…because someone might actually build it.

For years I told anyone that would listen how much I wanted an app that let me snap a picture of my meal and would tell me how many calories were on the plate. Seemed pretty simple to build and, with M-turk, pretty simple to do the calculation.

So when Meal Snap was announced last year, I was thrilled.

I quickly paid my $2.99 and downloaded the app before heading out to breakfast with the kids. I decided to take it for a spin and snapped this picture to test it out. The app worked as advertised and within a few minutes of uploading the image, I got the results back. Given my experience as a calorie tracker I knew that the answer was inband for what it should have been and remarked as such.

And I never opened the app again. 

Here was an app that I was so vocal about wanting, nay, needing. Yet when I actually had exactly what I’d been wishing for, I found it didn’t do much for me. Turns out I’d developed a good enough sense for calorie counting that my estimates were just as accurate if not more so than the magical app of my dreams. It looks like I’m not the only one who didn’t go back.

The point here isn’t to pick on Meal Snap. It’s a beautiful app and they may have some dedicated users. No, this was a Timehop induced reminder to myself that often current and future users really don’t know what they want, so take their suggestions and feedback as just that. 

YMMV.

Bear with me while I connect the dots from a few of the things rattling around the web today. 

The guy with the most data wins.

That’s from my Partner Tim in his interview at the Where conference that was posted today. It’s a fantastic interview that covers a wide range of topics, well beyond the theme of Where. But Tim returns to this theme of data often. Making the point over and over.

Ominously, particularly in the wake of JBat’s announcement that the Web 2.0 conference will begin an indefinite hiatus, Tim recounts his timeline for the how Web 2.0 would evolve. He posited that it would begin with applications that harnessed collective intelligence and would end with the establishment of data monopolies. 

It’s with that phrase “data monopolies” rattling around in my head that I read this BusinessWeek interview with Larry Page. 

We would love to have better access to data that’s out there. We find it frustrating that we don’t.

Frustrating enough that the company is attempting to reconstruct those off limit data sets they simply can’t get their hands on. Yes, there’s whole new worlds of data forming they simply aren’t allowed to organize. They’re forming behind password protected sites. They’re forming within inaccesible apps. All just outside the reach of their army of bots, crawlers, algorithms and, just as importantly, their advertisers. 

In the past, services like Google had to wait for us to get to our desks at work before we could start feeding them our data. Then we all got laptops and were able to feed the machines our online behavior at home as well. Now we have phones that we feed on the go and throughout the day. But to maintain an edge, to truly have the most data, there needs to be a device that removes that slow and cumbersome manual input altogether. It should simply sense, learn and “enhance” the world around us. 

Today, we got a glimpse of what a device like that might look like. The data set it aims to organize isn’t confined to a screen or a keyboard or any other kind of manual input. No, this data set is something entirely new and if captured, will undoubtably define a winner. From the NYT:

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby.

The glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby.

Everyone I spoke with who was familiar with the project repeatedly said that Google was not thinking about potential business models with the new glasses. 

So you’re able to track every website someone sees, every conversation they have, every Ukulele book they purchase and you’re not thinking about business models, eh? 

I’m still in the cynical phase of processing the days developments but I think they’re notable.

And in 10 years, potentially seminal. 

In January a friend asked what I thought the big trends to watch were going to be this year. My answer was that this is the year things get weird. I don’t know if we’ll label the next phase of development Web 3.0 or something else. But, with the stakes being data monopoly or also ran on the table, it will only get weirder from here.  

A friend developing a new mobile application reached out the other day asking if I, or anyone else in my house, wanted to try out the service he’s been building. When I offered up me and my oldest daughter as guinea pigs he was taken aback.

Did I really want my 14 yr old daughter trying out an unproven app and participating in an unknown community, he asked?

His question caused me to pause.

I’ve long thought it important for my kids to be active online participants. Partly so that they can have fun and engage with me and their mom and their friends across multiple social services. But, more importantly, so that they can begin to develop their own sensibilities about what it means for them to be digital natives navigating a very different set of technology and social norms than any I experienced at their age.

Most of my kids have Twitter accounts. Several have Tumblr accounts. All the ones with iDevices have Instagram accounts. One has a Codecademy account. And my two oldest have Kik accounts. Because I want them to learn to own their online identities, I’ve set all of their accounts to public. This may cause some to bristle, but I can’t imagine a more fertile training ground for them to practice being active online particpants.

