The other day I did what I do with increasing frequency: I wanted to meet an exec (call him “Exec A”) at a startup company (call it “Company X”) where Valhalla might invest, so I looked in LinkedIn to see who was connected with them.

An old friend from Palo Alto days was indeed one degree of separation from Exec A, but when I contacted my friend — and, by the way, it was great to catch up with him on all kinds of things — he said, “I hardly know A and I know nothing about X”.  He had LinkedIn with A because they had worked together once, but it was not a meaningful connection.

There are pressures to make meaningless connections: pressures on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter.  And a kind of Gresham’s Law takes over: the bad links drive out the good.

I’ve watched it happen with UseNet, with email, with the Web, with portals, with Quora, with the social sites cited above.

So maybe there isn’t an absolute “network effect”.  Maybe above a certain size the debasement of links takes over and the value of network declines.

I’m certain that smarter folks than I have worked this problem.  I’d welcome any links to discussions.

But, please, only the good links.

In response to my post on “What will be the SQL of NoSQL”  William Candillon of 28msec wrote:

Our take is JSONiq, an extension of XQuery for JSON: http://jsoniq.org.

First I’d heard about JSONiq, and, truth be told, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about JSON except the name.  Or about XQuery for that matter.

(One drawback of crossing over to the VC side is I fall inexorably behind on tech, despite my wishes and hopes.)

So I followed the link, looked at some of the code examples, and looked at 28msec.

I’m just digging into this, so would welcome any further pointers from the community.  SQL was not just a query language, but a frontier between the data layer and the rest of the app.  How does JSONiq get to that status?

Your thoughts?

As cloud computing really starts to take hold, some features of the landscape are becoming clearer. At least they seem clearer to me.

First, the disruption happens disruptively:

• Through consumers and smaller business customers, rather than through the biggest enterprises.
• Through applications converting to SaaS delivery and non-critical, experimental, or bursty infrastructure rather than mission-critical infrastructure.
• Through “consumerization of IT”, where demand for iPads and cool apps drives the need for new delivery models

Second, the disruption will move upward to larger organizations, first through private clouds, then hybrid clouds, and then full-dress clouds.  (Of course, larger organizations use SaaS applications and suffice iPads and cool apps today, so they need some kind of cloud solutions today.)

Third, however, is interesting: if IT moves out of the enterprise and into the cloud, why do you need an IT organization over time… and why do you need a CIO?

The CIO’s job is to make sure that the house IT plant supports the mission of the organization.  Already other functions are trying to make IT decisions without the CIO: implementing Salesforce, constructing mobile apps, buying kit for websites.  It stands to reason that the CIO’s job loses power over time.

CIOs have barely been able to pry themselves free from reporting to CFOs.  Will they report to CMOs next?

I went up to the World Maker Faire in New York this past weekend, and had a great time despite iffy weather (relevant because the bulk of the event was outdoors).  The lockpicking course from @Toool alone was worth the price of admission, but I also bent some plexiglass with the Institute for Exploratory Research, a hacker space in NJ and had some paella from huge woks that @NickPinkston told me was “a MakerFaire tradition”. 

I’ve begun to think of the Maker Movement as having three threads, each of which was present to some extent at the Faire:

1. Kids.  America gives lip service to the wonder of children, but doesn’t always deliver.  Kids were first at Maker Faire.  Exhibits were geared to them, people were giving way to them, and they were clearly front and center in the Maker Movement.
2. Scruffy Hacker-ness.  This of course gives a lot of personality to the Maker Movement.  The people who were running the lockpicking event, for example, obviously and repeatedly asked participants not to the break the law.  But the subtext was, “if there’s a lock you want to open you should be able to do so.”  I bought a t-shirt that said, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”
3. Rennaisance Fair for American Manufacturing.  This is the meme I’m trying to invest in, and you had to poke around to find traces of it at the Faire, but it was there.  Next-gen manufacturing companies like AutoDesk and Valhalla’s portfolio company GeoMagic were present and sponsoring and clearly hedging their bets with small stakes in the success of the Maker Movement.  There will be more.

Went to DreamForce last week for a couple of days.  My first time.  I’m always intrigued by companies that build of an ecosystem of contributors, and had wanted to see this event for that reason.

