what made them great. For any set of companies you use, there exists a set, equal in number, that contradicts the rule you arrive at. There is no way to find the formula for how names increase success because, except for possibly extreme cases, it has very little effect.

Now this is just my personal musing, I wonder if there’d be way to prove this scientifically? Although I know of no one doing this experiment, I’d love to actually get data on naming and how it affects success. Take the entire pool of startups at a particular stage and have experts chose the good names vs. the bad names (with only the names as data). Track those companies over their lifespan. I wonder if the ones they choose as good would show any greater success rate than the others. I’d wager that the predictive ability of experts in choosing names as a success factor would be barely better than random (some names are so truly, dreadfully, awful that they might impinge the success of a company).

So without further ado:

Mikes rules for startup names

1. There are no rules, so even these are probably flawed
2. Don’t obsess.
3. Try and make it easy to remember, say, and write

Supplemental guidelines:

1. Try not to make it sound like (or be) swear words or distasteful concepts.
2. Careful with other languages and unintended meanings

I didn’t make the second set rules because I could easily see something like schitter.com becoming popular, depending on the context I suppose.

I just typed a single letter into the url field and the first item in the awesome bar’s results drop-down was exactly where I wanted to go. Freaky. If it gets any better maybe I’ll be able to navigate via thought :). A very nice addition, kudos to the Moz team.

Update: it looks like Summize is feeling the pain, takes a bit of time to load at the moment.

Update2: Looks like they really went down hard. The JSON interface is returning errors.