Orrin Hatch wants your renegade software pirating computer vaporized.

Via Wired: See Also

• Can Techie Oust Orrin Hatch?
• Orrin Hatch, Software Pirate?
• Hatch Wants to Fry Traders' PCs

Orrin Hatch, the entertainment industry-affiliated Republican who made it a federal crime to play a DVD on a Linux computer and tried to enable copyright holders to destroy the computers of suspected copyright infringers, is accustomed to representing Utah in the United States Senate.

After voters head to the polls on Nov. 7, he will most likely continue to do. But it won't be because there was no young, straight-shooting, idealistic, tech-savvy candidate there to oppose him.

His name is Pete Ashdown, and if anyone can clue Congress in to technology before it legislates the internet into a bunch of pneumatic tubes, it's Ashdown, who breathes bytes and exhales bits. He founded XMission (the first and largest ISP in Utah), deejayed raves and posted a Wiki version of his campaign platform for anyone to edit. One contribution to that Wiki formed a cornerstone of his platform: that the Iraqi people should vote through a referendum on whether U.S. troops should stay in their country.

In an age where energy magnates meet behind closed doors with elected officials to determine policy, Ashdown posts a calendar showing every meeting he takes in a day, and thinks other politicians should do the same.

This political transparency comes as a breath of fresh air to Ashdown's supporters, many of whom reside outside the state of Utah. The New York Times pegged Hatch as the "overwhelming favorite" there, but that hasn't stopped Ashdown from fighting for every last vote in a state he considers to be full of Democrats who just don't know that they're Democrats.

Entrepreneure: Parallel, serial, or out of work?

 Are parallel entrepreneurs functional? A post Via A VC.

This week we saw Evan Williams launch Obvious Corporation.

Obvious is a place where Evan and other developers can build web services and launch them. They can do this in parallel as they have already done with Odeo and Twitter. Buying out the investors in Odeo means that Evan and his colleagues are doing this with their own time and money.

I think its a smart model. Build a network of web services (Evan calls them web apps), use the popularity of one service to launch another, keep the services that are small but successful, shut down the ones that don't work, and spin off the ones that really take off. I like it.

I think we are seeing more and more parallel entrepreneurship. It makes sense. Entrepreneurs realize that serial entrepreneurship means putting all their eggs in one basket. VCs get to leverage a portfolio effect and I think we'll see more entrepreneurs try to do the same."

MySpace & FacePage Trouble: Those ungrateful teens.

It seems that MySpace isn't cool anymore, but my daughter could have told you that.

MySpace is going to go the way of Cabbage Patch Dolls and Pet Rocks. The spam, negative press, worried parents looking over teen shoulders. The unbelievable rise of MySpace feeds right into the fad phenomenon. What they should have done is slow the growth and 'trend' their way upwards. Fads by nature are not sustainable.

Of course, they sold and cashed out to the tune of $580 million and left  News Corp. holding the bag.

Startups, venture, hiring, tech, geeks, & other smarts.

Paul Graham writes insightful essays on... 

• How to Start a Startup.
  Build something users love, and spend less than you make.
• Hiring is Obsolete.
  The market is a lot more discerning than any employer.
• How to Make Wealth.
  To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.
• Ideas for Startups.
  The initial idea is not a blueprint, but a question.
• Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas.
  A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful.
• The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
  Some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
• How to Fund a Startup.
  Venture funding works like gears.
• How to Present to Investors.
  Explain what you're doing and why users will want it.
• The Venture Capital Squeeze.
  Why not let the founders have that first million, or at least half million?
• The Other Road Ahead.
  You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you.
• What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
  There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.
• What the Bubble Got Right.
  Even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change.
• A Unified Theory of VC Suckage.
  If you're not one of the very top funds, you're condemned to be the bad guys.
  

Tag Jungle presents at Launch: Silicon Valley Venture Showcase

Tag Jungle has scored a big win in the visibility wars before it's even launched. The Tag Team has been pushing hard to go live with the site while Phil has been scrounging around trying to keep everyone fed.

The Tag Team announced tonight that Tag Jungle has been invited as one of only 30 tech startups to present at  Launch: Silicon Valley Venture Showcase. This is a big win for the wonderbread boys.

