Business, conservation and one life left to lead

Is your product a heart pump or a blood test?

Last week I went to the Venture Capital in the Rockies conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was going to go to DEMO Fall in Santa Clara, but my team had that event covered and I decided to show some love to the Rocky Mountain region. Mark Solon (who can golf pretty darn good in sandals), Michael Bearup, Brian Birk and Stephanie Spong all did a great job putting on the event in Santa Fe and the weather was just perfect.

The conference was well attended and had a single "pitch" track where all the companies, healthcare, IT technology and clean tech presented in the same session. I sought out a power outlet, got my laptop spun-up, and settled down to do some e-mails during the pitch's that were not IT focused. But, I ended up paying attention to every single pitch, as the markets and opportunities had many parallels to my typical webby world.

Two of the more fascinating were SynCardia, a manufacturer of a portable artificial heart, and High Throughput Genomics who manufactures a simple blood test that can detect and identify bacteria. Both had great presentations, causing a term sheet request from one of the review panel members, and both seemed to have more 00's associated to them than the typical IT funding presentations that I see, but they got me thinking about an analogy to our industry.

SynCardia has a narrow, relatively predictable market, but when you need the product, you HAVE TO have it. They showed a happy patient, alive and mobile, simply because their product existed. But the market is complex to deploy, requires a certain amount of support infrastructure (such as heart transplant surgeons), and requires a high degree of precision and oversight to manufacture. High Throughput Genomics essentially is an analytics tool. It solves in hours, what normally takes days, and allows doctors to prescribe the proper antibiotics regiment quickly and effectively. As opposed to growing germs in a petri dish, which takes days, their tools tag the DNA and can call out the microbes in the blood sample. In business, this is like getting the month end report vs. seeing in real time your business's performance attributes. That's a business that can scale, but the sales pitch is quite different.

I was pleased that two of our BizSpark One companies Graphic.ly and NextPage were also pitching at the event. Both of which are fantastic companies. NextPage is more in the heart pump category as it focuses on documentation compliance and is simply a must have, you either use NextPage to do it easily and electronically or you use some other technique. Graphic.ly, well, it's hard to categorize them as a blood test, but they do have the potential for massive global scale and bring a staid, paper based, slow industry into the real time world of online entertainment and social media.

So, are you building a product that is a heart pump or a blood test? There is plenty of room in the world for both, but make sure you understand how others, your prospects, and your investors, will view your company and your company's products.

Seesmic Desktop 2.0 is Launched!

Back in March at MIX10 in Las Vegas, we hosted a small reception for Seesmic at the Mandalay Bay resort. At the session, Loic Le Meur and his team showed an early prototype of the Seesmic Desktop and the associated plug-in development platform. A few intrepid developers rose up to the challenge and build some Silverlight based plug-ins that tied into the Seesmic platform. Now, with over 30 plug-ins, the Seesmic Desktop 2.0 is released. Here is a snapshot of my Seesmic and some highlights of a couple of plug-ins.

 

Note that in the sample here, I have a Facebook entry from my Aunt's art gallery in Florence, Italy. Unfortunately the Galleria Biagiotti updates are in Italian, but now, with the translation plugin, it automatically gets translated to English. Now, I can see my cousin's posts as well, and not worry about the cut and paste translation. That goes for Julien's posts from France and my friends in Brazil as well. This is great. You can also see the Bing map locator, tracking Graphic.ly's Micah in Indianapolis. You can see Foursquare on there too. You can also see the TwitterCounter detail there as well.

Now, call-out to all of you BizSpark developers, you can go here, get the SDK, and plug into the Seesmic framework. You'll need Visual Studio 2010, but if you have a startup, or decide to leverage the Seesmic platform and make one up, then you can get if from BizSpark, direct tweet me at @DaveDrach if you need some help. Real startups only, of course.

I really try to strive to use the applications that my BizSpark One companies are releasing and I am an avid user of Ping.fm, which is owned by Seesmic, and now I can dump twhirl (and Adobe Air) for the new and improved Seesmic Desktop 2.0. Built on Silverlight and running on both the PC and that other fruit brand.

Congrats to the Seesmic development team, and to Microsofties Nicolas Kardas and Daryll McDade for helping Seesmic get to launch.

Go get it at http://seesmic.com/desktop .

Ten rules for the Cheap Revolution – use ‘em to run your business

I have been a subscriber to Forbes magazine for 30 years or so, and I got it from my grandfather who probably had it since it's inception.

Normally it's in that porcelain adorned reading library we all have in our home and I can spin through it in one visit. Usually it's hmm, and Meh, into recycle.

But this month, Rich Karlgaard did a nice piece on the "Ten Rules of the Cheap Revolution", see here. Yes, the last century has been a fascinating evolution of manufacturing prowess and global execution that has allowed us to keep getting more for less. But, how do you think Cheap?

Let's take those rules and use them to run your business? More hmm than Meh. Here is an excerpt:

• Consumers rule. Consumer technology is now ahead of most industrial technology, which forces businesses to change their operational practices.
• Solid-state rules. Hard-disk drives will be used for long-term storage. Any information requiring quick access will be stored on silicon.
• Interface rules. The friendliest interface will win. It's all moving in the direction of entertainment.
• Transparency rules. All those 1990s predictions of middleman destruction turn out to be true. Poor bandwidth only temporarily delayed this inevitability.
• Detail rules. The appeal of entertainment and sports on older TVs is weak but has blossomed with large screens and HD. Think soccer and the Tour de France. Similarly, business managers want lots of detail on their screens, too. Drill, baby, drill ... down for deeper detail. That's what consumers and executives want.
• Smart-aggregation rules. Some forms of content will always need human curating.
• Dumb-aggregation rules. And some forms of content won't. The trick is to figure out where algorithms beat humans, and vice versa.
• Speed rules. "Newsweeklies" now sell for $1. Mind you, not the product but the company.
• Self-learning rules. We are at the beginning of the Death of Credentialism. The ROI for a majority of college educations will be negative.
• Self-discipline rules. We are on our own. The most important software of all is our internal operating system.

Thanks Rich.