Application Deadlines

Okay, for those of you interested in going beyond brain-storming, here
is the first line-in-the-sand -- a deadline to meet for getting
funding!

What I'm going to do is to keep an ongoing list of conferences for
funding opportunities in the investment community. It is likely that
these events will be all over the country, so we'll have to decide how
we target them.

In addition to the list of conferences and dates, I'm going to specify
which idea to be pitched at that conference. Initially the idea will
just be the "idea of the month", but as we get to know the investors,
locations, etc... we'll have a better idea for where the investment
dollars are going in that city and we will target the opportunity
better.

2007 Aug 7
- Application deadline for http://www.InvestSouthwest.org, located in
Scottsdale, AZ; event is Dec 12-13, 2007.
- Conference with Angels and VCs

2007 Oct 11
- App deadline for http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html, located in
Cambridge, MA; event is Nov 3-4, 2007
- Investors that provide seed money for startups; seed money is the
earliest stage of funding

More to come...

John

Cape Cod for Vacation

I'll be in Cape Code for the week at a place called Bourne. Yeah, kinda coincidental that the new movie is coming out soon. I don't know if I'll have access to the email/web while living in a 100+ year old farm house. I'll try to find time to work on Bison.

-john

TechCrunch 20

I thought I'd take a moment to introduce a topic to discuss money, how
to get it, where to get, what to do with it, etc...

To kick things off, check out the list of VCs and Corporations
attending the first TechCrunch financing event -- this is an
impressive list. http://techcrunch20.com/look-whos-coming/

Well, maybe we'll attend next year as presenters.

-john

Bison: Patent and Security

Alright guys, I talked with a couple of you last night to understand
whether you're keeping up with my writings -- thankfully you have
been, really.

Three focuses this morning for me were:
1) finish Bison Slides explaining how a user would use Bison.
2) investigate patent possibilities for ILP, yeah I'm serious
3) security thoughts

---Bison Slides---
Diagrams take forever to put together, so the slides I worked on this
morning are high-level views that do not show how Amy would add
contacts and do relationship tagging, and then tag/mark-up her
writings with the tags. I may just want to draw it out again on my
whiteboard and take a photo of it for uploading.

What I did upload is a consumer's viewpoint on Email and Blogging and
how Bison ILP provides a simpler solution to redundant writing/
managing of communications. Please take a look and provide feedback on the content; the graphics and text were quickly thrown together this morning. The filename is Bison v1a.ppt.

---Investigate Patenting---
I didn't get around to it because time flies when you're thinking
about stuff. As a reminder, I believe that this sort of information
level security/sharing/protection has yet to be seen. Let's think
about how security is done currently...

---Security Thoughts---
@Operating system level
Solaris and does file level sharing. Does a user/group have permission to Read, Write, Execute. Windows does pretty much the same. The container is the file, and permissions on set on the file, there is no seperating of the CONTENT of the file into seperate views or levels of permissions.

@Application layer
Hmm, I'm not a software engineer, so I'm going to have to investigate this some more, perhaps you can chime in??

@Presentation layer
Permissions are established about whether a user can view/interact
with a portlet (the application). Once again permissions deals with
whether the portlet can be accessed, there doesn't seem to be any
logic regarding the content of the portlet. I'm really stretching
here.

Anyway, I'll have to research security at these different layers, but
once again, if you have experience/knowledge on it, please share your thoughts.

-john

Bison: Prelim Slides

Alright, my focus this morning was to do diagram a scenario of how a
user would make use of ILP. I did the diagram on my whiteboard and it has taken too long to put into PowerPoint, so here is the gist of it.

Amy is a Bison user.
She adds people to her contact list.
At the same time, she assigns her own tags to these people: friend,
family, band, etc...
She writes a blog entry and before she publishes she marks-up the
sentences with the tags from her list of people/relationship tags.
She publishes the blog entry and the people, according to their tags,
get to read her separate stories.

Here is an first run at a Bison powerpoint slide:

Bison believes that
- There is a story behind every event in our lives.
- Each story has lots of details and nuances

Bison wants you to share your story, but control your message, because
- Not everyone should know the details
- Bison allows individuals (organizations)

Bison: Publish your public parts, not your private parts.

okay, more tomorrow.
-john

Bison: Prelim SWOT Threats

My objective this morning is to get through the Threat (T) portion of a SWOT for Bison.

SWOT refresher
In the not-so-near future, I need to do a SWOT analysis on Bison. As a reminder, the reason that this NoMoreSnow Ventures group will be doing SWOT analysis is to decide whether a venture is compelling enough to start a business. In case you need a refresher on SWOTs, here are two links I'll be using this morning:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis
- http://www.bplans.com/dp/article.cfm/148

Core Reminder:
As usual, we need to remind ourselves, what are Bison's offerings:
Communication and Networking. Please read the previous posting for the details of these objectives.

Communication Objectives
1. Be an Open Network, allowing information out and in
2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP)
3. Allow Anonymous Communications

Social Networking Objectives
1. Allow Relationship Tagging
2. Provide Visual Relationship Network (VRN)

What are external threats that Bison will face upon launching? I'm
just going to list external factors that may influence the success of a Bison launch. These are not in any particular order and I'm going to
throw everything into this list, including the kitchen sink. Later, when the SWOT is performed, I'll pair the list down to the major issues.

