Google+ 1 More: I'm Joining Google Monday

In the world of tech, you can make the news or you can break the news. I like to do both.

Never wanting to just play the role of armchair quarterback, I have over the last 12+ years actively played a direct or advisory role to dozens of startup companies, both consumer and enterprise. In the last 5+ years, I have shared with you many of my own experiences here on this blog, be it what I am seeing in the market, new products and services I am enjoying or big trends I think are going to impact the way we interact with tech each day.

Behind the scenes, often with less fanfare, in my various roles with my6sense, Paladin, BlueArc, and other companies, I've worked closely with and learned from some of the top people in the Valley and beyond. Increasingly, I have spent more time with different teams at Google, learning how they work, what they find valuable, and seeing how their goals closely mirror many of my own. Starting Monday, I will be playing an active role in helping bring Google's products to more people, as I am joining the Google+ team in the role of Product Marketing Manager.

The way the world perceives Google and the way I perceive Google has changed a great deal since my first posts on the company's services back in 2006. The company has grown from its initial roots in search and advertising to play a major role in many parts of our online lives, and has been among the most vocal in fighting for standards, data portability, and bringing content to more users, faster. The company's new social effort, Google+, is in its initial stages, and from what I know about the people behind the project and how they are positioning it, this will be a major piece of the company's strategy going forward.

Even My Kids Are A Little Excited About Google

After years of sitting on the sidelines watching various networks get some pieces right and others frustratingly stall or make decisions that seemed contrary to their users interests, I am eager to be on the inside helping make the products better, fighting for users and thinking creatively about how social plays a beneficial role in our increasingly connected and mobile world. I want to help build and promote a product that isn't just more fun, but more intelligent and useful.

Joining Google, a company greater than 100 times larger than anywhere I have ever worked, about 3,000 times larger than my6sense, and 10,000 times larger than Paladin, is daunting, and will bring its own challenges. In the last few months, as I talked with future colleagues at Google, I asked about how one person can make an impact at such a company. I asked about the potential for slowness and bureaucracy, and each time, employees talked about its revitalization under Larry Page and acting like a startup with incredible resources. Many times, through interviews and casual conversations, the company referred to its own youth as being remarkable - just over a dozen years old, and them just getting started, even if we take their pervasiveness for granted. While some may question the company's stretching into new venues with projects like driverless cars, it shows me the company's willingness to experiment and tinker and try new things outside of scope, where others might not.

Obviously, joining Google changes things and I don't honestly know all this means for what you can expect on this blog and elsewhere - but it doesn't change who I am and this blog isn't going anywhere. I remain a major advocate for small startups, niche apps and services everywhere, in addition to my new 9-5 work.

In the coming weeks, I'll learn the best approach to talking about the company and its products and competition, so you know you're still hearing from me in the most transparent way I've always tried to be, while also honoring appropriate confidential activity with the company and its partners - the same way I always have with my6sense and others. It does mean that my work at Paladin is officially on hold, and I'm not taking on new consulting work. It also means that I am wrapping up my dedicated role with my6sense on Friday - still a big supporter of their ideas, their people, and looking forward to some great product announcements they have coming up.

This move to Google is made even more exciting due to the caliber of the people I will be working with, from Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr to Jonathan Terleski, Timothy Jordan, DeWitt Clinton, Don Dodge, Chris Chabot and more. In meetings with Google as a blogger, as a power user or as a partner, I've always been impressed by the insight, integrity and culture of the company and its employees - a different feel than that I have seen when working with others across the Valley.

You know me - I vote with my activity. I push what I like and I advocate what I will actually use. When Google+ debuted, it made sense to me immediately and I've been using it as my primary social destination since, even when it wasn't obvious I'd be heading Google's way. I've been holding back some of my ideas and feedback on the product here as I want to do that from within the core of the project - but I am happy with I've seen so far and eager to help push it to the next level.

You can find me on Google+: http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray

Tracking Commute Speeds and Slowness With Foursquare

While many people see Foursquare as a strictly social experience, to alert friends to their comings and goings, or to highlight their incredible coolness factor by checking into happening venues, I've long held to the service playing a role of utility. I don't filter my check-ins, and have always been willing to bend the rules a bit, through proximity check-ins, drive by check-ins, and just having a little bit of fun. Having recently been commuting regularly for a new Paladin client, I've found I can use Foursquare to determine the usual commute times, not just for the whole trip, but from points of interest along the way. With every check-in, it also signals to colleagues I'm on my way.

What I've found is that despite any matter of grousing on my part from day to day fluctuations in traffic, from backups on the Dumbarton Bridge connecting the Peninsula to the East Bay, crawling on 880 North, or navigating the 980 to 580 to 80 East maze into Emeryville and Berkeley, where RepairPal is headquartered, the minor annoyances actually have little impact on the average commute time. In my sample size, the time between consistent points is surprisingly stable.

Three Days of Routine Checkins and Timestamps on Foursquare

For the local folks, my usual commute over the last few weeks has me taking 101 North from Sunnyvale, exiting Willow Road toward Dumbarton (Highway 84) and then going north on 880 past the Oakland Coliseum before exiting toward Emeryville. On the way, I've made it a habit of checking in at the same places each time - starting with the new Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, followed by the Dumbarton Bridge, then the O.co Coliseum (where the Oakland A's and Raiders play) and then finally RepairPal.

The Daily Trek from SF Bay Corner to the Other

Today, the check-in at Facebook happened at 8:08 in the morning, followed by 8:12 at Dumbarton, 8:33 at the Coliseum and finally 8:49 at RepairPal. A similar trek that started 16 minutes earlier at Facebook saw the same three minute gap to Dumbarton, 22 minutes to the Coliseum, and a total trip of 42 minutes from point to point to RepairPal. Previous days show the total trip as 44 minutes from point one to point four.

