Saw this acquisition notice in my inbox this morning:

Bellevue-based Global Market Insite (GMI), a provider of market research and sampling serviecs, has been acuqired by a unit of advertising firm WPP, according to WPP subsidiaries Kantar and Lightspeed Research. According to Lightspeed Research, it has acquired GMI, and will combine the two businesses. Financial details of the buy were not announced. Lightspeed said GMI has 230 people across its various offices. GMI was venture backed by FT Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Voyager Capital. WPP is a multinational conglomerate which owns a significant portion of the marketing, public relations, and advertising industry.

This is interesting to me because GMI is (was?) one of those companies that was always on my background radar as a potential partner/early adopter for the Crowdify technology.  I’ll have to follow this one and see if there are any significant shifts that might signal an opportunity.

http://www.nwinnovation.com/gmi_acquired_by_wpp/s-0037953.html

UPDATE: Check out my newer post recapping my experience at the 2010 Flashies!

I just registered for the Flashies, which is TechFlash’s first annual in-person awards event.  They held the Flashies last year, but only on the TechFlash site.  This year it’s at the Experience Music Project, and we actually get to network and talk to people.  It should be a fun time, since the format is a bit different than the usual “best of” categories, and there are a few moments that are sure to elicit laughter and/or groans as people relive the best and worst of the year.

Here’s a list of the award categories, with some of my thoughts embedded:

1. Do-Gooder of the Year This is a tough category to handicap, as the Seattle startup community has a *lot* of people who selflessly devote their time to helping others succeed.  My vote? Confidential
2. Story of the Year My reaction upon seeing this list was “meh”.  It was a fairly quiet, noncontroversial year if among the best you can come up with is a fairly abstract argument over the state income tax.  I predict the iPad will win this category for sheer trendiness.
3. Newcomer of the Year If Jason Calacanis wins this award, I’ll eat someone’s baby.  Srsly.  Arrington moved here, which a lot of people think was a tax dodge related to the impending sale of TechCrunch.  I think the biggest local story was the amazing success of the first year of the local TechStars program.
4. Guest Column of the Year I’m personally addicted to Frank Catalano, who has a no-holds-barred approach to blogging which I appreciate.  He says we’re addicted to free shit and compares us to whores.  How can you not love that?  Plus, he’s right on the money with his post Bartering in the Personal Information Economy.
5. Big Deal of the Year Yawn.  Nothing spectacular here, unless you’re one of the founders/principals/investors.  I’m not a finance guy so I couldn’t tell you whether each of the deals listed was a home run or a lucky escape in a weird market.  $540MM for diapers raised an eyebrow, that’s for sure.  Of course, prorated across the number of baby butts in the world…
6. No Longer Stealth Award Intersect looks really interesting.  Other than that, the casual observation is that there’s a lot of me-too plays in the list.
7. Stunt of the Year The Microsoft funeral dirge for the iPhone was pretty ballsy and got a lot of blood boiling, not to mention a lot of press.  This category was missing something beautiful: Ben Huh’s acceptance speech for his victory in the “Shameless Self-Promotion” category at the 2010 Best of the Web Awards, whose five words were all “me”.
8. Innovation of the Year Some of these technologies are over my head (or, more charitably, outside of my area of expertise, but I can say that Kinect and Swype are both very cool in very different ways.
9. Buzzword of the Year “Cloud” is a good candidate, since everyone and their grandmother wants to transform the marketing for their crusty old client-server architecture into a cloud-based treatise.  I personally missed not seeing the word “douche” on the list – which would garner quite a few votes – and in the end, think gamification should win, as it’s all the rage and we have some serious players in the field here in Seattle.
10. Newsmaker of the Year Paul Allen was part of the 1098 catfight, which was very newsworthy.  He also decided that lining his yacht with gold was substandard, and attempted to upgrade to platinum by suing a bunch of companies for supposed IP violations.  So, I can’t possibly recommend he win.  I think I might give this one to Andy Sack since he seemed to be everywhere and involved in everything, including TechStars and Founders Co-Op, and he even gave a *cough* memorable Ignite! performance earlier in the year.
11. Tech Debacle of the Year It’s hard to beat the mega-flop that was Microsoft Kin, but Amazon may have nudged them out with the “Amazon coddles pedophiles” flap.  I stand firmly with the first amendment folks on this one, but the blogosphere went momentarily supernova over this isolated issue.
12. Tech Platform of 2010 If iOS doesn’t win, I’ll regurgitate the baby I ate when Calacanis won for “Newcomer of the Year” and eat it again.
13. Breakout Performance of 2010 Hum.  Bored of these nominees already.  Really?  Nothing bigger than that?  This list looks like it was written by someone a wee bit too sober.
14. Tech Move/Hire of the Year A couple buddies are on this list, but I have to think that Geoff Entress and/or Bill Baxter will take this one. A late entrant that didn’t make the list was Jennifer Cabala’s move to Startup Weekend, which will boost that group’s chances of success by some multiple of “-illion”.
15. Startup Deal of the Year I kind of hope Picnic doesn’t win this one, since they’ve seemed to win everything in sight in the last 18 months.  They’re like the Meryl Streep of local startups.  I hope that Bonanza/Bonanzle or Apptio wins this category.

