I was watching Colbert the other night, and caught the very tail end of an interview with author Annie Leonard.  She was promoting her new book, “The Story of Stuff.”  I didn’t catch enough of the interview to know if I wanted to buy it, but did catch enough to grab my Kindle to order up a sample chapter.

The subtitle of the book is: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change.  Let’s stop and think about that one for a second.  The author is railing against how the obsession with consuming, ostensibly, atoms is ruining the planet.  OK, I get that.

Imagine my surprise when I could only purchase her book in atom form.  Not available on the Kindle.  Wha?  Look, I get that not everyone has a Kindle, and that reading devices aren’t quite mainstream, but doesn’t this hypocrisy sort of negate her whole message?  Dave Ramsey rails against the use of debt for anything.  He’s a man who stands by his principles.  You cannot use a credit card to purchase wares from his site.

What principles is Ms. Leonard standing by when her book is not available at ship date in any form other than atoms?  The lesson here for entrepreneurs is pretty clear.  Know what you stand for, and why, and stick to it, lest you ruin your credibility.  This is an epic fail.

ABC has an awesome hit show on their hands with Modern Family.  While there isn’t anyone who can hold a candle to the sheer personality awesomeness of NPH on How I Met Your Mother, the cast and writing on Modern Family are genius.  It’s very rare that I laugh out loud at television, certainly not consistently week to week.  Well, except Family Guy.

This week, however, presented some comedy for both the wife and I.  A rarity, though this is the only sitcom we watch together.  You can view the episode on Hulu, and the scene in question is at 1:00 in to the show.  It’s a gem, and basically cured my wife of any thoughts that she might be crazy.

Ty Burrell may be the the nerdy father we all cringe at, but secretly know we are, but Julie Bowen is a real hidden gem in this show.  Her timing and delivery are under utilized, though she is often over shadowed by the Sofia Vergara.

There’s a great podcast I have been listening to since 2006 called Keith and the Girl.  The content is most definitely NSFW, but discovering this gem was like finding Howard Stern before everyone knew about it.  It’s a fantastic show, and they have also done a great job of building community around it.  As of this morning, in the 5 years they have been doing the show, they have had 60 tattoos and 2 brandings of their logo.  Crazy.

In any event, Keith and Chemda (the “girl”) are publishing a book on Mar 9th called “What Do We Do Now?”  They get lots of relationship type questions emailed to them from listeners, answering some on the air, and eventually got a book deal.  Awesome.

Here’s the nutty part which I never knew.  I’m sure authors are well aware of this, but all pre-order sales for a book count toward your first week sales number.  It’s an interesting game you can play as an author, especially one who shows up with an audience, in that you can promote the book well in advance of the release, get the core audience purchases to land you on the best seller lists, and then in store placements which result will likely have a multiplier effect on sales thereafter.  I love it.

If you want a good laugh, go read their sample chapter, or pre-order the book.  They do the show for free and make money from ads and merchandise sales.  Why not buy yourself or someone you know a copy and help get these guys on the best seller lists in the first weeks?  I plan to post my video review later in the week, but I just loved this idea of hacking the best seller list and wanted to share.

I have long held that our current system of taxation is a bad one.  It’s oppressive, is changed too often, and encourages cheating.  Further, the more complicated the tax code, the more likely you are to have to spend more time, and in many cases money, sorting out what you do and don’t owe.  It’s onerous and I hate the current system.  I want to hack it.

With that out of the way, it was with some interest that I was reading this article about the multitude of tax programs which are being enacted to help students get out of debt post school.  When thinking about any program, I view it in the same lens as I would a product that I would take to market.  First is who is my customer, but second is how do they become aware of the product.  For the average person, staying on top of all of these government programs is challenging at best.  In times like these, I prefer to opt for simplicity.  With that, let me propose some assertions, and then a potential solution:

1) As a country, we should aspire to have a more educated work force

2) The cost of college, university, and graduate education is rising faster than the rate of inflation, making it more un-affordable with each passing year

3) With the current tax system, a higher paid, and more productive, work force should, ceteris paribus, generate more tax revenues

If we can all agree on those assertions, then I propose this simple tax plan:

If you borrowed money to attend college or graduate school, and are now working full time, you do not pay taxes.  All federal taxes that you would have paid are instead diverted to paying down your student debt.  There are no exemptions allowed to reduce tax burden, and by extension extend the debt repayment schedule.

Simple right?  There needs to be some teeth in this, and fleshed out a bit more, but I am offering this one up to Congress for free.  Why?  Because I don’t have the ability to move the ball forward short of throwing this out there and having the community at large comment on, improve upon, and forward this to someone who might be able to something with it.

Think about who this serves.  As a student, you worry less about debt that you are taking on, because the mountain of debt waiting you at the end of your scholastic journey is now much, much more manageable.  As a body politic, we benefit from having a generally up leveling in the education level of our population because more people will find the prospect of continuing their education more economically feasible.  Unlike these other programs which seek to essentially allow for debt forgiveness, each person is responsible for their debt until it is paid off.

Someone looking at this might say that there would be a huge revenue hole to the government if all of the sudden you removed the tax revenues of debt repaying students.  I see that as an investment by the government in the population.  The notion that the better educated population will generate more tax revenues should be simple enough for them to understand.

Why is this good for business?  First, we have the better educated employees.  Second, you have an employee base that has more carefully considered their options.  No 18 year old really knows what they want to be when they grow up.  If you could go back to school at 25, knowing that the debt you are taking on will get repaid first before tax dollars, you are far more likely to make that decision.  As an older employee, with more work experience, and life experience, you are more likely to know what you want/ought to be doing with your life, and if that requires more education, it’s better for everyone that you remove yourself from a job you didn’t want (opening that position for someone else), and positioning yourself for a job you do want without fear of how you are going to pay for it.

