At any rate, the part that I did want to mention was a link at the very bottom of that post that appears to be part of Jerry’s memo since it’s styled in italics and follows his signature. The link leads to Kara’s Ethics Statement, and it’s well worth the read. It’s probably the most well stated statement I’ve read about how your personal life has potential to intrude on your work and yet can be kept at bay, and it certainly makes me wish I was a fly on the wall in Kara and Megan’s home for some of the conversations she alludes to. It’s also  a really well-written statement on the horrendous Proposition 8 that somehow passed in California on November 4th. I am no fan at all (and made a donation to panasonicyouth’s legal fund following his Experience at the Reverse Prop 8 Rally), and I applaud her statement that she will continue to get married until it sticks.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are — the wife and I never had to consider the legality of our holy matrimony — so take a moment to think about all the things in your life that you enjoy despite other people not being able to. The couple who got married after us at Toronto City Hall wore matching tuxedos, a beautiful moment that made our whole wedding party smile as we passed them on the way out, anxiously awaiting their moment. I’m proud to have tied our knot in a city and country that openly supports gay marriage, and I wouldn’t have done it if that wasn’t the case.

• From Boulder CO
• I get asked to speak at a lot of stuff
• I hear more and more about Toronto
• I came here to check out the community and to meet some of the people who have applied to TechStars
• Started as a software developer/hacker/geek
• Did three startups
• Went to the darkside of investing
• I’ve bootstrapped, raised, and self-funded
  • Zoll Data Systems
    • Public safety data systems
    • Paramedics with pen-based computers
    • Dispatched about 50m ambulance calls
  • earFeeder
    • Music and RSS
  • iContact
    • Only revenue was selling the domain name to a new company
  • TechStars
    • Fourth ’startup’
• Boulder is known for:
  • Mork and Mindy
  • Skiing
  • Pot smoking
  • 125,000 people including students
  • Denver is 1m
  • Nestled right up against the mountains
• VC in Boulder
  • $311m in Q1 2008
  • $2500 available per person
  • $130m in Ontario spread across 13m people, so $23 each
• VC is broken!
  • Really it’s a chickent and egg problem
  • Entrepreneurs are waiting around for more VC to start
  • VCs are waiting around for companies to invest into
• VC is hard to get everywhere, not just here
• VC follows innovation
• Boulder had a strong telecom and data storage basis
  • Created a lot of entrepeneurs with money who stayed there
  • Created the angel economy that is the engine behind the startup world
• Angels aren’t just in it for the money
• Startups
  • Photobucket
  • Newsgator
• Techstars
  • Partners
    • Brad Feld, askthevc.com, feld.com
      • Invested in Harmonics who made Rock Band
    • Jared Polis
      • Blue Mountain Arts ($780m), ProFlowers ($477m)
      • Elected to Congress
    • David
  • Mentorship driven seed stage investment fund
  • It’s not just about the money - it’s about the network you get surrounded with
  • Bring 10 teams of (young) entrepreneurs to Boulder for the summer (out of 400 applicants)
  • Incredible mentorship experience
  • Matt Mullenweg, Jeff Clavier, Stewart Alsop, etc. all come in and spend time
  • Companies hang out and live together
  • 10k sq. ft. ‘bunker’ that everyone can work from if they want to
  • 40 sessions in 90 days on topical subjects
  • Companies pitch over and over during the summer and get better every time
  • Investor and demo day in Boulder and Silicon Valley (200 - 250 investors)
  • Goal at the end is to get just enough funding to get to the next point
  • Success:
    • Socialthing
    • Brightkite
    • intensedebate
    • Filterbox
    • 13 of 20 companies now angel or venture backed
    • 1 defunct
    • 2 positive exists (Socialthing, Intense Debate)
    • Under $600k invested in two years of the program so positive ROI to date
    • About 40 new jobs in Colarado
    • AOL office opening in Builder
    • 9 of the 20 companies stayed in Boulder (4 from there originally)
    • Boulder becoming known as a startup town
• Lessons
  • Don’t focus too much on VC. Just start executing.
  • Community can be more powerful than you imagine if it works together
  • Promote your community (blogging, speaking, etc.) when you promote your company
  • Mentorship is the scarce resource that matters (not capital). Surround yourself with the best.
• Twitter: dgcohen23, techstars

Facebook Verified Apps Badge

According to TechCrunch, Facebook has launched their Verified Apps program that was announced back at the f8 Developers Conference in July (see TechCrunch liveblogging coverage). Sandra Liu Huang of Facebook says that the badges will start appearing to users early next year (screenshot at right).

