Inbreeding – The Valley Style

So Marc Andreessen joins the Board of Facebook.  (Advance note of jealousy towards Mark Zuckerberg for getting someone of Marc’s stature.  Kudos).

What I find surprising is will there be any input from Marc on FB’s technical strategy?  I am specifically concerned about Marc’s Ning using OpenSocial and FB using its own FB API.  Will we see a merging of the two?  Surely it would be stupid (a quality I possess in abundance) to think FB would abandon FB API in favour of Ning for better tapping into Ning and its countless social networks hosted within.  However one cannot help see the allure in a wrapper to FB API to be OpenSocial compatible?

Or is this issue too puny and insignificant to deserve a mention?

KabookiWater

STIRR Sydney was hosted again last night (Thu 29/03/2007) at the Ivory Restaurant 620 Harris St, by Tangler, Atlassian, Omnidrive and TVP. This was my first time at this event (well I had been to BarCamp earlier so I knew some of the gang here) and the event stood upto its reputation. Smaller than BC, it was again teeming with loads of entrepreneurs and VCs alike.

As usual, the game HalfBaked was played here. The idea is something like this:

1. Come up with a whole bunch of words in random: Kabooki, bungy, vodka, lemon, wave, sequins, sheik, water, etc
2. Split crowd into 5 groups (around 8-12 in people each).
3. Each group comes with a two-letter word dot com name drawn from the words above (in step 1).
4. Each team now has 10-15 mins to make a pitch to the VCs out there.

SO the fun begins. Our team came upon the company name KabookiWater like a pack of bums on Sydney’s Liverpool St upon a juicy steak. We had initially thought this was something to do with japanese beer, but soon Michael had pointed out that Kabooki actually stood for Japanese theatre (D’oh). After a bit of hair pulling (lucky for me), we decided it should be User-Generated Interactive Drama – aka Theatre On Tap (TOT).

Kaching!! Folks, this is big money. Imagine a soap, that is actually controlled by what users want on any particular day, instead of the usual Birth-Marriage-Death cycles their writers have to churn out till time immemorial? Audience demands drama, KabookiTheatre gives them crying and moaning. Audience demands sex, instead of crying and moaning, KT gives them, moaning and THEN crying. So possibilities are limitless. I dont want to spoil your fun by revealing all the possibilities to you.

So where is the money coming from? Simple, folks. Product Placement! Users are telling you what they want from the drama, and that should give an indication of what the kind of audience is. So bingo. Google, with your Ad-Sense, eat your corporate hearts out! Not to mention Spin-off markup languages including UGIDML and TOTML for representing and distributed user theatrical preferences. Here come those courses on Tafe’s and those TOTML and UGIDML for Dummies books – Kaching Kaching.

So if any of you out there (especially VCs with lots of money) are interested in the next best/super-duper thing since sliced-bread and Google combined, here it is. Il be waiting. I have nothing better to do .

On Startups (and Software and Violin)

I think I may be a bit presumptuous in incorporating “Startups” in my blog title.  Like the other two items in the title, this is something Id like to do well, not something I am an expert at or even know anything about.  At best, its an effort to documenting my efforts in creating a (successful) startup (which is probably more imaginary at this point in time than the lord of the rings trilogy).  Hope that clarifies it.  Same applies to Software and the Violin.

BarCamp Sydney

BCS (http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampSydney) was hosted on 3rd March at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). It was a gathering of entreupreneurs and wanna-make-it-biggers (like myself). Only one way to describe it – AbsolutelyFantastic (no spaces so its a single word!)

Key speakers were Martin Wells from Tangler, Mike from Atlassian amongst others.