I'm just now over my jet lag enough to think through a few brief thoughts on TC40 last week.

General Overview

Pros:

• Laid back atmosphere
• Fancy hotel
• Demo pit was fun
• Keynotes were excellent, and imo, justified my attendance.
  
• Free swag bag was nice. It's replaced my wal-mart backpack.

Cons:

• At the event, I felt like it could have been kept the TechCrunch 20.. Then some time passed, and I thought it could have been the TechCrunch 10. A week out, and I feel like TechCrunch 5 would have been appropriate. Mint didn't just stand out -- they blew everyone away. It's a sad day when whats supposed to be the best of the best includes three video wikis and at least a dozen companies with no hopes for revenue.
  
• Would have been nice to do the happy hour thing in the lobby on the first day as well.
• Panelists were way, way too soft on the companies. Second day was better. Guy Kawasaki, despite the travesty that is trumors truemors, was fun.
• Some of the presentations were awful. Just awful.

Companies

• Cake Financial has interesting potential, but I'm not sure on the implementation yet. I'm going to have to play with it some more.
• Mint, as you've probably heard by now, is gorgeous and will kick Quicken's ass for most use cases.
• Silvia will be neat in toys.
• The hand motion interface stuff was really neat, but can't remember who-done-it. Viewdle screams acquisition.
• Xobni lived up to some of their pre-launch hype, but I don't use Outlook (gmail up in this hizzy). Their search looked like it kicked ass though, and made me jealous.
• TripIt actually solves a problem, which given the sad state of the presentations, made me happy. It's just not a problem that I personally have.
• I'm excited to see Flock reach 1.0, but... Out of that room, which would be a decent sample of the infamous "1 percent", how many of them are hardcore youtube users, facebook users and flickr users. Probably half or less. Seems like a terribly small market to me.

Favorite Demo Pit Company

• Satisfaction, by far, was my favorite. Maybe it's because of the Spirit Airlines debacle, but I truly believe there is a huge opening in the customer service space. This product is basically customer ticketing rethought. It has a b2b angle and a great consumer level face. Lane Becker, formerly of Adaptive Path, is one of the founders. In Adaptive Path like consistency, the application looks and feels like it's truly thought out. GetSatisfaction.com to check it out.

I told both Jason and CK awhile back that I'd pass along my thoughts. I wanted to sit back for awhile and watch how things all started to develop before offering up anything.

There are two users to a search engine. You have the person searching for information, and you have the person providing the information. In the case of Mahalo, the first use-case I get. Curated, edited, focused information that I'm looking for. In fact, I had my first Mahalo moment while searching for information on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and Mahalo was a big help. Awesome.

But when Dave Winer mentioned that Jason didn't bring a Win-Win to Gnomedex, it struck me as the words that I was looking for to describe the second use-case, although he probably meant his words in a little bit different context.

The second use-case falls flat on its ass. There is currently zero incentive for a blog author/content producer to support Mahalo. On Google, the value proposition is clear -- the more people a producer suggests to Google, the more people who are using it. The more people who are using it, the more traffic the producer's site ultimately gets. Yes, some people cheat and get more traffic than they should, but ultimately everyone has a chance to receive "votes" by way of organic links. It's a classic win win.

When Mahalo first launched with curated results, the existence of this proposition was at least debatable. Google backfill kept the basics of a search engine in play. Now that Mahalo is producing original content instead of SeRPs, however, it isn't really a search engine, but a knowledge base. From a content producer's point of view, why on earth would they want to contribute pagerank/trust rank/support to something that will ultimately overtake their keywords and traffic on Google? The slightest change in the rankings can dramatically affect a sites ad sales/conversions/whatever. Supplemental information makes sense I suppose, it's just like linking to a blog post. But again, that's seems like an awkward conflict of interest in the role of a search engine.

Remember when Google started giving their properties premium placement in the SeRPs? The damn near riot that almost ensued? People were grabbing pitch forks and lighting torches chanting "do no evil". That's nothing compared to the outrage people would have if Google started indexing their own open-ended random content on all subjects ahead of their second group of users, the content producers.

Mahalo will probably succeed with whatever Jason does. Answers.com, about.com, wikipedia, etc are all really popular high traffic sites. They just all happen to also be incredibly boring. If Mahalo wants to be exciting and redefine search (which seems to be J's stated goal), then it needs to create a win-win for the people who are building out the rest of the web. Figure that out, and Mahalo stands a chance to really help a lot of people.

UPDATE: In fairness, I should note that while sitting here thinking about the win-win comment, I saw the mahalo "how to write a resume" link scroll by on delicious. Talk about putting it all into context ;)
UPDATE #2: Both Jason and CK respond in the comments.

Jason Calacanis asked an interesting question today in regards to the economy.. Interesting times, indeed.

I spent a little time trying to catch up on the economic going-on's in the world on my flights this past week, and things are looking volatile if nothing else. Credit fears and overall consumer confidence levels are a drag, inflation concerns and the price of oil are putting downward pressure on the markets, and real estate is in the dumps.

