September 1, 2010

Here’s the problem with my book: it’s aimed at a business audience. Business people who read it love it, but it’s not an easy read. There are a lot of new terms and concepts to learn. That makes it far too much work for journalists, whose job is to crank out a book review once in a while and cover Facebook, Apple, Google, and a small number of well known companies the rest of the time, grinding out the same news as everyone else. They just don’t have time to look at a book about the future from someone who’s only written three previous bestsellers. So the business community doesn’t know that my book exists. Business school professors should read it, but they don’t know about it. CEOs should read it, but they don’t know about it. All venture capitalists should read it, but they don’t know about it. I need to get the word out somehow. So I’ve decided to have a contest.

Every weekday in September (except the 7th), I’m going to send someone a copy of my book, Pull. Your chances of winning are quite good, because on any given day not that many people will enter. (I am indebted to Scott Bourne for this contest idea – if you are a photographer you should definitely follow him.) Here are the contest rules:

1. You must be 18 years or older to enter. You may not be an employee of Penguin or Portfolio Press.
2. If you live in the US, Canada, or Puerto Rico, I will pay the shipping for the book. If you live outside these countries, you will have to Paypal me the shipping amount before I will send you the book.
3. You must have a Twitter account and be following me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PullNews
4. You must send the tweet below EXACTLY as it is written with no changes. You can only send this tweet once. You’re welcome to tweet it as often as you like, but only the first time counts.
5. At the end of every day (by midnight Eastern Standard Time), I’ll choose one person at random who is a) following me and b) sent the tweet for the first time. I’ll send this person a direct message on Twitter asking for his/her address. I will send the book, signed, within a week or so. (Random numbers generated by Random.org)
6. If you live outside the US, you’re responsible for any taxes, duties, or delays.
7. This is for physical books only, no eBooks will be given away.
8. If you don’t win, the book is available at all online bookstores and isn’t very expensive. Just click on the book cover at right. It will probably change your life, so please get it and read it, and if you don’t find it worth the cover price and can tell me exactly why, I’ll refund your money personally. So there. You can’t lose!

Here is the tweet to send, exactly as you see it below (do NOT use a URL shortener, it fits just fine):

Win a free business strategy future semantic web book from @PullNews. Pls RT. Info: http://thepowerofpull.com

If this is your first time to my web site, it’s huge. There are a lot of resources here. I encourage you to read the blogs, below, and to explore the links on the left. There’s a beginner section, a bookstore, a good place to learn definitions, and much more. In addition, here are some of my more (in)famous blog posts:

An Open Letter to Ray Ozzie
I Have a Dream – the Semantic Collaborative Work Space
An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer
Looking for a CEO to Help me Take On Facebook

And many more. You’re sure to learn something from my tweet stream, and those who want to follow my personal tweets are welcome to (emphasis on photography, kids, travel, and wacky ideas). Please tell business people about my book. And, if you know any journalists, tell them they can interview me and they won’t be sorry.

I’ll be back in October with two insightful blogs per week and to keep you updated on my quest to start the online data locker company.

David Siegel

August 29, 2010

I’m still looking hard for my future business partner, but it’s August – difficult to get the message out. I’ll be blogging twice a week after Labor Day, and I’ll be giving away a book a day in September. Meanwhile, please see this video about the Calendar of the Future by Tungle. It’s going to be part of everyone’s dashboard.

By the way, if you know business people or professors in business schools, please ask them to take a look at my book. And if you’ve read it and would review it at your favorite online bookstore, I would really appreciate any honest reviews.

August 15, 2010

I’ve been dreaming about this moment for a long time. I wanted to build the personal data locker ten years ago, but the infrastructure wasn’t there. It still isn’t, but it’s starting to emerge, and the time is right to start a new company that will take us all into the 21st century. It’s nice that Google is in the advertising business, Apple is in the hardware business, and Microsoft is standing out in left field wondering where the party is. The opportunity is now. I have to put a team together.

