Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

I've always been of the opinion that concise value proposition articulation shouldn't be the achilles of the Semantic Web. As the Linked Data wave climbs up the "value Appreciation and Comprehension chain", it's getting clearer by the second that "Context" is a point of confluence for Semantic Web Technologies and easy to comprehend value, from the perspectives of those outside the core community.

In today's primarily Document centric Web, the pursuit of Context is akin to pursuing a mirage in a desert of user generated content. The quest is labor intensive, and you ultimaely end up without water at the end of the pursuit :-)

Listening to the Christine Connor's podcast interview with Talis simply reinforces my strong belief that "Context, Context, Context" is the Semantic Web's equivalent of Real Estate's "Location, Location, Location" (ignore the subprime loans mess for now). The critical thing to note is that you cannot unravel "Context" from existing Web content without incorporating powerful disambiguation technology into an "Entity Extraction" process. Of course, you cannot even consider seriously pursing any entity extraction and disambiguation endeavor without a lookup backbone that exposes "Named Entities" and their relationships to "Subject matter Concepts" (BTW - this is what UMBEL is all about). Thus, when looking at the broad subject of the Semantic Web, we can also look at "Context" as the vital point of confluence for the Data oriented (Linked Data) and the "Linguistic Meaning" oriented perspectives.

I am even inclined to state publicly that "Context" may ultimately be the foundation for 4th "Web Interaction Dimension" where practical use of AI leverages a Linked Data Web substrate en route to exposing new kinds of value :-)

"Context" may also be the focal point of concise value proposition articulation to VCs as in: "My solution offers the ability to discover and exploit "Context" iteratively, at the rate of $X.XX per iteration, across a variety of market segments :-)

Mike Bergman has written a very detailed article about OpenLink Software and it's product portfolio that basically answers the question: What has OpenLink been Up To?

As the company's founder, it was quite compelling to read a third party article that accurately navigates and articulates the depth of work that we've undertaken since that seminal moment in 1997 when we decided to extend our product portfolio beyond the Universal Data Access Drivers family.

Of course I also take this opportunity to slip in another Semantic Data Web demo :-) Thus, take a look at this mother of all blog posts from Mike via the following:

1. OpenLink RDF Browser Session
2. Dynamic Data Web Page

Note: In both cases above, you use the "Explore" or "Dereference" options of the Data Link (typed hyperlink) to traverse the RDF data that has been materialized "on the fly" courtesy of Virtuoso's in-built RDF Middleware (called the Sponger).

BTW - I am assembling a collection of interesting DBpedia based Dynamic pages that showcase the depth of knowledge available from Wikipedia. If you're a current or future technology entrepreneur (or VC trying to grok the Semantic Web) then you certainly need to look at:

1. Venture Capital
2. Venture Capital Firms
3. Venture Capitalists
4. Entrepreneurs By Nationality

This post is part contribution to the general Web 3.0 / Data-Web / Semantic Web discourse, and part experiment / demonstration of the Data Web.

I came across a pretty deep comments trail about the aforementioned items on Fred Wilson's blog (aptly titled: A VC) under the subject heading: Web 3.0 Is The Semantic Web.

Contributions to the general Semantic Web discourse by way of responses to valuable questions and commentary contributed by a Semantic Web skeptic (Ed Addison who may be this Ed Addison according to Google):

Ed, Responses to your points re. Semantic Web Matrialization:

<< 1) ontologies can be created and maintained by text extractors and crawlers" >>

Ontologies will be developed by Humans. This process has already commenced and far more landscape has been covered that you may be aware of. For instance, there is an Ontology for Online Communities with Semantics factored in. More importantly, most Blogs, Wikis, and other "points of presence" on the Web are already capable of generating Instance Data for this Ontology by way of the underlying platforms that drive these things. The Ontology is called: SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities).

<< 2) the entire web can be marked up, semantically indexed, and maintained by spiders without human assistance >>

Most of it can, and already is :-) Human assistance should, and would, be on an "exception basis" a preferred use of human time (IMHO). We do not need to annotate the Web manually when this labor intensive process can be automated (see my earlier comments).

<< 3) inference over the semantic web does not require an extremely deep heuristic search down multiple, redundant, cyclical pathways with many islands that are disconnected >>

When you have a foundation layer of RDF Data (generated in the manner I've discussed above), you then have a substrate that's far more palatable to Intelligent Reasoning. Note, the Semantic Web is made of many layers. The critical layer at this juncture is the Data-Web (Web of RDF Data). Note, when I refer to RDF I am not referring to RDF/XML the serialization format, I am referring to the Data Model (a Graph).