Tag Jungle will be showcasing their solution to make sense of the blogosphere. With a bazillion blogs up and running and Google and Technorati hitched to a linear search strategy of back links and keywords, there's room for a better solution. Tag Jungle thinks they're it.

I've seen it. They might be.

Tag Jungle uses some novel approaches to make sense of the millions of blog posts and sorts them using recognition patterns developed at BYU. (Help me out here if I get off base here Phil.) This new context recognition ability allows Tag Jungle to determine what the salient points of the post are and what the post is about without the keyword cha-cha. It also determines what other relevant tags might be of interest to the user and displays them as a tag cloud along the right.  I've seen this in action and it is mucho impressive. The user can use filters to target the information they're interested in including a cool 'sentiment' filter. (I'll let Phil describe that.) The relevance of the search results promises to be an order of magnitude over what's available.

If you're blogging and don't have any hardwill towards the Tag Jungle Tarzan Team (ie. If they don't owe you money.) throw them a bone and link to their site. You'll also want to jump on as a new user and try out the cool little gizmos they've built in.

Business 2.0 disruptor round table: Inquire within.

Uncle Web 2.0 want's you! Erick Schoenfeld over at Business 2.0 is asking for input. 

For the past couple of weeks I've been putting together an impromptu roundtable tied to our current Disruptors cover story.  And the response has been amazing, considering the last-minute notification I gave the attendees.   A coupel of them are even flying in from Europe.  The roundtable will be this Thursday in San Francisco, and about 40 entrepreneurs, CEOs, VCs, researchers, and bloggers will all come to talk about how to build a disruptive business, and the pros and cons of doing so.

The guest list includes CEOs, founders, and VCs from nearly all the companies profiled in the story (Zopa, Jajah, Netvibes, Coghead, Salesforce.com, NextMedium, Applied Location, Blue Lithium, Nanolife Sciences).  It also includes other disruptive entrepreneurs like Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Prosper CEO Chris Larsen, Rebtel co-founder Greg Spector, GigaOm Malik, TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington, del.icio.us founder (now Yahoo employee) Joshua Schachter, Writely founder (now Google employee) Sam Schillace, as well as VCs David Cowan, David Hornik, and Christine Herron.  These folks are all practioners of the fine art of shaking up established industries. 

But here's where I need your help.  How can I shake up these folks?  What questions should I ask them?  What do you want to know about the ins and outs of taking on industry giants?  What can I do to make the event as constructively disruptive as possible? (Please give me your suggestions in comments).

The first toad is free...

 Seems like it might be time for an cross-species intevention. From NPR:

"We noticed Lady spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard," Laura Mirsch recalls.

Lady would wander the area, disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed.

"Then, late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in," Laura Mirsch says. "She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up, and out plopped this disgusting toad."

It turned out the toads were toxic -- and, if licked, the fluids on their skin provided a hallucinogenic effect.

What followed was the Mirsch family's quest to stop their cocker spaniel from indulging herself. But it wasn't easy. Lady was persistent, and resourceful.

The situation seemed to resolve itself when the toads went into hibernation for the winter.

But when they returned, so did Lady -- and with a vengeance.

"We couldn't keep our dog's addiction a secret any longer," Laura Mirsch says. "The neighbors all knew that Lady was a drug addict, and soon the other dogs weren't allowed to play with her."

In the end, Lady seems to have found a way to manage her problem.

"She seems to have outgrown the wild toad-obsessed years of her youth," Mirsch says, "and now only sucks on weekends."

Tankball: just the thing to bring to Fight Club.

Tank paintball. Now this looks fun. (Hey, is that Michael Moore in the turret?)

Stuart had the guns removed and contacted Jez Smith, 26-year-old local engineer and serial inventor, to make the biggest paintball gun ever seen. Their chosen ammunition, fired by compressed air, would be paint-filled ping-pong balls.