So what and who cares? Not too many people, of course, which is why I toss all my silly check-ins to Twitter on a dedicated account (@lgloco) and don't post updates to Facebook. But by using the exact same route and checking in at the same places in the same order, it gives very precise indications of the time between points on any typical weekday, and lets colleagues anticipating when I'll arrive pretty much track my debut to the minute.

I'm also one of the people who keeps Google Latitude running constantly to provide closest connections with a precise knowledge of my whereabouts, but running Foursquare this way helps move the game-driven toy intro something more useful as a metric. If enough people followed the same approach, with consistent check-ins at specific points on a regular basis, you could safely estimate real-world timing between distances in practically any geography.

If you don't mind my nonsensical check-ins, you can follow @lgloco or see me on Foursquare here: https://foursquare.com/lgloco.

Disclosure: RepairPal is a Paladin Advisors Group client, where I am managing director of new media.

Worshiping False Business Gods, Finding the Right Metrics

Web Statistics Can be Addictive. But Are They Really Your Business?

Many employees at businesses are focusing on the wrong metrics and keeping themselves busy on tasks that don't help the bottom line - often for reasons like inertia, or because of bad instruction from a superior. In my role as an advisor for multiple small startups, as well as being a third party consultant through the work I do with Paladin Advisors Group, I often find myself talking with people who are frustrated with the bottom line, who know what they're doing isn't having direct impact to success, but continue to do it anyway.

For example:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Web statistics

Search Engine Optimization can be a false god of metrics. Web traffic and user visits can be addicting. Once a company experiences a level of traffic, or a rate of visitor growth, it can be something they don't want to let go. A slowdown in Web traffic or even a reversal can make them react by taking less advisable measures, such as spawning dozens or thousands of algorithmically-created Web pages with low value in an attempt to game the search engines. And if they get caught, as some did with Google Panda this year, the blame goes to the engines, not the people implementing bad behavior.

In discussions with one firm, they acknowledged the quality of the visitors through these non-human pages was pretty bad. Bounce rates were high, signups were low, and they really were not their target customer anyway. But the company struggled with the idea that seeing Web traffic decline, with a better focus on high quality content and visitor conversions was more important. They didn't want to let go of their numbers!

So we talked about what they really should be measuring. Was it revenue? Was it new customers? What about application downloads or signups? What was the right thing to be incentivized on?

User Counts

If SEO is not the catch, user registrations can also be another number that gets out of control. As most of you know, once you get a user, you can always list them as having been a user. So this number always goes up. But how many are active users? And how do you define active? Is this number increasing or decreasing?

Social Media

And don't get me started on counting Twitter followers and Facebook likes... given that social media is so new to some people, they really don't know how to measure success, but I would say it always comes back to the company's bottom line and finding real revenue users.

Busy Work vs Real Value

In my career, I've prayed to false gods of Web traffic and rote activity that occurs "because we've always done it this way". I've run Web campaigns that had little success, but could show that I ran the campaign as a deliverable I achieved. I've sent newsletters that few people opened, yet sent another one the following month. But where I felt the best was getting real new leads into our CRM tool (Salesforce.com) that led to real meetings, opportunities and revenue. Being able to track real revenue back to activity I had initiated or assisted on meant I, and my group, had delivered real value to the company.

So think about what metrics you are measuring. Are you responsible for raising Web traffic? Tracking Twitter followers and Facebook likes? Downloads? Users? Find out what you really need to show business momentum and success, and push on that. For praying to the false god won't work forever.

Why We Brought my6sense to Twitter.com via Chrome

This morning, as you might have seen from one of the many places that covered the launch, my6sense took its first step beyond the world of mobile, bringing tweets ordered by personal relevance to Twitter.com, in the form of a Chrome Web browser extension. The idea, of course, is to take on the challenge of finding excellent content in your real-time streams and bringing it to the top. More signal and less noise. Working with a team that is small and has limited resources, we have to be smart about our choices, so it's my pleasure to talk about why this is such a big deal, and why we went this way.

Tens of millions of tweets pour through Twitter every single day, according to the company's cofounders, and even through the most valiant efforts, you're bound to miss something, even after carefully hand-selecting those you follow, skimming fast and having great news sources. The idea is no longer a situation where "the news will find me", but instead that you are sipping from the firehose, and your limited time at the fountain means you are seeing select portions of the stream from the time of day you are looking. Meanwhile, in between the best stuff from all your friends and brands, there are a lot of updates that just might personally not be relevant. So something is needed.

Even Twitter says "Our Challenge Is Relevance". We agree and we're hoping to help.

• GigaOM: My6sense Brings Personalization to the Twitter Stream
• VentureBeat: My6sense filters Twitter for the most relevant tweets
• Mashable: Chrome Extension Surfaces Most Relevant Tweets Based on Your Reading Habits
• ReadWriteWeb: My6Sense Chrome Extension Filters Your Tweet Stream on Twitter.com
• TheNextWeb: my6sense does what Twitter hasn’t — highlights the top tweets in your stream
• TechCrunch: My6sense Injects A Relevance-Based Tweet Stream Into Twitter.com

I joined my6sense to help accelerate the third wave of the Web - personalization of streams from all sources, not just to bring apps to consumers. So it's no secret we've been talking since day one of the right way to come to the Web and bring my6sense to where people already participate. We don't want to build a dedicated Web site to compete with our partners and popular Web services, but instead, to bring the magic of our app to where consumers already are.

my6sense in my Twitter stream

There are two ways to bring the intelligence of my6sense to existing streams - one being through their adoption of the Attention API, which some are pursuing, or through other methods that we can initiate, like a dedicated extension that works by service or domain. Twitter, an incredible company changing the way people communicate, has to be selective in how it works with third party APIs, not choosing favorites, so we knew bringing this intelligence via extension was the right move.

Browser extensions now exist for practically every platform - but are most well known for Firefox and Chrome. With the growth of Chrome's browser share, and the browser's overlap with our technology-savvy user base, launching on Chrome was the right idea. Also, starting with Chrome gives us a clear address on the Chrome Web store. No doubt, Firefox will be coming soon, resources depending.