This default to public has lead to so many teaching opportunities about how to handle various online interactions. What should they do when someone with a curse word in their username starts following them? What should they do when their friend pulls a 3rd unknown person into a Kik chat? How do they block commenters? How do they get more followers and is that something they should be concerning themselves with? How should they handle friends posting things about them they don’t like? The list goes on and on.

Sure there have been some snags and even a few sketchy exchanges, but nothing more sketchy than anything I encountered as a kid riding my bike all over town.

Back then, I had so much freedom. My parents would let me ride miles from home with no supervision. I learned to navigate my town in the light of day and the dark of night. I learned the safe routes and the neighborhoods to avoid. I learned how to deal with bullies hiding behind bushes and dogs off leashes. I developed what some might call “street smarts”. That early adventuring was formative for me and those same street smarts have kept me out of trouble on more than one occasion.

Today, many of our kids don’t have the same freedom we had to roam. The streets of my youth have been replaced by electronic alleyways that connect our kids to the rest of the world. Rather than shield them from online activity, I’m hoping to instill in them their own digitally native sense of street smarts. Smarts that I hope will serve them every bit as well as my back alley bike rides served me.

Needless to say, I assured my friend that getting her an invite to his new service was most definitely dad approved. She’s been loving it ever since, gaining a reputation and following in the community and sharing her feedback on the product with me.

Perhaps training up an in-house army of digital native beta testers will end up serving their VC dad well too.

There’s a native American tale of an old rattlesnake who asks a passing young boy to carry him to the mountain top to see one last sunset before he dies. The boy was hesitant, but the rattlesnake promised not to bite him in exchange for the ride. After that concession, the boy carried the snake to the top of the mountain where they watched the sunset together.

Upon carrying the snake back down to the valley floor, the boy prepares him a meal and a bed for the night. In the morning the snake asks:

“Please little boy, will you take me back to my home now? It is time for me to leave this world, and I would like to be at my home now.” The little boy felt he had been safe all this time and the snake had kept his word, so he would take it home as asked.

He carefully picked up the snake, took it close to his chest, and carried him back to the woods, to his home to die. Just before he laid the rattlesnake down, the rattlesnake turned and bit him in the chest. The little boy cried out and threw the snake upon the ground. “Mr. Snake, why did you do that? Now I will surely die!” The rattlesnake looked up at him and grinned:

“You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

Slate has an interesting piece peeking behind the post-Page Google M&A machine. Amidst the talk of new found focus and well defined business units, there’s a noted shift in their approach to the technologies and teams they’re pursuing. In years past Google has had a voracious appetite for talented startup teams, but that focus is turning, in large part, because those teams have often not had the effect on Google products that they’d hope. 

From the article:

Larry Page wants results. This is perhaps the most important change since Page took over: Gone are the days when Google would buy a company only to have it disappear without ever producing a product. Page now expects direct, regular reports from Google’s acquisitions team on how recently purchased companies are performing.

The problem with these acquisitions is that both the acquiring company and the founders are rattlesnakes.

Pre-acquisition founders promise that they’re committed to their vision and see the acquiring company as the perfect platform to realize it. Acquiring companies promise to get companies the resources they need to scale and not mess with what’s working.

But founders are founders, and even with the best of intentions their systems largely reject big company culture. And big companies are big companies, they just can’t help but bury startups in political overhead and unkept promises of scalable resources.

Which leaves many founders and big companies turning to each other with bite marks in their chests asking “why did you do that”?

To which neither should be all that surprised when the other answers back, “you knew what I was when you picked me up”.

To most founder’s parents, especially to those outside of technology hubs, starting a company is indistinguishable from being unemployed.

So I was intrigued by an insight shared by a founder friend over lunch yesterday. He said that he was getting calls from his childhood friends from around the country asking for advice on how they can get ideas out of their heads and sketchbooks and into real life businesses.

We talked about some of the whys around this mainstreaming of startup culture. His insight that struck me was that the last few years of massive unemployment has made it much more socially acceptable for talented and qualified people to not have a job. Given everyone knows someone who’s been laid off or unemployed for an extended period of time, there’s a deeper sense of empathy and understanding from a generation who’s careers were optimized for stability and lauded for company loyalty. 