How about looking at this from a numbers stand point.  The average student graduating in the class of 2008 will owe $23,200 for their efforts.  That’s a painful number.  I found this study which claims the range for post-secondary debt levels ranges between $27,000 and $114,000.  Yowsa.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s take a WA state resident, making $40K per year, but deciding that going back to school for a degree which will enable them to make $75k per year.  The difference in annual Federal taxes withheld (filing as single and no exemptions) is $5,268 for the lower income, and $14,164 for the higher.  Now, assume you jump from $75K to a $150K per year job (which is not crazy if you get an MBA).  The annual Federal tax liability jumps from $14,164 to $35,135.

See what I am getting at here?  A smart, thrifty student would pay down their debt the same way they were before this plan was enacted, but get the additional paydown accelerator afforded by this plan.  I am guessing most people would actually just have their taxes pay down the debt, which would free up disposable income, which is likely to be spent on taxable items.

Is my reasoning sound?  Am I missing something?  I am not a tax expert.  This is simply an idea that has been rattling around in my head for a while that I would love to see explored more.  Please, prove me wrong.  Tell me why this won’t work.  More discussion can only lead to more ideas.

Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:

There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass.  I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.

The rumor mills and speculation are running at fever pitch.  I really should have predicted that 2010 would be the year of the tablet.  With bloggers falling all over themselves trying to get the scoop on the Apple table, it seems that the bloggers are trying to call a tablet from Microsoft to be announced tonight, though Mary Jo says “I don’t think so.”  With all that in mind, I was trying to figure out how to explain the world of tech in which we live.

Any unannounced, but speculated on, Apple product lives at the intersection of Impossible, Inspiring and In-Demand.  People may scoff at the notion of “in-demand” being applied to a table, but Bing tells me that there are 22.5 million results for Apple Tablet.

In an effort to save a lot of pain and suffering for those people who don’t want to read an incredibly long blog post, I have a nice little summary table.  The predictions run the gamut of my personal and professional interests, so they may not be 100% interesting to all people.

• 99% of All Decade Lists That Come This Year Will Be Wrong
• Twitter Will Become A Footnote
• Real Time Has Had It’s Time
• Interest Rates Will Begin To Rise
• Housing Prices Being To Stall And Then Fall
• Jorge Lorenzo Will Win MotoGP World Championship
• Netbook Market Disappears
• Apple’s Disdain For Developers Will Reach A Tipping Point
• ChromeOS Proves To Be Another Of Google’s Failures
• The Final Season Of Lost Will Not Be Seen
• Foundations For The Repeal Of Sarb-Ox
• The Venture Business, As We Know It, Is Dead
• Oil Trading Draws Legislative Scrutiny
• Windows Mobile 7 Will Impress
• Tim Tebow Will Play No Downs That Matter At QB

99% of All Decade Lists That Come This Year Will Be Wrong – how can I say such a thing?  Well, for the most part, I have already seen the early warning signs that everyone is going to want to do the “decade in review” or “predictions for the decade” or some such thing.  I know this is a nit, but it’s one that has bothered me ever since I got the Final Jeopardy question wrong way, way back.  2010 is not the first year of the new decade.  2011 is.  Deal with it. =)

Twitter Will Become A Footnote – the reality of what Twitter has shown us has not yet been fully realized.  Yes, we have all at one point or another succumbed to the pursuits of vanity by asking people to follow (demanding, in varying degrees, is more like it).  We all watched with rapt fascination as the race to 1,000,000 followers was won by Ashton Kutcher.  Twitter is everywhere – commercials, tv show mentions, Facebook, billboards.  It’s everywhere, and yet it’s nowhere.

You see, the main value I get out of Twitter is information discovery.  Mostly interesting links that are being shared by people who I have chosen to follow.  Yes, you can use Twitter to solicit answers from your network, but those answers may come from people who follow you, and not the other way around.  This follow-asymmetry is what gives me the most angst about the future potential for Twitter.  It’s both wonderful and harmful at the same time.

Further complicating the issue around the “success” of Twitter is an issue which I tracked at my last company, and one for which I know of no easy way to track if you are external to Twitter.  Churn and “last login” times.  Like blogging before it, where the average blog was abandoned in 4 months, I wonder what the time to abandonment on most Twitter accounts happens to be, and how this is changing (growing or shrinking) over time.  Perhaps I will write some code to take advantage of the 10x improvements to access to the stream to figure out the average time lag on the last tweet.  We already know that the vast majority of the content on Twitter is generated by a very small group of people.  What happens when the digerati that made Twitter begin to suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome and move on to the next thing (and they will)?

When I share things on Facebook, I feel confident that they are being consumed by people I know, and those people, more or less, want to consume them.  If you buy into the fact that most people will abandon Twitter at the same, or perhaps increasing rate of bloggers, what is the long term value of sharing content with a Twitter audience?  As people move on, where is the value in Twitter?  I will stop sharing because I am essentially speaking into an empty room.

I have already spent too much of this post on Twitter.  I expect this company to fade into obscurity like PointCast.  Real time search, and user generated content did not start with, nor will they end with, Twitter.  Some company may end up *WAY* overpaying for Twitter, seeing it as a potential trove of information and relevancy to Gen Y and younger, but it’s a fools errand.

Real Time Has Had It’s Time – The reason that TechCrunch and seemingly everyone else is frothing at the mouth about real time search is that it’s something about which they can write.  Something about which they can prognosticate and generate page views.  Real time, when you boil it all down, is about surfacing information quicker.  You hear all the time about how Twitter floats a story faster than the traditional media.  Heaven forbid anyone hold Twitter streams to any kind of error or fact checking.  I am waiting for the War of the Worlds moment on Twitter.  Can’t wait for that.