Unrelated: where the fuck is Glenn Kelman?  Normally he spends more time up on stage at these types of award events more than the microphone stand.

Also: Speaking of “cloud” as a buzzword, no mention of Azure, which Microsoft has spent a lot of time promoting, nor of the additions to AWS that Amazon seems to roll out on metronome timing.

Should be a fun event, regardless.  See you there!

I’ve used NuevaSync for some long period of time (a year? 18 months?) to sync my contacts and calendar back and forth between Google Apps and my iPhone.  Now NuevaSync has announced that they are eliminating their free service and moving to a two-tiered pricing model.

Embedded within the press release is this sentence:

Along with the introduction of the new services, we will no longer be offering our original free service.

Arrrgghh.

Okay, let’s take a step back.  Businesses need to get revenue in order to, well, be businesses.  Otherwise they are a collection of hobbyists.  So I applaud NuevaSync (or any company) for realizing that, and not providing services without revenue.

But is this the best way to do it?  Completely eliminating a free service and effectively forcing users to pay or leave?  Giving a 5-day window?  I would be content with a very small subset of the services they provide, and when I get SuperMegaMonoCorp, Inc. off the ground, I would probably be content to use a small portion of the savings we’d make by not having to pay U.S. income taxes to buy premium licenses for my employees.

But the move just appears so abrupt, so boneheaded that it either smacks of (a) desperation or (b) tone-deafness.  Neither is good.  So I will no longer be a NuevaSync customer, preferring instead to browse for alternate solutions to solve my problem.  If a free solution does not exist, I may explore using a manual workaround.

It’s a knotty issue.   How do you move from free to paid?  And, when you do move, who pays?  I wonder if NuevaSync explored licensing deals with wireless providers or even The Goog to avoid having to shift the payment burden to the end user.  Or exploring a corporate model that provided additional features to corporations in exchange for a paid Premium service that left individuals with a free plan.  Ultimately I’ll pay (or “we”, as consumers, will pay).

It’s a useful service – it’s been reliable and I haven’t had to think about it much – but it’s just a feature, really, of my overall mobile life, and a small feature.

I know that a lot of buzz has surrounded the idea of “micropayments” – small ad-hoc payments, made effortlessly, for things that we value – but I don’t know that this is the correct future paradigm to bet on, at least in the near term.  And certainly not until the free service landscape shakes itself out.

iTunes has shown that we’ll make impulse purchases for entertainment, at small dollar values.  Will that translate to business or professional services?  I don’t know.  Not in the near term.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Let’s say LinkedIn wanted to charge you $1.99 for connecting to someone outside of your network who has more than 500 connections.  First of all that’s a stupid idea because LinkedIn benefits as more and more people get connected.  There’s no incremental operational cost to them, and they get the attendant benefits of page views, interest, engagement, attention, leadership in the corporate-networking space.

But say they did charge. Would you do it?  No, I doubt it.  You’d find a way around the system to get connected.