I've posted before about the movement of money from one investment opportunity to another, and I still think thats the case. It's just.. When the market goes south, along with a hard asset like real estate, that largely leaves things like gold, CD's, t-bills and private equity investments, right? If interest rates are forced up from inflation, that doesn't make CD's all that appealing, but the Fed is looking like they might have to cut rates to spark spending -- I'm just not sure what a rate cut would do to consumer confidence. Wouldn't it be seen as more than an admittance of trouble ahead? I bet the media would at least spin it that way.

The other option is to move money overseas, which could lead to an even more unbalanced trade deficit/weakening dollar. Not necessarily a problem if we didn't have such profound budgetary concerns. Can't cover the overruns unless you can grow the economy faster than the debt. That won't happen if the money is invested elsewhere (the often overlooked exception to trickle down).

On the other hand, a month ago the Dow set a record high, factors like the unemployment index are fairly strong. June 2007's CPI was up 2.7% from June 2006, which seems to be about right (expectation should be 2-3% a year, correct?). The productivity index is up strong for the second quarter (over 2% 2nd quarter, compared to 0.2% for the 1st quarter of 2007). Many aspects of the economy seem to be not just healthy, but growing stronger. (follow along at home over at bls.gov)

I'm inclined to suggest that our overall confidence in handling the potential threats is what's dragging us down, and if there is a signal of good news somewhere, it'll cause a rebound. The threats aren't small ones, to be sure, but we're also surrounded by lots and lots of negativity driving down confidence. I'm not an economist, and I'm still trying to learn as much as I can about the subject, but it would appear that our economy is much stronger than folks want to give it credit for (hah, get it? credit?...ahem). It goes without saying that housing continues to be the biggest risk -- if we can avoid sellers panic, we may just pull through. Thin ice, though.

Thoughts?

Helped Launch Netscape.com

It was June 15th that we put the beta Netscape online. Love it or hate it, we certainly made waves ;)

It was a project I wasn't initially supposed to be involved with, at least, not to the extent that I was. When Jason and Brian took over the netscape.com domain, I was offered the opportunity to go to AOL sort of as a netscape/weblogs, inc contact for Blogsmith. Gavin, Mike and I had been working on Blogsmith for a few months and Blogsmith was a small indie startup still. Moving one of us to the "inside" made sense.

At some point last March, the three of us flew out to meet the Netscape team at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. One thing led to another, and I was asked to be the lead developer for the project through the product launch. The next couple of months were absolutely insane. Kathryn was out in California so I was left on my own in DC and pretty much worked around the clock. We launched the beta on June 15, 2006 and then spent the next month or two cleaning things up. We overloaded the servers, we got hacked, we had less functionality than we initially anticipated, we had scope creep into areas we didn't plan for -- you name it, and we dealt with it, all in a very short amount of time for a project of that size.

My reason for joining Netscape was to tackle the challenge of launching under such a tight deadline. Once things calmed down and things were humming along, Blogsmith happened to be purchased by AOL. I was able to slowly (perhaps without his full knowing/understanding) delegate most everything to Tom (suckah!), and transfer back to rejoin Gavin, Mike and by then, Celly on the Blogsmith project.

I was the first to drop off Netscape I guess, soon followed by Jason and then C.K.. The current team though is absolutely incredible and firing on all cylinders. The developers over there are top notch and working on some amazing technology that will certainly shake things up when its released.

It's been a hell of a year and a half personally, and Netscape is a big part of the story. I'll never forget someone ease dropping on our conversations out in LA, seeing it posted in the Digg comments and then everyone successfully burying it before it gained any strength. Riding segways around Venice with groups of people yelling "Freaks!!" at us and Jason, for some reason, acting like a Robot the whole time. Or discussing the merits of the Viceroy's amazingly delicious bacon with Wil Wheaton. Of course, using the then newly launched Emurse.com to staff up was enjoyable as well ;) (nod to Finke) (yea, I know, a plug.. I couldn't help myself)

I think the biggest lessons I learned was to sleep when I'm tired (oops), how to work with a boss like Jason (notoriously demanding) , script kiddies will always find a way, script kiddies don't like being called script kiddies, when talking to the press you're always on record and most importantly, anything in any amount of time is possible if you have a dedicated and focused enough team. Distance be damned.

Congrats on a successful first year for Netscape.com (the social edition). I absolutely can not wait to see the things planned for the next year. Trey and his team are men amongst men, and Tom's dedication and leadership holds great promise for the entire Netscape brand. Keep it up guys -- NETSCAPE FTW!

UPDATE: I've been quoted in the Netscape article on the same topic, "Happy Birthday, Netscape"

So yeah, the thing I haven't been able to talk about the last 3 or 4 months? The reason I've lost touch with friends and family? I'm the lead developer of the new Netscape.com.

