Michael Arrington Archive

Last week I authored an article discussing Ask.com's new "algorithm" advertisements that are plaguing the cities around the world. No one gets them. They are not the type of ads that create buzz, either negative or positive. They are the type of adverts that you just walk by and not care or talk about.

But on the flipside, Ask has started some better online campaigns (not great but better!) in the last week or so. So far I have seen the ads on AskANinja and Digg.

Here is what I find interesting after doing a little bit of research. Michael Arrington seems to love Ask. While I assume he had nothing to do with the creation of the banners, Ask.com is obviously using his statements (see the images below) to help them gain some popularity.

Then, much to my surprise, Lindsay Lohan also seems to love Ask. In her new movie, she plays a girl who is dead and then comes back as some other alter-ego or something. Anyway the movie is about finding her and believe it or not she uses Ask to find herself! Maybe she already knows that Ask has the better algorithm! Here is a screenshot from the trailer.

So we seem to have two campaigns running currently. The outdoor "Algo" ads and the online "popular figure endorsement" ads. I think the latter is a better choice for Ask. The problem still lies in that getting techies to use the service is all well and good, but the majority of online users are not techies. Ask needs to follow my suggestions along with the other suggestions from Tony Hung and Josh Catone.

Alright, so the burgers and dogs have been eaten… the sailors are all out walking around Times Square and I just beat the heck out of Michael Arrington. Mr. Bad Boy himself went down for the count. I used the Iowa Backhanded Fist of Claw to beat him. Check out the screenshot below for the proof. Note that he is "CPU" and I am "You" and in 88 seconds (quicker than a Western Trackback) he went down. Splat. Sorry Mike, but you know that eventually I had to knock you out. Here is Mike's post about his defeat.

In all seriousness, this is a great fun boxing game created by some of my Deutsch freunde at PlayMyGame. Check it out and go beat the heck out of someone!

The TechCrunch20 conference site launched today. I think what Michael is doing is a great idea… that is helping to get companies some grand exposure similar to my video startup idea (side note: submitting a video here might help you to tidy up your presentation for TC20.)

With 20 startups over 2 days assuming that the days will run 7 hours in length, thats 30 minutes each plus time for discussion and keynote presentations. In addition, they already have some big names on the confirmed industry list.

The pricing is reversed from many of these type of conferences. The startups pay nothing, but we pay $2,000 to $2,500. I think this is a HUGE amount of money for a 2 day infomercial. Personally I would have tried to recruit established companies to pay and then offer up the attendees free entrance as well. If they don't approve a press pass for me, unfortunately I won't be able to attend.

I am guessing the room will be full of VC firms who can drop this money without a second thought. There will be few independents that will be able to afford this. Heck, you can almost get a 17" macbook pro for this amount and just read about it online and watch the videos. :) I am sure Jeremiah and/or Justin will be recording the event live!

I would love to chat with Michael and Jason about their thoughts behind the pricing. I will ping Michael later this evening and report back. I can't attempt to reach Jason again as every attempt over the last year has gone unanswered except when he called me names for questioning why he spelled a name incorrectly.

They are opening the company applications to anywhere in the world but they want absolute exclusivity on first showings. I am sure hundreds of companies will apply because they will have a full room at the Palace Hotel of VC firms just waiting to help the ideas come to fruition. And that's a great thing. This should help those with limited resources get the word out.

Some early morning news here on the east coast, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has hired a CEO. No word on the package but Keith Teare, TC shareholder, indicates she is now a significant shareholder in TC.

From Om Malik, "Heather Harde, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media is all set to join as the new chief executive officer at TechCrunch, a technology blog edited and published by Michael Arrington. Harde’s presence will help Arrington focus most of his energies on editorial."

From Arrington, "There is a lot for her to do. She will run every aspect of our business other than editorial, which I’ll be focusing on for now. TechCrunch has grown faster than I could manage over the last couple of years. Heather’s job will be to leverage the opportunities that we have sometimes let slip by, and to manage our organic and acquisition growth going forward."

I wish Heather and Mike much success and luck and we will all be watching where the TC ship goes now. My bet is that TC starts to look at buying small startups and becoming a force in overall online media and in the VC arena.

Update: Ben Metcalfe has a good writeup about the prospects of TC becoming a VC firm.

Below is Jason Sadler's recap from Day 1 of the Future of Web Apps in London. Jason is co-founder of popular startup Only Human and also runs a blog at Thought & Theory. The following presenters are covered below: Michael Arrington, Edwin Aoki, Tara Hunt, Ben Holmes, Matthew Ogle, Anil Bawa Cavia, Werner Vogle, Kevin Rose and Stefan Fountain. His picks of the day are the Digg announcement about OpenID support and the Soocial Demo.  (Allen's note: This is a great recap post, very worth the read.)

