I take the web’s infrastructure for granted.  I open up Safari or Firefox and I access the web.  I turn on Xbox 360 and connect to Xbox Live to play friends across the world, buy virtual goods, and download trailers.  My iPhone can surf most sites on the web in native format, a favorite is Grub On the Go.  This blog is hosted at MediaTemple and people can reach this site 95% of the time (uptime could be better).  The infrastructure of the Internet with all of it’s plumbing is extremely intricate and changes quite often, but the one thing remains the same:  we need to access the web one way or another.

Traditionally, the gateway to the web has been Darpa, CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online/AOL, RED, Mindspring, Optimum Cable, RCN, Windstream, and various other access providers.  Some of the folks on this list are defunct but they all provided a way for us to access the richness of the web.  As a consumer, I didn’t care what they did behind the scenes to get me online; all I cared about was the speed I access the Internet at.  I want my webpages to load quickly, my tweets to go from pointA to point b, xbox live to load, and my connection to be reliable.

GigaOM wrote an article tonight entitled, As Broadband Growth Slows, Expect Speed Bursts.  A little excerpt from the article:

The latest company to follow this path is Windstream, a Little Rock, Ark.-based RLEC. The company said recently that it’s offering 12 Mbps ADSL2 service in some parts of its 16-state network. More importantly, it has increased its lowest-speed tier to 3 Megabits per second. Our good friends at DSLReports add that Windstream is offering the 12Mbps/1Mbps tier for $19.99 for the first six months, and $45 per month after that.

For sake of full disclosure, Windstream is a client of The Media Kitchen, the agency in which I work for and one of the digital media accounts I directly oversee.  I didn’t put them into this blog posting because they are a client, but because 12Mbps ADSL2 service is FAST and if they can roll this out, imagine what the larger providers can do.

Speed is a byproduct of a bigger pipe to and from my computer (or access device).  As consumers, we’re demanding bigger pipes because we’re not just reading content online, but we’re also creating content.  As we’re creating and consuming content, the quality of the content has gotten much greater and watching your favorite television show now takes more speed in order to watch it in high quality.

Besides access infrastructure, cloud computing and storage has been a hot topic for the past year and a half.    Amazon Web Services and Google are pioneering this space, but networks like AppNexus and 10Gen are emerging as unique players within a huge and potentially extremely lucrative market.

Web infrastructure is certainly interesting and it’s only just begun.

Sony has launched Sony Home, their virtual world enabling their community of users to interact with each other in a “game like” setting.  Apple is now toying with opening a store in Second Life (speculation).  Will this mean that ultimately, they will acquire Second Life and roll it out as their communications platform for their computers?  Will it be the next iteration of iChat?

One thing that we have learned is that people do not have have time to manage identities in multiple virtual worlds at the same time. If you are engaged in Habbo Hotel, then chances are, you don’t have time for Second Life.  If you’re playing World of Warcraft, then you may not have time to utilize IMVU.  Also, many of the previous brands who have released their wares into Second Life have all abandoned them after it being all the hype (front page of NY Times, etc).

I’m curious to see how this plays out.   What are your thoughts?

Arbitrage is making its way into the advertising industry. According to Dictionary.com, arbitrage can be defined as the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same securities, commodities, or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices.

Making headlines a few weeks ago was Wenda Harris Millard’s speech about trading media like pork bellies. She states that… “We must educate one and all about the value our digital offerings provide marketers and not trade our advertising space like pork bellies.”

Today, I uncovered an article in Advertising Age about MindShare’s restructuring into four groups, one of the groups entitled The Exchange is accountable for arbitragueing inventory.

An important aspect of the Exchange is that MindShare will be getting into arbitrage — meaning it will be both buying and selling media. Arbitrage is an important play of MindShare’s parent company, Group M, which has invested in Invidi, a company developing addressable TV ad technology. Though specific plans are still unclear, Group M will likely use the technology to buy chunks of TV inventory, make it addressable and resell it to marketers. MindShare will seek out similar opportunities where it actually owns media space it can sell to marketers.

