Lots of cool things coming up so stay tuned. SXSW. Road trip across the country. SF for a bit. Two new products in the works. Dreaming up a super agency with some cool people. Ad Committee gaining steam. 2012 is off to a great start.
Lots of cool things coming up so stay tuned. SXSW. Road trip across the country. SF for a bit. Two new products in the works. Dreaming up a super agency with some cool people. Ad Committee gaining steam. 2012 is off to a great start.
Awesome talk by David Eagleman on how the Internet can help avert the collapse of civilization. A lot of the ideas he discusses will benefit greatly from the connectedness Palmetto will bring.
As I worked through the specs of the Palmetto API, I realized a separate ID protocol is needed. I’ve split the two concepts into their respective designations and wrote up an explanation on the new website: http://GoPalmetto.com/ That website will be the home of Palmetto from now on.
If you haven’t been following along: Palmetto makes it easy for apps to share data across the web, all while giving complete control and privacy to the user. By curating common data across systems, we enable users and vendors to connect like never before, and develop a strong understanding of trust, which can be used for permission granting and discovering new information.
This secure and distributed system is comprised of two components:
The Palmetto API is a crowd-sourced gateway for APIs across the internet, allowing any app to communicate with other apps based on common data attributes. In case you aren’t familiar, an API is a way for two websites to share data automatically, regardless of which programming language each uses, and regardless of how the data is labeled (see the Palmetto Overview background section for a greater explanation).
The Palmetto ID protocol describes how online identity providers help users control their data by interacting with the Palmetto API. This gives users the ability to seamlessly administer all of their data – and set permissions – in one central location.
Learn more by checking out GoPalmetto.com.
This entire talk is brilliant, but – as it relates to business and marketing – especially 7:23 to 10:15.
Simon Sinek: If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Business from 99% on Vimeo.
“We’re not good at everything, we’re not good by ourselves,” says Simon Sinek at the 99% Conference. Our ability to build trust and relationships is the key to our survival as a race, and to thriving as ideamakers.
The good news is I got accepted, the bad news is I was the only applicant. Allow me to explain….
I’m starting the Maxae Incubator program as an alternative to the status quo. We’re going to solve two major problems faced by all graduates of existing incubator programs: 1) overcoming the network effect and 2) reaching profitability.
Incubator programs such as Y Combinator and Tech Stars are great for giving young, inspired entrepreneurs and developers an opportunity to bring their ideas to life. They are popping up all over the country. While I appreciate the attention these programs bring to my chosen profession (developing web apps) I’m concerned about the economics of these programs; more to the point, the fact that they are creating false economies.
One of the greatest obstacles all new web ventures face is overcoming the network effect. The classic example of the network effect is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner.
Services like Facebook and Twitter enjoy the benefits of owning the network effect; every new user they add makes the service more valuable to all existing users; and makes them more profitable by owning the network.
This naturally creates a huge barrier to entry for the rest of the developers and entrepreneurs with innovative ideas for new web apps. They are forced to use the giants as a tollbooth, and have little chance of gaining traction otherwise without a huge capital injection.
In case you aren’t familiar with how the process works: the owners of an incubator program inject tiny micro funds into a small number of teams comprised of 2-3 programmers and entrepreneurs, sometimes give them a place to work, usually hook them up with mentors in different fields for a few months while they build the first version of their product, then bring in a group of investors to hear them pitch after their incubation is complete. In return, the incubator program owner receives a small percentage of equity in each company (3-9%) and the investor receives more based on how much they decide to invest.
I’ve read that something on the order of 2/3rds of the resulting apps receive a round of funding. Of those, a scant few will actually become profitable companies.
This is the bad economy I mentioned earlier. It’s way too early to tell what percentage of the funded companies will achieve profitability, but due to having to spend massive amounts of capital and labor to overcome the network effect, I predict very few of the companies will be able to sustain themselves over time. This is generally bad economics, as those funds could have been employed in a more productive and more likely to succeed enterprise. See the Parable of the broken window.
A caveat to my criticism: the only thing I don’t like about incubator programs is the difficulty of bringing the product to market due to the huge barriers of entry built by the incumbents who own the users. I love every other part of incubator programs: the opportunity afforded to bright entrepreneurs and developers, exposure for the industry in the media, the mentorship received, the connections, etc..