<< 4) the web becomes smart enough to eliminate websites or data elements that are incorrect, misleading, false, or just plain lousy >>

The Semantic Web vision is not about eliminating Web Sites (The Hypertext-Document-Web). It is simply about adding another dimension of interaction to the Web. This is just like the Services-Web dimension as delivered by Web 2.0.

We are simply evolving within an innovation continuum. There is no mutual exclusivity about any of the Web Dimensions since they collectively provide us with a more powerful infrastructure for building and exploiting "collective wisdom".

As for the Data-Web experiment part of this post, I would expect to see this post exposed as another contribution to the Data-Web via the PingTheSemanticWeb notification service :-) Implying, that all the relevant parts of this conversation are in a format (Instance Data for the SIOC Ontology) that is available for further use in a myriad of forms.

Wikicities gets $4 mill in VC funds, changes name to Wikia: "

Filed under: VCs, wikis

This is a couple of days old, so maybe it's onlynews to me - but Jimmy Wales' private wiki initiative hasreceived $4 million in venture capital from a very hip crowd of investors. Many people love the MediaWikisystem that Wikipedia runs on. I think others find it too complicated.

Wikis are interesting,but I can't believe they are going to be exciting enough to be funded by advertising. I like Wikis alot, so I hope all these hip investors will be proven correct. I'm not sure I can see truly mass audiencesediting pages and reading edited pages on very specific topics. I hope I'm wrong, though!
Found via alarm:clock

(Via The Social Software Weblog.)

Great tips for real entrepreneurs from Guy Kawasaki. Note that Guy refers to the kind entrepreneur described by Jason Calcanis in his "Real Entrepreneurs Don't Raise Venture Capital" post.

The Art of Bootstrapping: "

Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.

Let's say that you can't raise money for whatever reason: You're not a ‘proven’ team with ‘proven’ technology in a ‘proven’ market. Or, your company may simply not be a ‘VC deal’--that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Finally, your organization may be a not-for-product with a cause like the ministry or the environment. Does this mean you should give up? Not at all.

I could build a case that too much money is worse too little for most organizations--not that I wouldn't like to run a Super Bowl commercial someday. Until that day comes, the key to success is bootstrapping. The term comes from the German legend of Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. Here is the art of bootstrapping.

1. Focus on cash flow, not profitability. The theory is that profits are the key to survival. If you could pay the bills with theories, this would be fine. The reality is that you pay bills with cash, so focus on cash flow. If you know you are going to bootstrap, you should start a business with a small up-front capital requirement, short sales cycles, short payment terms, and recurring revenue. It means passing up the big sale that take twelve months to close, deliver, and collect. Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
   
   
2. Forecast from the bottom up. Most entrepreneurs do a top-down forecast: ‘There are 150 million cars in America. It sure seems reasonable that we can get a mere 1% of car owners to use install our satellite radio systems. That's 1.5 million systems in the first year.’ The bottom-up forecast goes like this: ‘We can open up ten installation facilities in the first year. On an average day, they can install ten systems. So our first year sales will be 10 facilities x 10 systems x 240 days = 24,000 satellite radio systems. 24,000 is a long way from the conservative 1.5 million systems in the top-down approach. Guess which number is more likely to happen.
   
   
3. Ship, then test. I can feel the comments coming in already: How can you recommend shipping stuff that isn't perfect? Blah blah blah. ’Perfect‘ is the enemy of ’good enough.‘ When your product or service is ’good enough,‘ get it out because cash flows when you start shipping. Besides perfection doesn't necessarily come with time--more unwanted features do. By shipping, you'll also learn what your customers truly want you to fix. It's definitely a tradeoff: your reputation versus cash flow, so you can't ship pure crap. But you can't wait for perfection either. (Nota bene: life science companies, please ignore this recommendation.)
   
   
4. Forget the ’proven‘ team. Proven teams are over-rated--especially when most people define proven teams as people who worked for a billion dollar company for the past ten years. These folks are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it's not the bootstrapping lifestyle. Hire young, cheap, and hungry people. People with fast chips, but not necessarily a fully functional instruction set. Once you achieve significant cash flow, you can hire adult supervision. Until then, hire what you can afford and make them into great employees.
   
   
5. Start as a service business. Let's say that you ultimately want to be a software company: people download your software or you send them CDs, and they pay you. That's a nice, clean business with a proven business model. However, until you finish the software, you could provide consulting and services based on your work-in-process software. This has two advantages: immediate revenue and true customer testing of your software. Once the software is field-tested and battle-hardened, flip the switch and become a product company.
   