The first attempt blasted a ball into orbit. Jez lost sight of it after a mile-and-a-half when it passed the church spire. It also sent a small potato through the sound barrier. Over time, he calmed it to a legal and relatively modest 200mph. Jez then designed a 40mm, 8ft steel barrel to slot into the turret and the company now has five. "Obviously, these aren't proper guns with rifled barrels or they'd be illegal," says Stuart, 38. "But a ping-pong ball full of liquid doing 300ft per second is lethal. That's why we operate with sealed hatches."

Multipreneure or Parallelpreneure?

 From the Mercury News,

``Basically, everyone I know is involved in five or six projects right now,'' said Scott Rafer, 38, former CEO of the search engine Feedster and now CEO of blog tracker MyBloglog.com, co-founder of Mashery.com, a stealth-mode company aiming to help Web developers, and chairman of WiFinder.com, a WiFi hotspot directory. ``VCs spread their risk across numerous companies,'' said Rafer. ``Why shouldn't we?''

George Zachary, a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures on Sand Hill Road, compared the climate to Hollywood. ``It's like how multiple people get involved in multiple movie projects as insurance. Entrepreneurs are responding to the hits-driven nature of the industry, where only a few big acquisitions are happening every year.''

... Indeed, most observers agree that a committed business partner is critical to make running more than one company work. ``The entrepreneurs I've studied have found partners who complement the entrepreneur very nicely and who devote fuller attention to an individual venture,'' said Noam Wasserman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

Connect Magazine: I guess it's my point of view except for the fat guy in front.

I was flattered when Connect Magzine called me and asked if they could send up a writer and run an article on my. (Connect article) I prattled on for an hour at least before Lisa felt she had had enough.

But that's not what this post is about.

Geoff Osmond called me later and asked if they could come up to Park City and take a picture for the article. Fine with me. Everyone at Connect is great to work with. So Kevin Kiernan proceeded to snap a few pictures. I was happy enough until he showed me a few of the shots on the back of his camera. Who the hell is that fat guy standing in front of me? That was my first thought.

Here's the picture that Kevin took. What the hell's happened to me?

 Now I'm not totally wrapped up in vanity but hey, that's not nice.

Especially since this is how I think of myself. (This is a promo shot for my publisher and it's about 10 years old.)

Startups take their toll. I used to be something of a gym rat. I ran the NYC Marathon. I was in really good shape.

Seven years of startup hours have left their mark. Now I've got Married Mans Disease.

I'm going to the gym. 

Silicon Valley: It's location that makes you visible & viable.

Why will Silicon Valley rule the start-up universe? Because they're already there.

From the New York Times comes an article on location awareness in VC backed startups. 

Los Angeles area also has a pool of talented engineers (working at aerospace companies like Lockheed, Northrop and Hughes) and great universities (notably Caltech and U.C.L.A.) and plenty of money to invest. “But in Los Angeles,” he said, “people are scattered across a wide area; everything is more spread out.”

It’s harder for entrepreneurs to meet with one another and with investors, he added. And that means connections take longer, deals move slowly, fewer companies are formed. “Like a gas, entrepreneurship is hotter when compressed.” he said.

Sequoia makes its preference for the 20-minute rule almost explicit, telling applicants whose companies are at the “seed stage” (receiving less than $1 million) or “early stage” ($1 million to $10 million) that “it is helpful if the company is close to our offices” because they “require very frequent contact.”

And more on startups as a priority:

“In New York, it would be extremely difficult to find a law firm willing to defer the first $20,000 of your legal fees,” Mr. Sternberg said. “Here, we got that. It’s a pretty standard thing in Silicon Valley.”

... He did end up needing Silicon Valley for something else: technical talent that would be willing to accept equity in place of any salary. Six weeks ago, he moved to Silicon Valley to recruit more people like his chief technical officer, who has been working full time since Jan. 1 for equity only.

“Elsewhere, if people in a large organization think you have potential, they offer you a job, trying to save you from the uncertainties of a start-up,” said Mr. Sengupta, who himself has worked at Oracle, Microsoft and General Motors. “In Silicon Valley, they say, ‘Can I join you?’ ”

Mr. Sengupta now has six “employees” working for BeyondCore without salaries. Only in Silicon Valley, he said, do “people have confidence that if you act on great ideas, the money will come.”

