Startup Camp Companies Selected

Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp:

We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting the list to seven startups was extremely difficult. The companies selected include:

• Collective Knowledge
• EduFire
• LReady
• Neo Technology
• Reductive Labs
• Replicator
• Stonewall

If your company is listed above, you should have received an email from us with a formal invitation to the OATV Startup Camp and Foo Camp. If you applied and are not listed above, we thank you for your application. There were too many good proposals and we simply did not have enough room to invite more.

We also want to thank the following startup veterans who have agreed to lead various sessions at the OATV Startup Camp:

• Michael Arrington: founder of TechCrunch; co-founder of Achex, Zip.ca and Pool.com
• Dale Dougherty: co-founder of O’Reilly Media & GNN; publisher, MAKE magazine
• Esther Dyson: founder of EDventure Holdings, PC Forum, Release 1.0
• Mark Fletcher: founder of Bloglines and ONElist
• Marc Hedlund: co-founder of Popular Power and Wesabe
• Dave McClure: founder of Startup2Startup, conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns and Web 2.0 Expo
• Howard Morgan: founding investor of Idealab; partner at First Round Capital
• Tim O’Reilly: founder of O’Reilly Media
• Kathy Sierra: co-creator of the Head First series of books
• Evan Williams: co-founder of Pyra Labs (blogger.com), Odeo, Obvious Corp and Twitter

Ubicomp and Web 2.0: Connecting the Dots

I've been saying for some time that the next stage of Web 2.0 is the application of collective intelligence techniques to sensor data, not just to data input directly by humans.

Two stories this weekend illustrate this point nicely. The New York Times published a story on Saturday entitled Billboards that Look Back, about a new generation of electronic billboards that use cameras to track who looks at the billboards, and a story yesterday on Techcrunch about Like.com's contextual ads triggered by Facebook photos.

Most people will immediately recognize the first story as a ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) story: a next generation display equipped with sensors bringing computing to an arena that was previously analog and uninstrumented. But connecting the dots between that story and the second one is really important.

Many of the most important breakthroughs in Web 2.0 have come through finding new meaning in data that already exists, often through statistical methods and related algorithms, not by gathering new data, or adding metadata and structure to existing data. (Pagerank is the canonical example.) If Like.com really is able to do a good job of matching ads to photos via clever algorithms, they've effectively turned a wealth of existing user-generated photos into sensors for their application, without having to deploy a single camera of their own.

In my talks, I've long argued, following Dan Bricklin's Cornucopia of the Commons, that there is a hierarchy in architectures of participation, with the most powerful literally building a system in which participation is automatic, and driven by the design of the system itself rather than any explicit request for user contribution. Methods for extracting additional layers of meaning from activities that users perform for their own self-interest fall into this category.

Thus, it's important to include in the category of sensor data richer interpretation of photos and audio/video streams. So for example, photosynth is a great example of an application that, after the fact, extracts additional data from user-contributed photos. Similarly, Last.fm's audioscrobbler turns your playlist into a sensor, and Wesabe is effectively turning the credit card into a collective intelligence sensor. (Disclosure: Wesabe is an OATV investment.)

Take away two messages:

1. Think about ubiquitous computing not just as the move from the computer to the cellphone and other mobile devices but the fact that those devices are becoming sensors for cloud applications harnessing collective intelligence

2. Remember that "data is the Intel Inside" of Web 2.0, and that databases driven by network effects and applications deriving meaning from that data via statistical methods will continue to be the key to competitive advantage in the ongoing network era.

P.S. I've been calling this trend ambient computing, because I like the sense of computing encountered while walking around, and because I found Peter Morville's Ambient Findability so thought-provoking, but ubiquitous computing or ubicomp seems to be the winning buzzword.

O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp

The Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year's Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp. This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders. The sessions will be more of a conversation on each topic rather than a lecture, in which participants will learn from each other as well as from entrepreneurs who've already been successful.

We're making space at OATV Startup Camp (and at Foo Camp to follow) for two people from each of six to eight early stage startups that we select from those that apply. Once we select the startups, we’ll tailor the sessions to their issues, but we're planning to cover things like fundraising, PR and viral marketing, and working with investors and a board of directors. And of course, you get to interact with all the people who'll be there at Foo Camp as well.

To apply, email your company presentation (no more than 20 slides) to foo at oatv.com. Then note that Foo Camp is all about bringing people together who are doing amazing things. What about your start up would be interesting to the people who come to Foo? At O'Reilly, we're not just interested in making money (although like all investors, we do care about that too!). We're interested in people and technologies that we believe have the potential to change the world for the better, and that tell us something new about emerging trends that everyone else isn't already thinking.

Some areas of interest include cloud computing, mobile, location-based services, open source hardware, physical computing and new materials, the future of manufacturing, tools for information management and open data, open source (especially as used to create Web 2.0 data assets), rich media and the future of creativity, cleantech, braintech (applied neuroscience), and personal genomics. Even better, surprise us with something you see that we don't.

We'll pick 6-8 early stage startup companies by June 20, 2008. Applications are due by June 6, 2008.

PMOG as a kind of Augmented Reality

Mike Arrington did a good overview post this past weekend entitled Play A Multiplayer Online Game While Surfing The Web about O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures' portfolio company GameLayers, whose first product, a "game" called PMOG, is due out of private beta in a few weeks.

In this post, I want to connect what GameLayers is doing to the theme I wrote about the other day, augmented reality. A key concept that we all need to wrap our head around is the idea of multiple information layers. The narrow view of augmented reality is the overlay of generated images onto, say, a real-time video stream, but I think of it as any technique that creates additional layers of information on top of the primary layer we're interacting with. Google Maps' blended view with street lines overlaid on satellite imagery is thus a kind of primitive augmented reality. Adding 3D images of buildings would be a further augmentation. As would being able to twitch sideways to a view of data about the companies or people residing in those buildings, or downwards to view the subsurface infrastructure of sewers, water pipes and cable runs.

Taken in this broad sense, now consider what GameLayers is doing. Via a Firefox plug-in, they provide a platform for building additional layers across websites. As Michael explains, this could be used to create virtual tours of related sites, quests and other game-like activities, all happening on a layer that is invisible to many of the people coming to those sites, but all too real to those inhabiting the shared consensus reality of the new layer.

GameLayers is thus a bold experiment in searching out new possibilities in cyberspace. We invested in the company because of the long view that the web is only the first level of electronic augmentation of the world we live in. There are many more levels to be built, until, as Wallace Stevens said:

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.