Want an invite to the medioh! closed beta?

Well, look no further.

medioh! is bringing in a few folks for a limited time to play with our system and give us feedback.

If you'd like an invite, send me an email (scott@medioh.com). I'll blast one off to you. Just put the word invite in the title so I find it fast.

What is it? Think: Long tail video aggregator. Another way to put it is a guide to all the video on the internet across thousands of sites with 10's of millions of videos.

We've created some API's for developers that allows you to integrate medioh! video services into your site (and we're adding more capabilities each week).

In the near future, we'll be adding the tools needed to fine tune your 'view' of the internet video world and the ability to integrate it into your website, onto your cell phone or beamed onto your TV screen.

Heard of those internet video capable and RSS enabled TV's, Blu-ray players, set top boxes and wifi enabled hand held devices coming later this year and early next year? Yea... in addition to your business or organizations website, that's where we plan to be.

Later this year, look for medioh!studio, a set of tools that make it simple to publish your own video content. Use it with the filtering tools to get just the right mix of content for your audience, mix them together and you've got your very own television network! (or more accurately, your own custom video network tweaked specifically for your audience that any internet linked device can access). Cool stuff.

Get a peek at the future early... ask me for an invite and check out the medioh! internet video guide today.

Are you a startup personality? (SE+NS+C)*CD*(n)BSC

I've been trying to figure this one out for awhile now: What are the personality traits that make a startup guy?

Why me? Why am I attracted to this life? Is it a disease, a curse or a gift? Frankly, at different times, it's all three.

I've decided that it's really a a specifically balanced combinations of personality traits and genetic makeup; it's this particular 'entrapenuer' combination that seems to attract people long term to starting companies. Usually over and over. I'm also reasonably sure it's not all that complex.

I see it being 5 main components:

Smart Enough (SE): Startup guys need to be smart, intelligence is important, but it's not the deciding factor. This is a weird balance thing. I'm not dumb, but I'm no genius either. I like to think I'm this special intellect, but I know I'm just above average (on a good day). I'll bet you know some pretty successful people that aren't entirely brilliant. I do. I also know some incredibly brilliant people that would make truly pitiful startup guys. There's a sweet spot here that's 'just right'. Usually not a rocket scientist, but not a career dish washer either. Smart enough.

New Stuff (NS): You're the guy with the new car, the new Mac Air (or whatever's hot of late) and you've been to the newest restaurant in town. You're just like that. Ahh.. something NEW.. gotta check that out. This, I think, is a genetic defect that worked against us through most of human history but now works in our favor. It's likely people who liked new stuff were killed off very early in life when we poked that new animal we found sleeping in the shade under that rock and it turned out to be a migrating saber tooth tiger. End of that genetic line. Now? People who are always up on the NS are likely to be the 'go to' guy about something new at work, at home or among our friends. Society morphs and negative traits become, well, useful. It's also why there are, likely, less of us (startup types) than everyone else. These traits were repressed for eons by the environment and are only recently proving valuable.

Curiosity (C): You've got to be curious about things that, frankly, you have no business screwing around with. (see above: Saber Tooth Tiger). This is similar to New Stuff, but 'in addition too'. They don't necessarily go together and you need them both to be a startup guy. I think curiosity tends toward grokking concepts and ideas more than 'stuff', but it's a closely related trait to NS.

Connecting Dots (CD): Very important trait. This is taking the three things above and making sense of stuff, ideas, concepts and the environment in ways other people don't think of. You synthesize ALL the time. Constantly. You can see how, for instance, a 100 million video's on the web scattered across thousands of sites could be aggregated into a video guide that captures the long tail of internet video. Build some filtering tools and viola!, you can now see that you've got something content owners can use to disintermediate the old school distribution channels like cable and satellite TV, or how a commodity hardware manufacturer can add a little cheap processing power (like an RSS reader) into their TV, Cellphone or gamebox and they can disintermediate the old distribution channels. Hell, you could even see how the old distribution channels out of panic and fear would buy your service to keep from being eaten alive by those uppity content and device makers (bastards!). Or maybe you're just noticing that going 23.5 MPH along 20th street in Denver let's you hit all the green lights, all the time. You do it all the time though, and you can't seem to stop it.

