Who Is Andrew Parker?

Blog Daily is Fred Wilson's mantra. Many people know him as a venture capitalist. I know him primarily as a blogger. He is my favorite solo blogger by far. So a few minutes back I showed up at his blog, and this is what I saw.

Fred Wilson: Bidding Andrew Goodbye

That blog post linked over to this one, also written by Fred Wilson.

Union Square Ventures: Bidding Goodbye To Andrew

By the time I was going through the comments at that blog post, I realized I was already following this guy on Tumblr without realizing he worked for Union Square Ventures. I found him through Nina who I found through Scoble.

Andrew Parker: ... Boston Bound, Leaving USV And Next Steps

Fred Wilson, July 2006: Looking For The Right Person
Brad Burnham, August 2006: Welcome Andrew Parker
Charlie O'Donnell, July 2006: Leaving Union Square Ventures: My Other Name Is An Avatar ....

Right now I am in a mood to do round 1 work for my startup part time while working a job. I have sent out a few feelers seeking a social media job of some kind. But that might feel like a deviation from my path. I am not aspiring to be a media guy, social or otherwise. This USV job might be a dream job for someone with my aspirations, but I am not sure they might go for me. And, curiously, I would like to start out by giving them some reasons why they should not hire me.

1. I am going to be working on my startup idea part time, on the side. I am not walking away from it.
2. I might stick around for about a year max. So if you are looking for someone who will be with you at least two years, I am not your guy. But when I leave it will be because I have decided to go full time with my startup, there will be no other reason. I'd give you a month's notice.
3. I don't have a good track record of putting up with authority. I have never really had a corporate job. Even a job has to feel entrepreneurial to me. Can't be a cog.
4. I am not a white male. There was this group photo somewhere I saw last year, or maybe before, it had all the top young tech entrepreneurs in town. The first thing I noticed was every single one of them was a white guy. I recognized only one, the MeetUp CEO Scott, a friend. Now that I also know Sam Lessin, the Dropio guy, I am pretty sure he was also in there. I have a pretty sophisticated understanding of race. I was one of Obama's earliest people in the city, and I got to become friends with many of the top Obama volunteers in town in all five boroughs, many of them white. But then I am used to not being part of groups with total cultural overlaps with me since I was 10. Makes me very individualistic as a result. I am big on personal space in my own way. In Nepal it was ethnicity in a boarding school environment - talk about The Other, in Kentucky it was race.

Some of the reasons I might like the job:

1. I a-m looking for a job. If I get it, round 1 feels like so much less pressure. I am not having to pay myself a salary, however low, through my startup. I might even save some money and pump that into my startup. I don't need much.
2. This would be a dream job.
3. Going to tech events in town is not cutting it for me no more. I need something stronger.
4. This USV experience might be the detox I need after a few years of hard core, cutting edge political work.
5. The tech startup ambience, the people you will meet, the expanded personal network.
6. Getting a better feel for the NY tech  ecosystem.
7. Fred Wilson. If I so enjoy interacting with him at his blog, that enjoyment must be greater by so many degrees in person. This guy is as good as they come. In the world of movies, they have Scorsese. In the world of venture capital, they got AVC. This guy is a legend in the making. I have higher regard for him than VCs with more money than him. He is really good at what he does. He was born to be a VC. (Fred Wilson's Insight)
8. I am on the L line. They are on the L line. It only struck me a few days back that USV is perhaps named after Union Square. For the longest time I thought, so the Square is the square like in geometry, what is Union?
9. I like it that they are a small team. Three is the Google number. Three seems to be the USV number. Google works on the premise that three is as big as a team should get. 
10. I absolutely am loving it that they are asking not for a resume but a blog. This blog will do it for them. Well then, here goes. You have this blog. And you can click over to all my social media presences from this blog itself. Give me a job, if not at least give me some page hits. :-) Best, make me an offer. 

This is what I looked like when I showed up in town summer of 2005.

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Measuring Your Twitter Influence

Image via CrunchBase

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

1. How many people follow you?
2. How often they retweet you?
3. How often is your name mentioned?

Those are the three measures being pointed out by this research paper. In my case, (2) and (3) are the same. My first name is my Twitter name. When you retweet me, when you reply to me, you mention my name.