This will split apps into three categories:

1. Great Apps: currently limited to Causes and iLike, the two third party apps that Facebook is showing off as being best of class. Your app will automatically be eligible for the Great Apps program if you submit it for Verification.
2. Verified Apps: authenticity and trustworthiness come to Facebook Platform. Make sure you meet the eligibility criteria, submit your app for verification, and earn a shiny badge as seen at right.
3. The Great Unwashed Masses: everybody else. Will this become the App Ghetto full of throwaways that no one installs or will users ignore the badges and take a flier?

There are two things that make this an important announcement. The first is highlighted in #3 above — will this become more tha a badge of honour and move into being a serious installation criteria? If so, that feeds right into number two: it costs $375 to have your application verified and you have to renew every 12 months. That’s per application, so developers who have four or five apps are looking at $1500 or $1875 to get their badge once per year. Let’s say that Facebook Platform sees 10,000 new apps next year, half of which get verified: that’s a healty almost $1.9m on Facebook’s bottom line.

The question in my mind is about whether this is a sign of maturity for Platform or a cash grab on Facebook’s behalf. You get some nice benefits out of being verified that go beyond the badge (see below), but do they justify the cost? Looks like it if you were planning to advertise using Social Ads, attend f8, and have your app spread through the requests/notifications/emails and news feed channels (and who isn’t, really?).

• Badging
  • A verified badge graphic displayed on your application’s About Page indicating that it has been verified by Facebook.
  • A special icon displayed next to your application in listings within the Application Directory.
• Distribution
  • Increased allocations for requests, notifications, and emails.
  • Increased visibility for News Feed stories.
• Advertising
  • $100 of Facebook advertising credit.
• Events
  • Discounted registration fees to events like f8, Facebook’s Developer Conference.

SaveOurNet.ca is a coalition of citizens, businesses, and public interest groups fighting to protect our Internet’s level playing field. We’re calling on lawmakers and industry to protect openness, choice, and access for ALL Canadians — and stopping lobbyists and special interests from ruining Canada’s Internet.

Their efforts are largely focused around two areas:

1. Stop the Throttlers: a response to Bell and Rogers from using ‘traffic shaping’ technologies to control network bandwidth for all carriers. This also includes things like inserting ads into web content as you browse the net, as Rogers has been known to do (will they stop at nothing?).
2. Net Neutrality: this issue should be of utmost concern to anyone who loves freedom and the net. To quote SaveOurNet’s FAQ:

What is net neutrality?
Net neutrality or network neutrality is a founding principle of the the internet. With a few small exceptions, it is the standard that has governed the transit of information over the internet up to this point. Put simply, net neutrality means non-discriminatory treatment of traffic. That is, outside of limited exceptions such as spam and known viruses, the companies that deliver information over the internet have treated all information the same, delivering each package of information as quickly and efficiently as possible (often referred to as the “best efforts” internet). Under this regime an internet user is free to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. Network neutrality means that the network provider’s only job is to move data – not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

More from Wikipedia.

Please get involved. I contributed to help the campaign cover ads and legal costs, and if it’s within your means, you should donate too.