For the past year, I’ve seen a few “exchange” based startups emerging into the advertising world. My friends at MediaMath are one of those folks. For those who aren’t familiar with exchanges, please reference this reference guide. The ADSDAQ trading desk was launched just weeks ago and they already have 6 agencies using it. It sounds like agencies are starting to move beyond just buying media…

This is where my issue lies. [to reiterate, these are my thoughts, not those of my employer] How are agencies structured today to handle a trading desk? Now that Bear Sterns is being absorbed, does this mean I have to go and recruit traders? Does the media buyer become a trader (buy and sell)? How does the current agency model account for this? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Also, are agencies buying and selling media utilizing their clients money? How does that work? If I know that ClientX gives me $5,000,000 to buy digital media, and I happen to arbitrage some media and turn a $1,000,000 profit, does that belong to ClientX or my agency? Just a few questions that I’m really interested in figuring out… who wants to help?

I’ve been meeting with mobile marketing startups for the last 6 years but have always remained hesitant to participate in the space because of the current infrastructure and mobile marketing initiatives. I guess all of the research and constant phone calls have softened me up to the mobile world and last week, posted about the iPhone.

I was reading some research this morning and wanted to share these tidbits from both Nielsen (mobile stats overall) and Rubicon Consulting (iPhone data):

• A third of iPhone users carry a second phone. There have been anecdotal reports of iPhone users carrying a second mobile phone, either for basic voice calling, or for other functions like composing e-mail. The survey confirmed those reports.
• A quarter of iPhone users say it’s displacing a notebook computer. 28% of iPhone users surveyed said strongly that they often carry their iPhone instead of a notebook computer.
• The iPhone increases phone bills. The iPhone has increased its users’ monthly mobile phone bills by an average of 24%, or $228 extra per year.
• E-mail is the #1 function. The most heavily used data function on the iPhone is reading (but not writing) e-mail.

Note that the iPhone data is skewed towards the early adopters.  I’m not sure that the mainstream adopters are going to replace their computer for an iPhone but this data is indicative of how mobile may shape the future.  The Nielsen report is located here if you’d like to read it.

MediaPost sent out a research brief this morning (I usually ignore them) and had some interesting information:

• The number of data users who recalled seeing mobile advertising between the second and fourth quarters of 2007 increased 38% (from 42 to 58 million subscribers)
• Asian-Americans and African-Americans are more likely to recall mobile advertising (42% and 40%, respectively) than all data users
• 26% of those who saw an ad responded at least once by sending an SMS text-message, the most popular ad response.  9% say they’ve used click-to-call to respond to a mobile ad
• 32% of data users said they are open to mobile advertising if it lowers their overall bill

These numbers are impressive but I’m assuming the response rate will drop as the medium becomes cluttered.  I’m personally not sold about getting SMS marketing on my mobile phone as that tends to remind me of SPAM in the days of email marketing.  The response rates for email marketing were extremely high in the early days but as the medium got cluttered, they dropped significantly.

I had dinner with one of my best friends and fellow entrepreneurs this evening.  He is one of the smartest guys on the planet  and I call him the mad scientist because of the way he views the world.  During the course of dinner, he opened my eyes into the “real” world of the iPhone - an area that I had never explored before because of my own ignorance.

For those of you who know me or have heard me talk about mobile marketing and such, I’m fairly bearish.  If we were in Europe or Asia, it would be a different story, but here in the USA, traditionally, it’s always been hard to pull off a mobile marketing campaign to a mass amount of people because of the current infrastructure that we utilize here.  It’s not to say that in the future, the infrastructure will change, but today…. it’s very tough.  Also, let me preface this by saying that quite a few brands are experimenting in the mobile space today and because of that, tons of startups are being funded… but I’m still bearish.  I’m also scared of penetrating one of the most personal devices… the mobile phone.  I know I don’t let people touch my phone and I only want information that I request on it.

Andrew showed me the world of iPhone apps and bookmarks.  Essentially, creating a bookmark on the iPhone screen that links right back to a webpage.  Genius.  I know this isn’t rocket science at all and I’m potentially one of the last people on Earth to find this out, but it just turned my prepackaged iPhone into a custom product….  my new computer.  Something else he showed was a Yelp application that tied directly into a database to find restaurants within a certain geographic location.  The restaurant tied into the Maps function on the iPhone to get immediate directions and it worked seamlessly.  The Internet tied into the Maps and it then tied into the Phone if you wanted to call the restaurant for reservations.