In reality, what we will begin to see is the major search engines battling it out based on their speed to index content.  Twitter is fine for surfacing some interesting link or content, but really, all that’s happening is some pseudo reporting of an event, and you cannot gain context or even real content.  All you have is a signal that something happened.  Google is already rolling out some changes they have made to speed up their time to index, and that will give links to content and context for any new interrupt.  The challenge Google has is that their methods for ranking and relevancy relied on a level of user curation which could take days to surface.  They’re not dummies, and I expect to see more news here.  However, all this trope about “real time” this and “real time” that will simmer to a boil and then hit the back burner.  Why?  Follow the money.  Bing and Google.  Twitter’s $25 million payday from Google and Bing was a nice pat on the head, and the big boys telling them to go to the corner.

Interest Rates Will Begin To Rise – We’ve seen a ridiculous run of low interest rates over the last decade.  This chart on the history of mortgage rates tells a very interesting story:

Consider for a moment that we were supposedly 500 trades away from a complete financial services meltdown.  That was Sept 2008.  What has followed, from this deep economic crisis, is another historic run of continued low interest rates.  For a more full picture of what rates have looked like over the last 17 years, here’s another chart:

As you can see, we are currently lingering in a zone well below the long term average.  Looking at the 4 year chart for the 10-year Treasury shows another interesting bit of data:

After the financial meltdown and subsequent loss of trust in the US markets, interest rates have continued to stay low.  Why is this?  The government continues to allow banks to trade the spread on the TARP money and Treasuries.  When that game is over, and it will be, interest rates will have to climb in order for the much needed capital from international sources to soak up the Treasuries.  How much debt?  With the current strategies employed by our current government, with trillions at stake, we have a lot of debt which need to be floated to cover the costs of the policies.  Who’s going to buy the Treasuries with rates this low?  No one.  In order to move the product, the price is going to have to change, which means interest rates are going to have to go up.  Mortgage rates will follow suit.

Housing Prices Being To Stall And Then Fall – coupled with the erosion of the mortgage market will be a marked decrease in the value of homes.  Whereas the last decline that we had was brought on by panic selling and a general lack of credit, this slump will be brought on by two factors working together.

First, the increase in the interest rates will force many people to start thinking about their affordability index not in terms of total home value, but rather in terms of the monthly payments they can make.  For a $200K mortgage, a 2% swing in interest rates from 5% to 7% is a $257 delta.  As we saw in the charts above, 7% isn’t that crazy from a historical norms perspective.  Now, for a $500K mortgage, assuming you can still get a conforming jumbo loan in your area, that swing in interest rates is a difference of $642 in your monthly payment.  If you live in California, things get messy.  The median income is about $62K, and the median home value is $304K.  Assuming you make that median income, and claim married and 4 allowances on your W2 (oh, and you don’t have any employee paid part of health insurance – ha!), that 2% swing can mean a 9% decrease in your take home pay, and that your mortgage would represent 48% of your take home pay.  How’s that going to work long term?

Second, and more insidious, will be the reduction of property tax collections as a result of the inevitable howls for reduction in assessed home values due to the drop in appraised values or comparable sale values in neighborhoods.  Local governments, already strapped with the pain of poor budgeting and overspending, will seek to replace this lost revenue.  They will most likely seek to do this by maintaining assessed values or increasing property taxes.  Neither will make home owners happy, and both will decrease disposable incomes for families.

Jorge Lorenzo Will Win MotoGP World Championship – taking a break from my professional life/prognostications comes the first of my personal hobby/interest predictions.  Jorge Lorenzo has shown himself to be an incredible racer, even when matched on a team with the greatest motorcycle racer ever.  This will be his year.  He has proven he can beat Il Doctore, and has demonstrated he is more than comfortable on the Yamaha.  Presuming he remains injury free for the season, he will prevail this year.  Stoner is back, but the chinks in the armor are there, and they have not gone unnoticed.

Second, Ben Spies will win at least one race in his debut MotoGP season.  I raced Spies once…way back in 1999 at Road Atlanta during the GPRA (now the USGPRU) National Championships.  I beat him on a 125gp bike, though he crashed out while 7 places ahead of me, after starting from the back of the grid, on his backup bike (that last one is a joke), which means that I too could win a MotoGP race. =)  That weekend I had the good fortune to race against Ben, John Hopkins and Jason DiSalvo.  What a long way each of them has come…amazing to watch.

Netbook Market Disappears – More specifically, the delta between what is called a laptop and what has been called a netbook will evaporate.  I tried to use a netbook for work related tasks (meetings, travel, etc) and found it impossible to use for anything remote resembling actual work.  The 600px screen was impossible to use (come on, seriously, when was the last time you used 800×600 (as a proxy for the size) and were happy about it?), the processor appallingly slow, the memory and the shared video memory make for a terrible experience.  Just awful.  Earlier in the year, I compared netbooks to the Razor scooter, relics of the dot com days which were fun for a little bit, but proved to be a fad.

Yes, you can get a netbook for about $350 all in (cheaper if you are OK skimping on screen size and memory) but what is ultimately going to be the delta between a netbook and a $500 laptop?  Will it be the delineation of the processor type?  If so, either the Atom is going to have to improve or Microsoft is going to have to port Win7 to the ARM processor (don’t hold your breath).  I am sure people will talk about ChromeOS, Google’s forthcoming offering, but we’ll talk about that one in a bit.

The erosion of the netbook market, and even the assist Apple is giving the industry by maintaining a slightly higher price point for their notebooks, is going to play out with people being OK with that $700-$800 price point for a good laptop, and $400-$500 for a crippled one.  All of this helps MSFT, as it will stop the pricing pressure for margins (or lack thereof) on the OS component of the bill of materials.  Customers will continue to benefit from this competition and trend as we continue to see absolutely amazing advancements in personal computers.