Bull Shiting/Charisma (BSC). Yep. Got it, Gotta Have It. Gotta Embrace it. The ability to Bullshit is pretty key to being a startup guy. Most importantly, the ability to BS yourself. You've got to be able to BS yourself into believing something no one else believes, first. Then, you need the ability to do that with people around you, unless you're planning on doing it alone, which isn't a good idea...and potentially down the road a bit with people you're trying to get investment from. Some call this being "Charismatic". There's some of that involved,but it's different... I think it's 60/70% ability to BS, 30/40% being charismatic.

In short: (SE+NS+C)*CD*(n)BSC where (n) is the level of BS and Charisma you can effectively muster.

Of course, I'm no expert and I'm just a indulging in bit of navel gazing here more than anything.

Hell, most likely this is just a bunch of bullshit.

How "Free" Permeates Everything, Even Art

Chris Anderson of "The Long Tail" fame has a new (old?) Meme: Free.

You can read it here. If you haven't already, you really should.

And if you don't buy the Free Meme (pun intended), look around. Music, Opensource software, even the world of street art you can see how giving away your art can create real financial gains.

Banksy, a UK based graffiti artist, has been creating clever street art for years. Effectively, giving away his art on the walls of buildings (among other things) all over the world. He's garnered so much adulation in the art world that his 'free' art is now worth 6 figures.

From Wikipedia:

On 7 February 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three Banksy works, reaching the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction: over £102,000 for his Bombing Middle England. Two of his other graffiti works, Balloon Girl and Bomb Hugger, sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimated prices.^[15] The following day's auction saw a further three Banksy works reach soaring prices. Ballerina With Action Man Parts reached £96,000; Glory sold for £72,000; Untitled (2004) sold for £33,600 - all prices being significantly above estimated values.^[16] To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit."^[17]

It get's better. Less than a year ago, this work (below) sold for over half a million dollars.

On April 27, 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy's work was set with the auction of the work 'Space Girl & Bird' fetching £288,000 ($576,000), around 20 times the estimate at Bonhams of London.^[20] On 21 May 2007 Banksy gained the award for Art's Greatest living Briton. Banksy, as expected, did not turn up to collect his award, and continued with his notoriously anonymous status.

If you create value, even when you're not trying to and you give it away for free, society will find a way to create value around it. Even if, in Banksy's opinion, your a moron for doing so.

1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars

This is just wrong.

In today's New York Times:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report. Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

How can the land of the free be #1 in citizens in prison globally?

China: #2. Russian #3.

USA: #1.

Hell, 5 states spend more on prisons every year than they do on higher education.

How this founder found the right CEO

During the last 9 months I've had the 'happens more than you think' founders experience of bringing in the wrong CEO, and then bringing in the right CEO. It was an incredibly enlightening experience. What I learned is obvious in hindsight, and it's pretty simple, really, coming down to one don't and one do.

1) Don't put your trust in others judgment, implicitly, of a potential CEO's fit.

I love my investors. They're great people and I continue to communicate with them regularly and several of them still regularly give me great advice. In this particular case, my investors help in hiring my first CEO didn't work out very well.

This was largely my fault.

This fellow came highly recommended. However, my initial impression of him during our first meeting wasn't positive and I ignored my instincts. It wasn't that he wasn't competent, it was just that we didn't particularly like each other all that much. We had several more meetings and, still, the click wasn't there. But he'd been recommended by folks I trust. They'd been involved in many startup companies and matchedup founders and CEO's many times. My mistake was not listening to my own instincts and saying yes, let's bring him on, before I was sure it was a good fit.

When you're working in a startup company, and assuming you're still involved in the day to day, the person you bring in to run your company has to be someone you really click with. You don't need to agree on everything (it's likely better that you don't.. that way you'll have honest debates and solve problems more quickly with multiple brains), but you need to have an honest respect for each other's point of view. If one person doesn't have equal respect for another persons POV, that's a recipe for trouble. Again: blind agreement on everything is bad, but respect is required.

I didn't do this with our first CEO hire. I'm sure he's the right guy given the right situation, but he wasn't the right guy for us.