I was very pleasantly surprised.  I think of Salesforce itself as a Web 1.0 application (or maybe 0.9).  It was a world-beater when it took down Siebel, but the whole world of web applications has moved forward quite a bit.  As Salesforce admin at Valhalla Partners, I have a heck of a time getting people to log their deals (we use it to track deal flow), and at least part of it is the clunky interface.  Not being able to see your subtask and your context at the same time is a huge liability of the Web 1.0 world (and only partially cured in Web 2.0 btw).

But the ecosystem around Salesforce is really vigorous.  There’s a lot of app work with first-rate UX.  And, if you think about it, Salesforce may be the #1 Web platform for databases about people and people-oriented workflow.  Certainly Microsoft Dynamics and Google apps can’t touch it.

I don’t know if we’ll find investable opportunities around this ecosystem, but I’ll give it a serious look.

Let me know if there’s anything you see that could use our capital…

I’ve been reading a bit about graph processing lately, and the tech that supports it.

I’ve thought that relational dbs were useless for graph problems since maybe 1985, when I started trying to keep my financial records in a database and found that it was nearly impossible to track the basis of a stock using the relational paradigm because it had to iterate over all the historic transactions for a given ticker and essentially compute what I read was called a “transitive closure”.

I wasn’t any database god in those days, but it seemed to me that there were an awful lot more problems in the world that required transitive closures than those requiring select and project, or even select, project, and some reasonable number of joins.

Well, of course graph problems don’t do very well in the relational formalism, but graph formalisms don’t do very well in the bounded computation formalism.  It’s easy to get swamped with nodes tweedling to one another.

I read the paper on Pregel with interest (and, of course, Google is probably on to Pregel 3.0 by now, or they wouldn’t have published the paper :-)).  But I’m curious to hear more about other approaches.

Your thoughts?

I’ve started to look at anonymous browsing.

So far, the schemes that are really anonymous are pretty kludge-y.  It looks like you find a path through cooperative servers to near your endpoint, and then, like Foxface from The Hunger Games, sprints over the last link or two to the destination.  Effective, if what you want is to keep from being tracked.  But not easy to use, and probably not destined for the mainstream.

Is this the best outcome?  Widespread use of anonymizers leads to a “distributed denial of data” attack on brands and merchants.  I have no great love for brands and merchants — they certainly treat consumers pretty cavalierly — but the outcome I want is to have (moe) power over them instead of them having (more) power over me, and ultimately, perhaps, to share power so that we both get part of what we want.  It’s the Intention Economy all over again (I know, I’ve been on this like a broken record, but Searl’s book is a great set of ideas).

We didn’t even have a word for “pivot” until a couple of years ago.

Companies “changed their strategy”, or “re-examined their business”, or “took a fresh look”.

Then all of a sudden “pivot” burst on the scene, and business became more like downhill skiing or dancing than war.  Everyone began to pivot.

Unfortunately, not all pivots are alike.  Valhalla’s Managing Partner Art Marks distinguishes between pivots and “faceplants” as follows:

Pivot:

1. New Strategy: Redefine mission based on market feedback, evidence of shortcomings.
2. Capabilities: Exploits existing capabilities
3. Evidence: Strong evidence of success on new path
4. Plan: Predicatable requirements for cash required to break even

Faceplant

1. New Strategy: Redefine mission because old one didn’t work
2. Capabilities: Imaginary and exaggerated new capaibilites added to enterprise
3. Evidence: More hope than evidence
4. Plan: Future cash requirements still uncertain.

Admittedly, many Faceplants disguise themselves at Pivots.  But still worth testing for one vs. the other.  Well worth it.

Thoughts?

When I blogged about this yesterday I was unaware that the topic I was broaching — the similarities between the Free and Open source movement and utopian socialism — was a well-traveled topic.

My friend Rob Atkinson (for whose Information Technology & Innovation Foundation I am an advisor) turned me on to an article by Milton Mueller on “Info-Communism” which, despite the provocative title, is actually a careful review of the debate between the open-sourcers and the information-property-ites and well worth reading if you want to understand what is morally and politically good about open source.

Meanwhile, my intent was to discuss whether or not open-source approaches ehance or stifle innovation.  My working hypothesis for some years has been that open-source code enhances innovation in areas that use the code (duh) but stifle innovation in the open-source area itself, and that open source is appropriate for software projects where stability and quality is more important than innovation.

I still sort of think this, although I’m open to counter-examples.