Apple’s Disdain For Developers Will Reach A Tipping Point – as one of the folks responsible for developer marketing at Microsoft, I am one of the biggest cheerleaders out there for the plight of the developer.  I love to spend time with developers and talk the nerdy talk with them.  One thing I hear over and over again from folks who are building for iPhone platform is that Apple basically is giving them the finger.  This issue is well documented and doesn’t need to be rehashed here.

What I did want to talk about it is how the anti-love from Apple toward developers could potentially play itself out.  For those of you old enough in the room to remember when Microsoft rose to market leader, do you remember why Microsoft was so successful?  The developers.  Of course.  Apple knows this and has done an absolutely incredible job creating an ecosystem of developers building applications for their platform.  I can’t think of another platform that hit 100K apps as quickly as Apple has.  Developers love to work on cool/important things, and the iPhone platform gives them that opportunity (farting apps excluded).

Unfortunately, Apple only has part of the solution correct.  Developers, like most participants in any economic market, seek to not just build things that they want to build, but they want to satisfy two things in their mind.  Their egos (seeking fame or recognition for their work), and they want to get paid.  All the open source jibber jabber in the world won’t convince me otherwise.  Eventually, everyone has to eat.

There have been plenty of stories of iPhone millions, but really, how many of them are there?  There’s a huge survivorship bias with Apple’s platform, and you rarely hear the stories of the guys who spent tens of thousands of dollars on development only to sell their app to their 10s of friends.  Yes, many apps have been developed, but how much money is actually flowing into this ecosystem?  Apple does a hell of a job getting app developers recognition for their work (seen any iPhone commercials recently?), but they aren’t solving the money problem.  Google is actually getting both of these wrong, for all of their developer communities, but Vic Gundotra will have to figure that out on his own or hire me to do it for him.

Back to Microsoft.  One of the things that makes the company so successful is their ability to help other people make money.  At the Worldwide Partner Conference last year (maybe the year before) one of the quotes from Allison Watson was that for every dollar of Microsoft revenue, there are $14 of partner revenue generated.  Think about that for a second.  That’s $840 billion.  Billion.  Almost a trillion.  Yowsa.  Microsoft is so successful because they enable people and companies to solve problems and make money from it.  It’s taken decades to build, is very hard to replicate, and one of the reasons why they cries for the coming fall of Microsoft are way, way premature.

With Apple, their continued indifference to this monetization problem, coupled with making it difficult for these companies to successfully service their customers (long turn-around times on app updates) will ultimately catch up with them.  I really like how people claim that the 100K apps are the huge barrier to entry to any other phone developer, but all Apple proved was that in a year you could get 100K apps built.  This ecosystem didn’t get built over a decade.  It’s not insurmountable, and the switching costs are not very high for developers.  Maybe Android can get it done.  Maybe Windows Mobile 7.  What one man can do another can do; especially true if you did it in one year.

ChromeOS Proves To Be Another Of Google’s Failures – Google is going to discover the same thing that the Ubuntu guys found out – the netbook market doesn’t support a Linux OS.  I don’t care what you say, it won’t work.  Google is already going to be stymied by the erosion of the netbook market about which I already talked.

Google, as a company, has lost sight of coming to grips with doing that which you want to do and that which you should do.  Customers should be driving development decisions, and while I get that Google wants to make it as easy as possible for people get online, and they believe that by building a net focused computer that more searches will happen online, they have too many hurdles to clear.  There’s no driver which will carry this product to the mass market, never mind the fact that the mass market does not trust the cloud (strict requirement for ChromeOS), and has not shown any immediate inclination to do so.  Outside of the cliquey circles of the 415 and 650 area codes, I don’t see much demand for this product.

Imagine for a second that someone comes to your house the throws out all of your books and replaces it with a Kindle with all of your now thrown out books on it.  Sounds like a logical, and efficient thing to do.  I would kill that person, despite my love for the Kindle.  Yes, it makes logical sense, but no customer would want it.  Yes, the engineers can make up all sorts of reasons why they should do this, but asking customers was not one of the inputs.  Google Docs and Spreadsheet are not the Office killer people want them to be, and consumer demand for the ChromeOS product isn’t there, so what’s going to drive market success?  ChromeOS in the enterprise?  I don’t see it.

The Final Season Of “Lost” Will Not Be Seen – I remember watching the very first episode of Lost and thinking “wow, they just grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go.”  They introduced all of these interesting story lines, but over time I came to realize that they never seemed to go anywhere.  They just lingered on and on.  Anyone remember the numbers?  WTF happened to those?  They were woven into multiple story lines like a fine thread of silk meant to enhance the value of the tapestry only to be abandoned.  The boys over at Penny Arcade noticed way back in 2006 that things were going a little strangely for the Lost writing crew.

Factor into the mix a writers’ strike and schedule planning with ineptitude on the order of who knows what and the net result is long breaks between seasons where you lose viewers.  The problem with Lost is further compounded by the fact that this is a serialized drama, which means if you miss something, you are lost (pun intended).  Lost itself is given to such fanciful fits of imagery and suggestion that even if you watch the show every week you have about 50% of a clue as to what is going on and must rely on the Internet nerds to show you the frame by frame analysis.  Anyone see the sequence in the shed revealing the Jacob is Locke (or that he has no face, it really depends on your proclivities)?  Remember the guy who carried the thing when Sawyer was in that place?  Well he had a Dharma tattoo on his wrist which you can only see if you do a reverse color scan analysis of the commercial preview.  Yeah, it’s something like that.