Of course the mainstreaming of angel investing and massive amounts of press coverage make the “glamorous” startup life irresistible to many. But, I do think there’s merit to his larger cultural observation around the impact that this current wave unemployment will play in reshaping the definitions of work and jobs for the generations who’se lives these times have touched. 

You know that scene in a movie or video game when the little aliens begin attacking their target? Generally they start by sending one to scope things out, which promptly gets killed. Then a few more, they usually get killed too. As confidence in the defender builds, more and more come at an increasingly rapid fire pace until they become overwhelmed and defeated by the sheer volume of attackers.

That’s what yesterday’s YC Demo Day felt like to me.

The sheer breadth of markets the companies in this class are attacking was refreshing. Architecture, Design and Manufacturing, Hiring and Work, Healthcare, Crowdfunding, Enterprise, Gaming, Security, Real Estate, Cloud Computing, Payments, Mobile Infrastructure and Applications, Financial Services, Farming, Auto and Device repair, Online Shopping, Search, Big Data, Education and Social Networking (I’m sure I’ve missed some too).

And with a class of 66 there were generally a couple companies attacking these markets from different angles.

Whether you’re a fan of YC or not, really doesn’t matter. We’re at a cultural inflection point where legacy companies are built on a crumbling foundation of infrastructure, processes and business models. Their modes of defense are still relatively effective- scale and favorable legislation. But, like in the movie or video game, their attackers are accelerating and multiplying with each new attacker learning from the missteps of it’s predecessor.  Soon the incumbents will either fall to their startup attackers, or adapt to their new environs.

Either way, we as consumers of these services will ultimately benefit from the accelerating onslaught of entrepreneurial attackers. And we as a startup culture will have a more direct impact on global culture as a whole.

As an aside- I don’t think YC has even scratched the surface on how much more they can scale their model.

I remember attending the first demo day. The room was about three quarters full, with founders like Aaron Schwartz and Alexis Ohanian lining the walls to make it feel more full than it actually was. There were probably 10-12 companies all of whom gave actual demos of products that kinda worked.

Fast forward to yesterday with 66 companies and a standing room only crowd of investors at the Computer History Museum. No need for founders lining the wall to make it appear full nor were there any live demos as part of the presentations (ok, maybe 1 live demo). At this point the actual presentations feel like an unneccesary relic of classes past.

If YC can attract the talent, I don’t think there’s any reason they couldn’t scale well beyond where they are today. By surrounding himself with capable partners and advisors PG has removed himself as a single point of failure in the model. Most founders I’ve spoken to in this class and in others note that the YC network does far more to magnetize applications than access to PG. And that network lends to scale. I can also see Demo Day evolving from a single threaded conference format to an expo format with booths and more one to one interaction with actual demos making a comeback. 

Look, I’m not saying YC is for everyone. Far from it. But if observers think they’re hitting a ceiling on the number of companies they can crank out, I say they’re just getting started.

A few weeks back I walked by a table where my to oldest daughters were supposed to be doing their homework. As I passed I saw they were both looking into the screen of an iPhone and trying their hardest to giggle without me noticing. As you might expect I was equal parts bugged and intrigued. 

When pressed, they told me they were txting with their favorite robot. I had no idea what they were talking about so they explained.

As a family we use Kik as our group txt’ing app and ad hoc social network. Turns out “Kik Team” is an account the kids all followed that is a bot on their network. They’d discovered that if they txt’d Kik Team questions, the bot would reply. And often those replies contained funny or snarky or just totally off the wall commentary. Apparently, they’d taken a study break to get some laughs from the bot. As I walked away from them my second daughter proclaimed “Kik Team is my favorite friend to txt on Kik”.

Given that I’m her friend on Kik I tried not to take offense.

Depending on what generation we’re a part of, robots illicit wildly different imagery. From Rosie on the Jetsons to the tireless warehouse workers stealing human jobs described in Nick Bilton’s piece over the weekend. We don’t often think of them as invisible or simply software, but these types of digitally disembodied robots are playing an increasingly prominent role in the evolution of our digital lives.

Why just today I retweeted  a robot.

Its name is @Horse_ebooks. For those unfamiliar, @Horse_ebooks is a twitter spambot that tweets random snippets from digital books it’s trying to hawk online. But to his (or is it her?) 10s of thousands of twitter followers @Horse_ebooks is steady stream of automated insights, obscurity, inanity and mystery. Whether for entertainment or enlightenment, the followers of @Horse_ebooks knowingly and unabashedly forge a relationship with a robot.