It starts with a business partner. This project is too big for me to do by myself. I need to get funding, build a team, design the experience, translate that into code, ship a beta, and get ten million people onto the platform before anyone else does. For that, I need to focus, and to focus while doing everything else right, I need a business partner. Here’s what I’m looking for, someone who:

• Preferably lives in the Bay Area or in New York.
• Has a strong track record as an entrepreneur – at least 3 successful exits.
• Has taken investors’ money and provided good returns for them.
• Has built a consumer-facing company or one with very high customer service.
  
• Is all about execution – much better at executing than at vision.
• Is a great manager and has a long list of people who would gladly work for her/him again.
• Wants to build a culture of openness and support for employees.
• Understands and enjoys sales.
• Understands and loves building partnerships – has a big Rolodex of partner companies to call on.
  
• Is ready for a big adventure.
  
• Understands the value of open standards.
• Appreciates that some or much of a company’s code can be open source.
  
• Does not need a salary initially and is motivated by stock.
  
• Reads my book and gets excited.
  
• Reads my previous blogs and gets more excited.
  
• Appreciates my role and sees a good fit between us.
• Has the desire to build something big by starting small.
  

As I’ve said, I think I can get the funding for this project. It will need a lot of money, and I believe I know where it will come from.

I’m hoping people will read this and spread the word. Please tweet about it and reach out to your networks to help me find the right person, so we can build the next big company together.

August 2, 2010

Back in 2,000, I had the first meeting with a company to discuss the online data locker. I met with a strategic marketing guy from Mercedes Benz. We met at the San Francisco International Airport, because he was between flights. I said eventually, when you buy a car, it’s going to come with a web site. He said yes, that would certainly be true. And, I said, if you own three cars, you don’t want to have to log into three different web sites to manage them, because to the consumer these are three parts of the same facet of their lives – transportation. He thought for a minute and saw that this was true.

I’m sorry I haven’t been very regular in posting this summer. I will try to post once a week, and you can find my tweets @PullNews. I’m spending much of my time on the vision and the team for my new startup to build the personal data locker. Once I find a good CEO, things will start rolling. I’ve had good talks with several people who can help with business development, and I’m talking with one potential CEO. I’d be interested to talk with or meet other potential CEOs in New York or San Francisco. I really want someone who thinks “start small, get big” and can help me bring a Facebook alternative to consumers who want to own their information, and they want their information to do much more for them than it does today.

I’ve been thinking about social democracy. Facebook is really social communism – Facebook makes the rules, and everyone has to play by them. Even if there are thousands of applications, you still have to read this week’s Terms of Service to see what you can and cannot do with your data. Facebook’s privacy policy is now 5,830 words long and getting longer and more confusing all the time. The same is true with iPhone and iPad apps – it’s nice that Apple plays the gatekeeper to keep us all safe, but I’m not sure I trust Apple to know what’s good for me and what isn’t. (If I’ve paid full price and signed up for a two-year contract, why shouldn’t I be able to use my phone on any other network I also pay for?) Sites like Plaxo and LinkedIn are helpful, but once again, they own your data, and you couldn’t close your account if you wanted to. And we all know that Microsoft is just a listless hulk of scrap iron surrounding $44 billion in cash floating in deep space.

If you’re thinking of leaving Facebook, there’s a site called QuitFacebookDay.com where you can get support. And, if you’re having problems deleting your account at any of these “Roach Motel” web sites, a company called Abine wants to help you.

There are new companies that want to eat Facebook’s lunch, but most of them still use the Roach Motel model of trapping users. Two recent launches are Me.me, by Yahoo, and LifeStream, by AOL. (Too bad, I really liked the LifeStream name.) These are well designed services that want to replace your Facebook and Twitter interfaces with a seamless place to spend your time, but they won’t be any better than Facebook in the long run, because they aren’t open.

What we need is true social democracy – a place where people can finally put all their personal information and know that they will always be able to control it. A place where people can make contributions and everyone will benefit. A place that gets safer and safer as more people help build it. A place that gives you full control over the kinds of relationships you have with people and the access you give them to your information. A place where you can point your automatic “data exhaust” – places you go, purchases, web surfing, people you come into contact with, places you eat, places you stay, things you like, etc. – and it will be yours to manage or delete according to your desires. A place that, one day, will drive all your devices and make you truly device independent.