Just when I am getting in a mood to increase my interaction levels on the Twitter platform, this research paper came my way. I am surprised they did not list a fourth metric: (4) How many times have you been listed? A subset of that item might be: (5) How many people are following those lists?

Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once
New Yorker, New York Times Style, Twitter And Me
Finally, Twitter Ads
Twitter Should Go For A Netscape-Like IPO
I Have Access To Twitter Lists
Jeff Jarvis, Me And Twitter
I Must Be Following A Lot Of People On Twitter
NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12
Twitter Top 100 NYC: I Am In
Twitter Top 100 NYC
Make Money On Twitter
Twitter Top 0.1%
Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google
Twitter Number 115 In New York City
Twitter, TechCrunch, And The Stolen Docs
The Best Follow Friday I Ever Received On Twitter
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
How To Increase Your Following On Twitter
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter
NewsDesk: China, Twitter, Hawking, Obama
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Twitter Is Not Micro
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

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I Share Mark Cuban's Passion On The FCC Broadband Plan

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The FCC Needs to Set Its Sights Higher.. Much Higher (Mark Cuban)

The recent FCC broadband plan has been the talk of the town in the tech blogosphere. (Broader Broadband) There seems to be broad agreement in liking what the FCC has come up with. Some key people have come out saying it is not enough. But nobody seems to be saying what I said in one of Fred Wilson's comments sections: The American people need to revolt like they revolted against the British.

Well, here comes along Mark Cuban saying what the FCC is proposing is not entirely enough. And he is saying it with some passion. Yeah, why stop at 100 megabits per second? That might look a lot now, but not long back 5 megabits per second looked like a lot.

A parallel story is Gmail. Gmail storage looked like a lot when it came out. But soon people started running out of space, at least the power users did.

High speed internet to Cuban is less about video and more about Internet 2. Ride on.

Google has its sights on 1 gigabits per second. And although Mark Cuban is on record wanting to upend the Google search business, here he seems to be in agreement with Google's bandwidth goals.

Mark Cuban is worried about applications that might not show up even when speeds go up. I am not. I think it is inevitable that new applications will show up when super high speed is everywhere.

Cuban, passionate plenty, still does not match my talk. Revolt. Free up the spectrum for the people. There Cuban and I seem to have some disagreements. He is more cautious than I'd like.

Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban: A Quick Thought on the Viacom/Youtube Lawsuit Disclosures
Don’t Waste the Internet on TV – Protect the Future of the Internet
Should the FCC Reclaim Broadcast Spectrum
 

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Pierre Omidyar

TC: Pierre Omidyar from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

The New York City Subway

This train could take me anywhere it wants
And I would not complain
Because I am in New York City
And I love it so

I had her number, so I called her
"Who is this?" she said
I called her again weeks later
"Who is this?" she said
It is the city I love

The people who make it hard
For me to get into the jampacked train
Fascinate me
Were Central Park to have
Such congregation
I might never leave

The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?

(Matt Asay is responsible for this blog post. This was a comment I left at his CNet blog post. I have added a few lines.)

So what is the best smartphone to buy? The iPhone, Nexus One, or Motorola Droid? Is it fair to say those three are the top contenders? Is Nexus One the best Android phone out there? If not, which is? Is Droid better than the Nexus One? Is it a plus that the Droid is on the Verizon network?

I have never bought an Apple product in my life. I think the world of Steve Jobs as a tech icon, but my prejudices and business instincts are more in the direction of Sam Walton, Michael Dell and the 99 cent pizza people.

But if the Nexus One is to the iPhone what Bing is to search - I never seriously tried Bing - is one better off sticking to the iPhone? On the other hand, is the iPhone the Mac, and is Android the Windows, the one for the masses? My instinct says go for the masses.

So far I have stayed out the smartphone welcome. Heck, I don't even have a regular cellphone. I have a prepaid. I hardly ever make or receive calls - most communication happens over email, like Mark Cuban says, "If you can say it to me over the phone, you can say it to me over email" - and the prepaid baby is good enough for sending out Twitter updates, which I don't anymore since I do FourSquare check ins, perfectly possible on the prepaid text. Text it to 50500.

But I might have to give in soon and get me a smartphone. What should I get?