The future of mobile is that of leveraging the web from anywhere.  The iPhone won’t be the end all and be-all, but it will certainly pave the path for the future.  Mobile marketing isn’t as much as text messaging (spam?) or creating WAP sites, but rather tying a mobile component of your current content (as a product/service) and making it accessible via the new phones emerging such as the iPhone.

I’m starting to not be as bearish on mobile…

A colleague here at The Media Kitchen just forwarded me a link to a Newsweek article written by Clifford Stoll from the February 27, 1995 issue. If you are in anyway attached to the technology/Internet/digital media world, you probably have read it… or should go back and read it. My colleague wanted me to verify that the article was real as it was so ridiculous. Sadly so, Clifford was waaaay off on his assumptions and it is real.

Here are some tidbits:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community.Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems.

We may not have electronic town meetings, but our meeting recap is certainly online. The community that I live in (in Westchester) has it’s own social network. Yes, that’s right. Commerce and business has certainly shifted online… just look at Amazon, Zapatos, [amongst others] and all of the mortar stores that have digital counterparts. We believe in Amazon and it’s online presence so much, that we attribute$36 billion dollars to it’s company (marketcap). ShopBop, eLuxury, BlueNile, and such all have setup digital only presence but many traditional fashion retailers, as traditional as they are (Nordstrom, Neimans, etc) have all setup e-commerce sites.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

I’ve said it time and time again… I rarely read the newspaper. My newspaper are my RSS feeds. While a teacher may not be replaced by a CD-Rom, look at University of Phoenix and Rosetta Stone. Learning through online platforms are powerful. And why can’t teachers exist on CD-Roms? Oh wait, I’ve not seen a CD-Rom in years! (other than music CDs)

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

The man’s still right. We may not be using Usenet any more… but there is a lot of clutter online. This is where proactive and predictive filtering comes in… we’re not quite there yet, but we’ve started to see what is coming down the pipeline. I mentioned RSS above… this is what I’d call filter 1.0. While it’s not a great content filter, it’s a great site/feed filter. I know some content filters exist, but I’m not too privvy to them and I’ve not heard anyone speak really highly about them. Feel free to educate me in the comments section about this. I’m actually shocked that 13 years after this article comes out, we’ve not come a long way in the filtering aspect… but I can see why… due to needing structured information (say hello to the semantic web). There are a few A-list bloggers who shout louder than everyone else… but all-in-all, if you asked the average person in upstate NY who Michael Arrington is, they’d probably not know.

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Need I say more? Amazon Kindle. Sony Reader. Even a NY Times article on the future of electronic books.

Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

You know, in 1995, Clifford was right. It has certainly come a long way since. Before booking a trip, I go to TripAdvisor.com to check out hotel reviews and information. Crowdsourced editing. We didn’t really have that back in 1995… but it’s here today. Look at Shopping.com or Cnet.com for reviews. Voila. Even my wife reviews restaurants over on HermanWeb. The content is now out there… the search engines, which are the new homepages btw (more on that in subsequent posts), determine which pages come up first… so if there are good reviews, they should come up higher because of people linking to them. As for the technical limitations of server requests… I think we’re pretty much over that by now… if your site is on Digg or TechCrunch, hopefully you can survive the massive traffic surge, but generally, most sites are experiencing majority of uptime. Before I leave the topic of reviews, I do believe the majority of current digital review systems are flawed - as a review is fairly subjective and if someone of a different demographic/HHI background reviews something, should their review equal your review? You need to compare apples from apples. There are some very smart people working on this right now…

These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Every classroom since 3rd grade for me has had at least one computer. If computers in education wasn’t important, then OLPC (one laptop per child) wouldn’t exist… but wait, it’s hotter than ever.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete.

Point is made above. Also, add in Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak….

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?

Twitter. AOL IM. Gtalk. FriendFeed. FriendFinder. LavaLife. Jdate. Match. eHarmony. Facebook. MySpace. Bebo. ASW. AlwaysOn. You get it.