   
6. Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good ’form.‘ MacBooks. Audis. Graf skates. Bauer sticks. Breitling watches. You name it. But bootstrappers focus on function, not form, when they are buying things. The function is computing, getting from point A to point B, skating, shooting, and knowing the time of day. These functions do not require the more expensive form that I like. All the chair has to do is hold your butt. It doesn't have to look like it belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Design great stuff, but buy cheap stuff.
   
   
7. Pick your battles. Bootstrappers pick their battles. They don't fight on all fronts because they cannot afford to fight on all fronts. If you were starting a new church, do you really need the $100,000 multimedia audio visual system? Or just a great message from the pulpit? If you're creating a content web site based on the advertising model, do you have to write your own customer ad-serving software? I don't think so.
   
   
8. Understaff. Many entrepreneurs staff up for what could happen, best case. ’Our conservative (albeit top-down) forecast for first year satellite radio sales is 1.5 million units. We'd better create a 24 x 7 customer support center to handle this. Guess what? You sell no where near 1.5 million units, but you do have 200 people hired, trained, and sitting in a 50,000 square foot telemarketing center. Bootstrappers understaff knowing that all hell might break loose. But this would be, as we say in Silicon Valley, a ‘high quality problem.’ Trust me, every venture capitalist fantasizes about an entrepreneur calling up and asking for additional capital because sales are exploding. Also trust me when I tell you that fantasies are fantasies because they seldom happen.
   
   
9. Go direct. The optimal number of mouths (or hands) between a bootstrapper and her customer is zero. Sure, stores provide great customer reach, and wholesalers provide distribution. But God invented ecommerce so that you could sell direct and reap greater margins. And God was doubly smart because She knew that by going direct, you'd also learn more about your customer's needs. Stores and wholesalers fill demand, they don't create it. If you create enough demand, you can always get other organizations to fill it later. If you don't create demand, all the distribution in the world will get you bupkis.
   
   
10. Position against the leader. Don't have the money to explain your story starting from scratch? Then don't try. Instead position against the leader. Toyota introduced Lexus as good as a Mercedes but at half the price--Toyota didn't have to explain what ‘good as a Mercedes’ meant. How much do you think that saved them? ‘Cheap iPod’ and ‘poor man's Bose noise-cancelling headphones,’ would work too.
    
    
11. Take the ‘red pill.’This refers to the choice that Neo made in The Matrix. The red pill led to learning the whole truth. The blue pill meant waking up wondering if you had a bad dream. Bootstrappers don't have the luxury to take the blue pill. They take the red pill--everyday--to find out how deep the rabbit hole really is. And the deepest rabbit hole for a bootstrapper is a simple calculation: Amount of cash divided by cash burn per month because this will tell you how much longer you can live. And as my friend Craig Johnson likes to say, ‘The leading cause of failure of startups is death, and death happens when you run out of money.’ As long as you have money, you're still in the game.

Written at: Atherton, California.

"

(Via Guy Kawasaki.)

By way of the upcoming TechCrunch “un-conference” style demo-brainstorm-fest Wiki I came across a blog post by Michael Arrington titled: Top 5 Web 2.0 VCs. Here is the entire list (Top 5, Notables, and Up and Coming) extracted from the post (see my linkblog page to get some insight into the motivation behind this post):

David Cowan is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and writes a blog called Who Has Time For This. He’s on this list partially because he incubated the hottest and most anticipated company on the web right now, Flock.

Tim Draper invested in Skype. Done. He also sits on the board of SocialText, and his fund was in Baidu.

David Hornik is is a General Partner at August Capital and writes a blog that has over 10,000 RSS readers.
Josh Kopelman, through FirstRoundCapital, is quietly filtering through just about every young web 2.0 company, and investing in many of them.

Fred Wilson is a founding partner of Union Square Ventures and writes the extremely popular A VC. If you are new to web 2.0, start with his Blogging 1.0 post.

Jeff Clavier - Jeff is a former VC and still makes the odd angel investment (Feedster, Truveo, and a few others). His new venture allows him to work with pre-funding companies and get them ready for prime time.

Brad Feld - Brad is a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital and writes a must-read web 2.0 blog called Feld Thoughts. Read his posts on Term Sheets if you are in the process of raising capital.

O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures - This is the only non-person on here. OATV just closed a $50 million fund to invest in young companies. Given the incredible access Tim O’Reilly has to these companies, OATV could quickly become an important fund in the web 2.0 space.

Pierre Omidyar - Pierre founded ebay and is the Co-founder of Omidyar Network, where he’s invested in a number of interesting companies including EVDB, SocialText and Feedster, and others.