My settings page on the my6sense Chrome extension

But what about the deployment? We knew we needed to make integration into Twitter.com seamless. From the first day we talked about this project, we wanted it to look and feel like Twitter. So our app simply adds a tab to the Twitter.com experience, and tweets are reranked based on user preferences. No fancy UI, just simple integration. Adding on support for URL expansion to preview articles and shared rich media, and we think we've brought real value to existing users without complicating their experience.

If you understand our focus - to implicitly determine your interests based on those items you read and skip, or act on in the Twitter.com interface (such as favorites, retweets, replies, etc.), you know we are trying to reduce the amount of time you spend culling through updates that aren't of interest to you. When people see the difference between the chronologically ordered timeline and the personally ordered timeline from my6sense, the difference is clear. Sometimes the stream may toss up surprises or items that aren't a clear fit, but no software is perfect. The good news is that we're listening to all the feedback, positive and negative, and hoping to make a real impact on the way we all consume and share content.

I hope you'll try our new extension and see how we can improve your Twitter.com experience by bringing the best updates from your friends and brands to the top. You can find the Chrome extension at http://m6s.com/chromeweb.


Disclosure: I am Vice President of Marketing at my6sense.

Yahoo! Hires Hotmail Vet to Manage Mail, Flickr, More

While most of the recent personnel news surrounding Yahoo! has dealt with who has left the company rather than who has joined it, the company is expanding its efforts in communities, social and communications, building out a corporate roster below Carol Bartz that features many former Microsoft and MSN alumni, looking to restore the company to its once lofty leadership position on the Web. Joining the purple people on Monday was Steve Douty, one of the first five employees at Hotmail during the Web 1.0 days, tasked with owning product management as the vice president of communications and communities, including properties such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr and Yahoo! Answers.

Reporting to Bill Shaughnessy, the company's senior VP of global product management, who in turn reports to Blake Irving, Yahoo!'s chief product officer, Douty is responsible for product strategy and roadmap to rollout for the products' current offerings and their future plans, including how they would be monetized.

Like its counterpart at Google, Yahoo! has struggled in some cases about delivering uniformity of product between properties - even while Yahoo! Mail and Flickr especially have maintained top positions in terms of global use. In talking with Douty on Friday, he told me that one thing the company could do a better job with is focusing on integrating these services, and keeping a user longer, aiding them to "go deep into Yahoo and then naturally experience other services in a highly integrated and relevant way", using another Yahoo! property. This hope mirrors a similar challenge experienced by the MSN team during his time there following Microsoft's acquisition of Hotmail at the end of 1997.

Douty, whose Linkedin resume includes stops at Moxie Software and Groopix after Microsoft, joined Hotmail in June of 1996 as the first businessperson at the company, running marketing, product, sales and business development, he said. He recounted to me stories of jump-starting the adoption of free Web-based e-mail through college newspaper advertisements, and making the user experience incredibly simple, including getting a new personal e-mail address within a minute of entering the site and sending a message in the second minute. "In two minutes, you could compose and send a message with your own mail ID," he told me in a face to face meeting last Friday. This led to significant word of mouth for Hotmail that rivaled or even outperformed the service's much-celebrated viral capabilities, including the standard email signature.

Yahoo!'s no upstart, and handful of newspaper ads on college campuses isn't going to turn the trick to get the company back to being recognized as an innovative leader in the Web space. But Douty said he thinks there is significant opportunity for the company to grow from its current position, and capitalize on positions where competitors are not strong.

"There are a lot of incredible assets (at Yahoo!) that have not been adequately stitched and integrated," he told me. "Those assets, combined with a new fresh look on how people use the Internet and interact with others gives everyone an opportunity. There is an opportunity now for a brand-new entrant and a creative set of new offerings for people who are not being served well by anyone today, and Yahoo! is in a position to capitalize on that."

For starters, though Douty is in his first week on the job, it's possible Yahoo! Mail could play a connecting role with the many other services he owns, maybe not as the primary event, but as a conduit to other properties. He recounted Hotmail's challenges with spam, saying Yahoo! and Gmail both do very well at combating spam, and also said Yahoo! Mail is one of the Web's biggest photo properties, simply when photo attachments are included.

Yahoo!'s fight is no longer for search market share against Google. Like Apple's futile OS war against Windows, the time has come to look beyond those initial battles and find new ground to shine. Douty hopes his efforts, and being reunited with many former MSN colleagues, will be key in the company's similar turnaround. Of note, other MSN alumni include both Blake Irving and Bill Shaughnessey as well as John Matheny, the senior vice president of engineering at Yahoo!. With Office and Windows being revenue royalty at Microsoft, MSN never quite got the opportunity to lead in Redmond. In Sunnyvale, Web services are king.

Disclosures: Steve Douty is a director for MenuMax, a Paladin Advisors Group client. He holds the same role for Groopix Inc, a Paladin client in 2009. I am cofounder of Paladin Advisors Group.

Catalogs.com Launches A Flippin' iPad App for Shopping

The iPad has been an unquestioned hit since its unveiling and debut this Spring. Our home alone has a pair, which are seemingly constantly monopolized by my two year old twins, who have made it their primary entertainment device. With millions of the devices sold, application developers are creating new and innovative ways to browse content, play games, and, with some effort, get work done. But the device isn't exactly known as a commerce engine - something Catalogs.com is looking to change with the company's new iPad app, officially announced today after approval by iTunes over the weekend.

Much like Apple's iBooks app introduced the idea of flipping pages right to left as you progressed through a story, Flipboard and other developers have tapped into the same concept to make the iPad experience immersive and personal. Catalogs.com has done the same thing, bringing the old world of print catalogs to a new medium.

The application, at launch, comes prepackaged with 30 catalogs from retailers like MacConnection, Petco, Foot Locker and the Home Depot. Instead of grabbing the catalog from the mailbox, all you now have to do is click on the cover and flip from page to page.