It’s amazing to look back into history. Someone is going to read this post 20 years from now and laugh at me. I can’t wait to read it.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’re well aware of the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview that took place in Austin. If we can look past this historical interview, you would notice that FriendFeed emerged and as some would quote, became the Twitter of SXSW.  Recently, there has even been a lifestreaming backlash posting that made the front page of Techmeme.

When Twitter first emerged, I was skeptical. I didn’t think I needed to broadcast to the world that I was eating or that I was sitting in traffic on the West Side Highway. I saw some applications for it in terms of groups getting together, but all-in-all, it’s been an application that was always secondary or tertiary to me. But, for a select few lifecasters (350k Feb ‘08, ComScore), this service has been serving them well.

Twitter contributes to a growing technological/MEdia segment called lifecasting (lifestreaming too). The notion of lifecasting/lifestreaming is that people are interested in your behavior both offline and online. This is not new at all, as even in the earliest days, voyeurism has been extremely popular with certain audiences. Facebook’s News Feed, is taking lifecasting to new levels and introducing it to audiences that never would have adopted it.

Lifecasting/streaming certainly brings a level of transparency to this world. In advertising, transparency is all the rage now with all of the major ad networks divulging their properties. In the latest Wendy’s advertisements, it talks about how their food is always fresh… and even the fish are from the north pacific. Transparency.

So I’ve been recently turned onto FriendFeed… how could you not with all of the recent hooplah around it. FriendFeed is certainly not the first in it’s market but apparently has a stellar team that’s building it out (ex-Googlers) and their credibility is gaining the startup some attention. In a market that’s all about transparency, someone has to aggregate all of the different lifecasting services together and create one platform or ‘feed’ (maybe the wrong term). FriendFeed aggregates all of my blog posts, Twitter “tweets”, NetFlix movies, Flickr photos, (and a lot more), all together and then mixes them with my friends (people I subscribe to). By doing this, you’re essentially creating a single place to get all the information you need about your friends. Certainly interesting. From an aggregation layer, I do like the opportunity that this affords.

In terms of FriendFeed overall - are we there yet? Here’s my FriendFeed. Is society ready to be fully transparent? Apparently Spitzer didn’t think so and he’s paying the price for it now. Honestly, I’m not ready….there are many things that I’m doing both personally and professionally that I’d rather not share. Not saying any of these things are illegal, but there are certainly times that I want my alone time. Anyone who knows me extremely well understands that I can easily survive alone. Justin.tv is the opposite and over 300k people are going to Justin.TV according to ComScrore in Feb 08… so there is an audience.

These lifecasting/lifestreaming services are not for everyone but it seems that many web applications are being built today with a massive target audience. Many of the major bloggers and journalists almost expect FriendFeed to be for everyone. I can almost garauntee that my mother would not use it.

There is one thing that we cannot change in this world and that’s time. We have 24 hours a day in order to live. Some of our lives are shorter than others, but if one thing remains constant, we’ve all been given the same amount of time per day to live. How much content can we consume in one day? How many different applications can we use in one day? How many different devices can we utilize each day? How many different feeds/websites can we use in one day? I personally don’t see where people have the time to update their lifecasting/lifestreaming feeds on a continuous basis. Life is all about priorities and for certain audiences, lifecasting/lifestreaming maybe just that… but for me, I think I may have to take a back seat position for now.

From an investment standpoint, we need to explore how this impacts the future of services.

There are two topics that I want to address but don’t have enough time to write two distinctly different posts.  So, I’ll write them in bullet format here:

