Incubation got a bad name in the period following the bursting of the dotcom bubble in March 2000. But, at the heart of innovation, incubation always has, and still does, play a big role for me in determining what to focus on. Incubation is really the same as early stage experimentation. It is where I get to play with concepts, ideas, features and products before subjecting them to any real market pressures.
Historically I have always incubated. EasyNet, in 1994, came about after 2 years of playing with AOL, Compuserve and Demon Internet in the UK. If it wasn’t for the experimentation and play there would have been no EasyNet. RealNames came about after a year of playing with mapping French MiniTel addresses to URLs and building browser plug-ins to enable the Minitel addresses to be resolved to URLs. I even invested about $500,000 into the idea before launching it and getting the first deal with AltaVista in 1998. TechCrunch was initially Mike Arrington’s way of gathering and filtering data about the emerging Web 2.0 landscape in 2004-5. It became a business much later. Edgeio was incubated for almost 2 years before it did a seed round and launched in 2005-6.
So, incubation is key to innovation. But incubation alone doesn’t cut it. What you incubate, the theme that guides the focus for incubation is crucial. If that theme makes no sense then the resulting ideas will find no scalable audience.
Themes are not fixed. They change as conditions demand. In 1983 the emergence of networking and multi-user, client-server databases was my theme (what became cScape was born in that period). In 1994 my theme was the emergent internet replacing AOL and Compuserve (EasyNet, CYBERIA and Ivan Pope and Antony Van Couvering’s NetNames came out of that period). In 1997 I focused on internet search and navigation (RealNames was created during that period). In 2004 my theme was distributed content and aggregation, and tools to manage those (edgeio was formed in that period, as was Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch to monitor and assess those developments).
Today my theme is the transformation of the internet into a real-time platform for content publishing, distribution and discovery and also for relationships between people (friends, followers, colleagues). And secondly, the increasing engagement with this information through high quality mobile devices.
These trends challenge the winners from the last era. Will Google still be the king of search as our focus on real-time information changes our view of what constitutes “good search results”? Will CNN still be the place to go whenever something major happens in the world? Will people’s passion for their hobbies move from buying Magazines to something else? Will Yelp be the place to find places, or will that be something new? The new becomes old quickly in times like these, and up to 1.5 billion people can now vote with their fingers, almost instantly.
I have 4 projects in incubation presently.
1. s.erious.ly
http://s.erious.ly is an idea predicated on the trend to de-portalization. It starts with the rapid growth of content relevant to any given topic of human interest, and the diverse forms of publishing that are producing that content (blogs, online magazines, twitter, Facebook and so on). Secondly it realizes that most users won’t put in the effort to track the best content available for the topics they care most about. Awesome though it is, Google Reader is too geeky for most people. Thirdly it therefore acknowledges that the audience for any given topic is fragmented across the many places that publish content about the topic. The audience for Wine is scattered across at least 200 web sites for example. s.erious.ly has created a platform for curating content, by topic, from the best sources, and gives the reader the ability to discover all that is new in the topic from a single starting point. Examples are http://seriouslywine.com and http:/seriouslyipad.com. Each “seriously” site has a mirrored Twitter feed where people can follow the headlines, like a custom wire service for the topic they have a passion for.
The next stage in incubating s.erious.ly is to discover whether or not it is possible to aggregate the audience from the 200 sites that make up a topic into a single targetable audience for a brand advertiser without taking that audience away from the sites they are already on. If that can be done there is significant value to the sites, to the advertiser and to s.erious.ly.
2. now.tv
http://now.tv is all about the future of conversation about the big issues and events of our time. It starts from the existence of inexpensive recording devices in the hands of billions of people – cell phones with cameras, flip cameras and so on. Secondly, it builds on the existence of Twitter and Facebook as platforms for alerting the rest of the world to key events. Finally it builds on the existence of inexpensive means to curate and organize a coherent discussion about these events, live, globally and in real-time. It is to 2010 what CNN was to 1980, the new way to engage people in a conversation about “now”. More as it develops.
3. speedi.ly
http://speedi.ly is an early effort to create real-time metadata from web content. It is clear from early responses that there is much interest in this and people ready to pay for a service not unlike that at http://topics.speedi.ly and http://products.speedi.ly. What is less clear is the best way to build a sustainable business in this area. Again, more as it develops….
4. MobJot Productions
MobJot is focused on the development of real-time story telling. It covers both fiction and documentary story-telling and seeks to engage the audience as participants in the story, leveraging social media in the process. Richard Svinkin and Benjamin Kroh are co-founders.