So, if your regular viewers are having a hard enough time keeping track of your broken story telling, and you insist on inserting long breaks between seasons while you finish smoking whatever it is you are smoking, and complete you scripts under the cover of night, in a tent, while raining, with a flashlight in your mouth, well, you can expect that this season will bomb.  Oh, and when you really want to get lazy about your story telling, you can introduce time travel to cure all ills.  People may tune in to the final show in the hopes of getting a non-Soprano’s like ending, and they may just.  However, from the friends with whom I have spoken, they could care less.  They are tired of having to work so hard for something which has been increasingly decreasing in return on investment.

Foundations For The Repeal Of Sarb-Ox – The economy is in trouble.  Things are not moving forward as quickly as everyone would want them to, and people are beginning to look at the current administration for new ideas.  Approval ratings are sliding to the point where people have to be genuinely concerned about their ability to get re-elected.  With the onset of 2010, we have in front of us an election year.  36 seats in the Senate are up for grabs, and all of the seats in Congress.  The body politic is tiring of our government failing time and again to get anything done, especially when you have a super-majority.

About the smartest thing the current Democrats could do would be to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.  What a complete cluster this has been.  What was one enacted in the hopes of costing a low six figures to enact in a company is currently estimated to cost $2 million a year to put into place all of the controls required.  Large companies like it because it keeps smaller, more entrepreneurial companies out of the public markets.  Smaller companies can’t get access to public capital, which in effect reduces the ability for many of them to grow.

A December 21, 2008 Wall St. Journal article laid out the cast as following: "The new laws and regulations have neither prevented frauds nor instituted fairness. But they have managed to kill the creation of new public companies in the U.S., cripple the venture capital business, and damage entrepreneurship. According to the National Venture Capital Association, in all of 2008 there have been just six companies that have gone public. Compare that with 269 IPOs in 1999, 272 in 1996, and 365 in 1986."

Just look at those numbers.  Granted, there were many crap companies that went public during the dot com blow up, and that harmed personal investors, but that’s not what Sarb-Ox was targeting.  The law was enacted to prevent fraud, not protect idiots from putting all of their money in terrible companies.  Hopefully that lesson has been learned, though I am not sure when I hear about Twitter raising money on a billion dollar valuation.  That’s just crazy talk for a company with a speculated $25 million in revenues.  That said, there are many companies that are just itching for the ability to go public, and they can’t because of needless regulations.

There’s a lot of people up for re-election, a lot of populist dissatisfaction, and politicians love to appear to be “doing something.”  Someone is going to start pushing, very seriously, the idea of repealing Sarb-Ox under the banner of jump starting the economy.

The side benefit from all of the big winners of the last IPO bonanza lends nicely to my next prediction.

The Venture Business, As We Know It, Is Dead – There are several factors at work here, but the top line is that the companies which are getting funded simply don’t need the amount of capital they once did to get to profits.  Further, the number of engines available to small companies to drive customer acquisition and revenues have never been more prevalent.  The economics of the venture funds dictate that they invest ever larger pools of capital.  They simply aren’t structured to take the large pools of capital with which they are being entrusted and invest in smaller and smaller chunks.

Angels have had a bit of a renaissance as of late, but what is not being implicitly reported is the number of no-name millionaires who made their money in exits in the last decade and are investing at $25-$50K clips into early stage companies.  What’s so interesting about these guys is that they all tend to know each other, and they aren’t afraid to share deals.  This is in stark contrast to the venture model where every VC feels that they must generate proprietary deal flow in order to justify their fees.

Further, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships have changed dramatically over the last decade thanks to social networking, specifically LinkedIn and Facebook.  The folks 35 and under are implicitly social and work together.  These newly minted millionaires hail from the development ranks, and they mostly cut their teeth on open source software.  The idea that you work with other people, people that you may not even know personally, together, toward a common goal, for the good of the group is bred into their fiber.  This stands in stark contrast to the hotly competitive, type-A MBA jockeys that run most venture funds.  In many of those funds, they will stop at nothing to get the best deal for themselves, even at the expense of the founders/company.

However, it’s the more recent development to which I have had a third row seat which may prove to be the death blow for traditional venture funds for the software space.  One man VC shops, mostly funded with personal money.  The professionalization of the funding process, but investing their own money (and not OPM), dramatically reduced capital requirements, and an innate sense of collaborative investing process is going to make things exceedingly painful and difficult for the existing larger funds.  Throw into this mix and entire generation of mid-level professionals (read, the Vice Presidents and Principals) who haven’t seen much in the way of exits, and things get even more painful.

I don’t expect orgs like bands of angels coming together to meet on a quarterly basis to do deals.  I actually expect more of a BarCamp approach to funding where small groups of guys who want to write checks get together and start funding these companies.  Should it come to pass that Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn or any of the real money makers who are sitting on the IPO sideline actually go out, expect a new type of mafia wars (nod to Zynga).  The PayPal mafia can only fund so many companies.

Oil Trading Draws Legislative Scrutiny– There are many, many things wrong with the oil trading business.  I actually wish I knew more about it.  I spent quite a bit of time during my hiatus from RLX to IMSafer working with a company in Houston that was in the oil and gas industry, and we spent quite a bit of time with hedge funds and MLPs in the space.  One thing that I came to love was how insane the oil market is.

Demand reality is not reflected in the oil market.  I am going to say that again so that everyone hears me.  Demand reality is not reflected in the oil market.  The challenge presented by the oil market is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can participate.  You can trade barrels of oil whether or not you intend to take possession of them, and indeed the vast majority do not.  Further compounding the problems presented by this trading model is the leverage which is allowed to be employed by the traders.  The leverage is what really pushes the table action.