Browsing the Catalogs.com iPad App and Adding Items

If you like an item, click it, and add it to your wish list, just like you would from Amazon.com. The wish list can contain items from different catalogs as well, in one place, just like Amazon can share a wish list between multiple departments in the store. And when you are ready to order, click "Details/Buy Now" to complete the process.

Catalogs.com has partnerships with more than 600 merchants in its main Web site listings, and is starting off with a few dozen offerings optimized for the iPad experience. Instead of getting new catalogs each week or month, cluttering your mail, the app updates automatically with the latest offerings and prices.

My WishList on the Catalogs.com iPad App from Multiple Merchants

For casual shoppers who are enjoying their iPads, the new app is extremely convenient. You can see initial feedback from TechCrunch (Shopping Site Brings Print Catalogs To The iPad) and BetaNews (Catalogs.com gets the Flipboard treatment with new iPad app) as well. The app can be found at http://bit.ly/ipadcatalogs.

Disclosure: Catalogs.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, for which I am a co-founder.

Tweetbeat Captures World's Events In Realtime, Spam Free

One of the most valuable and pervasive user-generated features of Twitter has been the evolution of hashtags. Whether used to signal discussion of a specific topic, or to participate in a shared event, searching for mentions of popular hashtags has become a frequent occurrence, aimed to capture the pulse of the world in real time. But, like most good things, they too can be used for ill will, as spammers and other jokers latch on to popular events and topics to push their nefarious agenda. Also, search results from Twitter, especially as the service grows in popularity, are not categorized or grouped. Tweetbeat, the latest introduction from search company Kosmix, delivered a solution last week that brings the world's events to the fore, with Twitter as the filter, spam free.

Just like the company's previous (and ongoing) efforts with the Tweetbeat Firsthand extension, which surfaces relevant Twitter accounts through the entire Web, Kosmix is again trying to make the pervasive noise from Twitter useful, bringing the best of the service forward, and pushing the dreck to the back.

Tweetbeat tracks the opening of The Social Network

Tweetbeat, launched last week at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, features what the company calls LiveFollow event streams to see real-time reactions from experts and others, Replay functionality to show tweets that took place during past events, and recommendations to find people who are engaging in events of shared interest.

The Disrupt event was not only a good launch conference for the product, but also a good test case, as Tweetbeat chronicled people's reactions to startup introductions, panels and yes, the AOL/TechCrunch news. Companies and people mentioned in the event were featured in a leaderboard, showing who was getting the most digital ink.

Tweetbeat tracks the Giants and Padres as they fight

But Tweetbeat is more than just tech conferences. Tweetbeat fires up for weather hotspots, movie releases, and all manner of sporting events. (See: http://tweetbeat.com/events. For me, one of the most compelling and fun uses of Tweetbeat is the service's dedicated NFL section, which shows real-time reactions to games across the league, with breakdowns by contest. You can even play back each game to ride fans' highs and lows. Even the baseball pennant race got a look in (See: Giants vs. Padres - Game 162 on Tweetbeat).

Tweetbeat NFL in Action for the Lions & Packers

Kosmix was among the earliest partners to have access to Twitter's full firehose feed, and they are leveraging that access to its fullest with Tweetbeat, pulling in about 3,000 tweets per second, filtering them for relevance and hiding those with low influence - a rank they have developed for every single active Twitter user, utilizing multiple factors, such as retweets and the influence level of those who have retweeted them. The result? An incredibly fast, no nonsense view of the world's reactions to real-time events.

Twitter's trending topics are well known to often be led by frivolous or off-color hastags, and you won't find that on Tweetbeat. While Twitter search may be a quick click away within the service to see what people are saying that very second, Tweetbeat is capturing it all and ranking it for usefulness. You just might find the event you are searching for is not just on Tweetbeat, but organized with style. So check it out at http://www.tweetbeat.com. With the NFL season under way, and fall TV shows hitting the air, you know I'll be sneaking over to see what the world is saying.

Disclosure: Kosmix, the parent company of Tweetbeat, is a client of Paladin Advisors Group.

Podcast: Talking Social Media Missteps, Family, and Android

Through my work with Paladin Advisors Group, one of the longest-running clients has been Emulex Corporation, a networking solutions provider focused on the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet. One of the company's system engineers, Thomas Jones, has caught the social media bug in a big way, getting deep into blogging, Twitter and podcasting. You can find him at @niketown588 and http://www.niketown588.com. A week or so ago, he kindly took the time to talk with me in a wide-ranging conversation that covered not just social media tips and missteps, but blogging strategies, the ongoing debate of iPhone versus Android, and more personal questions, ranging from family to fantasy football.

This laid back, but content-rich podcast, can be found on his Web site in two 30-minute parts, or below in full. His soothing demeanor and friendly style make for good background listening if you want to hear about everything from Sonos to iPad, Mario Kart and TweetDeck.

The full content is below:

Edge Theory: Talking my6sense Tech With Chris Saad

As word of my joining my6sense as vice president of marketing broke late last night, Chris Saad (@chrissaad) put on his journalism hat, and the two of us recorded a quick Edge Theory Conversation to explain the opportunity ahead, and what this means for all the other roles I have been carrying.

Chris' insight into the opportunity for my6sense's ability to prioritize and personalize content from all streams on the Web is especially important for me, given his background as a geek and his dedication to data portability, open standards, and his day job, working for Echo, where they aggregate reactions of all types. With Echo becoming the back-end conversation repository for major media sites, it's of course possible those discussion areas are ripe for personalization and prioritization...