• Mobile:  There’s been big announcements recently about an all-you-can-eat voice plans from Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T.  This is big news and I’m actually shocked that it has not been talked about more.  There are many implications of this but what I foresee is that the mobile world realize that they have more money to be made in data opportunities and/or people aren’t using all of their minutes and they are downgrading their accounts, thus losing revenue.  From my days in web hosting, an all-you-can-eat plan is appealing to the majority of users but they use less than 20% of resources allocated each month.
  • There is no doubt that mobile is going to be big.  It is already big.  I’ve been giving presentations recently where I hold up my iPhone and ask the difference between that and a regular desktop computer.  No one seems to be able to tell the difference in terms of functionality other than hardware specs and a few applications it cannot run.  I can blog, tweet (twitter), email, facebook, markup documents, spreadsheets, listen to music, maps, sms, get stock prices, surf the Internet, etc.  Sounds like a desktop, eh?
  • I’m seeing dozens of mobile companies pop onto the radar screen trying to do anyting and everything in the mobile space.  Bad idea.  Don’t try to be everything to everyone.  Concentrate on one thing and do it well.
• Kids:  Over at Conversation Agent, Valeria talks about a recent interview between Kawasaki and Ballmer in which Kawasaki mentions that 14 year olds have no idea about the history of Microsoft and that they think Halo and Xbox are pretty cool… so MSFT is pretty cool.  Those of us who have been around and out from under a rock know that MSFT has had a less than cool reputation but that fundamentally does not matter to certain audiences…
  • A fascinating point of view and one that I totally agree with, but one that I’ve not stood back to analyze.  Different audiences see brands in different light.  Even though something is the same (the same game, the same service, the same product, etc), to different people, it means different things.  There are many ways to utilize this in marketing

Just a few thoughts - wanted to get them out today.  Comment - I’ll respond…

This is the sixth interview in this series and I’m excited to announce that Sam Lessin, Co-Founder of Drop.io is participating. I’ve known Sam for a bit as we’re both participating in the New York entrepreneurial scene and apparently, our circles are fairly close together. His company is picking up some buzz here and there in the marketplace and I’m looking forward to what the future holds for his company, Drop.io.

Please welcome Sam Lessin…

1. State your name, title , years at current company/position:
Sam Lessin, Co-Founder, Drop.io. (Since August 2007, when my partner Darshan Somashekar and I started drop.io)

2. What are you currently up to?
Drop.io is a solution for simple private exchange (and Input/Output if you will). Take any type of media (pictures, video, audio, documents) through almost any digital input (web, email, mms, phone, fax) put it in a ‘discrete‘ location online, share it privately with exactly who you want, and no one else. No network, no search, kind of like an improved multi-channel FTP.
The ‘web 2.0’ community has been churning out great stuff for a long time for public sharing, where personal media and information is widely diffused across networks through social-, search-, tagging- etc. the thrust of the whole movement has been to let technology push your content out across different networks…

Drop.io takes a very different tack. We allow users to create simple private exchange points called ‘drops.’ Drops can be created in as little as two clicks, and users can optionally set things like passwords and self-destruction parameters. The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. There is no network and no search function, drops are just floating points for private exchange. You can create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share/subscribe/zip download the originals as you want.

The solution has an incredibly broad base of use, largely because there is incredibly broad demand for simple private sharing. There are thousands of people who use drop.io every day to privately share baby photos with family members, or party pictures with friends. At the same time, we have a ton of freelancers and SMBs using drop.io to collaborate on projects, and schools using drop.io as a simple platform for privately communicating with students.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
There are a few reasons – some which are business and some which are personal. At the highest level, it is wonderfully gratifying and fun to build something from the ground up you care about.

Business wise, there is an enormous and extremely broad demand for private sharing online and it is not being met by anyone in the market. Social networks and search engines are great, but the concept of simple private sharing is being left out in the cold. We want to fix that, because it is fun and important to build something that people want.

Personally, I really believe in this service on both functional and theoretical levels. Functionally, when Darshan and I set out to build drop.io we both maintained FTP sites just to move stuff around. We were constantly personally inconvenienced by the lack of a viable private sharing option for both work and personal uses. So, first and foremost, we built a service that we really wanted and needed ourselves.
On a theoretical level, I believe that it is important for people to have an option for simple privacy online. Lots of people like to talk about whether ‘privacy is dead’, that is just plain wrong. What has gone on is that for lots of reasons the internet has made it far easier to be public than to be private. People online have traded privacy for ease and functionality. This is the inverse of the historical norm, where privacy was easier and cheaper the publicity. The trade away from privacy fundamentally doesn’t have to be made online anymore. We are highly enticed by the opportunity to help return the internet to the historical norm by making digital privacy easy.