Yesterday, as you probably read about in the New York Times, Techcrunch, Digg, Slashdot, or other major media outlet, we launched the newest generation of the Netscape brand. It's a social news site blending together professional journalism and user submitted content. It's a beta and certainly not without its flaws, but we think it's a hell of an initial "release."

On the Experience...

It's been a hell of a ride. Again, we wrote this thing in 3 or 4 months from scratch. We kept nothing of the existing netscape.com code base. We modeled the framework after the Blogsmith framework (which I worked on with Gavin Hall, the dev lead on Blogsmith and Weblogs, Inc., and also my long standing business partner), so we kinda had a decent idea of scalability and performance. (Blogsmith runs Engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc, and most recently, TMZ.)

The Netscape tech team is absolutely top notch. Brian Alvey is our chief architect and a super hero. Trey, Tom, Craig, Andy, and MIke Propst are just amazing at what they do. Combine that with the incrediable journalists we have as anchors and the fact that Calacanis can sell a feather to a pimp -- it's bound to be entertaining. The experience was (is) even more enjoyable simply because we all get along so well. We're kind of like a techie street gang.

On Launch...

Seriously.. Who showed Jason how to use iChat?! Now I have a giant, upset Jason staring at me when things aren't working right. Talk about pressure. ;) It's all good though, while some prefer email and IM, I guess I'm just a little more traditional with the face-to-face. Having the video going made it really easy to communicate with the folks up at 75 rock. God bless the internet.

It wasn't a perfect launch, we had amazing amounts of traffic and media coming in right from the very first minute, but we've learned a lot and it'll make us a better site going forward. Beta is about exposing weaknesses and fixing them, and I think we accomplished that (and will continue to do so).

Mad props go out to the hosting staff at AOL -- Matt Dunbar, who has stayed up with us on the damn-near-all-nighters, Adam Leff who we paged out of bed last night, Joe Gibbs, Kevin Pettit, Jacob and everyone else who puts up with our annoying help-us phone calls -- the list could take up an entire blog post. Much love.

On Digg...

I'll just take it head on -- of course we modeled ourselves after digg. It's an iteration, and a huge compliment to Digg itself. We're validating social news on a much more mainstream level. Are we a "digg killer," uh, no. Was digg a slashdot killer? I still check both. It's not a zero sum kinda thing. I pay for slashdot, and I would gladly pay for digg. I don't need to pay for Netscape, cause well, we have enough ad's to cover it........ (ahem) yeeaaah...

Digg wasn't the first site in the social news space by a long shot. Hell, I wrote a half assed attempt at it six years ago. My version failed, just like most of the others before Digg. Digg succeeded because Kevin Rose and his team did a hell of a job.

I know there's a lot of uproar from the Digg army about how close our site looks to Digg. Take out the vote badge, and would that still be the case? What then? We use the color yellow? This is web2.0 -- we all use the color yellow. We settled on the badge after playing around with a handful of other metaphors. Props to newsvine by the way, I love that damn vote thing. The fact is, Digg got it right. Why would we not do something that we thought was the best of the bunch? We could invent something else I'm sure, but seriously -- 3 months. That was our schedule. There's bigger fish to fry.

On Anchors...

Seriously. How cool is the idea of taking professional journalists, and throwing them into the mix of a social driven site? Users suggest the news, vote on the news, and the news gets covered by the people and by the folks who are paid to research things. If you can't see the power in that, then well, your just a hater ;) C.K. and the gang are going to be the jam.

Speaking of Hate...

Thanks for the QA Valleywag. Also, lots of people freaking out about the frame navigator -- it's going to be a preference that users can turn off forever and ever, we promise. The best possible way to measure response to it is to throw it out there. Lots of people like it (if your in firefox, use j to move forward, k to move backwards, v to vote, etc... its neat), lots of people don't. Sounds like the perfect thing to make a preference out of.

As far as the ads go.. Our hands are kinda tied. We promise to clearly mark anything thats an ad as an ad. We promise to get rid of the really horrible ones as soon as we can. Hopefully, we'll be able to come up with ad placement that makes everyone happy. We've been in beta for exactly 24 hours now.

On Features...

I'm just now allowed to blog about this thing, god knows I'm probably not supposed to blab away about upcoming features. I can tell you though, we have some really neat things coming down the pipe that will help seperate netscape from the "digg clone" category. Again, or goal isn't to be another digg. It's to be a social news site. That's it. Look for really neat tie in's to the anchor stuff. Also, I'm a huge fan of tagging and the like, so, hopefully we'll be able to get us-some-of-that (more than we have). And obviously, RSS/JSS on damn near everything. Oh, and whatever Digg v3.0 does, cause, all the haters bring in lots of traffic..... ;)

On Feedback...

We're listening. Leave a comment on someones blog, or use the feedback link on the new netscape site itself (sign in, its in your user info box, top right).

On Blah...

I'm officially pooped. Looking forward to decent sleep tonight and maybe a full meal in the morning. My appetite is finally starting to come back now that the caffiene is fading off.. w00t.