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen to the full recording below:

Why My6sense: Right Time, Right Place, Right Context

After a post talking about the "Me Me Me" portion of social media, it seems only right to follow up and talk about news with me. If you caught Marshall Kirkpatrick's story on ReadWriteWeb (See: My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World) or caught the CinchCast interview I did with Robert Scoble, you know that I have joined digital intuition pioneer my6sense as the company's vice president of Marketing, after working with the company for a year as an advisor as part of my work with Paladin Advisors Group. By joining my6sense, I am the company's first employee in the United States, as the bulk of the company is at their Israeli headquarters, and I get the opportunity, once again, to take a major participatory role in a tech startup which has the very real potential to change the way we consume information, of all kinds, in all places.

As you may know from my previous coverage of my6sense, the company has an iPhone application today that prioritizes content from your subscriptions and social streams, based on your own behavior, automatically. Even more importantly, the company has an "Attention API", which can plug into any content provider, stream client or social network, breaking us out of the box of editorially-divined content prioritization, or best guess social circle recommendations, or the most-common, simple chronological sorting.

Truth is, even for the most focused of us information consumers, we are missing interesting content. More people are sharing more information more easily in more places, and it is impossible to read every Tweet, every Facebook share, every RSS entry or every Google Buzz post. Our intuition tells us quickly what are the most important items, and we find ourselves skipping the rest, or getting annoyed at what we find less valuable, considered "noise". I fear it is only going to get worse.

Solving for this information overload dilemma has seen new companies debut interesting filters, or rely on popularity or community to push items that may interest you to the top, but this is not true human ranking function, or it expects you to explicitly list your interests by keyword or subject. From all the companies I've talked to, interviewed, tested, and written about, my6sense has the best underlying technology, which works implicitly, leveraging your own behavior and not only already works very well, giving me a great mobile feed reading experience, but also sets up the opportunity to make this the official prioritization and personalization engine for the Web.

Even if we wholly adopt the belief that there is value in real-time reactions and recency, there is much to be said for the right content to find its way to you at the right time, in the right context. Factors that make you decide whether to read one article or update over another can be dependent on many different things - the source, the author, the headline, the subject, or even the time of day or location, and my6sense's Phds are working on divining the best stuff just for you - not anybody else. And in the year-plus that I have used the iPhone app, I practically never use its alternate time-based view, as the content is unfiltered and usually off-topic.

What makes me excited enough about my6sense to put Paladin on the backburner, despite the firm's doing very well, and having just hired a new partner, is that this is the right time to start plugging in prioritization and personalization for the entire Web. If the entire story were "just" an iPhone application, it wouldn't be interesting. But consider the benefits of personally curated content sites from major media outlets, social networks and clients. Consider how valuable it would be for those sites if users found content more relevant and stayed just percentage points longer per site, read more stories, and clicked on more relevant ads. Consider the real value of not contributing to the world of information overload, but cutting through the noise like a warm knife through butter, find the best and ignoring the rest.

My6sense already has the best technology, from all I have seen and heard, to make this happen. Now comes the opportunity to help do my part, an active role, to transform the company from technology leader to market leader.

And if you are curious what this means for the future of louisgray.com, I will of course be changing my About page and will offer disclosure if there is ever a time that warrants it, just as I always have. I have tried to bring solid content and ideas and smart technology here since 2006, when I worked for a hardware company, and in the last year, as a new media Partner at Paladin. The perspective changes, but the goals remain the same. Please do continue to keep me honest, and always let me know if you think I have crossed the line.

If you haven't yet had a chance to catch the call I did with Robert Scoble from Monday night, it is embedded below.

In Storage & Networking, Big Numbers In Dollars and Data

Today, at least for those of us who watch the enterprise space closely, the big news is that Dell Computer has offered to acquire Fremont-based 3Par for $1.15 billion, a premium of more than 80 percent over the company's stock price. In a world where much of the tech news is dominated by small companies taking money from angels, it's interesting to see the gulf between what it takes to grow a successful hardware company and the more ephemeral Web-based or application based companies that play significant roles on practically everyone's smartphone. And while I haven't talked about it too much on the blog, trying to keep a black and white separation between my day job for much of the last decade and my more hobby-oriented interests here, I've lived it, participating in one venture backed storage startup for more than 8 years, from 2001 to 2009, seeing companies raise, rise, fall and fail. In storage, the big winners, with few exceptions, can raise hundreds of millions of dollars before reaching break-even, and may be worth billions on the other side. Others may never find traction at all. 3Par, which took on tech titans like EMC and IBM, proved to have a winning formula.

There are three major truisms in technology. The first, and most well known, is that of Moore's Law, which while it has slowed in recent years, dictates that CPU processing speed increases at a regular clip while reducing in price. The second is that data storage capacities and densities are doubling at practically the same rate. Just look at the gigabytes or terabytes on your desktop or laptop hard drive and compare that with 5 or ten years ago. And the third is the speed of the network, both wired and wireless, increases - from the Kbps-rated modems of yesteryear to the fast-flowing networks of today, including 10 gigabit Ethernet on the client side and high speed Fibre Channel on the back end of many data centers.

These three advances mean simply this - more data can be created, shared, transmitted and stored more quickly than ever. Entire industries have been spawned around managing the data flow and storage, enabling branch office access to centralized data, deduplication and compression, load balancing and virtualizing the resulting complexity. If you watch consumer companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, you probably see each of those companies creating new standards for global file systems and redundancy. You see them eschewing traditional storage companies and building their own devices in an effort to keep costs down as usage spirals upward. The trends are both amazing and incredible.

Back in January 2001, as Web 1.0 was crashing, I left a Web services company (eventually sold to Oracle) and joined a small company called Synaxia Networks, which later launched publicly to the world in March as BlueArc. At the time, comparable network attached storage devices from EMC and NetApp were capable of scaling to a then-massive 7 terabytes, and performance was not a metric either of them dominated. Our approach was simple - by converting aspects of the file system from software to hardware, we could dramatically accelerate storage. We scaled not to 7 terabytes, but to 225. We promised five nines (99.999% uptime) of reliability, and performance that was ten times the competition. And if we were less than that, everybody knows that two to five times the speed of the incumbent is still pretty darn good.