Threats:
- competitors begin offering ILP-type services for email, blogging,
forums, calendars, webpages, etc... Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Google
Groups, and Blogger to name a few.
- People's attitudes about security and privacy change, such that
these topics are no longer important
- People are satisfied with using their current tools (email,
calendars, blogs, etc...) and don't see the compelling need to switch.
- Social networks are "old news" and people no longer care about
networking because they've done it so much lately.
- Advertisers no longer see the value of paying social networking
sites.
- Technology is not yet mature for us to implement ILP or VRN.
- No more angel or VC money available. It is possible that VCs have spent all the money they wanted to spend this year. Timing of when we launch may be bad in that the amount of VC money that has already been invested this year have almost reached $1B.
- Others???

This type of objective look at our offerings compared with what we
think are Threats makes me consider that Bison does not want to
"pigeon-hole" itself into being called a "social network".

I'll have to revisit this later, off to work now.

-john

Bison: v2

Alright Guys,

There's been a lot of thinking done this past week about what are
Bisons' core offerings and resulting from this is a more focused list
of consumer features. Yes, we may have all of the default features
that other social networks have, but the following list will set Bison
apart from the rest.

Mission
Bison is a next generation social networking site with a mission to
improve how people communicate with their personal networks(s).

Communication Objectives
1. Open Network
Be an open network that freely allows registered users(members) to
communicate with people outside of Bison. This includes, but is not
limited to
- blogs on Bison being read by non-members
- email is just considered email, there will not be a members-only,
internal email system.

2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP) {copyright}
Information-Level Permissions are member-defined allowing for finer grain control over how much information is exposed and to whom. Whether it is their personal profile, blog postings, emails, visual network of contacts, anything that they write or expose can have information-level permissions. This is beyond just taking file and folder permissions at the operating system layer and moving it into the application layer. Bison may be the first to define a ILP model.

For example, a Bison member will be able to do the following:
- create a blog posting about a recent date
- publish the blog posting with the following relationship tags
'public', 'friends', 'guys' (more on relationship tags later)
- here is an example using html-style tags to explain to whom the
content is exposed

2007 July 22

Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

Alright, in case you had a hard time reading the example, here is what each level of permissions will be allowed to read.

@ Public-level (includes outside Bison and members who are not part of that user's defined relationship tags)
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Friend-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina and she is studying electrical engineering. I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

@ Guys-level
2007 July 22 "Nice Date"
Wow, I went on a great date last night with a girl I met at school.
She has the most amazing eyes and her personality just lit up the
room. I picked her up from her sister's house and we headed to happy hour at that new backwoods bar. She wore a black tank top that made it hard for me to stay focused on her face. Her name is Angelina Jolie and she is studying electrical engineering. Did I mentioned that I cooked breakfast for her this morning? I think we're going to make a lovely couple.

3. Anonymous Communications
Though members can already set ILP, Bison allows a member to be as anonymous as they would like on the network. This means that a
person's name, address, or other identifying information can be
completely hidden from relationships tagged, for example, 'public' and 'friends', whereas the 'guys' are able to see the person's real name and other private information. Though this may be just an extension of information-level permissions, it is important to point it out because Bison takes privacy seriously.

Social Network Objectives
1. Relationship Tagging
Bison allows for members to define their relationship to a person in
their own personal network. So it is possible to label your brother
with the following tags, 'family', 'high school football team', 'guys', 'single' I think this type of tagging, though may complicate the ILP model, may provide members with a powerful search and relationship mapping possibilities.

2. Visual Relationship Network
In coordination with the relationship tagging feature, Bison provides
members with a visual relationship network(VRN) which displays
graphically how people in your network are related to you. It will
show degrees of separation because you will be able to see the number of "nodes" that lead out from you. In addition, it will represent in a graphical way the type of relationship tag that you have with that person. On top of that, as you move to the second-degree of seperation, you will see both your relationship tags and that of your first degree contact.

Here is an example about you, your brother, and his girlfriend.

You----------------1st Degree ---------- 2nd Degree
You --------------- Brother -------------- Girlfriend
Your tags--------- family, guys --------- girls, taken, church
Brothers tags:
family ------------- Brother -------------- girlfriend, hot

Anyway, it all depends on how your brother set his ILP for the tags...
as to whether or not you can see his tags, but the idea for this VRN
feature is to allow a member to learn so much more about another
member based on the tags and network of people. As we browse through our friend's network, we learn more about them through the information exposed in their friend's profiles, tags, VRN, etc...

Dating?
How does dating fit into all of this? Regardless of the purpose for a
communication, whether for business contact reasons, or keeping up with friends, or to meet a potential date, Bison allows people to
communicate as they see fit. We will implement browsing and searching of members. Not sure if we will take the time initially to have relationship matching.

Well, that's all I can think of now, I've been up since 5am and now
its time for me to get ready for work. I'll try to post some powerpoint slides to better explain these features. Please comment on them if you have the time. Thanks.

-john