When I said that the demand doesn’t reflect reality, what I really mean is that it reflects the collective perception of the many market participants who make highly leveraged trades based on information which may or may not be right, and speculation about future.  Ask 10 people in the oil and gas industry how much oil is in the ground, and you will get 10 different answers.  This lack of knowledge of the exact quantities is only part of the problem.  Technology to recover oil only permits partial recovery – meaning on the order of 40-60% for a particular well head.  The industry has come up with many ways of getting the oil, but it basically boils down to first allowing natural pressure to push it up, then flooding the rock with steam to push more up, and then some tertiary methods to do additional recovery.  However, about half of the oil in a particular deposit is still in the ground.  It cannot be economically recovered.

Throw things like shale oil into the mix, and you have new sources of oil (versus raw crude) that can come onto the market if the price per barrel is high enough.  As technology moves forward, and the industry discovers new and innovative ways to recover the additional 50% of oil still in the known fields, well, things get interesting – but supply isn’t the issue you are led to believe it is.  For today, however, the reality is that no one knows how much oil is in the ground, and the people that are making trades based on market demand are in fact driving/creating the demand by affecting market prices with their outsized leveraged bets.  It’s quite a vicious cycle.

For those of you who didn’t catch the absolutely amazing This American Life which talks about the economic meltdown which occurred in 2008, please do.  You will come to know about and love credit default swaps (CDS).  The short version is that a CDS allows you to make bets on things that you have no business making bets on.  For instance, what if you could buy insurance for every house in your neighborhood.  Wouldn’t you like to get paid if some other house in your neighborhood burnt down?  What if everyone in a neighborhood bought that same insurance on the same house.  50 families all buying insurance that would pay out should one house burn down.  That’s a CDS in a nutshell.  Why on earth would we allow this to happen?  If you don’t have a economic or vested interest in that house (i.e., you are the owner or the underwriter of the loan) why should you be allowed to make that bet?  Further, if you can’t prove that you can make the payout on all insurance policies you write, should you be allowed to write them?  Oil markets are not very far afield from where the CDS markets were last year.  Anyone can play, and you can buy oil on which you never intend to take delivery, and you can do so with massive, massive leverage, without having to supply adequate backup capital or prove that you can even pay out should a multi-sigma event happen.

I believe that someone from the talking head community (either CNBC or Fox Business) will get this story out in the open and the legislators will jump on it.  High oil prices hurt the economy (this one specifically) and they are not high because of an influx of demand or shortages.  Prices are reflecting trading, not the actual delivery and usage of oil.  Prices are further impacted by the price of the dollar (since barrels of oil are priced in the USD$).

Since you don’t actually have to worry about taking or making delivery of the oil, and you can get great leverage, and the price is impacted by the price of the dollar, if you were a really crafty (*cough* nefarious *cough*) trader, you could do some very interesting paired trades.

Windows Mobile 7 Will Impress – I have seen things.  I am impressed.  That is all I can say.  Stay tuned.

Tim Tebow Will Play No Downs That Matter At QB – It’s such a shame that Tebow’s college career had to come to an end at the Sugar Bowl.  He’s one of the greatest college players ever to play the game, and it’s a loss for the sport.  He also presents as a great leader with a genuine passion for the human condition.  With all that said, he needs to give Scott Frost a call.  I love that Tebow wants to play QB at the next level, and I believe that whatever team picks him up will allow him to perhaps take reps during the pre-season, but it’s more likely that they are going to want to know if he can catch a ball.  Think Jeremy Schockey and Kellen Winslow.  Big tight ends who can smack some people around when they have the ball.

Rare in the physical gifts is an athlete such as Tim Tebow.  He has massive size, good speed, incredible strength, and he’s a tremendous presence on the field.  One of the bigger challenges for any team that does pick up Tebow will be how to channel his leadership qualities if he is not under center – you don’t need two quarterbacks on the field.

My call is that he will go in the mid/late second round, perhaps early third round.  No coach will want to use a first round pick on a player that is a “maybe QB, but definitely an athlete.”  This isn’t a case like Cordell Stewart, where it was clear he could transition to wide-out.  Expect Tebow to get put through the ringer during the coming months of pro-days and combines.  If I had to peg the team that will take him, my call is Miami, because of their strong comfort with the Wildcat offense, or perhaps New England because they have two consecutive early second round picks.

About two weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend some time at an offsite where I met Gary Flake.  I remember reading the Wired Magazine cover piece on Gary a few years back, but didn’t didn’t have any idea who he was when I was introduced to him at the offsite.  As one of Microsoft’s Technical Fellows, he’s basically one of the 20 or so smartest engineers in the company.  Spending time with a guy like that is a treat, and this guy thinks about stuff that gets me excited.  Data and systems.

It’s a good thing Gary is so good at his job, because when he gave me the initial pitch for Pivot I thought it sounded about as interesting as a new sorting algorithm [NOTE: the downloads are restricted to token holders, so if you are interested in getting Pivot, hit me up on Twitter and I will get you one].  It wasn’t a great pitch.  Only after I saw the software in action, and lifting my jaw off the floor, did I run back over to Gary and offer to rewrite his 25 word pitch.  My motives were not all together altruistic.  I wanted access to the software, but more importantly I wanted access to the tools to create my own data sets.

The unofficial, not blessed by Microsoft, but how I would talk about Pivot is: a client application to explore user created data sets along multiple criteria in a rich, visual way.  In short, it’s Pivot Tables + Crack + WPF.  The demo datasets that Gary was showing were interesting, but nothing about the data was actionable.  It was informational, but not insight generating.  My brain jumped to dumping CRM data into Pivot…or a bug database…or a customer evidence set.  Things that were actionable, traditionally hard to search, and would benefit from a visual metaphor.  Then, like a ton of bricks, it hit me.  What about Crunchbase?

Spend a few minutes wandering around Crunchbase, and you realize what an incredibly rich dataset they have assembled, and yet the search and browse interface could be better.  It’s rather simplistic and it’s not possible to dive deeper into a search to refine it.  So that was my project.  I was going to use the Crunchbase API to generate a dataset for Pivot.  Sounded simple enough.  Here’s how I did it, and the result.  (here’s a link to the CXML for those of you with the Pivot browser and who want to see mine in action – WARNING: It takes about 20 seconds to load).