As I’m working on the business plan for the new company, I’m also working on a Social Democracy Bill of Rights for users. This is a draft. Feel free to suggest additions or changes:

Anyone who has a data locker …

• Can choose to host it anywhere, on any machine that will accept it. This means you choose your hosting company. Just like WordPress – you will have a choice of places to host your data locker, including your own server under your control.
• Can easily move the entire account to a new hosting facility anytime. You may start your personal data locker at MercedesBenz.com, Out.com, Visa.com, or Harvard.edu. At any time and for any reason, you will be able to move your entire account to another hosting platform with no questions asked.
• Has the ability to create rich networks of friends and acquaintances that closely reflects the relationships in real life. No one has 500 friends. The more you can specify the exact relationships you have with people and put them into meaningful groups, the more those online relationships will work for you online.
• Can delete it at will. Since your data is all in one place, you should be able to CRUD your data – Create, Read, Update, and Delete it. I would suggest making a back-up first, but it’s up to you.
• May choose the security layers that surround his/her data. Using open standards, you should be able to surround your data with whatever levels of security you like. If you want to make certain information as secure as possible, you may have to pay extra for it, but you should have a huge range of choices when it comes to security.
• Controls which information is public and which is private. You should be able to list everything you own on your personal data locker, put it on the open web, and receive offers for anything you own without having to list it on eBay or Craigslist or any other web site. But you don’t have to. You’ll control what’s public, what the bots can see, and what they can’t.
• Has as many logins as he/she wants to have. You can create as many login names and passwords as you like, but the beauty of the system is that you’ll be able to have one login with the data locker, and use it to log into any services or sites you want to use online. That means you can get rid of your passwords on all those web sites and let them refer to your data locker, which then authenticates you as the person you say you are. This may sound complicated, but it’s much more secure than what we have today, and the technology for “federated login” is ready to deploy.
• Can have as many data lockers as he/she likes. Ideally, you have just one, but if you want to have multiple lockers, that’s okay. If you have a separate “persona,” you may want to create a second one. For example, if you want to make secret travel plans for a getaway with someone special, you may want to use a different persona than you normally use. It’s up to you.
• Can add new facets any time. You’ll start with a number of standard facets, like personal, family, work, resume, hobbies, travel, finance, real estate, accounts, activities, etc. You may, for example, have a facet devoted to managing your car’s data, and you may have your data hosted at MercedesBenz.com, where the nice marketing people at Mercedes Benz want you to have a fully branded experience. But, if you buy a Range Rover or a Porsche then you’ll also be able to have a fully branded experience to manage your new car, and in fact your “manage my cars” facet will be able to combine the information from all your vendors into one seamless view, so you can see how you’re managing your cars, fuel, maintenance, etc. The same would go for airlines, hotels, restaurants, etc. No single vendor will be able to prevent other vendors from adding information to your data locker, even if your locker is hosted on their servers.
• Has a platform for doing vendor relationship management. You’ll manage all your marketing data here, and you’ll be able to work with vendors on your terms. As I talk about in my book, most people would rather manage a house full of products in a single web site than having to go to dozens of web sites to log in and use information. The data locker is the infinitely-expandable platform for working with vendors on your terms, keeping control of what information they get and how they use it.
• Can freely exchange information with anyone or any service. You’ll be responsible for obeying the law and using your data locker responsibly. We won’t be playing “Big Brother” in the background.
• Can freely use any app that will work with his/her data. There will be an app store, where you can buy or add apps to your data locker (thank god there are no more downloads!). In fact, there could be many app stores. We won’t have any central control over the apps available. I expect, however, there will be various filtering mechanisms for finding apps that meet certain expectations or criteria.
• Is part of a community that helps share data. If you want to hook your schedule to your online travel advisor, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The data locker will have a community of people building data pipes (APIs) that help make their data lockers much more useful, and those data pipes will go into the public domain via a nonprofit entity set up for this purpose. We’ll build the open standards we all need without increasing the spaghetti of proprietary data standards.

