seedWatcher

Increo's Backboard Launches with seed round from DFJ

Silicon Valley-based Increo closed a seed round form Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) this week and kicked things off with the launch of their first product, Backboard. It's a simple collaborative tool for sharing a document, presentation, image or even a URL to a group and gather feedback over the web. Team-based collaboration tools are nothing new these days, with favorites such as Huddle, 37signal's BaseCamp, Onstage, and DeskAway.

The pro's of Backboard, are clearly it's painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. I went ahead and set up a Backboard feedback page for the seedWatcher blog. Anyone can comment on a document if they're given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I'd like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It's also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it's going to get wide-scale business use.

The company's been bootstrapping it for the past year on the Stanford campus before the recent DFJ investment. Increo's founders are all recent Stanford grads - Jeff Seibert, Kimber Lockhart, Rebecca Illowsky and Ray Thang, who came together as part of a CompSci class assignment to develop their own project.

For a first product from this new team, it's a good start. They whipped up a quick and dirty way to share something with a group of people in a shared space. On their site, they write, "the company's software supports teams throughout the innovation process, from brainstorming to conception." Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way. If that's the case, then I would suggest leveraging some of the social networking API's and getting it so users can share directly from some of the groups I'm already engaged with online.

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Increo Solutions

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Draper Fisher Jurvetson

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Daily Wikipedia tours in your RSS Reader with DailyLit

DailyLit has been quietly growing since its launch in September of 2006 when it first brought serialized daily chunks of a handful of classic lit titles to your email inbox. Today of course you can subscribe to over 750 classic and contemporary books in your RSS reader (or email if that's your thing.) Today they launched "Wikipedia Tours" which will give you a daily walk-through of sweeping Wikipedia topics from Major World Religions, "Best Picture" Oscar Winners, and Wine 101.

The idea behind DailyLit is that more and more people are becoming habituated to read in blog-post style amounts, essentially articles, rather than long sessions with our latest novel. Rather than fighting that trend, you can bring the novel into the the way we read today. Novels rose to popularity in the days before electricity, radio, television and of course computers. They were designed to occupy several hours of a person's time over several evenings. Today, we aggregate numerous sources of content daily into a single source with the rise of the RSS reader.

I think this is a tool we need to look at seriously when developing new methods to engage young people in the learning process. The truth is reading for pleasure is down in the US across all age groups.   

In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize, celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.” (New York Times, 11/19/07)

DailyLit could be a leader in the effort to bring traditional reading into modern formats. It's possible that this is something Amazon will pursue, though they appear pretty married to the Kindle approach. I think they've got the right idea by making its community features optional to those who chose to participate in the book discussions, while still allowing anyone to anonymously subscribe to any free feed of their choosing. For the Pay-Per-Read ones, that is books that are not yet in the public domain, you have to purchase the feed.

I've subscribed to two daily feeds from DailyLit to join my Google Reader staples, one classic novel and one Wikipedia tour:

1. Democracy in America, Book One by Alexis De Tocqueville.

2. Wikipedia Tours: "Best Picture" Oscar Winners.

(For anyone new to RSS readers, check out my favorite overview guys at CommonCraft's video: RSS in Plain English.)

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From Flore Vegan on Sunset Blvd. in LA.

Time to Reinvent the Classroom: A Vision of Students Today

"Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects and schedules." -Marshall McLuhan, 1967

Watch the video.

Then come join the discussion at mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg

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via http://handa.tumblr.com/

Fun with QR codes - Semapedia hearts Wikipedia

Semapedia.org wants you to create physical stickers of QR codes that link directly to Wikipedia articles. For fun, I made one that links to my father Dick Hustvedt's entry:

For those that don't have a 2D barcode reader for your phone, you can find one here. And for those who aren't yet up to speed on QR (Quick-Response) codes - they are essentially next-gen barcodes that serve as hardlinks/hyperlinks to some sort of content.  You snap a photo of them and the software on your phone recognizes the data, sending you directly to the desired destination. It isn't yet a native feature on the iPhone, and you have to jailbreak your phone to install the iMatrix app to read them. This should be taken care of with iPhone 2.0 this summer. The are huge in Japan (developed by Japan's Denso-Wave in 1994) and now all over the place in the UK.

You can create your own QR code over at Kaywa, like I did for the seedwatcher blog:

Remember Evernote? It's finally up to speed.

A lot of talk about the new Evernote beta release made me stop in for a little look-see and product test of this 'new' web productivity tool. Apparently some people forget that Evernote's been around since 2004, when it was simply a PC-based application that could sync notes to your PDA. It's now fully Mac-supported and let's you snap photos directly from your cameraphone/smartphone and sync them right up to your web-based depository of notes.

First impressions? Not horrible. I posted notes and photos to my site from several sources - my iPhone, my digital camera, web clipping, and even direct entry. They are all indexed and I can search them for keywords pulled directly from the notes or images. The text recognition (mock-OCR), that to me is one of the more appealing features, is a bit lacking, even allowing for the low quality of most smartphone cameras. This photo was snapped from my iPhone in low light which is typical for a non-flash cameraphone.

There are a number of good reviews out there with more elaborate test results, including one over at Wired's blog, and a great one on Replacing Business Cards with Evernote by Stowe Boyd.

You guys know I'm a big fan of product demo videos, which have become essential with the constant barrage of new web products coming our way. Evernote's is up to snuff:

Need an Invite?
They are still in a closed beta, but if you want an invite just email me and I'll set you up.

Interesting to note that they've raised $9M of purely Angel money, choosing to avoid the VC route. Could be because PayPal-founder Max Levchin is behind it. So far so good, as traffic seems to be picking up nicely.

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Shrub Maze at The Getty.

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Learn from Google's greatest stregth - Design.

