Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Paul Graham has turned his talk from Startup School into an essay. It’s a keeper!  The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn is a must read for all entrepreneurs. 

Paul says Release Early, and Keep Pumping Out The Features. AMEN!  You don’t know what you don’t know, and until your product meets the end users, you just won’t know.  You need to have a plan to release early, and release often. 

There’s a wealth of great insight here.  My favorite:

Almost everyone’s initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases their customers told them what their business should be– and they were smart enough to listen.

Just go do it!

The Globe and Mail did something really unusual this morning: they devoted an editorial to Wikipedia (behind their premium firewall, sorry!).  Normally reserved for political or social commentary, the editors wrote about this internet phenom instead.  Towards the end, this paragraph explains the motivation:

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge. Media groups will have to find a way to emulate Wikipedia and bring readers and viewers inside the tent, as this newspaper is trying to do by, among other things, inviting on-line comments and organizing question-and-answer sessions with journalists. Political parties will have to use the Web to involve an alienated public, as Howard Dean managed in his Web-driven run for the 2004 U.S. Democratic presidential nomination. Government itself, that ultimate control freak, will have to open up to the views of its Web-empowered citizens. In the same way that Wikipedia presumes "collaboration among users will improve articles over time," government should learn to accept that collaboration among citizens can change things for the better.

At Barcamp Ottawa, one of the most raucous sessions was Chris Nolan’s "What does Web 2.0 mean to you?".  A cornerstone of the debate was between folks that felt that credentialed producers (notably, newspapers) gave them more value than the raw feed.  In other words, one faction was all too willing to read the RSS feeds of the material they wanted, while others found value in the editors selection compiled into a dead tree edition.

Disintermediation is having a profound effect on many traditional businesses.  It seems as if there are no boundaries to how the Internet can be used to disintermediate existing models, either.   Here’s an interesting, and perhaps cheeky, thought experiment: what would a disintermediated religion look like?  After all, from the perspective of business model, a church is a distribution mechanism to get "wholesale truth" from God, and distribute it retail to the masses. 

Perhaps the more profound change to come, however, is in the collaborative dialog that the Globe wrote about this morning.  When every citizen can be a publisher and collaborator, the world is a very different place. 

Billing itself as an open standards job search site, Resumebay is the latest brain child of Randy Morin.  Job search is a big market!  Good luck Randy.

I’ve been offline all weekend.  It was the first really nice weekend we’ve had since winter.  Living in this part of the world, when the good weather arrives, you take advantage of it!

Anyway, having been offline, I missed the growing Voice 2.0 buzz.  VC Ed Sims writes about "…beyond Vonage" suggesting that applications will dominate the future of communications.  In fact, in SiliconValley.com Ed is widely quote as well, talking about his recent trip to Israel, with similar themes. 

Last night, Jim Courtney, who has been an iotum beta tester for some months, wrote his first look review of the new collaboration between iotum and PhoneGnome, which we’re officially announcing this week. FYI, if you are a PhoneGnome customer, you can start using iotum today.  It’s just another option available to PhoneGnome customers.   Jim titled his piece Voice 2.0 Builds Momentum.  He concludes with some good commentary, including the observation that Voice 2.0 services, such as iotum, are fundamentally agnostic to the network. 

Bruce Stewart, on the O’Reilly ETel weblog wrote a brilliant review of the iotum and PhoneGnome integration which he published Friday.  Bruce has been a tester, and is also a fan of both companies.  The first comment on Bruce’s piece is from Mark Petrovic, who also does some consulting for PhoneGnome.  Mark writes:

What I’d like to add, and which I think lots of Java, Python, and Ruby folks will want to hear, is that the protocol binding between the PhoneGnome and Iotum platforms is (drum roll)… XML-RPC.

Not SIP, but plain old, accessible XML-RPC. It’s a simple query-response protocol that makes this nifty service a reality. One message to alert Iotum of the inbound call details, and one messsage to PhoneGnome with instructions on how to dispose of the call.

XML-RPC. Think about that. This en-franchises an entirely new set of voice-related developers. This is Voice 2.0, indeed (great phrase). Voice for the rest of us.

As I wrote in the Voice 2.0 Manifesto last year, the use of published XML protocols is one of the foundations of this new approach to telephony.  Platform strategies are most effective when large audiences of developers can be engaged.  XML let’s us do that.   Following Mark’s comment on Bruce’s blog, Mark wrote on his own blog about how the iotum and PhoneGnome integration actually works.  In Welcome to the Voice 2.0 Big House he gives example protocol interactions, and commentary.  He finishes up with:

if you know any language for which there exists an XML-RPC implementation — and they are many — you are a member of the modern Voice over IP developer community.

For the first hundred years of voice telephony, you were not invited. You didn’t have the money. You didn’t own a Network.

Welcome. You are now invited — we have running code to prove it.

Powerful stuff.