2) Do trust your instincts & spent as much time as you need to to get a real feel for the candidate.

During the time things were going downhill with CEO #1, it was becoming clear that one of us wasn't going to stay. I had no idea if the person leaving would be me or him (he was the chosen guy my investors had brought in, afterall. I'd heard all the stories). So, I started talking to lots of people about what to do. Part of these discussions invariability turned to starting new companies.

I explored many potential options with alot of different people. One person, in particular, I really clicked with. We discussed a particular business idea and decided to explore things a little further. He brought in a third potential partner and we started fleshing out the idea in off hours. He was employed at a large local company so we met during the weekends and evenings. This went on or about 4 months with many meetings, discussions, disagreements, realizations and general getting to know each other over dinners, coffee's and beers.

During this time things came to a head at my existing company between CEO #1 and I. I came to the conclusion he wasn't going to leave and between the (perceived) support I assumed he had from the investors who brought him in and my "I'm liking this" rule falling way below 50%, I decided to make things easy for everyone and I offered my resignation which CEO #1 was quite happy to go with. My investors had a different take. To my surprise, they asked CEO #1 to resign and handed me back the keys to the car.

So, I had my company back.

Part of this process was my own realization that founders often find hard to come to and that my investors realized early on: I needed help to take the company to the next level. I'm really good at alot of things, in particular, I build great teams and great products. I'm great at getting things fleshed out and started up. I'm a good 'early early stage' CEO, but I'm not the guy who takes it to the next level. I realized that I'm merlin. But I'm not King Arthur. Maybe someday, but not now. In the meantime- every Merlin needs a King Arthur.

I brought this up with my 'other company' guys and the thought immediately entered my mind: Why not this guy I've been spending time with figuring out how to start a company? He has a deep understanding of my companies business (his bigco job was related to the same industry), he's trying to figure out how to start and run his own company, I loved the way he was going about it and, hell, I really like the guy.

The first time I brought it up with him was during a phone conversation that started out talking about the other company. I just out and out asked him: "would you consider coming on board at my current company as CEO?". He didn't even hesitate. He said he'd be honored. He's now our President and CEO.

Of course, I could still be wrong, but I really doubt it.

One really nice side effect was the growth of my circle of friends and associates that I can now call on for help and advice, and, maybe someday, as potential partners in other future ventures. This is something all successful entrepreneurs, I suspect, either know intuitively or, like me, have to have pounded into their tiny little brains through brute force. Either way, it's invaluable.

The simple and obvious lesson? Trust your initial instincts and spend the time to verify them. It may take a few months, but it's worth it. It'll save you and everyone else involved alot of headaches.

Legal spying and telco's

There is a point where you have to say: I don't care what good they did or could do, this evil they just now committed is enough of a reason to vote them out of office.

Allard helped: I expected it. He's at least doing what he thinks is right (regardless of how misguided). Still, he needs to go.

But this is wrong. Salazar ALSO helped: I didn't expect it. He really needs to go. More than Allard because he can't be trusted to do the right thing or follow his principles.

We need to swap out the congress. We start this election. It'll take a few more elections, but everyone who's there now, tainted by the stink of corruption, needs to go.

We need a fresh start.

Senate Approves Telco Amnesty, Legalizes Bush's Secret Spay Program

By Ryan Singel February 12, 2008 | 5:59:31 PMCategories: NSA

The Senate overwhelming voted Tuesday evening to legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and grant amnesty to the phone companies that helped out with the domestic spying..

The 68 to 29 vote is a major step in radically re-configuring 30 year-old limits on how the nation's spying services operate inside America's borders. The vote also deals a severe blow to civil liberties groups that are suing companies such as AT&T and Verizon for turning over millions of American's phone records to the government, and for helping the government wiretap American's phone and internet communications without a court order.

Boulder is the smartest city (again)

According to Forbes Magazine, Boulder is (2nd time in a row) 'The Smartest City in America'.

From the Denver Post:

The rankings were based on the percentage of adults 25 and older with at least a bachelor's degree. In Boulder, 53 percent of adults do. Ninety-three percent graduated from high school and 4 percent have a PhD.

Hopefully we won't get arrogant about it. I hate smart-ass cities.