My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

As I currently work at a startup I have a small stake in the company. When talking with one friend of something I have been working with someone with on the side, the question came up over if this was a conflict of interest. I was actually quite shocked to hear the question at first, not only did I expect them to do likewise, as I know many that do. The full on conflict of interest statement just shocked me. Being at a startup it does make it slightly more of an interesting statement, but I received similar comments sometimes at my former Fortune 100 employer. I’ll start with that place and then migrate to the startup environment.

I could not disagree more being an employee at some place, and working on additional things being a conflict of interest. In short you are an employee, not property, your best interests lie with yourself. Sure its great if you believe in the company and what they do, but in our generation you are not attached for life to the company you work for. The company has claim on what you do between 8-5 with regards to work, sure if you do things that may damange a company brand or your effectiveness to do business its fair for them not to retain you, but simply doing additional work in your spare time? Hardly!

Now as we move on to the startup atmosphere, where it’s pretty standard that when becoming employed you receive some amount of equity in the company. In most cases with not being a founder this stake is of relatively small size. Sure you could consider Google where I believe it was over 400 employees that were made millionaires by their IPO, but these situations are very rare. The equity receive normally vessts over a period of time, and from my perception is simply equivilant to a portion of your pay no more no less. Sure it does make you feel more of a sense of ownership, but does not extend to the full extent of the business owning you.

As an employee you’re being paid to perform a job, they don’t have full claim to what you do on your time.

Many people criticize Wal-Mart for the way they run their business. I personally find no problems with it, as their goal is simply to make prices competitive. If you care about the other details then either A. shop else where or B. donate to those causes you feel should be supported with the money you save. While sure some of these qualms may be justified I’d like to hint at another thought, of why people don’t take advantage of the same approaches.

You see I recently started using a service, which I’d prefer not to disclose yet that gives me access to completing very monotonous and tedious tasks for very low price. Indeed there is some overhead involved but once you learn to manage it effectively, and that is the key to do it effectively. Because in reality anyone can manage, but the vast majority over manage things, rather than giving them just the right amount of attention. But back to the primary point, the idea of taking tasks that you normally wouldn’t do because of their tedious low value nature and getting those completed for a very low cost can become extremely valuable for you. When you start to think out if you had more time to do those tasks hundreds of things probably come to mind, so I’ve encourage everyone to explore the low cost options for work/support and try to leverage them to your advantage

Live video streaming from your phone might just seem like another form of lifecasting, a video form of twitter, or even a mobile version of ustream.com or justin.tv, but it really is far more than that. A few people have taken these mobile streaming services such as Qik, Flixwagon, and Kyte and really used them to their fullest capacity. Sure you can go to an extreme like Robert Scoble, but admittedly most of his content from Qik can be pretty good.

The real thing about mobile video streaming is something that some people have mentioned about twitter. Twitter often breaks the news, or has more information about breaking news than anywhere else. As much as anything thing else it allows for quick live footage of events. Whether its breaking news or an impromptu interview that someone happens to come across. Those willing to embrace this new form of potential reporting, and sacrifice expensive editing and high end video equipment will come away with more interesting pieces and find a rapidly growing following of consumers that tune in.

Mobile video streaming is far far bigger than ustream and justin.tv. It’s about more than showing the day to day happenings of your life whenever you want, and more about continuous access to news and happenings.

So traditionally I’ve been a very do it yourself person. I wanted to be the person that didn’t have to rely on anyone, and thus far it’s worked pretty well. I can handle my day to day chores, as well as do my job, and most any side project of venture I take on I feel like I can accomplish pretty well. However, I recently asked my question if that was the best approach. While it’s good to be self reliant, the people at the top seldom do everything on their own. If I take notice of where I spend my time, most of it is on tasks that produce very very little value. Meanwhile there’s other tasks where I only have time to spend a few hours a week that produce much larger value.

On this point what I’m looking into is outsourcing many of these tasks. While it will take additional time to manage that process and delegate the tasks I believe I’m currently at a break even point where it makes sense. From there it can only go uphill and not down. I’ll likely post again in a few weeks after I’ve seen how this is progressed, but it seems those that are accomplishing a lot, in large part its because others do so much for them.

In the coming weeks I’m going to be working with a friend to help his venture in a new partnership that someone has approached him about. This partnership is rather large and I’m not at liberty to disclose details yet, and while this is indeed great news for the site, the great news for users is the site is already fully available.

In short fotoviewr is one half of an online photo album, it doesn’t store your photos for you, but allows you to take your existing photos from flickr or smugmug (with other support coming soon) and instantly put them into a visually appealing gallery. To me the nicest thing about it is the variety. I’ve used piclens before, and while I love piclens to scroll through 1000′s of pictures quickly, that seems to be the extent to which I use it. I can’t use piclens to show off my photo’s to friends or family. While browsing through a standard flickr page isn’t a bad experience, it isn’t a good one. Fotoviewr really does seem to deliver the other piece of what is missing from online photo sites.

Check out a few of the sample’s below, I’ve taken a few of my personal pictures from the past 4th of July and put them into a few of his views that are available. All-in-all this took me a fraction of the time it took to type this post, which is how more things should be online, simple.

At a conversation today we got into a discussion about how ebay can compete with amazon. Which alone is enough content for an entire post, as they really aren’t playing the same game so not really competing. Instead I’d like to talk about where the conversation progressed to. To me the most interesting thing about ebay isn’t how they won the long tail, or how users are unhappy with the increasing costs placed on them. Instead its more at the level of where they really lost out.

You see, ebay had a devoted following back around 2000. Millions of people would visit their site, buy items, focus on their feedback rating, often spending time in the same category. While at the time most of this was indeed innovative, they stopped there. If they had only taken it a step futher and exposed the final piece of the puzzle by allowing users to interact with each other. If they had developed a network of users that could communicate with each other, that shared interests based on product categories, they could have easily been one of the largest early social networking sites out there. As facebook initially exploded as a social network for college students, and other more recent ones focusing on younger crowds, meanwhile you have linkedin to as a professional network. Ebay could have very much been the network for collectors, or anyone purchasing similar items. Not only would have this increased user engagement, it would have driven more sales.

Take for example if I’m a fan of a particular brand of jeans. I may be very proud of the brand I’ve found, but recently discovered some that were newer and more hip. Well I’m going to be a bit more hesitant to share that with my friends I hang out with as I want to be the one that’s hip versus everyone else having them as well. However if I have a similar community that I connect with online, I can share this information, build a repoire with them, and still maintain my step ahead of friends. It allows your users to become you product recommendation engine versus the Amazon approach of through a lot of machine learning at the problem.

And the most unfortunate part of it all, I’m not sure ebay even realizes they missed the boat.