As we debuted, the press attention at the time was incredible - as our launch, backed by $30+ million in funding and our CEO being a former top guy at Compaq computer, gained massive attention. We had headlines in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. George Gilder proclaimed that our product "imperiled" all software based storage devices, and after a successful debut at PC Forum, one reporter at TheStreet.com said it was like offering crack to CIOs. Pretty heady stuff, and not unlike other dramatic booms seen from companies that captured the tech press's attention, including the currently hot Twitter and Foursquare, to those less successful, like Handspring and Transmeta.

But building a storage company takes a lot of real money. BlueArc, which raised another $20 million just last month, has raised $200+ million over its lifespan. 3Par, purchased today by Dell, similarly raised $100 million in 2001 (as we were raising $72 million) and others raised similar amounts. Cereva Networks, whose assets were later purchased by EMC, had raised $137 million and laid off 140 employees back in 2002 after not getting off the ground. Zambeel closed in 2003, having raised $66 million, but selling only a single system. Panasas raised $25 million in 2008, one of multiple rounds for the firm. Maxiscale raised $12 million before coming out of stealth. Pillar Data, funded largely by Oracle's Larry Ellison, is expected to have raised between $300 and $400 million alone. So when I hear tech reporters hem and haw about Web startups raising $10 or $20 million, it doesn't make me blink, considering the world of big dollars I've operated in for a decade.

So why the big dollars? Why are venture capitalists so willing to put such big bets into spinning disk and faster networks? Because when things go well, the customer benefits are very real, and the returns could be even better. Customers will pay top dollar to reduce the amount of time it takes to build special effects or bring pharmaceuticals to market. Fast network storage devices are key in mapping out the earth's terrain from satellites, and combing its ocean floor for potential oil deposits. Fast network storage is being used to collect mountains of data by the government, to simulate nuclear weapons' testing, and build next generation vehicles. And those companies that won't compromise on the speed of execution will buy from new storage startups not named IBM, EMC and HP.

That's why Isilon, a competitor to BlueArc during my time there, is worth more than $1.1 billion today, even after its own public struggles. 3Par earned its way to the discussion and is now cresting above $1 billion. Ocarina Networks, a client of Paladin, was purchased by Dell last month, for an undisclosed sum. Ocarina's competitor, Data Domain, was caught in a bidding war between EMC and NetApp, eventually going to EMC for more than $2 billion last year - simply with the promise of reducing storage capacity!

Today, some of the biggest debates in the Silicon Valley are around angels versus venture capitalists, and whether a $500k round can tip you from one side to another. Some of the best known Web startups today are begging for a $25 million acquisition by Google, or so it seems. FriendFeed, one of the biggest acquisitions by Facebook, was rumored to be "only" $50 million. But on the other side of the datacenter, it is an entirely new ballgame, where hundreds of millions of dollars go in one side, and you could get billions out the other end, or you could get nothing. Companies like 3Par, BlueArc, Isilon, DataDirect Networks, Panasas and others have put pressure on EMC, NetApp and IBM to innovate, and expand their product portfolios. Companies like Data Domain, Ocarina Networks and Permabit are working to optimize storage throughout the datacenter. Emulex, Qlogic, Brocade and Cisco are working on faster networks, cards, adapters and protocols to make sure data can go between client and server and back again at rates previously impossible, and everybody is betting on standards they hope will put them in the best spot.

So congratulations to 3Par for their fantastic exit and sale to Dell. Congratulations to Isilon for fighting a tough battle and living the life of a public company, worth $1 billion and up. It's fun to see companies and people I once saw as competitors, partners and allies, who I rubbed shoulders with at trade shows, and with whom I traded taunts on Twitter, taking things to the next level. There is no doubt in my mind that others will be good stories, and some will go the other way with spectacular flameouts, equally incredible to watch, but for much different reasons. It's a very different ballgame over here.

Disclosures: As a former BlueArc employee and investor, I own private equity stock in the company. In addition, Emulex is a current client of Paladin Advisors Group. Prior to their sale to Dell, Ocarina Networks was also a client of Paladin Advisors Group. Maxiscale was also a Paladin Advisors Group client in 2010. At times, I may seek to do business with or engage with many companies in this list, or their competitors.

My6sense Boosts Personalized Streams With Serendipity

my6sense, the iPhone application and API focused on hyperpersonalization and digital intuition - aimed to simulate your own sixth sense and surface relevant content, issued a new update to their app this week which goes beyond your selected RSS feeds or social streams and recommends items from the extended community that are very likely relevant to you. The idea? That as the application grows to know you and your personal preferences better over time, that it knows of content out there you may find very interesting, but didn't already have in your subscriptions list. It's essentially the same personalization that has separated the product from competition, but with a new wrinkle - the element of surprise.

As I've highlighted a number of times since I first was introduced to the app, and as I have grown to know the team and the technology through working with them at Paladin Advisors Group, my6sense's core function is to implicitly watch your behavior and learn through your own activity what content you like and don't like, what sources you like and those you don't, essentially curbing the growing issue of information overload, reducing the time you need to find the best content tailored for your interests from hours to minutes.

The New Update's Features In iTunes

But even the most aggressive content consumers, like myself, can't subscribe to everything and find every article. As the number of people using my6sense has grown, the company has more data on what users have the most similar digital intuition profiles to you, and can surface relevant pieces of content that would score highly in your own streams, but don't require you to be subscribed.

If I am Not Following TUAW, Serendipity Finds Me

These items, which are sifted into your "Relevance feed" in the app, are highlighted as recommended items. Should you want to subscribe to the source, you can just click the "+Subscribe" button and add that feed to your library.

Other feed and stream readers have also tried to surface content to which you are not subscribed, mostly by relying on what your social circle has liked. Google Buzz surfaces content of people you don't follow thanks to friends' activity, while Google Reader shows recommended feeds or posts that have proven popular. But the move is a small change in direction for my6sense, who to date has built their streams solely on the content you bring to the table.