Google is a master of design. Their apps are incredibly intuitive, simple and fast as hell. We all could learn a thing or town from them. They brought together a user experience (UX) team to define exactly what are "Googley" design principles. They came up with 10.

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Whether you're a startup or a well-known corporation developing a product, make sure you embrace these principles in your earliest talks about design. Too often design is done after initial product development, or at best concurrently on the fly. It needs to be the first thing you think and talk about when starting out. That will help make all the subsequent feature and marketing discussions have a frame of reference. Google does this very well and it shows.

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(from pofmagazine.com)

The future of civic communication? LAFD Twitters!

  *EXPLOSION* 21100 W. Superior St.; TG ; FS 96, Explosion in 1 story concrete building.  1 injur... Read more at http://tinyurl.com/3vo3b8          08:50 AM April 28, 2008 from TwitterMail                            

*UPDATE: 6263 W Leland Wy* 2 story dwelling converted to restaurant; Firefight continues; No injuries; NFD - Brian Humphrey###          05:36 PM April 27, 2008 from TwitterMail                            

  *Cliff Rescue* 4115 S Gaffey St; TG 854-B2; FS 48, Near Point Fermin; We are still enroute by l... Read more at http://tinyurl.com/5323y2          07:12 PM April 26, 2008 from TwitterMail                            

These all came across the Twitter feed from the LAFD the past few days. As they happened. Not a news media site feed, but direct from the fire department in real time. Could this be the future of effective government interaction with the public?

I can still turn on the 10 o'clock news and get the fire beat, though let's be honest, I never do. It's just not news at that point. It's footage of a building burning and and on-site reporter wrapping up the aftermath. Entertaining, maybe in some odd way. But is that useful? Not really.

When I'm out driving to a meeting and I get a Twitter update (tweet) on my phone from the LAFD letting me know the 405 is a mess due to an overturned semi truck, that's useful information. Where it gets truly useful is in a city-wide disaster situation.

Atlanta's tornadoes back in March really brought Twitter out to dance. FlowerDust covered her first-hand Twitter tornado updates on her blog. Here in LA we had the massive wildfires from the Santa Ana winds back in October. The LAFD was already actively using Twitter and constantly updating its followers, many of them news organizations, of the fire situation. Talk about early adopters, this was October, and they already had 500 people following them on Twitter. (If you look at the growth of the Twitter-sphere, this was well before the latest user boom.)

If and when the next big earthquake hits Southern California, we're really going to see the power of this approach. And it's a two-way street. Brian Humphrey, the LAFD's Public Information Officer and champion of this next-gen civic communication, calls the Twitter faithful, "our reporters in the field," acting as eyes and ears even before a fire truck has left the station. If the department needs to quickly spread word that the water supply has been contaminated - the "boil tap water" tweet can get beamed out instantly. So if you haven't already, and you live in the LA-area, make sure you are following LAFD. If you don't Twitter, you can also get alerts at http://lafd.org/alert. 

Brian and his team at the LAFD totally get it. They understand how powerful the new web tools are and the role they need to play in today's civic government. Open government is a founding principle by and large pretty well adopted across government agencies. But interactive government is where we need to be heading.

I sent a tweet over to LAFD today asking why hasn't the other 4-letter LA-city department, LAPD, jumped on the bandwagon. Brian emailed me back right away and said as of yet, they just haven't gotten on board. "Despite active encouragement and repeated offers of help, the LAPD has yet to express an interest in Twitter and similar technologies. If they decide to get on the bandwagon, we will certainly be there to support them."

LAPD - get with it. If there's a shooting in my neighborhood that just went out over the police scanners, the local news all monitor so they can come point cameras at it 30 min later. But I would like to know the second it goes out. That's when it's useful information!

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Time to learn Mandarin at eduFire

Ok, so I've been putting it off for a while. We all have. But it's about time to learn some conversational Mandarin. Now I could head to craigslist and search for LA-based Mandarin teachers or tear off one of the phone numbers on a flyer I saw at Whole Foods. But this is just too Web 1.0 to me. How am I supposed to know who's a good teacher or not? From their ad? No, I need that social networking component that I'm starting to take for granted in practically all the services I rely on - Yelp, YouTube, Facebook, Digg.

That's when I found eduFire, an online learning community that's right now focused on matching language tutors with people like me who want to learn or practice a language. A quick search found that as of today, there are 19 tutors who can teach me Mandarin, ranging in price from $10-45/hr. The tutors list themselves, their experience, their teacher rating from past students, and even a video clip of one of their lessons.

Founder Jon Bischke, who previously founded The 2000Tutor.com Network (sold to Penton Media), Zaadz (sold to Gaiam) and LearnOutLoud.com, has quite the track record in building successful teams. The Santa Monica-based company currently has a nimble 3-person team but is looking to grow as the site develops. Hmm, having an office one block from the beach should help with recruiting. They are looking to close a Series A round in the next few months, and currently have a $400k angel round to hold them over.

The site is very Web 2.0, built around a solid Rails-based social networking platform and uses Flash to deliver the video. They launched about a month ago and have already recruited a network of over 400 language tutors. Newly added is the Flashcards feature that allows you to work on language vocab between tutor sessions.

Tutors don't have to pay anything to list themselves on the site. eduFire takes a 15% commission from each tutor session, which is only paid once the session is complete. The model is similar to Grockit (disclosure: I'm investor in Grockit), which is building an online learning platform and community using game mechanics to connect experts with students. In both cases, the best teachers with rise to the top and command the highest rate.

As for my Mandarin lessons, I might sign up with Liu Jin Shan, who has some terrific testimonials and brings a nice mix between Western teaching styles and actual time living in Mainland China. At $25/hr he seems like a bargain. Time to find out.