I think that there’s some psychic element in play, some aspect of human behavior, that is very important and (at least for me, right now), very hard to pin down about small costs for non-essentials.  It could be societal – a conditioned response – which is what I think a lot of people are betting on.  But if it’s deeper than that – personal, genetic, human – then the whole micropayments future collapses.

Wondering what you think.

Gerry Langeler, the managing director of OVP Venture Partners and  a Seattle 2.0 blogger, published a post this morning on the myth of “no-surprises management”.   As a management-theory junkie, and as a stubborn Irishman with strong opinions, I feel compelled to respond.

Gerry’s main point is that you can’t avoid surprises – such as a tree limb falling on a power line, or a customer all of a sudden changing their mind on a big order.  So by claiming that you practice “no-surprises management”, you’re really not dealing with reality.

This is true.  You can’t avoid surprises.

However, what you CAN do as a manager, what you should do as a manager, is avoid SURPRISING (note the verb tense) the people you work with and for.  The way I see it, in addition to Gerry’s good advice to be transparent and alert, there are four additional practices that managers should follow.

1. Make decisions based on values, THEN principles, THEN circumstances.  If you’re making decisions always based on context (and I guess by this I mean expedience, or short-term-gain thinking), then your team is going to get confused, because they can never infer how your next decision is going to be made.
2. Don’t cause whiplash.  A slightly imperfect decision, clearly stated, which gives your team the room to take the initiative and responsibility for implementation and follow-through is WAY better – like, light-years better – than a situation where you constantly change your mind and send your team scurrying first right, then left, then back, then forward.  Remember that you don’t know everything and that people are smart and can make things work.
3. Over-communicate.  The strong, silent type has no place in management.  Your job is to lay out context, provide information, SOLICIT information, and get everyone on the same page.  Managers who see information as power, and hoard it for their own silo-building purposes, should all be rolled up into a blanket and dropped off the deck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. (OK, that’s hyperbole).
4. Don’t make secret deals.  This one is a real bugaboo for me.  A secret deal is a situation where I place an expectation on you, but do not inform you about the expectation.  Then, when you (naturally) don’t do it, I get pissed off and/or hurt or embarrassed.  Don’t surprise your employees with secret deals.  Make all expectations explicit. (Note that secret deals are not limited to the business world; ever been in love with someone who didn’t know you were in love with them?  I’ll bet you had a few secret deals in place )

The underlying theme to this post is about making your employees feel secure and comfortable, because it’s from that place that people are best able to be effective.  If they walk around on eggshells, worrying about your surprising behavior or decisions, it’s just a bad deal all the way around.

Don’t be a surpriser.  Adapt to the unexpected, but don’t add to the burden.

I like Bill.  Read his stuff.

Now that has got to be stressful, to learn that your customer is your mortal enemy and your co-worker, and that your boss has all the loyalty of a public company CEO.

From his post How Being a Startuper Is Not Like Being An Assassin.

How much loyalty for you does your boss or company have?

I have mission today.  That mission is to convince you, dear reader, that people are the most important success factor for your business, whether it’s a fledgling two-person startup or a Fortune 500 multinational.

Tony Hsieh is the founder of Zappos. Their core values are admirable for their focus on the human side of business.  The core value Create Fun and a Little Weirdness tells us we function best when we can be ourselves.

Think about that for a second.

Does your current company allow you to “be yourself”?  Or does your company treat you like an interchangeable part in a large machine?

A cog.

A worker bee.

A robot.

Does your company play to your strengths, or ding you for your weaknesses?  Does your company value and respect those aspects of community that help bring us together – honesty, trust, communication, accessibility, empathy, and joy?

Think about it some more.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

In the software industry, there’s this thing known as the Iron Triangle or Project Triangle that has been around forever:

This diagram represents the tradeoffs associated with the typical software project, and it’s usually phrased as “time, cost, or features: pick any two.”  Which means that if you (the customer) want a set cost and a set time, then we (the project team) will need to adjust the feature such that we make your budget and schedule.  If you want to fix the schedule and features, then we will tell you what it will cost to do so.  Etc.