The new update, available on the iTunes Store, is free, and is an automatic upgrade for existing users.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Podcast: On Paladin, Clients, Blogging and Influence

Despite the blog having my name in the URL, I try not to make the blog all about me. Instead, it's more fun to highlight new developments in tech, entrepreneurs and my perceptions of trends and innovation. Today, Jennifer Lindsay of Blog Talk Radio took a half hour to talk with me about the development of louisgray.com, clients I serve as Managing Director of New Media at Paladin Advisors Group, and what it takes to be an early adopter. Jennifer also took time to ask a little bit about my background, my focus in college, and my Superman vs. Clark Kent approach of focusing on enterprise companies all day and talking consumer at night. I hope you find the discussion valuable.

Jennifer posted the discussion on her site here, and I have embedded it below. You can find Jennifer on Twitter at @jennifered.

Presentation: Writing a Killer Blog Without Killing Yourself

Writing a Killer Blog (Without Killing Yourself)

View more presentations from Louis Gray.

For a presentation this morning, sharing with all of you.

My6sense Intros Attention API for Hyper-Relevant Web

Content is coming at us from every direction in the form of streams, from blogs to tweets to social networks. These streams are combining to become information waterfalls of noise from practically every direction - noise because they are all shouting for our attention and demanding we choose them over updates from somewhere else. For some, this crashing sound has become information overload, as the demands from our data exceed the time we have available to give everything its appropriate attention. For the last nine months, I have been talking to you about my6sense's application for the iPhone, which watches my activity and senses what is most relevant to me, from my RSS feeds and my social streams. At the end of the last year, they became a Paladin client, and I have been working with them closely as they improve their digital intuition. Today, at the DEMO conference, they announce their new Attention API, which lets developers and service providers capture personalized relevance - and this, the ability to see my6sense-like sorting and impact throughout the Web, is what I have been waiting for. It is this Attention API that will help quiet the noise and start delivering clear signal from new places.

my6sense Promises Personalized Streams Across the Web

As you know from my prior coverage of my6sense, and likely your own experience with the application, my6sense's intention is to surface the highest quality, most relevant information, not from the crowd, but for you. It watches what you read, and what you don't read. It watches what you share, and what you don't. It watches how long you read, what articles you open, and what you skip. And over time, effortlessly, you will find the content getting better and better. Now, one of my first stops on my iPhone after time away from the desktop is to my6sense, so I can just scan a handful of headlines and know I didn't miss anything. The introduction of the Attention API from my6sense promises to take that personalization to the Web at large, should software engineers and content publishers be interested in delivering personalized streams to their users, no matter the type of content, without requiring them to fill out detailed surveys, or explicitly indicate what they like, and what they don't.


Examples of Prioritized Streams on VentureBeat and the WSJ
In the past few months, you have seen increased focus on relevance. Google Reader has made significant steps forward with their addition of "Magic", both on their desktop client and most recently on the mobile phone. Google's search engine has started to personalize results for you, including links from your social circle. Cascaad also talked about personalization of their social media application for the iPhone, and Twitter client Twazzup is trying to find "highlights" for you based on who you interact with the most, and other factors. But my6sense doesn't see attention and relevance as simply features - but instead as the core mission of their product. That other services are also trying to solve this issue speaks well to the need for publishers to provide better user experience to their customers and make their products even more appealing.

As I introduce my6sense to people, the most common requested product features are for its running in other environments than the iPhone. The company has promised new platforms are in the works, but the addition of the Attention API does more than bring my6sense benefits to new handsets, but to new environments altogether. While the company already made a big step to start filtering Twitter and Facebook streams by relevance in the application, you can imagine how content publishers, from vertical sites to industry news, new social networking clients and blogs could offer personalized streams, based on relevance, without having users jump through complicated hoops - or simple annoyances, with "more like this" buttons, thumbs up and down, likes and dislikes.


Examples of Apps That Could be Impacted by an Attention API
As my6sense promises today with their announcement, partners looking to offer tailored, personalized streams would connect my6sense's digital intuition engine to the streams they wish to personalize, and then let my6sense know how users are expected to interact with the streams. My6sense would then return personalized streams for each user, regardless of feed type. If partners sign up, the silos of unfocused, unprioritized data that we live in today should change - into a more focused Web that delivers content ranked for every visitor. With more people tapping into social services, and trying to follow more people in more places, the opportunity to cut through the noise and find the important information, taking it to the top, could be a critical competitive advantage. With today's launch, I look forward to seeing which applications and sites will step up first.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.

Ecademy Chairman Says Limited Networks are "Flawed"

This week, Ecademy chairman Thomas Power and I presented to a roomful of executives in various influential positions in Silicon Valley companies on leveraging social media and taking advantage of new networks or technologies to find information faster and make the right decisions at the right time. (See the presentation on 'connectedness' here)

Before he flew back to the UK, I took some time to ask him about his approach to social networks and what he thinks about connections.

Thomas, connected to more than 30,000 on LinkedIn, and endorsed by more than 700, more than double the world's second-highest profile on the site, believes strongly that any kind of limits online, from Facebook's limit of 5,000 friends (which he hit long ago) or Twitter's limiting you to 1,000 follows a day, is short-sighted and damaging to potential growth of one's network. Thomas' profile on his own network, started in 1998, without many of the limits of other companies, highlights his own connections to more than 56,000.

My own e-mail in box proves Thomas to be an incredible communicator, who tries to maintain relationships well beyond Dunbar's number. You can hear some of his thoughts below, which I recorded via CinchCast.

Disclosure: I spoke to Ecademy last year in a paid engagement and just completed another engagement with Thomas this week. It's quite possible he and I may work on many more opportunities going forward. Simply put, I like the guy.