The more companies that come up with novel ideas and give them a go, the better. Other entrepreneurs and developers will see these attempts and potentially lilly-pad off them and create something better and more innovative. As long as we keep the scales of failure and wasted investment in balance, it’s a net gain for the industry (and society). Right now the scales are way off due the complications of money and effort required to test a product’s viability as mentioned above.
As I stated earlier, the Maxae Incubator program solves two very important issues.
I’m pleased to announce that I have been accepted to the program. The first class was very exclusive but pretty easy to get in to…….. I started the Maxae Incubator program immediately prior to writing this post and accepted myself as the only member of the first class. My mission during this first class is to build the flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Palmetto:
The reason I’m announcing this as an incubator is to hold myself accountable through exposure – and hopefully heckling – of my peers. During the next 4 months I’m committed to building the first version of the Maxae platform. The feature list goes something like this:
My mission is to gain user adoption of Palmetto. I realize getting developers to build products on top of a platform with few users is not going to happen. So I’m going to not only lead the charge by building the Maxae platform to demonstrate the capabilities of Palmetto, but I’m also going to offer my time and workspace to programmers and entrepreneurs who want to build apps on top of Palmetto.
I’m going to help conceptualize their idea, direct the development, provide space for them to work, and help them bring their product to market after it’s built. I don’t want a thing in return. No equity. No revenue sharing. My reward will be seeing mass adoption of Palmetto, leading the world to a decentralized web, and eventually truly open data.
If you’re interested in joining the second class of companies in the Maxae Incubator, contact me through any of the resources listed below this post.
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See you all in 4 months.
Here are a few pics I snapped while cruising around the waterways surrounding downtown Tampa:
Here are a few pics from our sunset kayaking tour with Osprey Bay Outdoors. If you are looking to go kayaking in Clearwater I highly recommend them. Our guide, Graham, was awesome.
UPDATE: The Palmetto website is live. Check out GoPalmetto.com for updates.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been outlining my vision for the Palmetto API – a crowdsourced API clearing house that will help apps communicate easier and provide complete control to the user. If you haven’t been following along, read my Introduction to the Palmetto API, List of Issues, and the Palmetto API Overview (with diagram).
So far I’ve explained the features of the Palmetto API at a high-level overview. I want to take a few minutes here and explain how these features will benefit the web, the user, and society at large. I won’t go into the current issues of walled-garden networks and monopoly controlled commodities. That’s been covered in many other places before. Instead, this post will outline the benefits of a decentralized web.
Instead of thinking of the web as a collection of websites, we need to think in terms of common data. Let’s call them commodities. These range from user accounts (profile info), to status updates, to pictures and videos, to comments and ratings, to physical check-ins, and lots more. These are the core features which comprise the majority of web apps. The real difference is in the implementation of these features. Twitter vs. Facebook for example. They can both be explained as “disseminating information to a selected group of recipients.” They differ in the way they go about that task, but the underlying common data attributes are the same (contacts and message sharing).
It’s made of wood and graphite and rubber and metal. These are the features common to all pencils. Thanks to the division of labor, it’s very easy for many different types of pencils to be manufactured based on these core components. Separate companies specialize in one area of the construction of a pencil. Each cog in the wheel works harmoniously with the others to build a great final product, with many more options than if one company cornered the market.
Try to imagine if there were only one graphite mining company who would not sell graphite to other companies to build pencils. Instead, imagine if they decided they were the only company who would build and sell pencils. This would be great for them – corner the market and make tons of profit – but terrible for the consumer.
A friend of mine – and fellow entrepreneur – is creating an exciting new app to help people eat better and live an overall more productive life. It’s an awesome idea and the owner is pure of heart; truly wanting to help humans achieve a higher level of well-being. Unfortunately he’s up against a couple of all-too-common technical issues created by the locked-in nature of the current web infrastructure, having to recreate two commodities: check-ins and access to a network of people.
If check-ins were universal, my friend could build a module on top of his app that would allow users to check-in with their current provider of choice. He wouldn’t have to worry about – or pay for – building an entirely new check-in mechanism. He could instead simply leverage the existing systems and focus more on the real value proposition of his app.
In my time as a consultant helping entrepreneurs build and launch web apps, the biggest hurdle I’ve seen is the Network Effect.
In economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it.
