Umair posited that in a truly Friedmanesque world, the only thing of value is the idea, because executing it is cheap. This was part of his argument that the whole VC structure is broken, and even though I don’t want to piss any VCs off, he does seem to take the whole Friedman argument in its logical direction. If Friedman (The world is flat is the book we are referencing, for those of you unaware) argues that because the world is getting more connected, that costs are being reduced, then it would make logical sense for the cost of a startup to drop. In this day and age, that makes a lot of sense, as the cost of execution is going down.Execution is the area where VCs traditionally shine, that and having piles of cash at their disposal, and thats where they like to contribute. VCs bring to the table quite a bit of resources that the average entrepreneur would normally have little access to: Harvard MBAs by the dozen, millions of dollars, and more important than any of those things: connections. Umair figures that the most important thing is ideas in this day and age, but ideas alone are nothing. Ideas are a dime a dozen, people can come up with hundreds of decent ideas, its the great ideas that are worth something.When great ideas are paired up with great execution and great resources, then that is when we see something magnificent emerge. Now the fact that one can probably raise the money to build a business by getting a small business loan, finding cheap developers, and using viral marketing, does not mean that the VCs are not necessary. You can’t raise the money necessary to operate a server farm by just asking friends (granted you don’t need a server farm up front, but thats not the point).So you might be asking yourself, what the heck am I arguing then seeing as I’ve backed both sides of the equation. Well I am trying to argue that ideas ARE becoming more important with the lower barriers to entry, but for those really big projects, the VCs are going to be sticking around for a while. They are a smart group of people that aren’t likely to sit idely by and watch as the industry topples its inverted pyramid.

As some of you may know, my company, infinimedia, has been working on a number of small business apps in addition to our regular client work. All of the projects share one problem, designing within constraints. You might be asking, what do you mean within constraints? this is web2.0, there are no constraints. Au contraire, there are the same constraints that have plagued IA people and UI people for ages, screen realestate.

When you are building a web based application, you have to put a lot of thought into what gets into each screen, you can’t go throwing the kitchen sink in there just because you can. So my current dilemna is that I am limited by the fact we’re trying to design for flexibility and usability at the same time. This is a quesion the average user never thinks about, but its something i’ve been spending alot of time on lately. These are questions every developer faces, and they may seem like little issues here and there, but each extra click you make a user go through adds up.

If all goes well, I’ll post a few teasers in the next week or so.

While perusing the latest issue of business2.0, I came across an interesting statistic: only 5% of our national marketing dollars are spent online even though the internet now commands 30% of people’s attention. Now I don’t know if this is accurate, but if it is, then this only reinforces my idea of how niche networks of micro-published content will thrive in the coming years.

Now don’t take this as a call to arms for everyone out there to go and setup a blog on any old topic and take google adsense as your sole revenue source because its easy. I don’t want people bitching and moaning that they aren’t making any money even though the market is soaring, thats not my fault. What I am arguing for is the pursuit of valuable niche markets. Jason Calacanis said in a post on his site recently that sports were an interesting market to pursue (mainly because fans are VERY opinionated). I totally agree here, I’ve been mulling a sports-related micro-publishing network (i am no longer going to refer to it as a blog network, because its not ONLY about the blog) for a while too.

What we need to see emerge in this market are two important things: advertising sales companies (sort of like doubleclick in the past, but more niche focused, and intent on targetted ads), and small niche publishing networks (note, not blog networks, as they won’t be positioned to capitalize on the market here). You need more clarification? Well what I am saying about these publishing networks is not that blogs are dead, far from it, but I think blogs will become more a feature of sites, and not the entire site itself. Blogs will need other products and services attached to them to fully capitalize on their traffic growth and monetization potential.

I will undoubtedly discuss this further in the coming weeks, but for now I am going to turn the conversation over to you all.

p.s. if someone is interested in starting a sports-themed network, let me know, I will bankroll it, design it, and have a domain waiting for it. Just need writers and an editor.

So today I attended 37signals’ “Getting Real Workshop” at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago. Quite the seminar I must say, the guys at 37s did quite a job of organizing the whole deal, everything was well thought out down to the food (which was VERY good, kudos to the catering company).

Unfortunately there was no preview of Sunrise their “CRM-ish” tool that they were rumored to be announcing/showing off today. They did manage to show off their new group communication tool “Campfire,” which was pretty neat for what its worth. Demos aside, the workshop was very useful in what they covered in respect to general business tips. Now I won’t go into specifics of what they covered (don’t want to step on anyone’s toes), but they had alot of good tips that many non-MBAs wouldn’t think of. Alot of stuff they covered strikes you as common sense AFTER you hear it, but its these things here and there that people don’t really think of. All in all it was a good workshop, more from a business of web apps perspective than from any programming aspect.

On a personal note, I am working on 4 different interfaces at the moment, for 3 different personal web apps, 1 for a client, not to mention a redesign of infinimedia.com, and a handful of other little projects here and there. So if I don’t post on this site much in the next week, then you know why. The reason for the rush is we’re trying to get some of these apps into a solid Beta, maybe even a limited 1.0 launch by mid-february, and hopefully going full speed by SXSW in march. So on that note, back to coding. I will write up a business article of my own loosely borrowing some of today’s themes later.