The Code

I have created a CodePlex project for the CrunchBase Grabber, and welcome any additions to the project.

The first problem I had to solve was how to take the JSON objects down and use them in C#.  I normally would have done something like this in Python and used the SimpleJSON library, but I really wanted to do a soup to nuts C# project, and walk a mile in my customers’ shoes.  It turns out that we have a pretty good object for doing just this.  In the System.Web.Script.Serialization assembly (for which you have to add the reference to System.Web) there is a nice JavaScriptSerializer object.  This was nice to use, but the web information was a bit confusing.  It appears that this was deprecated in .NET 3.0, and then brought back in 3.5.  It’s back and it works.

What I liked about the JavaScriptSerializer was that it could take an arbitrary JSON object in as a stream, and then deserialize to an object of my creation.  I only needed to include the fields that I wanted from the object, so long as the names mapped to the items in the JSON object.  That made creating a custom class for just the data I wanted much easier than enumerating all of the possible data types.

        public string name;
        public string permaLink;
        public string homepage_url;
        public string crunchbase_url;
        public string category_code;
        public string description; // = "";
        public int? number_of_employees; // = 0;
        public string overview;
        public bool deadpool;
        public int? deadpool_year; //= "";
        public imgStructure image;
        public List<locStructure> offices;
        public string tag_list;
        public int? founded_year;
        public List<fndStructure> funding_rounds;
        public Dictionary<string, fndStructure> aggFundStructure = new Dictionary<string,fndStructure>();
        public List<string> keyword_tags;

There’s a couple of things I want to share which will make life a lot easier for you if you plan on using this JavaScriptSerializer.  First, know how to make a type nullable.  If you don’t know what that means, here’s the short version: for any type other than a string, add that “?” after the type and that will allow you to assign a null type to it.  Why is this important?  During the deserialization process, you are bound to hit null types from the stream.  This is especially true if you aren’t in control of the stream, as I wasn’t with Crunchbase.  That’s 4 hours of frustration from my life I just saved you.  I left my comments in there to show you I tried all kinds of things to solve this “assignment of null” exception, and none of them work.  Just use the “?”

Second is understanding the created data types that were used.  Most JSON objects will have nested data structures.  When that happens, you will need to have a new data type that you create with the same name of the data coming back from the object.  In this example, let’s look at the image data:

    public class imgStructure
    {
        public List<List<object>> available_sizes;
        public string attribution;
    }

The available_sizes actually comes back with a set of sizes and a relative file location.  Because there are numbers and text, the List of type object had to be used.  That’s another 3 hours I just saved you.  Here’s the JSON that came back so you can see what I mean:

 "image":
  {"available_sizes":
    [[[150,
       41],
      "assets/images/resized/0000/2755/2755v28-max-150x150.png"],
     [[220,
       61],
      "assets/images/resized/0000/2755/2755v28-max-250x250.png"],
     [[220,
       61],
      "assets/images/resized/0000/2755/2755v28-max-450x450.png"]],
   "attribution": null},

Getting at that data would prove difficult.

return baseURL + this.image.available_sizes[1][1].ToString();

Because I wanted the middle sized logo, and the location, I had to use the [1][1] to get a string.  Had I wanted the sizes, I would have needed a [1][0][0] or [1][0][1] because the first [0] returns the object which is an array.  Yes, it’s confusing and annoying, but if you know what you want, navigating the complex nested data type can be done.

There were actually two JSON streams I needed to parse.  The first was the Company list, which I retrieved by creating a CompanyGenerator class, which creates the WebRequest to the API to get the company list JSON and then parses that list into a list of company objects.

    public class CompanyGenerator
    {
        //this is how we call out to crunchbase to get their full list of companies
        public List<cbCompanyObject> GetCompanyNames()
        {
            string jsonStream;
            JavaScriptSerializer ser = new JavaScriptSerializer();

            WebRequest wrGetURL;
            wrGetURL = WebRequest.Create("http://api.crunchbase.com/v/1/companies.js");

            jsonStream = new StreamReader(wrGetURL.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();

            //as opposed to the single company calls, this returns a list of companies, so we have to
            //stick it into a list
            List<cbCompanyObject> jsonCompanies = ser.Deserialize<List<cbCompanyObject>>(jsonStream);

            return jsonCompanies;
        }

    }

Once I had that list, it was a simple matter of iterating over the list and fetching the individual JSON objects per company.

            foreach (cbCompanyObject company in companyNames)
            {
                string jsonLine;

                //with a company name parsed from JSON, create the stream of the company specific JSON
                jsonStream = cjStream.GetJsonStream(company.name);

                if (jsonStream != null)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        //with the stream, now deserialize into the Crunchbase object
                        CrunchBase jsonCrunchBase = ser.Deserialize<CrunchBase>(jsonStream);

                        //assuming that worked, we need to clean up and create some additional meta data
                        jsonCrunchBase.FixCrunchBaseURL();
                        jsonCrunchBase.AggregateFunding();
                        jsonCrunchBase.SplitTagString();

Those functions FixCrunchBaseURL(), AggregateFunding() and SplitTagString() were post processing functions meant to get more specific data for my needs.  The AggregateFunding() function was really good times, and an exercise for the reader should you want to enjoy the fun of trying to parse an arbitrary number of nested objects for funding events, and assigning the funding to the right type, and summing the total funding per round.