Slideshow: Social Networking In The Connected Decade

In the event you noticed things have been a tad quiet of late, I have been preparing for and participating in a two-day social media retreat with Thomas Power of Ecademy and Bob Barker of Alterian in Menlo Park.

Today, as the first part of our workshop, we focused on how businesses and individuals can leverage the best social networks out there - how data is moving quickly from more places than ever with more people and connections in more countries. The hypothesis... the next decade will be about leveraging the full power of your network and all the related tools.

The full deck, admittedly better with demos and in person questions, is below.

Social Media Retreat: The Decade of Connectedness

View more presentations from Louis Gray.

You can also see updates on the event at the hashtag #socialmediaretreat.

My iPhone Data Consumption Workflow

Early in 2008, I tried to illustrate how I go about consuming data online, prioritizing some networks over others, and finding time to get everything accomplished, even as social sites and the sheer quantity of connections proliferated. While that routine has not changed dramatically in the last year-plus, what has changed is that I am consuming much more of this same data while mobile, on my iPhone 3G. Using the iPhone has its benefits, but also, its detractions, the smaller screen, and reduced bandwidth, relative to a hardwired desktop connection, which mean I need to be more selective in what I take in and how I can find the right information.

Last week, after arriving in California, after a week in Paris, France, at LeWeb, followed by 12 hours in the air, I found myself stuck in the airplane, as we taxied, and then waited for other passengers to retrieve their items from their respective overhead bins. This gave me the chance to execute what I see as my new iPhone workflow, aimed to get caught up quickly.

The process is as follows:

1) E-mail

It may not be as sexy as many of our more modern apps, but as I mentioned with my desktop process, everything begins with e-mail. To ignore e-mail outright, which could have the most personal messages, requests, action items, and updates, would be a step backwards. Not only do I still get a lot of information out of e-mail, it is also the repository for many online actions, which could alert me to relevant data elsewhere, such as saved search results, following notifications, etc.

2) my6sense


my6sense surfaces most relevant RSS feeds and tweets

As I follow hundreds of RSS feeds in Google Reader, the service's mobile application, while good, isn't robust enough for me to power through and find the most relevant data to me quickly. my6sense, a client of mine who I advise at Paladin, is built specifically with mobile in mind, and, having watched my own activity for the last few months, has a fantastic idea in terms of what stories are going to be most interesting to me. Now the the company also has mytweetsense, it will also surface relevant tweets that contain links.

Essentially, it's like sifting through the top 1% to 5% of my Google Reader feeds. I know I'll get the other 95% to 99% when I get back to the laptop. If I find items that catch my eye and are worth sharing, I can use my6sense's built-in capability to reshare this content to my downstream social networks.

3) Tweetie


Tweetie Lets Me Peruse Lists, Searches on Multiple Accounts

Tweetie is my default Twitter application both on the desktop (Mac only) and on my iPhone. It lets me review the multiple Twitter accounts I monitor, and quickly track down relevant Tweets, which may or may not contain links. Using Tweetie, I can browse my @replies, thumb through saved searches, or even check in on any of the Twitter lists that I am subscribed to. While I may still prefer RSS over tweets, ignoring Twitter would be as dumb as ignoring e-mail. When I find interesting content, I can either reply or retweet from within the app, from any of my accounts.

4) FriendFeed for iPhone

FriendFeed has many 3rd party client iPhone applications, but no one official iPhone app. In its place is the Web URL: http://www.friendfeed.com/iphone, which offers the same capability of one of my favorite social networks, from lists to prior discussions, search groups, and the ability to take action on any content, including comments and likes.

Using this workflow enables me to power through not just the top content sources, including e-mail, RSS and tweets, but the most relevant ones to me. Relevancy is more important on a screen like the iPhone, and when you only have limited time. While it may be comfortable to sit in front of a laptop for 8 to 16 hours a day (as I tend to do), your thumbs can really only take a good 30 minutes of iPhoning before it seems tedious.

This workflow does not mean to indicate that there are no other good sources of data. On rare occasions, I will hit the Facebook application and pull down messages or see feeds, but only after the first four major items have been hit. Other good news source apps for the iPhone include those from MeeHive, Regator and Techmeme's new mobile page - but none are more tailored for me than the above.

Do you have a workflow, or have you just been scrolling blind?

Disclosure: my6sense is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.

Simler Adds Likes, Favorite Tags, Revamps Homepage

Many social networks are working on ways to improve the relevancy of content - either through finding shared relationships between people through common people they know or through similar likes and dislikes. Simler, which I first talked about back in September, and opened in October, launched an array of new features this last week that offer the service's growing user base faster ways to interact with shared content, and improved abilities to discover new areas on the site where activity is happening.

As outlined in a post on Simler by the company's CEO, Ryan Goodwin, Simler updated their site to include a new homepage, highlighting friends, tags and most recent content. But more interesting to me are the two new items they added - the first being the addition of "likes", a feature you have seen on FriendFeed, Google Reader, Socialmedian and Facebook, and the second, being "Favorite Tags", which lets you pick your favorite topics of conversation, and highlight them in conversations that take place on the service.

Users Asked for Likes on Simler, and Got Them

Now, as you make posts on Simler, about any topic, you can tag other users by adding a tilda in front of their user name (such as ~louisgray) or you can use the well-known @ sign to link out to Twitter. And topics can be highlighted through brackets to link to other topics on the site. (Such as [Simler] or [Apple])

The service is also highlighting its most active users, by topic, as the SimKing, which users will be given a badge on their profile page if their content is liked by other users.

The New Simler Divides Into the Main Page, Tags and Friends

The addition of likes, as with other networks, will enable users a more lightweight way to interact with content and show what the find interesting. The improved options to highlight other users and topics on Simler should also accelerate the activity there. I also hope to be talking with Ryan and team to help them gain more traction, as part of my role with Paladin, as Simler is a very new client. The efforts that went into this release were in place prior to our working together, and I'm looking forward to helping more going forward.

Disclosure: Simler is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.