That’s all I have for now, but I’m sure there will be more as the company takes shape. I’ll let you know how things are going. If you can think of a great name or domain name for the personal data locker, or if you know a great CEO for me, please get in touch.

July 19, 2010

I’ve been thinking about my goal of raising a venture fund to build the online data locker ecosystem. After discussing the concept with friends and advisors, it’s clear that I need to help build the core company first. Not only would it take me a year to raise a fund, but things are happening quickly around what some people call the personal data store, and it’s time to build a company that goes after Facebook with an open, portable, data-centric approach. I can’t talk about everything here, but I want to give an outline of where I’m going and ask if you know people who might be interested in participating.

The idea is to build the online data locker in a way that lets you migrate your information from Facebook and run your life from there. Facebook has a Roach Motel business model – their goal is that you put lots of personal information into Facebook and you’ll be stuck for life, because you can’t get it out. I’m going to put a team together to do something different. Let me put some of the puzzle pieces in place and then give an overview of what I want to build.

The guys at Diaspora are trying to build something like a Facebook alternative, so you can do your messaging from one place that’s open and you can control your own destiny. They are cool guys. They are building open-source software. But they are going to focus on messaging and social tools, not data. I applaud what they are doing, but they won’t give consumers enough features to get them to switch easily.

The people at Higgins are doing great work on i-cards and the personal data store. This is exciting. They have new energy and are building a lot of the plumbing my new company will need to make information more interoperable. The more progress they make, the better.

OpenID and other protocols based on the Identity Commons principles will help us stop the insanity of creating login names and passwords every time we want to do something on a web site.

XAuth and things like it will let us store our cookies and browser information online, so we don’t have to care which browser or device we use to see the web.

The FOAF (Friend of a Friend) graph is getting bigger, and that’s great news. It’s not the perfect answer to building social networks, but it’s gaining ground and will be part of the solution.

Information Cards are gaining acceptance and will be the basis for much of how we use our personal data.

The work of the Open Rights Group and Data Portability people will play a big role in the core philosophy.

I have several long-term goals driving this effort:

As I talk about in my book, the web is the ultimate platform. When we have personal data lockers, they will drive all the screens in our lives. One of those screens is your phone. I hope that about four years from now, you’ll be able to buy a phone that simply logs into your personal data locker and runs from there. The phone itself will have only a shadow copy of what you have on your data locker, with the main information safe and secure in the cloud. When you start your phone, it takes up where it left off, but ALL its information comes from the cloud, and all the apps essentially run on the cloud. You can think of it like that – you never download an app. You subscribe to it, and it either actually runs on the cloud, or a temporary version runs on your machine. You NEVER run out of room or resources.

The second vision is that the personal data locker drives the screen in your living room. Once again, you log into your data locker and a personal VJ presents all your video content, from news, TV shows, and feature films to home movies and instructional videos. No need for network television, and no need for any personal data recorder (hard disk) that requires you to manage content. It simply finds what you’re looking for or shows you something interesting, and everything streams from there.

The third vision is that what we do with computers and tablets today is still push and still requires us to store data on our machines. We’ve barely begun learning how to use the cloud properly. As I’ve advocated in my I have a dream blog post, I think we’ll see a seismic shift in the way we do all kinds of design. I think we’ll see a similar shift in the way we work, read, consume media, and play with our devices. Once again, I think they will simply be screens of any size, they will have input devices like keyboards and mice, or touch screens and headsets, or eye-trackers and brainwave monitors – whatever way we interact with them in the future. But you’ll start your day on your personal data locker and do everything from there. Once again, resources will be limitless, and the apps will be thousands of times cheaper and more powerful than the apps we use today.

The fourth vision is that this is where you’ll want to put ALL your information that’s currently scattered all over the web and in databases worldwide. Your health data, financial data, educational and career data, family information, photos, videos, music, haves, wants, and much more. You can read all about this in chapters 7 and 8 of my book, Pull.