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)

A frequent TechCrunch reader myself; I was interested to hear if the tone of the site came off in Michael Arrington's speech. Michael, an eloquent speaker as most lawyers are, was straightforward and poignant. As someone who typically doesn't seem to talk much about the "little guy" in the Web 2.0 world, his speech (entitled "The Magic Formula") had some great information and insight. I came to a realization while listening to other speaker's talk and that is that everyone follows TechCrunch. A big part of this comes from Michael's tenacity to seek information, whether it online (his day job) or offline (during Jonathan Rochelle's talk about Google Docs & Spreadsheets).

Edwin Aoki (AOL)

The main point that I took from Edwin's talk was concerning the drive people have to build status or ranking via web apps. He discussed Second Life and the fact that hundred of thousands of dollars are spent every day in a virtual world. This is something I have been stressing since the inception of our first project (Only Human) and it was great to hear someone at AOL stressing it as well. Another point of emphasis was building web apps that are accessible to everyone; blind, elderly etc. This was definitely something that spawned a couple of ideas in my mind and affirmed some ideas that Dennis and I have been discussing.

Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency)

In her talk 'Fostering Online Communities,' Tara delves deep into the concept of a community and its integral parts. One of the most important points that I took note of was the succession of a site-user: from Visitor – to Customer – to Community Member. It is foolish to think that any person that comes to your website will automatically become the community member and evangelize your web community. You can, however, build a community that emphasizes key benefits such as loyalty, self-policing, word of mouth, user feedback and stronger filtering of content. Tara mentioned some key themes to a community which I think we have a strong grasp on; simple platform to use, sense of fun and play, an active dialogue, involved customer support and friendly greeting of new users. Tara, like Michael Arrington, mentioned the power of word of mouth. This is definitely the only way a small startup can possibly get off the ground utilizing blogs, RSS feeds and friendly interaction with other sites.

I spoke with Tara before the end of the conference and hope to pick her brain for some marketing ideas. It will be nice to know the exact process of guerilla marketing and buzz for future projects.

*Tara's speech confirmed two features that we are going to be implementing soon on Only Human: When someone uses the 'relate a story' feature, we will notify the original story creator and ask them if they have met this user and if they'd like to view their profile, read other stories created by them or send them a message. The other feature is anonymous story posting without user-signup. We believe this feature will be heavily used because our light users want to get involved, but are not comfortable signing up, they can post a story and take note of all the great features they are missing out on by signing up.

Ben Holmes (Index Ventures)

Dennis and I recently visited with a Small Business Development person at the University of North Florida and we had an eye opening experience that was backed up by Ben's speech. Looking back it makes me think I was a bit naive about the whole investing situation, but it all makes perfect sense when a company gives you serious amounts money. A solid point of emphasis was that Venture Capitalists are prone to invest more into a solid group of people, more than just a product. It is reassuring to find that the right people can be invested in, even before the perfect product is made. It does seem to become a financial decision at this point and you have to understand it is about managing your financials and keeping the passion going (with the allure of money sitting in the bank). Edgar spent a few minutes talking to Ben and will be following up with his opinions and insight.

As a short note, I have been reading Guy Kawasaki's books The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries. All of the major points that I dog-eared or highlighted were the important points of Ben's speech as well. If we are going to take on funding I do not think a Venture Capitalist is the way to go and that we will look to find an Angel Investor (or a few).

Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia (Last.fm)

Unrelated to the content from the speech of the Last.fm guys, I thought they spoke well together. It is hard to go back and forth seamlessly and I thought they did a very solid job (as well as the guys from Moo). A point of emphasis that I circled in my notes was "not to over extend – scale with your growth." Our site, Only Human, can greatly relate to this because we are unveiling feature sets as the site grows and as users give feedback. It is a relief to hear that companies that are currently successful did not start out doing everything right and that users came along and stuck with them throughout the trial and error periods.

Being open with your users, giving them the ability to give feedback about anything and communicating honestly pays off. It was unexpected, but they showed an IRC chat hack that was basically an ongoing log of programming tasks, error checking etc that turned the light bulb on above many people's heads in the conference. I was previously a hardcore Pandora user, but I think I might try Last.fm out after hearing these guys speak.

Werner Vogle (Amazon.com)

It couldn't have been put better – "compete on ideas, not resources." This short statement unequivocally describes Amazon.com's EC2 and S3 services. The S3 service can be summed up as infinite hosting capability that can scale to the moon.

