AMEE
As anybody who has looked into dieting or just improving their nutrition knows, there is a lot of conflicting advice on the impact of fats and carbohydrates on your body. But no matter what you ultimately conclude, you are now in the good position that you can select your food accordingly. This has become possible because in the US (and many other countries), food is labeled with fairly detailed nutritional information, even meals at restaurants.
The same, however, is not yet true for making product purchasing choices based on environmental impact. While some eco or green labels have started to emerge (e.g., EnergyStar in the US), we generally don't have the information available that would allow us to act on whatever our environmental convictions may be. There are many dimensions to the possible environmental impact of a product, such as whether the materials it is made from have been or can be recycled. Another important aspect that a lot of people care about are the emissions that a product caused during its manufacturing process and will cause during its operation. That turns out to be a much harder measurement problem to solve than the materials problem.
Consider a new computer. When the computer runs, it consumes electricity. The emissions caused by operating the computer therefore depend not just on how much you use it but also where your electricity comes from. Then there are the emissions that were caused by getting the computer shipped to you. That introduces more difficulty. How far did the computer travel? Was it shipped by truck the entire way or part of the way by air? What kind of truck was it? What type of airplane? But if you crack open the computer, then it really gets tricky. Every part that goes into the computer has its own emissions history. It too was manufactured and then transported to get to the place that assembles the computer. Determining emissions is thus a massive undertaking of connecting activities with their emission factors (which may well vary even for the same activity depending where or when it is carried out).
It is at this point that most people just give up and declare this problem as intractable. The team at AMEE, instead saw an opportunity for a lightweight web service. AMEE is a database in the cloud that allows tracking of activities and applying emission factors data to the tracked activities. It was built from day one to support other applications and web sites which gather the activity data from consumers and businesses. For consumers, that includes carbon calculators, e.g. Google UK's Carbon Footprint Project, but also services such as DOPPLR which uses AMEE to automatically calculate emissions for any trip it tracks. For businesses, existing systems that can plug into AMEE include accounting and supply chain applications.
The beauty of the AMEE approach is that instead of trying to solve the entire measurement problem in one go, AMEE starts with a known level of detail even if at that level of detail only estimated emissions factors are available. For instance, AMEE might have an estimate of the energy embedded in computer based on weight and materials. AMEE might also have an estimate of the laptop's power consumption based on average usage. And so on. As more and more systems connect to AMEE and provide data, those initial estimates can be refined and triangulated.
As Tim O'Reilly has described in his "Web Meets World" theme, we are on a path to increasingly instrument the world. Every time a new measurement system comes online, whether it is smart meters in homes, or cars that talk to the network, the data can be fed into AMEE allowing for a gradual transition from estimated emissions to detailed actual measurement of emissions. AMEE has made the deliberate choice to focus only on acting as a backend database and web service so as to not compete with any of the systems and companies that could provide inputs for AMEE and thus help improve the quality of AMEE's data asset.
All of this information will in turn let consumers and businesses make purchasing and production decisions that take environmental impact into account. We firmly believe that making more information available will ultimately result in better decisions and that the Web is the perfect mechanism for empowering people to do so. We are therefore excited to be investing in AMEE together with O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and TAG and look forward to working with Gavin Starks and the AMEE team.
December 10, 2008, By Albert Wenger
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Boxee
One of the big "aha moments" for me in the past couple years came when I hooked up a Mac Mini to a large display in our family room in the spring of 2007. Slowly but surely, our family started using the Mac Mini instead of the cable set-top box and the DVD player. My son watches YouTube videos on the Mac Mini, my daughter downloads tv shows and movies from iTunes and watches them on the Mac Mini. The Gotham Gal and I watch SNL on sunday morning on Hulu (that's Tina Fey on SNL being delivered into our family room via Hulu in the picture on the right). We also listen to music on iTunes and via streaming services like last.fm, Hype Machine, and, of course, fredwilson.fm on the Mac Mini. And when we are not actively engaged with it, the Mac Mini goes into screen saver mode and runs family photos that are sitting on a file server in our basement.
Not only are we watching less cable, we are watching less DVDs. We can get full length movies via Netflix, Hulu, and bittorrent on the Mac Mini. Many think that streaming video is not ready for "prime time" on a big screen in a family room but I can tell you definitively that is not true. We usually opt for streaming over file-based video due to the convenience, and the quality is fine.
All of this happens because the Mac Mini has a great HDMI interface, because it's small, compact, and doesn't make noise, and because the browser is increasingly becoming the interface to high quality audio and video services.