4. All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?
See above… the ‘problem’ is the #1 thing we care about.
5. Have you thought about your business model yet? I’m assuming so, so tell us a bit about it.
We have thought about the business model extensively. In my opinion, if you don’t have a tight business case you can’t really do anything of long-term significance because your service is unsustainable. So, we didn’t do anything until we were really confident in our model as much as our service.
We are a ‘freemium’ play, in that we give away a basic level of service and then make money when users want to upgrade for more storage capacity. Over time we are going to be rolling in other upgrade options around our various services (phone, fax, etc.) all of which have been proven already by different players in related markets.

6a. If you’re looking at an ad-supported model, how are you going about it? Do you have in-house ad sales? Using a rep firm? What are the challenges that you’re facing with getting ad dollars?
We don’t believe in the ad market for a service like ours anytime soon

6b. If you’re selling a product/service/subscription, how is that coming along? What are the challenges? Are you using the freemium model?
It is coming quite nicely. We are very happy with the rates at which users are upgrading. For us it was very important to quickly staring to sell some premium services off the bat, less for the immediate revenue, and more so we could start the process of test and learn around the fuller offering we are going to be opening up over the next several months.
The challenge is to be giving people what they want and allow them to buy it in the way they want to buy it. I think often people don’t do enough testing around how they are selling things/how people want to buy things.

7. As an entrepreneur or investor, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?
Competition is good. Competition is clarifying. It is great to push the envelope in a new direction, which we very much believe we are doing, but if people aren’t trying to compete with you or even straight up ‘rip off’ your service within a matter of several months you should start to get worried.
One of the very early questions you have to ask is why hasn’t someone already done this? We have some very compelling answers.

8. If your competitor called you up to have coffee and discuss shop, what would you do? Would you go? What would you divulge?
We play a relatively open hand of cards. I love speaking with ‘competitors’ or people generally in the space, it is a great way to find out how they are thinking about problems and helps you figure out where the market is going. I wouldn’t divulge anything technical that they couldn’t easily guess on their own, but beyond that we are quite open about what we are doing.
In most cases there are technical, legacy, or even HR reasons your competitors are not doing exactly what you are (that is, if what you are doing is good) – so, I generally believe you can be quite open about what you are up to and not risk all that much.

9. Is the current state of the economic market playing to your favor? If so, why? If not, why? What is your forecast of the market throughout 2008 and do you see affects? Macro and Micro economic theory would be interesting to hear about.
We are not too concerned with the US economy at large for a whole bunch of reasons. But, to single out one central idea, despite the fact that we have only been online since November, we are already highly internationally diversified in terms of our user base and our development is domestic… so, we love a weak dollar.

10. How much of your time is spent working? How much is spent with family? Have you found the entrepreneurial quality of life yet?
My girlfriend works way more than I do. On Valentine’s Day this year neither of us wanted to leave our blackberries at home, so she came up with a great solution – we swapped, I took hers and she took mine. That was a hugely trusting step on both our parts and took the relationship to a whole other level (kidding, sort of).
The cool part about drop.io is that I really love it and love working on it. I love working with the team, I love thinking about the problems. So, the line between work and play is highly blurred. In my mind, that makes the quality of life superb. Maybe a few less ski days and a bit more stress, but net-net I feel way ahead of where I was pre-venture.

Especially in NYC you are going to work a ton of hours no matter what you do – you should be working on something you care about and have equity participation.

If you have any questions or comments for Sam Lessin based on this interview, please leave them below and we’ll answer.

Following yesterday’s interview with Jordan and Abby from Haystack Media, I wanted to keep up the media and entertainment topic and release an interview with Nate Westheimer, who is the CEO and Founder of Bricabox, a next generation publishing platform. To see a live example of what they are building, check out the SXSWhere 2008 site.

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed to have these interviews delivered directly to your feed reader, click here.

Please join me in welcoming, Nate Westheimer.

Please state your name, title, and years at current company/position:
I’m Nate Westheimer, and I’ve been the CEO and Founder of BricaBox, LLC for the last year and a half. Meanwhile, I’ve also served as a consultant for National Public Media.