Many people, stuck in old ways of thinking, write phenomenally out-of-touch things like “Recognize that the iron triangle must be respected.”

A while ago, some smart folks in the industry noted that something important was missing from the Iron Triangle – quality.  How great is it that I get all the features I want, if they are buggy, poorly implemented, difficult to ehance, and impossible to maintain?  Some people, useless geometricians all, postulated that the area inside the triangle represented the quality.  Other swapped out “features” for “quality” and postulated that the area inside the triangle represented the features (scope).

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, a guy I respect a lot, still got stuck buying into the geometric nonsense by proposing the Iron Stool, in which we’re not dealing with a triangle, but a tetrahedron.  He still gets it wrong, for all of the reasons having to do with literal geometric interpretation.

Kyle Baley and Don Belcham came up with the idea of a balance, rather than a triangle, and took a few steps forward:

You can think of the inputs on the left, and the outputs on the right.  Want more features and/or quality?  Add more time and/or money.  This seems to make sense and is simpler to imagine than the triangular / tetrahedronal contortions imposed on us by the Iron Triangle.

But…

Where are the people?  You know, the human beings that show up every day and actually work on your project, interface with your customers, show up early, stay late, do their best, and go home to their families at night hoping they’ve contributed something worthwhile?

Well, it’s sadly embedded in the little dollar signs.

That tells you a lot right off the bat, doesn’t it?  More money = more people, or more “stuff” for people, like faster computers, better tools, Aeron chairs, etc.

What if we expanded our thinking a little bit, and put people first?  What if we recognized that happy employees, in the right situation, and with the right support and encouragement at all levels of the organization contribute mightily to the success of the project?

The traditional problem is that the bold terms listed above, on either side of the balance, are soft.  They’re squishy.  They are not easily measured, and not conducive to neat summaries in spreadsheets or slide decks or annual statements.  Bean counters and others for whom the human side of management is scary and foreign shy away from them.

Thought experiment: what do you think would be a bigger influence on the success of a project: adding one additional team member to a ten-person project team, or spending time to make sure that those ten are taken care of, respected, supported, treated as individuals, etc. etc. etc.?

I’d challenge you: give me two employees who know that the company cares, really cares, and works hard at all of the soft characteristics printed in red in the above diagram, and I’ll do better than your ten employees who feel like the company doesn’t really give a shit, and treats them as interchangeable parts.

Did your last project go over schedule by 17%?  Do you know why?  I’d wager in most companies the standard answer is something like “the client added scope” or “a project team member was on vacation”.  Even people who agree with me that human factors are far and away more important than what i might derisively term the bean counter factors are probably so afraid of speaking the truth that they might nod their heads in agreement.

What I’m not suggesting here is a radical realignment of corporate policies toward employees. (Although I might, in a different post).  What I’m advocating is that you start to recognized that people, and not money, features, or time, are the biggest and most important factor in your success.  And then, start to optimize your practices and policies accordingly.

Report back on your successes, here or privately at anthonys@crowdify.com.  I’m keenly interested to hear how it goes.

Marcelo Calbucci posted a link to a TechCrunch scoop broke the news this morning on Seattle 2.0 that Right Side Capital announced that they will be investing seed-stage startup money in 100-200 startups a year.  That’s a lot.  Marcelo links to this Tech Crunch article, which gets into a lot more detail about the announcement and the context in which to place it.

Already startup types are starting the debate about whether this (a) is game-changing after all, (b) will work, or (c) misses the boat on some other criteria.  For the most part the reaction is positive – an evolution / revolution in the classing funding model seems overdue, especially given the drought we went through in the last couple years.  And a  new approach driven more by metrics and less by relationships is … well, interesting, if not necessarily a sure thing.  It will be fun to watch during the lead-up to the funding announcements this summer, and then see what the growth and recapitalization requirements of the original set of companies looks like.