One of the biggest hurdles an Internet company has is not only do they have to focus on their business, but think about resources, hosting etc. Werner stressed the fact that you should be able to manage your growth easily and have resources on demand. We are thinking about using the EC2 service for our next project as it could grow very quickly and require the ease of scaling (without overspending on resources).

During the startup period there is no concrete way to figure out how many users you will have and how much of your resources they will be using, so this service could be very valuable. Werner did an excellent job presenting a very technical oriented subject in a very simple and understandable speech.

Stefan Fountain (Soocial.com – Sponsor Spotlight)

In my mind this short (10 minute) presentation was the highlight of Day 1. A lot of people would argue that Digg's announcement to use OpenID was the highlight, but for the skeptics of OpenID it was ho-hum. Going back to Stefan, the product is simply a web app that organizes all your contacts for your laptop, desktop computer, cell phone and PDA. Stefan's message was "ungimp your contacts."

I think his stage presence is what sold most of us on his product as he moved around and captivated the audience. After 8 hours of previous presenters, if you aren't Kevin Rose the chance of keeping the audience's attention is slim to none. There is no secret that the technology is not groundbreaking, but after watching Stefan's presentation I immediately signed up for his alpha software release (which currently has 380+ people signed up).

Kevin Rose (Digg.com)

Being Digg user, I was interested to see what Kevin had to say. With so many different personality types, I give Digg a lot of credit because they have to manage each one of those user's needs and motivations. Kevin mentioned an interesting point about with so many users on the site, its just inevitable that some people would not get along.

Kevin showed some interesting slides about how they are filtering out user-influenced content and what their growth has looked like. It was interesting to see how they could tell when people were gaming the system and could act accordingly or let the system take care of itself.

Digg seems to do a good job of listening to their users, yet people have been asking for a 'photos' section for quite some time.

The last announcement Kevin talked about was the adoption of OpenID. This comes after AOL and Microsoft's announcement, which makes OpenID a reality in more ways than one. I'm still kind of skeptical of how useful it will be in the future but it seems like its coming to fruition regardless.

Last Sunday, I posted about when is an appropriate time to remove a comment on a blog/site. This week, Michael Arrington posted a story on TechCrunch about edgeio receiving a round of financing. He put the following note in the article:

I won't say much more here due to the conflict of interest (I remain on the board of directors of edgeio and am a stockholder).

Valleywag, a Silicon Valley tech mag, posted an article about it. It is worth the read. It goes back to the trust factor and how important it is.

A comment from the Valleywag post:

Good but not great Michael, your other two writers Nick Gonzales and Marshall Kirkpatrick should have taken this one. Or were you just so giddy to announce your baby stopped breastfeeding and now is suckling the endless bottle of funding?

I will leave it up to you after reading the Valleywag post if there is a bigger conflict of interest. One of the commenters had a good suggestion about clearly listing all of the sites and companies that the blog belongs to.

My suggestion has been that when a blog/site wants to post something that might be construed as advertising, they state that it is. Period. You can post whatever you want on your site, it is your freakin site. But just don't make us all out to be morons.

Michael Arrington was the first presenter of the second day. Many people told me that he is very cocky and full of himself so I was expecting the worst. I thought his presentation was quite good and he does not hold back on his opinions which provided good value for the overall presentation. I recorded several of his comments in mp3 files which you can download below including his comments on the “Apple Incident” earlier this week. Oh yea, he also stated he would like to be Digg CEO.

Winners, Losers, and Companies to Watch

Winners: writely, grouper, skype, newroo, flickr, weblogs, myspace, bloglines, userplane, ksolo, blogger, del.icio.us

Very good bets: digg, facebook, youtube, photobucket, zoho, stumbleupon, popsugar, plentyoffish, netvibes

Ones to watch: jobster, riya, zillow, flock, sharpcast, rocketboom, 1-800-FREE411, odesk, secondlife, wordpress

What were they thinking: inform, gather, pubsub, browzar, jigsaw, squidoo

Winners – Shared Attributes

• passion for what thye are doing
• doing something extraordinary – purple cow
• removing serious friction
• great founder dynamics
• never raised big money
• perfect revenue model not required
• and launched with post on tc

Loser Attributes

• poor founder team choices
• lifestyle/ego entrep
• raised too much money/spent too much money
• over business planned
• forogt about scaling

Choosing Your Platform

• php
• ruby
• java
• .net

Client Platform

– net, ajax, flash, xul, adobe apollo (his fave)

Saturated and Unsatured Markets

• social networks
• social bookmarks
• video
• photos
• blogging platforms
• feedreaders

Big Potential for Success in the Near Term

• platforms
• desktop apps
• office efficiency
• cloud storage
• identity
• developer tools
• market destruction – i.e. 1-800-FREE411
• enterprise