What are you currently up to? If entrepreunering (my word), tell me about your startup.
Today, I’m days off of launching my baby, BricaBox.com. BricaBox is a new kind of web publishing platform, focused on the social content market. We aim to power thousands of consumer and publisher generated websites, where, like with YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, and Wikipedia, people come together with the intention of collaborating on a base of content.

Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
In a word, opportunity: Opportunity in the industry as a whole; opportunity in the web publishing market; opportunity in the social web space; opportunity in the semantic web. With so many opportunities floating around, it’s hard not to be in this business, doing what we’re doing. I really couldn’t imagine doing something else right now.

All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?
The problem has been that tools to create social content sites have had a restrictively high barrier around them. We think there’s a ton of opportunity locked up when those tools are out of the hands of the masses.

Have you thought about your business model yet? I’m assuming so, so tell us a bit about it.
No – we hate business models. Just kidding… We’ve thought a lot about business models. Our model is to charge for premium features that make sense. This “make sense” part comes from our friend David Karp, who founded Tumblr and thinks a lot about “smart monetization.” Like him, we’re 100% against charging for things that have to do with creativity and personal expression. Therefore, an account is free, you can host your site on your own domain for free, you can run ads for free, you can host files for free, and you can skin the site with your own CSS for free. However, we’ll charge for excess storage, for complete white labeling (taking away the “BricaBar” at the top of the page), and for 100% advertising rights (our free accounts let you run advertising, but when you do, we monetize 50% of the page views).

If you’re looking at an ad-supported model, how are you going about it? Do you have in-house ad sales? Using a rep firm? What are the challenges that you’re facing with getting ad dollars?
While we’re still small, we’ll monetize the pages our users permit us to, using contextual ads served by Google. Meanwhile, we’ll forge relationships with brands who want to have an impact on the user generated content space, and look at partnerships with other media brands. In the future, we imagine we’ll be able to sell verticals of content on the platform: enough restaurant review sites, for example, will spawn a restaurant review ad channel.

If you’re selling a product/service/subscription, how is that coming along? What are the challenges? Are you using the freemium model?
We’ll start offering our premium accounts in the second quarter of this year, so the numbers are yet to come in. Nonetheless, the friends we have in the market tell us to expect 1% participation in the premium game.

As an entrepreneur, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?
We’re in the business of providing tools, and the fact of the matter is that the tools we provide are not provided by anyone else at the moment. That is to say: I’m not preoccupied by competition because anything we do is cutting edge and leading the space. I don’t mean to be arrogant, but that’s just what we’ve found. Our biggest competition is our own slowness.

If your competitor called you up to have coffee and discuss shop, what would you do? Would you go? What would you divulge?
I’ve been having a wonderful time meeting with our so-called competition (those folks the press wants to make our competition). Any time I talk to these folks, I’m very forthright about our vision for the technology. Certainly there are features I won’t discuss, but the overall vision is out there fore everyone, including our competition.

Is the current state of the economy playing to your favor? If so, why? If not, why? What is your forecast of the market throughout 2008 and do you see affects?
I think my business is rather market agnostic, mostly because we’re new and our product is new, which means no direct budgets are being cut. There may be some R&D budgets cut which negatively affects us, but for the most part, innovation will do well in whatever market. Meanwhile, I’m glad I’m not still in the securities market right now. This is not a fun market.

How much of your time is spent working? How much is spent with family? Have you found the entrepreneurial quality of life yet?
I’d say my quality of life is unfairly high. I spend a lot of time with my friends; but, I also spend as much time as possible with my business and folks interested in my business. This means a lot of my friends these days are in my industry, so it’s nearly impossible to separate personal from business. In the end, I’m lucky to be young and independent, because it’s this focus on the business and the industry which gives me an edge. Family will happen for me, but I can wait; business doesn’t wait.

DH: Nate, thank you for your time in answering these questions. I am sure there will be comments on the blog from some readers and appreciate you taking the time to answer them.

A new interview will be released M-F for the next 8 days… leading up to the launch of my book, Coloring Outside the Lines: Confessions of a Digital Native.