• Don Dodge
  • 25 years of experience
  • Alta Vista, Napster
• Why start a company now?
  • Great people
  • Customers want to save money
  • VCs have tons of cash
  • Can’t get worse!
• People are most important
  • Number one hurdle is great people
  • boom times everyone is busy
  • Bad times people get laid off
  • Companies retrench, focus on core, nothing new, people get bored
  • Startups are fun, challenging, and create value
• Customers want to save money
  • Try new things and take a chance on a startup
  • Must demonstrate how you save them money
  • Productivity improvements aren’t enough
  • Have to demonstrate very clear value
  • Is your product a vitamin or a pain killer?
    • Nice to have vs. essential
    • Productivity vs. saving money
• Investors will fund solid ideas
• Me too startups will not get funding
• Ad supported models will be questioned
• Experienced people with great ideas will get funded
• Investors fund people they know and ideas they understand
• Start with investors/angels who know you
• Angles know VCs who will invest
• Target investors who have experience in your business
• VC is a hits business: 1 big success pays for years of losers
• A small software startup can do $1m/month - the CPM to get that is huge
• Angels are easier to convince if:
  • They know you or know people who will vouch for you
  • They have been in the business before or have an affinity for it
  • If not one of the above, they are harder to get money from
• Infrastructure is cheap
  • Everythign is cheap and plentiful
  • Office space is cheap - sub lease
  • Office equipment - buy used
  • Software - BizSpark from MS
    • Less than 3 years old
    • Less than $1m in rev
    • Building SaaS
    • USD $100
    • Global community of support resources
    • Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint
    • Microsoft startup zone
    • Contact David, Mark, Don
• Infrastructure - cloud computing
• Questions:
  • What’s the idea for Microsoft behind BizSpark? What are you hoping to achieve?
    • Group is put together to help startups succeed
    • Can’t succeed without lots and lots of companies building on MS
    • Competing with OSS
    • Tiny little startups don’t have cash and go the easy, free route
    • After three years or $1m they can afford for it
• Is BizSpark available through the cloud?
  • Yes, not just the dev tools
• Do I have to build something specific?
  • No, you can build anything on it
• MS acquired 22 last year, 21 year before, 16 this year to date
  • Generally filling in gaps or holes in the product line
  • Doing things better
  • Creating new markets
  • Usually start with a partnership and a biz dev deal
  • PowerSet semantic search, Fast enterprise search, Advertising aQuantive
• Do we sign NDAs before you develop the product?
  • We don’t get into that
  • Don’t tell me your secrets
  • VCs are the same
  • Never seen an NDA invoked or used

Toronto TransitCamp was built on everything we had learned over the course of 3 BarCamps and 12 DemoCamps, and carefully designed to use the techniques that had worked so well in the technology field to solve a very-non technology problem. We issued an announcement for the event in mid-January and held it less than three weeks later, an intense period in which we found twelve sponsors (at a $300 sponsorship cap to keep a level playing field), located a venue, crafted the TransitCamp pledge, carefully sorted through applications for the 100 participant spots, and worked with the TTC to secure their participation. The event was held at the Gladstone Hotel on February 4th, 2007, a freezing cold (-15° C!) Superbowl Sunday, in a collection of rooms with deficient heating and an average temperature of 13° C, and brought together designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators. This talk will cover some of the careful experience design elements that went into making the event successful and will leave plenty of time for questions about how you can apply the lessons to your own projects.

The event kicks off at 6:30pm in the University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre, Room 1130. I’ll be joined by Dr. Alison Smiley who will be speaking about To Err is Human, to Forgive Design, and Glenn R. Miller who will address From Lifestyle to Lifecycle: What’s Next for Ontario’s Seniors?.

See you there!

They asked me to do a piece that was based on the idea of the passage of time and their commitment to be together throughout. We started working on the concepts of circles and I did a few sketches before we settled on the idea of interconnected ones containing the four seasons. I’m still really happy with the result:

Interconnected seasons

My wedding gift to the happy couple was a large, framed version with the text they had written on either side and spaces to sign at the bottom. The only downside? I couldn’t get James Taylor out my head the whole time.

Winter, spring, summer, or fall,
All you have to do is call

Google Flu Trends vs. CDC

As you can see from the graph above, Google is doing pretty well compared to the Centre for Disease Control’s data for the same period. Given that this analysis essentially comes for free, I’d say it’s probably a whole lot cheaper than having the CDC calculate their predictions. Anyone know what that cost?

Flu Trends is part of Google.org’s Predict and Prevent initiative, which looks to “…use information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.”

They’re exploring many different ways to use our digital world to help make the invisible visible, an approach I can whole heartedly get behind. There’s an amazing wealth of data hidden in our daily interactions with the company, from flu tracking to pop culture zeitgeist. Think about what happens if Android takes off and they gain access to real-time mobile data!

Belated congrats, as well, to the IntenseDebate team, who were recently acquired by Automattic (Wordpress’ parent company). More details on the IntenseDebate blog.

Give it a try in the comments section below!