Putting this announcement in a personal context, what would it take for me to get Crowdify off the ground?  Four months of funding?  Six months?  Twelve?  It’s so hard to say, since I have yet to do the hard grunt-work of proving out the market with real live interested customers.  It could be that the first three brand managers I talk to all love it and want to throw business my way.  It could also be that it will take a year and thousands of phone calls / e-mails to get to my first five-figure deal.  Traditional VCs would want to know that the market was there to capture FIRST, before putting any money in, and I can’t fault them.  However, we’ll see if Right Side Capital’s new approach will work, and if it does, what it means to other “idea entrepreneurs” who need time and space to execute.

Interested in your thoughts.

The deadline is approaching for NWEN’s upcoming First Look Forum, to be held on Tuesday, April 13th at the Arctic Club in Seattle.  I’m seriously wondering if now is the time to submit a plan for Crowdify and put myself in consideration to pitch.

First prize is not a new Cadillac Eldorado, but rather free office space for a year in Axios’ space downtown (thanks for sponsoring, Adam!).  But from everyone I’ve talked to, the real value is in the coaching and feedback you get as you progress through the stages of the forum competition process.

I’m looking at the list of screeners and have met only a handful of them, and had meaningful conversations with only a couple of them, but it’s a high-profile list of local entrepreneurs, execs, and VCs.

Thinking…thinking…are you planning on submitting a business plan?  Tell me why in the comments!

Hot from my inbox —

The 15th annual Washington Technology Industry Association Industry Achievement Awards will be held March 4th, 2010 at Showbox SODO.  Organizer Katie Douglas writes that it will be a “casual affair” and there will be lounges that feature some of the tech behind the lifestyle characteristics (such as coffee, wine, and chocolate) that makes Washington such a great place to live.

I involuntarily laughed at the tagline/theme: “Washington Breeds Innovation”.  I’ve been doing a lot of connotative / denotative linguistic research as part of my work on Crowdify, and that phrase brings to mind the State of Washington furiously copulating with a passive, bespectacled, softly moaning Innovation.  I don’t know, maybe it’s a guy thing.  Maybe it’s just me.

Curious who the finalists in the various categories are?  I was too.  I’m most interested in the “Breakthrough Startup of the Year” category, in which Gist is nominated.  As I’ve written elsewhere in these pages, my hindbrain has a sort of unhealthy obsession with the algorithms behind Gist’s service and they all seem to be great people to boot.

I’ve seen the VholdR tech in person, and to my mind, it’s neat, but not as neat as Gist.  Plus they get demerits for funky spelling.  The Google correctly points you to their site if you type “vholder” in the search box, but still….

I don’t know a thing about DreamBox Learning, which is funny considering how many projects I’ve done in the online education space over the years.

I’m rooting for Gist in this category.

Register here: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/IAA

See you there?

Ever known the super-smart guy (typically, they’re always guys) who was just an absolute a**hole and couldn’t work well with others?  A recent GigaOM post, The Five Myths That Can Kill A Startup, refers to Reed Hastings’ term “brilliant jerks” to describe these people.  According to authors Michael Fisher and Marty Abbott:

Intelligence is important, but only insofar as it helps with performance and execution. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in “Outliers,” while some minimum level of intelligence might be necessary for superior performance, in many jobs it’s not in and of itself enough to ensure it. You need people willing and able to work as part of a team, and sometimes superior individual contributors can negatively affect team performance by creating affective or role-based conflict (for more on those, see Myth #3 below). As Reed Hastings puts it, you should eliminate all brilliant jerks from your team.

Which of course led me to Reed Hastings’ presentation on SlideShare that Om references.  I love it, and consider it a must-read for managers and entrepreneurs.  I like this statement in particular:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.

You ever work at a place and wonder how clueless management could possibly be?  (Scott Adams made a fortune off of this omnipresent phenomenon).  Look around: what are your company’s values?  They’re demonstrated by who gets rewarded, who doesn’t get rewarded, who gets hired, fired, reprimanded, how certain people are treated relative to others, relative pay, etc. etc.  The company’s support or non-support of certain people send an absolutely clear message about what’s important.  Printed mission statements and values declarations can’t hide it.

Now, having looked closely at that, do you still feel like your personal values are aligned with your company’s actual values?

If not, what do you do?