The user experience is the driver here. This data locker will rise from the pack of personal data products currently being proposed and funded, because it will be simple and easy for consumers to adopt. I won’t say much more here, other than my job is to build the next-generation interface that makes the iPhone and iPad look difficult to use (they are).

I’m hoping to put together a world-class team and secure funding in the next six months. As I said in my previous post, I think I can raise the money necessary. With any luck, we’ll have offices in New York and San Francisco. Please help me look for the people I’ll need to get it started:

• A CEO who’s a strong manager, a serial entrepreneur, someone who has built software ideas into companies.
• A CTO who can build the cloud-based infrastructure, identity and security layers, and all the parts necessary at scale.
• A Product manager who understands the user and his/her needs. Someone from Facebook, Google, or Yahoo would be interesting.
• A UI designer who has been doing AJAX-driven consumer interfaces for large scale deployments.
• A business-development ninja who can score partnerships with lots of big companies and services.

Please forward resumes to me at david@thepowerofpull.com

Thank You.

July 8, 2010

I’m surprisingly busy this summer. Since the Semantic Technology Conference 2 weeks ago in San Francisco, my phone has been ringing off the hook. I’ve realized I need to work on starting the personal data locker company before trying to raise a fund to support it. If the personal data locker gets off the ground well, it should take me a few weeks to raise a fund around it. I’ll talk more about that next week, but today I have a few random things to share.

After a bit of research, it turns out that I may be the fifth person to start blogging, back in 1995.

I want you to see a deck of slides by a guy named Paul Adams at Google. He’s starting to explain how complicated our real-life social interactions are, and why Facebook doesn’t really address them (this is what the identity gang have been saying for years). There are rumors that Google will launch something in this area. If you’re interested in social networking, this is an important deck of slides. You can either see the short version or the long version:

SAI Business Insider has the short version. I recommend signing up for their newsletter.

The long version is here:

June 28, 2010

Dear readers,

Some of you know I was at the SemTech conference in San Francisco last week, where a lot of things came together for me. I gave a keynote and hosted a panel session on the personal data locker (see my book for more on this topic), and it was, i think, a watershed moment for the future of the web and the way we use it. This short note explains how I plan to accelerate the emergence of the open web and the personal data locker by raising a venture fund to address the opportunity that has recently opened up.

We all know that the practice of visiting web sites, logging in, and collecting usernames and passwords broke years ago, and that some day we’ll do things differently. At the moment, Facebook wants you to log in using your Facebook credentials, but those of us working in the online identity movement and semantic web know something bigger is bound to emerge. We now have the pieces of the puzzle to create a place, or at least a framework, where you can have your identity, your credentials for using sites and services, and your personal data all in one place online, regardless of how you access it. Some of the pieces of this puzzle:

• The i-card foundation
• OpenID
• Open Identity Exchange
• XAuth
• Higgins
• FOAF
• Identity Commons
• DataPortability.org
• The Open Web Foundation

You may also know I’ve been thinking about raising a venture fund. My goal is to build a fund around the “personal data locker” concept I describe in chapter 8 of my book and start related companies to build out the necessary infrastructure and services. This will be the very last time you transfer your contact information, because your contacts will stay in one place and never move again. But for that to be true, your phone, your email system, and all your contact-related tasks (like finding and making new friends, participating in social networks, etc.) will need to use your single contact list for everything. Likewise, your calendar will be in the center of your universe and communicate with all the other calendars you want it to. Your bookmarks, your personal data, your photos, tickets, passes, keys, and all your other personal information will live here in your personal data locker (see my book for more). It sounds Utopian, but the building blocks really are falling into place now, and not a moment too soon – I don’t think anyone wants to build another profile or join another social network.

This fund has a few precedents:

• Kleiner Perkins’ Java Fund
• Kleiner Perkins’ iPhone Fund
• Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Venture partners
• Bay Partner’s Facebook AppFactory
• Betaworks Twitter fund

The only problem with my dream is that a) I don’t have a track record as an investor (my angel investments were mostly in 2000-2002, and others haven’t found liquidity yet) and b) it’s an extremely difficult funding environment, to say the least. However, I’ve recently been able to solve the second problem. Without giving away too much, I believe I can fairly easily raise the $100M+ I’m looking for if I can just find a credible west-coast partner. This fund will need a west-coast office, and I’ll have to go back and forth often. I don’t want to spill everything in this message, but suffice to say I’ve already had a few conversations with strategic funding sources and they are very, very interested. It is much more downhill fundraising than uphill. I have visibility to around $40M right now and hope to have some of those key starter conversations with potential companies in the next several weeks.