For more practical pursuits we’re seeing the rise of robots like Siri enter into our every day lives. It’s taken me a while to get the hang of my use cases for Siri, but I find my usage of it for setting alarms, sending txts, initiating calls and drafting short emails rising every day. The more I use it the better I get at understanding it’s limitations, and I can’t help but feel that it’s getting a better sense of mine.

There are more and more services like Siri hitting our radar every day. For instance, a new company called Alohar has visions of robots gaining an even more intimate understanding of our lives and circumstances:

Imagine you’re driving to your doctor’s appointment. You get the green to pull through an intersection, but another driver–late to his lunch meeting–runs a red light and smashes into your driver-side door. Now imagine that your phone, registering that you were driving and that you were hit through its motion sensors, predicts you were possibly injured and signals an ambulance through a 911 dispatcher.

Utilizing all the phone’s sensory data–from motion detection to Wi-Fi signals to temperature–Alohar has developed what it calls “persistent sensing,” allowing a user’s phone to constantly gather data on a person’s whereabouts and habits.

I can’t help but think this robot uprising that we’re seeing will touch even more industries than than their mechanical counterparts. With computers in every pocket sensing, responding and reporting in realtime we’re on the cusp of what feels like a pretty fundamental shift. Our relationship with these bots will move them from the novelty of my kids study breaks to more fully augmented versions that reshape our reality.

Siri for education? Alohar for health? @Horse_ebooks for President? The last one may be a stretch, but I don’t imagine the others are that far off.

Tuesday a video surfaced that inspired the online world. The reactions I saw from many across my social networks were of awe and a longing to achieve their own dreams of human flight. The link was tweeted, liked and fav’d all across the web, racking up millions of views on Youtube.

it didn’t take long for the skeptics to surface. And the next day, Wednesday, Wired started to find cracks in the wingman’s story. 

Although Wired’s preliminary analysis by physicist Rhett Allain suggests the video is not necessarily a fake, computer graphics and other experts are highly skeptical. What’s more, Wired could not confirm Smeets’ education and employment information posted on Facebook and LinkedIn.

A LinkedIn page for Jarno Smeets, which is linked from Smeets’ website, says that he worked at Pailton Steering Systems from 2008 to 2010. John Nollett, the group managing director for Pailton Engineering Limited, said there is no record of anyone by such a name.

Wired also contacted Coventry University in the UK, where Smeets’ online profiles claim he attended school from 2001 to 2005.

The university’s student records staff searched their full digital records database, which contains students’ names who attended from 1986 to the present. They told Wired they found only one entry for anyone by the last name of Smeets: Alexandra Smeets, who attended from 1999 to 2000. No record for Jarno Smeets could be found.

By Thursday, the creator of the video outed himself on Dutch TV as the filmmaker and animator Floris Kaayk, not the engineer and inventor Jarno Smeets. The video was, in fact, a hoax, er, art project. 

Watchdog groups are nothing new. They’ve been around for decades. But I think what we’re seeing now is an entirely new type of network effect that marries data, distribution and action.

One example of this that’s captured my imagination of late is Anonymous Analytics. 

From their website:

Anonymous Analytics, a faction of Anonymous, has moved the issue of transparency from the political level to the corporate level. To this end, we use our unique skill sets to expose companies that practice poor corporate governance and are involved in large-scale fraudulent activities.

We provide the public with investigative reports exposing corrupt companies. Our team includes analysts, forensic accountants, statisticians, computer experts, and lawyers from various jurisdictions and backgrounds. All information presented in our reports is acquired through legal channels, fact-checked, and vetted thoroughly before release. This is both for the protection of our associates as well as groups/individuals who rely on our work.

This is not your grandma’s watchdog group. 

Companies, politicians and individual citizens are leaving data trails that betray or validate them in entirely new ways. Informations is spreading and resources are getting pooled in entirely new ways. Individuals are collaborating and organizing information in entirely new ways. We saw it in Egypt, we saw it with #occupy, we saw it with SOPA, we’re seeing it play out with KONY2012 and we’ll see this new effect front and center going into this Presidential campaign.

As a firm, we’ve long held collective intelligence as a central investment theme. This added layer of collaboration and transparency the network enables will push collective intelligence and collective action into entirely new territory. 

And, as a firm, we’re very interested in founders looking to build companies around this theme.