Since the data is all user generated, and there’s no guarantee that the data is reliable, I had to trap the exception of a company URL simply not existing:

            WebRequest wrGetURL;
            wrGetURL = WebRequest.Create(apiUrlBase + companyName + urlEnd);

            try
            {
                jsonStream = new StreamReader(wrGetURL.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
                return jsonStream;
            }
            catch (System.Net.WebException e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Company: {0} - URL bad", companyName);
            }

I thought it strange that the company list would return permalinks to companies that are no longer listed in Crunchbase or have a JSON dataset, but as long as you trap the event, things are fine.  Once the data came back and I put it into the object, I could selectively dump data to a text file.

So that’s a simple walk through of how my code accessed the CrunchBase API in preparation for creating my Pivot data set.  Again, I have created a CodePlex project for the CrunchBase Grabber and welcome additions.

Data Set Creation

Knowing what I knew about how the Excel add in worked, I created my text file to have well defined delimiters and column headings.  I couldn’t sort out how to import the HTML which was returned in the JSON for the Company Overview and not have Excel puke on the import.  That’s a nice to have that I will get to at a later time.

It turns out that using the tool to create the columns is less error prone than simply trying to insert them yourself.

By creating the columns ahead of time, I could simply copy and past from my imported tab delimited file into my Pivot collection.  Here’s another tip – if you have a lot of image locations that are sitting on a server offsite (as in, on the Crunchbase servers) save that copy and paste for last.  By inserting the URLs into the Pivot data set XLS, the Pivot add-in will try to go fetch all of the images, which can take some time.

I processed my text file down from about 15K good entries down to about 4K.  The first criteria was that the company had to have a logo.  Second, it had to have funding and had to have a country, a founding year, and a category listed.  I had been given the heads up that anything more than about 5K objects in a single CXML file would be problematic.

I also wanted to ensure that some of the fields were not used for filtering but did show up in the information panel.  Luckily the tool made this pretty simple.  By simply moving the cursor to the desired column, you can tick off the check boxes to change where data will appear and how it can be used by the user.  This is a nice touch of the Excel add in tool.

Once the data was all in, I clicked the “Publish Collection” button and wandered off for an age or two.  It took, erm, a little bit of time, even on my jacked up laptop, to process the collection and create the CXML file.  If you have access to the Pivot app, you can point your browser at this URL to see the final result.  For those of you who don’t have access to the Pivot Browser, I have included a few screen caps to show what the resulting dataset looked like.

The first shot is what the full data set renders to in the window.  That’s all 4000 companies, and the Pivot criteria are on the left.  The really cool thing about Pivot is the way you can explore a data set.  Start with the full set of companies, and pivot on the web companies.  Refine that to be only companies in CA and WA.  Decide that you want companies funded between 2004 and 2006, and only those that had between $2 million and $5 million.  You can do that, in real time, and all the data reorganizes itself.  Then you can click on a company logo and get additional information.  Another example screen cap.

All of the filtering happens in real time, and utilizes the DeepZoom technology.  When you change your query criteria, any additional data is fetched via simple HTTP requests, and it’s all quite fast.  For those of you with the Pivot app, you can see how quickly this exploration renders once you have loaded the CXML.

For my Pivot data set, I opted to allow the search to pivot on were: company category, number of employees, city, state, country, year funded, total funding, and keyword tags.  It makes for some good data deep dive.  I want my next iteration to have funding companies as a pivot point as well.  Would be nice to see which investors are in bed together the most.

Put simply, I am stunned by this technology.  I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible with building data sets for Pivot.  I plan to spend quite a bit of my free time in the next few weeks playing with this and thinking about additional data sources to plug into this.  I love that we are building such cool stuff at our company, and I love how accessible it was to an inquisitive mind.  I cannot wait to see what other data sets get created.

About 1 year ago I was fortunate to be working on the launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.  With the start of our new fiscal year, I was asked to take over a team which was responsible for the technical marketing for our developer platform product management team.  It’s been quite a journey, and I have been able to expand the scope of the products on which I am working.

Today, we are announcing the availability of the beta bits for Windows Server AppFabric, our platform for deploying and managing servers in the enterprise.  The needs of the enterprise developer now require that they think about not just deploying on the servers that they own, but also to servers that are running in the cloud.  The AppFabric technology is also integrated with the Windows Azure platform, allowing for the easy transport of workloads between your servers on-premises and to the cloud.

The functionality around hosting and managing services is critical when deploying new projects.  The AppFabric platform makes it easy to get a handle on what is running, and how it’s performing.  Additional functionality, which I believe will get lost in the press coverage, is the distributed, high availability cache.  Like memcached, our cache enables better performance for data intensive apps.  The high availability bit is new and could prove to be a game changer.

If you are already developing services and applications using the .NET stack, you are ready to go.  Head on over to the site and get the beta bits.  If you want to chat more about AppFabric, feel free to reach out to me.

Here in the developer platform product management team, we have kicked off a new campaign about the .NET Framework.  There are so many people doing so many amazing things with .NET, and we want to hear from you.  The site linked to above has stories from some of our customers doing some very unexpected things with the .NET Framework.

Those stories were submitted by our field, but now we’re asking you directly.  Are you a .NET developer?  Have you done something cool you want the world to know about?  Great, come share your story and get featured on the wall of fame.  Free traffic and visibility is never a bad thing.

For those of you willing to create a demo of your product using DemoMate from Impresys, you could win a car or a 12-day Galapagos Islands trip.  You heard me…Bob Barker says “come on down!”  We’re looking for interesting and unique solutions build on top of our stack.  Bonus points if you interop with non-MSFT technologies.  We have a distinguished panel of judges who will select the winner.

Last, if you are going to be at PDC, come to our party.  We’re working in conjunction with the great guys at .NET Rocks (who, incidentally, have a great dev focused podcast) to throw a party at 8pm in the Visual Studio/.NET Lounge Theater.  Free food, drinks, prizes…good times to be had by all.