The key to success here is people. I now have access to the people who can help make this happen: people at Google, Facebook, and other companies that can help integrate all these ideas into a buildable framework consumers will adopt and other companies will want to connect to.

The final person I need is a west-coast partner. If I can find someone who’s an experienced VC looking for his/her next thing, reads my book, likes the premise, and wants to join me, I believe the fundraising will go quickly. I’m reaching out to you to ask you to forward this to friends and colleagues, mention something to your followers, and ask people to help me network to find a good partner who wants to join me. I’m happy to discuss the details with anyone but would rather not make them public. Please forward this toward people you know in the west-coast VC community and ask people to pass it on.

If you want to refer to this note in a tweet or blog post, please use one of the following URLs:

http://thepowerofpull.com/pull/looking-for-an-experienced-venture-capitalist-to-build-the-online-data-locker

http://ow.ly/24wkS

If you don’t have my book, I hope you’ll read it.

And if you want to track my progress, please follow me on Twitter:

@PullNews

@_dsiegel

Thank you,

David Siegel

June 28, 2010

Last week I went to freezing San Francisco to speak at the SemTech conference. I had a great time and met most of the movers and shakers in the world of the semantic web at this incredibly well run conference. It was gratifying to see so many people speaking enthusiastically about my book. In fact, the bookstore sold more than 50 copies and I signed dozens of books. I even signed 3 iPhones! My keynote talk was very well received, and thanks to the people at Atigeo, the panel on the Personal Data Locker was said to be one of the best of the conference. I met several people from big companies and had interesting discussions with many entrepreneurs. So after 3 days and 3 nights, I was full of semantics and very energized about the prospects of my book and the ideas it contains.

Continue Reading

June 21, 2010

Note: I had a great conversation with Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch last month. It turned into an excellent article on the concepts of semantic social networking and dating in the world of pull. I hope you enjoy it.

Dear Venture Capitalists,

Continue Reading

June 16, 2010

Don’t forget: I’ll be at #SemTech next week and will give a keynote speech at 08:30 on Thursday, June 24th. Come!

I got this in my in-box the other day. People often think authors don’t want to hear from readers directly, but I can tell you that in nonfiction it’s not true. We love getting emails from readers. It’s been about 10 years since I got a “you changed my life” email, so I thought I would share this (with permission of the author):

Continue Reading

June 14, 2010

Thanks to Fox News for picking up our press release and telling people about my keynote speech at next week’s Semtech conference in San Francisco. This is your once-a-year opportunity to learn what’s going on in the semantic web. I encourage you to jump on an airplane next Monday and join us.

Books should only be catalogued once. Currently the public purse pays for having the same book catalogued over and over again.
–Jens Vigen, Head of the CERN Library

Continue Reading

June 8, 2010

This week I’m a guest blogger at the World Innovation Forum. Please follow me and watch the tweet stream:

@pullnews – all the news that’s fit to pull

@_dsiegel - my personal twitter name

Follow the World Innovation Forum on Twitter!

June 3, 2010

“Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.”

– Eric S. Raymond

Dear Steve,

When you are out of ideas, it

It’s taken 30 years, but Steve Jobs is finally kicking your ass, and you are starting to look like Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner. Soon, Apple will own the consumer and drain business accounts away from you faster than you can say Windows Phone 7 (“meep meep”). You’ve spent $2 billion on cloud infrastructure and the Azure platform, and you haven’t come close to what Google offers. You think tablets are the next big platform. That’s three app platforms, Steve, and now you are planning to open Microsoft Stores as well? You are letting Apple and Google show you what to do next, you’re about three years behind both, and most of your products suck. You’ve dug the hole so deep it’s going to be difficult for anyone to save the company. It won’t be Ray Ozzie, and it isn’t going to be Andy Rees, that’s for sure. And, as you must be increasingly aware, Steve, it isn’t going to be you.