A friend livestreamed a video of him hanging out from across the world in Asia. He was using a Ustream application on his iPhone. That was the first time I felt like I could really use a smartphone. If I can take and upload photos and videos in real time from wherever, that would be cool, I thought. Also on the iPhone you can exchange contact info wirelessly. Bye bye business cards. A smartphone can turn you into a power networker.

On the other hand, photo and video editing has not completely migrated to the browser environment yet. That time will come, but that time is not now.

My Gmail is my primary, but I still log into my Yahoo Mail once in a while. It is good to be looking at the competition. An iPhone would be my way to stay a Google person, and still stay in touch with the competition.

Otherwise I am online for so many hours each day, when I am offline, I like to smell the roses, or the subway stench when that is what comes my way, which I compare to roses because I love the city so.

Face time is important, street time is important. It is also important to sometimes waste time. You have to make room for the random thought, for the muse to strike you. And people are all the rage for me, people I know, people I don't know, contacts and perfect strangers.

But I might cave in. What would be the smartphone to go for? Does the Nexus One have that Ustream application? I bet it does. Or should I get an iPhone in my first nod to Steve Jobs? At the risk of being called slick? I have a few weeks before I really might have to decide.

What do you think? What do you recommend?  

TechCrunch: Flurry: More Droid Devices Than iPhones Sold In First 74 Days On The Market

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AnyClip.com: More Thoughts

Image via CrunchBase

AnyClip.com: Second Thoughts
AnyClip Is Live Now

Did AnyClip.com launch recently? Because I have been having a stream of thoughts about the site. My latest thoughts are to do with the bottleneck the site is facing. How do you get the movie studios to play along?

You have to start by acknowledging that they are nervous. Nervous as nervous can be. You have to acknowledge that. To them. There has to be some I feel your pain talk.

Time: Cisco's New Router: Trouble For Hollywood The CRS-3, a network routing system, is able to stream every film ever made, from Hollywood to Bombay, in under four minutes...... the business equivalent of an earthquake for the likes of Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures....... the MPAA, whose members include Disney and Universal, attacked the VCR in congressional hearings in the 1980s with a Darth Vader–like zeal, predicting box-office receipts would collapse if consumers were allowed to freely share and copy VHS tapes of Hollywood movies. A decade later, the MPAA fought to block the DVD revolution, mainly because digital media could be copied and distributed even more easily than videocassettes....... The prospect of tying their future success to online distribution scares them because it means they will need to develop new distribution and pricing models....... both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck..... the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models that have changed little since the Mesozoic Era. With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute feature films online and promote them using social media such as Facebook and Twitter....... the high castle walls built over the past 100 years by the film industry to establish privilege and protect monopolistic profits may soon come tumbling down, just as they have for the music industry

Then you have to suggest you can't fight new technology. What you can do is come up with new business models so you make more money than ever before, and new technology feels like a friend, not an enemy. Steve Jobs was able to convince the music people, AnyClip needs to be able to convince the movie people. No small undertaking, but it can be done.

Then you have to start with what they are offering. They are offering 12,000 clips to the rival MovieClips.com. You take that. That can be the starting point. It can't be everything or nothing. You have to pass the 12,000 mark on your way to the 120,000 mark. You have to first show to them that the 12,000 clips were able to generate revenue. More movies got rented and bought as a result. More clips got embedded across the web. Movies as a category rose in the search results. They are big as they are. 2% of all searches are for 8,000 movies and 1,000 actors, right?



Sure the AnyClip promise is to make available any clip from any movie ever made. But then Google's promise is to organize all the world's information. But that does not mean Google stayed in hiding until they organized all the world's information. You release, you iterate, you take the site through a few different incarnations.

It is okay to have 120 clips, then 1,200 clips, then 12,000, then 120,000.

And maybe starting with the big names in the movie business, the big studios, is not the best of ideas. Maybe independent movie makers will feed the AnyClip database for, forget the old movies, all their new releases for all the free marketing and word of mouth they will get. Mark Cuban has a thought or two on this one. That guy is not just in the sports business. He is one restless entrepreneur. He is also in the movie business.

Maybe I should seek a consulting gig with AnyClip to put a few hours into helping AnyClip get over this hurdle that seems to come in the form of intransigence from the big movie studios.

AnyClip is an ambitious undertaking. This is not the last major hurdle it will face. Got to brace for the long haul.

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