But there are some issues with using a Mac Mini in this way. First, the Mac Mini's Front Row interface isn't so great. We end up using the browser for most of our activities on the Mac Mini. And you need a wireless keyboard to interact with the web browser. That's OK, but not ideal for a family room/living room experience. And the browser interface doesn't have a simple integration point for all of the various video services we use.
We could use an Apple TV or a Media Center PC instead of an Mac Mini. But both Apple TV and Media Center are closed services, and you can't get to every piece of content you want to access with them. The open environment of a personal computer and a broswer is superior to both. I've always thought there was room for the "Firefox of media center software." The best candidate to be the Mozilla of this analogy is the powerful open-source XBMC project that has gathered quite a following among geeks since it started in 2002. So when I heard about a company called Boxee that was developing a commercial version of XBMC, I got excited.
I first met the founders of Boxee over a year ago. At the time they were considering building a hardware device to run the XBMC/Boxee software. I really liked what they were doing, but the idea of investing in hardware for the family room/living room scared me. I gave them a bunch of feedback and wished them well. Like most entrepreneurs, they didn't take no for an answer. And I've met with them on and off ever since. The big moment came this spring when I got boxee running on our Mac Mini on our family room. For the first time, we had a single interface built for a family room remote into all of our video, music, and photo libraries and web services. My daughter saw it and said "genius." That's a big compliment coming from her. But even so, I wasn't sold. Just because our family liked it doesn't mean there's a market for it. So I told Avner no once more.
In late September, Avner emailed me and told me that over 10,000 people had downloaded boxee for the Mac already and that someone in the open source community had built an Apple TV version. That was the market validation we were looking for. So we decided to get involved. Today Boxee is announcing that it has raised its first venture capital round co-led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. I will be joining Boxee's board and will be joined by my good friend Bijan Sabet, a veteran of the "web TV" sector who spent time at both Web TV and Moxi Digital.
I believe Boxee will be the "Firefox of media center software". It's simple to download and install, it's available on Mac, Linux, and Apple TV. It will soon be available on Windows. And over 100,000 users have signed up to use it, and over 50,000 people are now registered users. And that's for a service that's still in a closed alpha. All you have to do is look at the Twitter talk about boxee to see how excited and engaged the user base is. If you'd like to give it a try, signup here. I'll end with a video showing what I'm talking about. I hope you join me on Boxee soon. Please let me know if you'd like an invite and I'll send you one. I'll need your email address to do so.
November 18, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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Return Path
Reputation is critical to most businesses, but on the Internet reputation takes on an even more important role. When you do business with a person or a company that you cannot see and you don't know, you really need some data about their reputation. Some of the most successful businesses on the Internet are built on reputation.
eBay, for example, maintains a rating for each and every user in their marketplace that is updated to reflect their reputation in real time. User reputation ratings in eBay are crucial for creating an accountable, safe, and reliable community of buyers and sellers. Google's page rank algorithm, that is the heart of their search engine, effectively measures the reputation of each and every page on the Internet and returns search results sorted by those pages that have the best reputations for a given keyword.
We are constantly looking for investment opportunities in other Internet businesses that are built on reputation and several months ago, we closed an investment in a Company that we know well and have been working with for quite a while already.
That company is called Return Path and they are the leading provider of email sender reputation data, deliverability, and whitelisting through a service called Sender Score. The Sender Score database tracks email senders (using the sending domain and IP address of the mail server that each and every commercial mailer uses to send their email). Return Path captures a host of data points about that sender through relationships with various points in the email flow from sender to receiver. Examples of the kind of data they collect are frequency of mailing, mail volumes, complaints, bounces, and unsubscribe request compliance. In all, Return Path captures about 60 different types of data on over 100 million email senders, being sent to them by over 30 sources representing almost 100 million email users, in real time.
As the name implies, each commercial email sender is given a Sender Score that is dynamic and always changing to reflect the current reputation of that sender. Return Path publishes these Sender Scores to the public at senderscore.org. If you are curious about the reputation of an email sender that regularly sends you mail, you can find it at senderscore.org by looking them up either by domain or by IP address.
Return Path has built a large business over the past five years servicing the commercial email marketplace with various products that all rely to some extent on email reputation. For example, Return Path's Sender Score Monitor product is a dashboard service that commercial email senders use to monitor their delivery rates at different ISPs and filters as well as test their emails before campaigns go out to help prevent problems. Monitor uses Sender Score reputation data to explain to commercial mailers why they have delivery problems so they can fix them. Return Path's Sender Score Manager product is a full service version of Monitor that includes expert professional services to provide email senders additional help in managing deliverability and ISP relationships. Return Path's Sender Score Certified is the industry's largest whitelist service that allows mailers with very high Sender Scores (ie reputations) to be assured of getting through spam filters at over 1 billion mailboxes worldwide, from Hotmail to Yahoo, to major corporate filters. In all, Return Path has about a half dozen services - including a number of products and services for ISPs and commercial email filters - and is regularly rolling out new ones.