Rather than selling you more Acme gunpowder for your latest me-too scheme, I’m here to offer a solution, one the company has enough cash to adopt, but one that will go against your corporate culture so much that you won’t recognize the company when I get through with it. And not a moment too soon.

Continue Reading

May 24, 2010

I’m traveling this week, so I’ll take this time to right a serious wrong that has gotten out of control. If you use Keynote, chances are much of the text in your slides is in Gill Sans. Why? Because Gill Sans, named after Eric Gill,  is the default font for Keynote (possibly chosen by Steve Jobs himself – he likes to get involved in font decisions). Unfortunately, Gill Sans looks really bad in lower case. Gill Sans caps, properly spaced, look elegant and museum-like. Gill Sans lower case pretty much never looks good in any application. It’s too wide, it’s too decorative, and it gets in the way of your message. I love Keynote, and I think anyone who likes Powerpoint will really like Keynote much better, but I want everyone to switch default fonts. Continue Reading

May 20, 2010

I’m off to ThinkingDigital for a week next week and am focusing on getting ready for my talk there. I would like to share this incredible video by Dan Pink about what motivates people. If you manage people, especially if you manage knowledge workers or creatives, this is a must-see video. I’ll be back next week with a fun piece on Apple Keynote. If you’re looking for more semantic web thoughts, come back in early June.

Continue Reading

May 17, 2010

I recently had a fun conversation with phil simon that I hope you take a few minutes to enjoy.

A few weeks ago, the Pew Internet and American Life project asked a bunch of experts to make predictions about the semantic web in 2020. They got 895 responses:

• Some 47% agreed with the statement: “By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee will not be as fully effective as its creators hoped and average users will not have noticed much of a difference.”
• Some 41% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited: “By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and his allies will have been achieved to a significant degree and have clearly made a difference to average Internet users.”

What should we make of this? Is it optimistic or pessimistic?

Continue Reading

May 13, 2010

When it rains, it pours. This week it’s pouring videos. Kate Ray, a PhD student at NYU, has interviewed a number of people involved in the semantic web and made a fantastic video I want you to see.

Continue Reading

May 10, 2010

I am nearly finished with the best and most challenging book that I have read in years.

- Phil Simon, Author, The Next Wave of Technologies.

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of a new video I spent two months creating. It’s launching on The Economist ideas blog, sponsored by Sean McManus. I’m very proud that the Economist has asked to debut my video and help bring the concepts of pull and the semantic web to the mainstream business public. I want to ask your help today in getting as many people as possible to see my video.

For those of you coming here from the Economist, thank you for visiting. This is a huge web site with a lot of content. It would take several days to see it all. So here’s a quick guide:

• Be sure to sign up to follow my Twitter feed. This is where you’ll get news, links, and learn about the latest projects in pull and the semantic web.
• Go to the Getting Started page, which will give you an overview of the principles of pull and the semantic web.
• Please buy my book and read it. It will take a weekend, and if you don’t think it’s worth your time, I’ll buy it back from you. I can guarantee you won’t read this material in any other book. It’s aimed at business planners, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and those who want a solid look at the future of information. That’s why I made a video on the history of information, to put it all in perspective.
• Hire me to consult or give a speech at your next big conference.
• Tell others about the book and this web site. The more people in your industry who start to understand the shift from pushing to pulling, the better.
• Leave a comment on the Barnes and Noble book page or the Amazon.com book page.
• Leave a short comment about the video on the Economist web page – the more people who comment there, the better.

Help me reach business journalists. The Harvard Business Review gave my book a glowing review. The Economist has put my video on their blog. Now I need more business journalists to understand how important the material is. Most business journalists are consumed with Google, Facebook, and Twitter issues. They don’t have time to think or write about the future of information. I think they should. If you can help me reach any business journalists, please contact me directly.