Peter Rip - Peter is a founding partner of Leapfrog Ventures, a $100 million fund. Peter also writes Early Stage VC, another must-read blog. His investments include ojos, an incredible new photo-metadata service that is going to be extremely disruptive (and useful).

Peter Thiel - Peter, the former CEO of paypal, has invested in LinkedIn, Friendster, LinkedIn and other web 2.0 companies. He’s just created the Founders Fund.

Thomas Ball - Tom is a Venture Partner at Austin Ventures, a fund with $3 billion under management. He’s their consumer and web 2.0 guy and seems to be spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley and at web 2.0 event.

Dan Grossman - Dan is a principal at Venrock Associates and has recently started a great blog called A Venture Forth (where he wrote a much bookmarked post on Ajax).

Jason Pressman - Jason is a principal at Shasta Ventures, a young $200 million fund that has a deep commitment to and expertise in consumer-focused businesses.

My entire time in the IT industry has been spent primarily trying to develop, architect, test, mentor, evangelize, and educate about one simple subject: Standards Appreciation!

The trouble with "Standards Appreciation" is that vendors see standards from the following perspectives primarily:

1. Yet another opportunity to lock-in the customer
   
2. If point 1. fails then undermine the standard vociferously (an activity that takes many covert forms; attack performance, security, and maturity)
   
3. Developers don't like standards (the real reason for this is to-do lists and timeframes in most cases)

Korateng Ofusu-Amaah provides insightful perspective on the issues above, in a recent "must read" blog post about how this dysfunctionality plays out today in the realm of HTML Buttons and Forms. Here are some notebable excerpts:

"Instead my discourse devolved into a case of I told you so, a kind of Old Testament view of things instead of the softer New Age stylings that are in vogue these days. Sure there was a little concern for the users that had been hurt by lost data, but there was almost no empathy for the developers who had to lose their weekends furiously reworking their applications to do the right thing especially because it appeared that they would rather persist in trying to do the wrong thing.

The sentiment behind that mini tempest-in-a-teapot however was a recognition of the fact that those who have been quietly evangelizing the web style were talking about the wrong thing and to the wrong people."

...

"..As application developers we should ask for better forms, we should be demanding of browser makers things like XForms or Web Forms 2.0 to make sure that we can go beyond the kind of stilted usability that we currently have. Our users would appreciate our efforts in that vein but for now, they know what to expect. Until then application developers should push back when we are told to "do the wrong thing".

There is an unfortunate mindset trend at the current time that espouses: "Sloppiness" is good, and "Simple" justifies inadequacy at all times. Today, the real focus of most development endeavours is popularity first and coherance (backward compatibility, standards compliance, security, scalability etc.) a distant second, if you can simply make things popular then that justifies the sloppiness (acquisition, VC money, Blogosphere Juice etc.). Especially as someone else will ultimately have to deal with the predictable ramifications of the sloppiness.

Standards are critical to the success of IT investment within any enterprise, but standards are difficult to design, write, implement, and then comprehend; due to the inherent requirement for abstraction - it's a top down, as opposed to bottom up, process.

Vendors will never genuinely embrace standards, until IT decision makers demand standards compliance of them, by demonstrating a penchant for smelling out "leaky abstractions" embedded within product implementations. Naturally, this requires a fundamental change of mindset for most decision makers. It means moving away from the "this analyst said...", "I heard that company X is going to deliver....", "I read that .....", "I saw that demo..." approach to product evaluation, to a more knowledgeable evaluation process that seeks out the What, Why, and How of any prospective IT solution. 

Knowledge empowers all of the time. It's a gift that stands the test of time once you invest some time in its acquisition (unfortunately this gift isn't free!). Ignorance with all its superficial seduction (free and widely available!), is temporary bliss at best, and nothing but heartache over time.

Fred Wilson writes:

I was talking to an entrepreneur today and advised him not to surrender to "analysis paralysis".

It's tempting to want to analyze every option and figure out exactly the best approach before jumping in.

But it's the wrong way to go in most cases.

As a contrast, I attended a board meeting today where the CEO presented the board with a post-mortem on some decisions he made that turned out to be suboptimal. That was a stand up thing to do and the board appreciated it. But I am not sure that the CEO in question did the wrong thing.

Because I believe that Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite Presidents) had it right when he said: "In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

I think action and risk taking is what separates great entrepreneurs from the pack. I am not advocating blind risk taking, but I am advocating making a decision based on less than perfect information and going for it. More often than not, you will be rewarded for doing that.