Brendon J. Wilson

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Entrepreneur Meetup

Yet another interesting entrepreneur meetup in Santa Clara with some local budding and established entrepreneurs. More discussion along the lines of the last meeting I attended in August, primarily focused on how to overcome the hurdle to find customers.

Attendees

  • Bego Gerber: a regular attendee at the Santa Clara meetup, Bego is an independent business development agent working on a “pro-sumer” (as opposed to consumer) product that enables individuals to buy directly by from companies at wholesale prices, as well as receive rebates on the products they purchase. (You’ll need a password for his web site: ebiz)
  • Zhi-Hong Liu: an electronics engineer currently working in the financial services industry.
  • Sunil Tagare: Sunil is CEO of recently-launched Research4, a firm focused on providing information that fills the gap between the blank piece of paper provided by CRM systems (like Salesforce.com and sales teams. Sunil is a serial entrepreneur with past successes in the telecommunications industry (Flag Technologies, and Project Oxygen).
  • Tyson Favaloro: Tyson is a Business Analyst with TechStock, a San Jose venture capital firm focusing on finding and funding seed-stage ventures. He was here pounding the pavement to see what kind of entrepreneurs the meetup attracts.
  • Brendon Wilson: is a product manager at PGP who has recently moved to Silicon Valley from Canada to establish himself in the area, build his entrepreneurial skill set, and put the pieces in place that will help him eventually start his first venture.

Topics Discussed

  • The Long Tail: I raised some of the items discussed in the recent Wired article on the opportunity presented by the non-mainstream markets being opened by digital/Internet-based delivery. Discussion of advertising and the “I want it now” society – if the market lies in “the long tail”, and providers of content, services, and products are exploding, how will you overcome the barrier to acquire customers? Sunil recounted his current attempt to use Google Adwords, and just how hard it is to make your product visible. We’re talking non-trivial amounts of money to be made – just look at ring tone sales ($3 billion globally in 2003).
  • Bego proposed an interesting idea: take the Amazon Associates program and augment it. If you brought a customer to Amazon, shouldn’t you not only get a cut of the first purchase, but a smaller cut of every subsequent purchase?
  • Evolution of the “I want it and I want it now” society: things like Scanbuy, a solution to allow users to capture barcodes with their camera phone will ultimately tie the everyday physical world with the digital marketplace. Meanwhile, more applications will be built on web services to entice users to buy immediately, such as Delicious Monster, an application which allows users to track their CD/DVD/book library and find other stuff they might like (all built on Amazon’s Web Services API).
  • When the drugs aren’t profitable: Bego brought up the interesting problem posed by a new, more effective typhus (or was it typhoid) vaccine that’s been created, but won’t be profitable for its creators. And hence, won’t ever make it to market, despite all the good it could do in the third world. Are we doomed to only cure problems that are profitable? And what’s to stop drug companies from creating new viruses that they can “cure” – it sounds crazy, but it’s currently happening in the world of spyware. Perhaps it’s time for a “Chemists without Borders”? Or an open source license for the vaccine? Or a DropCash campaign to raise funds to get the vaccine out there? Then again, maybe Bill Gates has some money to put to this cause?

Interesting Books, Movies, and Events

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Book To The Future

Back when I wrote my book, I was surprised at the lack of sophistication in the publishing industry. I had always figured that the desktop publishing revolution would have streamlined the publishing industry – I envisioned elaborate templates and tools that would enable a publisher to easily choke down text and automatically pump out a finished book. Instead, the tools provided by my publisher consisted of a Word template that rendered everything (titles, headings, body text, etc.) as monospaced Courier – all of which was later laid out in Quark Express by hand.

Rewind to last week at Web 2.0: Brewster Kahle presented the seductive vision of universal access to knowledge that could be achieved by scanning the entirety of the Library of Congress for a pitiful $260 million. This revelation followed the announcement of Google Print, Google’s answer to Amazon.com’s Search Inside the Book feature, will enable users to find information in books as part of their Google search experience.

While I applaud both Google and Brewster’s vision, I sense a gap: Brewster’s proposal will give a digital access to books from the past; Google’s service will give (limited) digital access to books from the present. All I can wonder is: who will give digital access to books in the future?

While it is obvious that digitizing the Library of Congress is a manual procedure, it might come as a surprise that Google’s efforts are equally manual. Google generously offers to scan publisher’s content, thereby making it available via the Google Print service while protecting the publisher’s content. Scanning. Just like Amazon.com. By hand. This means that 75 years from the date of an author’s death in the future, Brewster’s organization will have to scan the author’s books by hand – books that Google will already probably already have in a digital form.

All of these undertakings smack of massive amounts of physical (i.e. non-digital) labour. So, if Amazon.com and Google are both doing it, why not cut out the middleman? Why not just have the publisher’s provide the PDF’s (or whatever is the appropriate digital format) of their content directly to Google or Amazon.com? Or, better yet, why not have the Library of Congress solicit electronic versions of books directly from publishers and escrow them for the time when they enter the public domain, just as they do for physical copies? Aside from the efforts of the Library of Congress to digitize rare books, I’m not aware of whether or not they do this already – does anyone know?

My fear here is that Google and Amazon.com will amass a digital library of scanned books that will remain gated off from the public even once the books within it have entered the public domain. Do we really want to still be running Project Gutenberg in another hundred or so years? Probably not.

If the Library of Congress isn’t already cooperating with publishers to escrow electronic copies of books, wouldn’t it make sense for Google and Amazon.com to pledge to release the electronic copies to the public, the Library of Congress, or Brewster Kahle’s organization once they’re in the public domain? After all, it’s not like they even have to fulfill the pledge for another seventy-five years.

Does anyone know if this is already part of Google/Amazon/Brewster’s plans?

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