Thank you, and enjoy the video:

May 6, 2010

The first US domestic talk I gave about my book and the semantic web is now online. It was at Marco’s SemWeb meetup in December.

Today I’m going to answer questions from readers.

Continue Reading

May 3, 2010

I had a chance to talk with Jay Myers of Best Buy the other day. Jay works on the retailer’s web site(s), and he’s one of the people on the front lines of the semantic web. Jay has two interesting problems: he wants people to find product information much easier than they do today, and he wants the Best Buy stores to have their inventory found more easily, to make a tighter connection between buyers and sellers. Continue Reading

April 29, 2010

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into orbit around the Earth. The very next day, the U.S. House Committee on Science and Astronautics held an emergency meeting and recommended to President Kennedy that the United States dedicate its resources to putting a man on the moon ahead of the Soviets. On May 25th, Kennedy announced his intention to fund the Apollo space program, which had the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” before the decade was out.

Last Wednesday, Facebook launched its “Open Graph” campaign to let Facebook members tag web pages and tell their friends what they like on sites anywhere around the web. Now that it’s Monday, I’m pretty much the last person in the blogosphere to have something to say about it. Or maybe one of the first to put some perspective on it.

Continue Reading

April 19, 2010

News flash: my book isn’t selling very well. I put two years of my life into researching and writing it, and so far only the few semantic web people are buying it. The problem isn’t that it’s no good. In fact, the reviews are all much better than I expected. Those who have read it say it’s remarkable and just what’s needed. One person said we’ve all gotten used to going to the outhouse, and my book describes the future of indoor plumbing, where the water (information) is delivered to us so we don’t have to fetch it or go to it.

Continue Reading

April 15, 2010

Congratulations to John Hagel and John Seely Brown, who have just launched The Power of Pull. Like my book, this one has been in the works for more than ten years. Unlike my book, it’s coming out with the kind of fanfare and marketing push it deserves. John Hagel, author of the excellent Net Gain (which came out a bit before my last book, Futurize Your Enterprise), has been crushing it the last several years with more books, lectures, and thought leadership than most people pack into a lifetime. He and Seely Brown (former director of Xerox Parc) have been hard at work defining new paradigms for institutions and individuals. As they say in the promotional piece for the book:

Continue Reading

April 12, 2010

I caught up with Kaliya Hamlin (AKA Identitywoman) the other day. She, along with Doc Searls and a handful of other identity pioneers, are working to make secure identity management a reality. If you’re interested in identity, you should definitely go to the upcoming 10th Internet Identity workshop in Mountain View, May 17-19. Like most events Kaliya attends these days, it’s an un-conference: a conference where everyone shows up and they decide each day’s agenda together that same morning. In fact Kaliya could write the book on un-conferences, and I hope she does.

Continue Reading

April 8, 2010

If Vinod Khosla recommends [your book], then I’m not interested.
— Curt Monash

Cheetah, Namibia. Photo by David Siegel

An Open Letter to Canon and Nikon

I’m a Canon photographer, but what I’m about to say also applies to Nikon, although more generally. I have purchased 8 Canon bodies in the past five years, and I can’t count how many lenses. At the moment, I’m shooting a Canon 5D2, which I can’t wait to trade for a full-frame camera that can actually autofocus. Canon and Nikon are in a never-ending arms race to dominate the 35mm and sub-35mm SLR markets. Serious photographers who own Canon bodies have to settle for Canon lenses. Why? Not because they are the best, although many of them are excellent and a few are remarkable, but because they are the only high-end lenses Canon bodies can autofocus. Canon keeps this interface between body and lens proprietary, to keep Canon owners buying more Canon lenses and prevent them from using third-party lenses. A company like Sigma, which makes lower quality lenses, can get a license from Canon, because as Sigma sells more lenses, Canon sells more bodies. But Zeiss makes better lenses than Canon does, and Canon won’t license the autofocus codes to Zeiss at any price, because Canon executives know that many of their customers would switch and buy Zeiss lenses and they would sell fewer Canon lenses. The same goes for Nikon. And it’s true – we would.

Continue Reading