Design Engine: Robin Peng builds really cool things.

I met Robin Peng at a networking event this week and we immediately hit it off. Robin runs Design Engine, an industrial design shop where they're working on some stuff that just blew my socks off. (He let me play around with a 3D modeling tool that gives feedback. You can lift, move, bounce anything in the environment and actually 'feel' the differing weight. It was mindblowing.) I really liked the parachute Hummer that they designed for the Army. Rob made me sign a couple of non-disclosures so I can't tell you what they're up to except that you'll be seeing some of it soon. I didn't get home until 2 a.m..

Robin went to Art Center at the same time I was at USU. At the time (84-88) USU had one of the best illustration programs in the country and we'd bus down to LA in the summer to meet people. Art Center was always on the list. It was eye-opening to pull the bus into the parking lot and see that the students were driving BMW's and Lamborgini's. They'd rent Tigers from the Zoo for drawing classes. It was another world. We did kick their ass thought, at least in the illustration department.

Rob came out of the auto design program and was hired by Ford's Advanced Concept division. He's a 'Golden Child' in the best sense of the word. He's also just a great, genuine guy who I immediately trusted. I've set up a meeting with his team Monday to show the some medical laser & IPL technology that I'm in the process of turning into a business.

I'm adding Robin to the Fight Club list so you might meet him there. 

This little widget is driving mucho traffic.

My blog is worth $40,887.98.
How much is your blog worth?

I stumbled across this little Technorati API application that gives you a value for your blog or site based on the number of inbound links priced according to the numbers on the AOL-Weblogs deal. (He figures out that at $25 million valuation, each inbound site (as per Technorati) is worth $564.54.)

It's a little blog-vanity.

Here's the code if you want to add it to your site:

Click to read more ...

Big Chair: Just what every stylist wants.

My good buddy Shane Jones is getting close to opening his business Big Chair Salon & Spa Suites.

Big Chair (He stole that name from me.) is an almost tech solution to a small business problem.

Opportunity: Every hair stylist, massage therapists on earth wants to own their own salon.

Problem: Salons and spas don't make money (6% margins nationwide) and have high startup costs.

Solution: Big Chair builds out individual 'suites' that they lease by the week, providing exactly what the market wants. Every stylist can now own their own salon and run it however they wish.

Shane's a smart guy and knows this market. The beauty of this business is that he'll have 'no employees', it's just a simple lease agreement that gives the tenants what they want and prevents all the headaches.

Fight Club: To flame or not to flame, that is the question.

Matt Asay wrote a column in Connect Magazine about entrepreneurship and startups in Utah. Matt states that Utah has significant hurdles for startups and concludes that entrepreneurs should consider leaving the state in order to gain experience. (I'm speed paraphrasing.)

Chris Knudsen takes exception to this on his blog here. In addition to trashing Matt's article, Chris uses the following language to attack Matt:

"Bay Area transplants riding into Utah on their high horses and knocking the state.."
"condescending garbage"
"asinine"
"How may I help you leave Utah…forever?"
"leave the Bay Area attitude in the bay. We do things a little different here and for that we offer no apology."
"don’t lecture me about whining. You’ve made an art out of it and Connect has been your outlet."

First: I do not know Matt Asay. I do not really know Chris Knudsen (although I met him once at Fight Club.)

Second, and this is the point, while Matt may be right or wrong, it's obvious to anyone reading Matt's blog (AC/OS) that he's worth listening to. Chris damages his credibility by resorting to personal attacks. No matter what your disagreement with an opinion, personal attacks are unwarranted. I've been on the receiving end of these type of flame attacks and it's not pleasant. So while Chris won't apologize, I will. Sorry Matt.

Utah has potential, but to think that Utah isn't a pale shadow of the coasts is silly. The reason companies or entrepreneurs relocate is because it's in their best interest. Matt's opinion is one I find reasonable (as were his comments on Utah's funding problems.). The first step in change is to understand where there are problems. Personal flame attacks have no place in the discussion.

I'll extend an invitation to both Matt and Chris to duke it out at Fight Club. I'll supply the oversized sumo suits.