I've known Return Path since 1999 when my prior firm, Flatiron Partners, invested in the company in its first venture round. I've been on the board of Return Path since 2001 and have watched Return Path build its reputation based email deliverability business into the market-leading provider. Return Path recently made the determination to divest itself of its other semi-related lines of business to focus exclusively on the email deliverability and reputation business. They also acquired Habeas, their largest competitor in the deliverability business. In the process of doing these transactions, an opportunity presented itself to bring a new investor into the company, and Union Square Ventures was very pleased to be asked to be that new investor. You can read CEO Matt Blumberg's blog post about the transformation of the business here.
Those that follow our investment activity closely will notice that this is a "later stage" investment, something that we are not known for doing. Brad mentioned in the post announcing our new fund that we would selectively look for late stage investments that operate in markets we know well and find attractive. This is the second such investment and certainly not the last.
We are very happy to be an investor in Return Path, joining Flatiron Partners and our good friends Sutter Hill and Mobius. And we are thrilled to be able to back a terrific management team led by Matt, Jack Sinclair, and George Bilbrey. We look forward to creating the next big reputation based business on the Internet.
October 30, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed
I had a beer recently with Dave McClure of 500 Hats. As is always the case when I get together with Dave, we had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation about how the Web is changing the way businesses get built.
At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.
Dave immediately said he’d give me three months to blog that before he did. I thought that was generous even for me who doesn’t blog easily or often. But just to be sure I make the deadline, here is the post.
The basic insight that the flow of innovation has reversed has been out there as a meme for a while. Fred wrote about it and referenced Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 article. I took a shot at why it was happening; I focused on changes in the way services are built and their complexity. The conversation that Dave and I had was more about how critical the user interface is in consumer facing web services and how that might influence the flow of innovation.
We have marveled more than once on this blog about the remarkable efficiency of Craigslist. That service is essentially a very lightweight governance system that manages an enormous collection of users who contribute all of the content and much of the oversight that makes the service work. It is because Craig and Jim focus on managing the efforts of their users instead of doing the work of those users that Craigslist is so phenomenally efficient. Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems. Facebook and Twitter come to mind.
Even services that do more than mediate communications among their users often depend on users contributing data through their engagement with the service before they can provide value back to those users. Wesabe can only help users understand their spending and suggest ways to do more with less because users share their spending data with the service. Del.icio.us depends on users tagging the Web in order to be able to help users discover sites, services and memes on the web. Last.fm only works because users share their listening behavior with the service.
In the old days, electrical engineers focused on getting computers to work not on getting people to engage with the systems built on top of those computers. The folks that built enterprise software were vaguely aware that their systems had to be accessible to the humans that used them but they had a huge advantage. The people who used them did so as part of their job, they were trained to use them and fired if they could not figure them out.
Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.
Designing a system that does that is not an electrical engineering problem. It is a social engineering problem. The best social engineers are working today on consumer facing web services. They understand that there is enormous potential leverage in those services. The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service.
So that, it seems to me, is one more reason the flow of innovation has reversed.
September 29, 2008, By Brad Burnham
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Power to the People
The environment is another area where the web can enable the
kind of structural change that shifts power to individuals. Again much of this is due to the vastly
reduced cost of moving information around and acting on it. For instance, the cost of producing
electricity depends a lot on the load in the system and on the availability of
various sources (e.g. if the wind is blowing). Prior to the web it was difficult, albeit not impossible, to disseminate
a fluctuating electricity price to households and give them the ability to act
on it. The web makes this almost trivial
and can thus enable individuals to adjust their demand. With the web it is even possible for
individuals to do this when they are not at home (this being an almost literal
example of “power to the people”!). Similarly, it used to be difficult to
gather and analyze all the data necessary to understand the environmental
impact of a particular activity. The web
allows for this to happen in a seamless manner. You book a flight online, the reservation site can query a database and
tell you about the carbon footprint. The
same could happen for any online purchase. Imagine going to Amazon and comparing two products and seeing not just
their price and features, but also their lifecycle environmental impact in an easily comparable fashion.
The shift away from existing institutions in education, the environment and other areas up for change will not be brought about magically by the web alone, but by companies that use the web to create the right kind of platform. We believe that these represent tremendous startup opportunities over years to come and look forward to meeting with entrepreneurs and teams working to give "power to the people."
September 22, 2008, By Albert Wenger
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