The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase a telephone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case. Online social networks work in the same way, with sites like Twitter and Facebook being more useful the more users join.
All too often I’ve seen the network effect crush what could have been an amazing, innovative web app. This barrier-to-entry is great for the incumbents, but terrible for new entrepreneurs, and even worse for society. I believe businesses should be rewarded on the basis of merit (quality of their product and customer service), not on their ability to lock-in their customers. If we decentralize commodities on the web, it will allow entrepreneurs to focus on building better, more innovative products that will help make everyone’s lives easier rather that focusing on how to block their competition and force their users into accepting their less-than-sufficient product.
In a decentralized web, engineers will be able to build incredible information discovery services. These new systems, combined with the ability to link up to contacts across systems, will make bringing a new product to market easier than ever. Good apps built by great people will naturally rise to the top. The person with the most money to market their product will no longer automatically win.
I love Facebook, Google, and Twitter. I use them all daily. They provide extremely valuable services that are in high demand. We simply need to level the playing field to allow for more innovation, and to put the control in the hands of the users.
In the decentralized web, the user is the center of attention. All apps must communicate with the user to learn which services they use for various common data (pictures, videos, status updates, etc). This gives users the ability to decide exactly who has access to which parts of their data. In some cases sharing your data with a web app is great. It can lead to a very personalized experience, making your life much better (through product discovery for example). In other cases, you don’t want companies to have access to your personal data (like spammers for example). By shifting control from the service providers to the individual users, we can hold the service providers accountable, and make the web overall a much better experience.
Separating the core features which comprise most web apps will lead to multiple companies serving the same market, providing a fail safe in case one of them experiences connectivity issues. Think back to the number 2 pencil example. If a graphite mine in one area of the world gets shut down for whatever reason, the companies whom purchase their graphite can simply use a different supplier temporarily. This is analogous to many services on the web. For example: if your current provider of pictures goes down due to a freak weather occurrence in one part of the world, your pictures can automatically be served from an alternative provider. The applications you subscribe to which use your pictures will be able to work with any provider automatically and instantaneously.
This is the biggest benefit – and my personal driving force – behind a decentralized web. A system of distributed, mirrored services can’t be shut down by governments as easily. There is still an issue with centrally controlled DNS systems, but we’ll be able to remove at least one more bottleneck. There is a solution on the horizon for the issue related to DNS as well, which I’ll talk about in future posts.
Most importantly, by extending the network effect to all apps across the web, innovation within education will spread like a wildfire. Educators and social-do-gooders will be able to reach the under privileged much easier, providing access to information and knowledge like never before.
There is a wealth of information on how society works locked up in various systems across the internet. This information, if unlocked and allowed to be analyzed, can lead to some amazingly innovative and efficient new products and services that will make life much easier. I’m by no means an expert on this topic, so I won’t go into it, but here are a few links and resources I recommend:
But how will it be accomplished? The ideal solution, as I see it, is coming up with a set of standards that all developers will follow. Similar to how the internet itself works now: every website agrees to communicate based on the same standards. This allows your web browser to talk to any other website on the internet. This works great within the confines of simple, anonymous bit transfer, however, I don’t think it’s a practical solution when dealing with all different types of subjective – and in some cases unforeseen – data attributes. My recommendation is allowing developers to build apps however they please, include an API to access data in their system, then simply crowdsource an index of all those APIs, defining all of the common data attributes. Create one common language that is updated by the collective, require all participants to share alike, create demand from the users, and the system can flourish.
I’d really love to hear your feedback. If you’re interested in helping, contact me and let’s talk! Subscribe to the Palmetto API category’s RSS feed or follow @GoPalmetto to keep up.
As I’m detailing my vision for the PalmettoAPI, I’m going to try to share some other resources and thoughts on the topic of open data and the semantic web. If you aren’t familiar with what I’m doing, read my Palmetto API Intro post, list of issues, the Palmetto API Overview (with diagram), Benefits of a Decentralized Web, and How Social Networks Should Work.
Check out this great video by Kate Ray (@kraykray ) explaining the issues surrounding data on the web and it’s future. After watching the video, read my post titled Determining Semantics is All About Context.
If you’re interested in helping, contact me and let’s talk! Subscribe to this category’s RSS feed or follow @PalmettoAPI to keep up.
