The NVA Blog

I’ve been reading a good number of VC and Entrepreneur blogs this year and it struck me as somewhat ironic that of all the blogs I read, it seems the VC blogs serve a disproportionate number of ads. Given that VCs are entrepreneurial and coin-operated by nature this didn’t entirely surprise me. That said, successful VCs are the last group of folks that need the additional cash from serving a few ads.

I asked Fred Wilson of “A VC” about this as he’s got a ton of ads on his site and he is a very active blogger. Fred responded quickly and mentioned he donates all of the ad proceeds to charity. He also blogged about it today, naturally. Fred has some pretty impressive traffic numbers (2 million page views and 1 million views via feeds) and plans to donate around 40k to charity from the ad revenue. I think this is a great thing to do, and hope that others take his lead. Kudos Fred!

I don’t see anything wrong with monetizing your thoughts and ideas online in principal. One could draw parallels to traditional content/media sites… I think there are pros and cons:

Pros:

• it takes time and energy to be a good and relevant blogger, so seeing some compensation for your efforts is rewarding (hey - time is money!)
• serving ads also helps you learn more about the ad business and your visitors.
• you can use the revenue to fund other projects, or even better charities as Fred has done

Cons:

• the ads can be annoying to look at, and they break up the visual flow of many sites
• some people can perceive blog-advertising as being greedy or cheap
• managing ad placement and watching your ad revenue can be big distractions

I heard about this a few weeks ago and think it’s an interesting approach to accelerating our entry into a wi-fi everywhere world. FON, a Spanish start-up, is out to sell you a $5 wi-fi router. If you share your network, you can use any other FON hotspot for free. It’s like a collective except that FON has a few crafty revenue models built in to ensure they make $$. They have some good marketing to build the hype as well: “Become a Fonero” is my favorite. They are calling their $5 router (really a linksys with custom firmware they are eating the cost of) a “social router”. Ha! Just remember to use protection

Is this a great way to help wi-fi access explode everywhere or simply a large corporation trying to appear like a socially concious start-up doing good in the world? Hmm.

For the hackers out there, since the Linksys router runs Linux, people have already figured out what it does differently and how to work around it…gotta love the GPL.

I’m getting overwhelmed with all of the tools, utilities, and new free services out there to help report, track, organize and “simplify” access to the stuff I actually want/need online. There are too many options from too many start-ups. The tech market is inflating again, which is good and bad at the same time. There are *at least* three problems that are giving me a headache:

1. The noise level: Thanks to “web 2.0″ and the world of RSS feeds I now get tons of info delivered to my inbox every morning. This is a double-edged sword; good in that I have technology working for me and improving my reach, visibility and efficiency; bad in that this much improved visibility causes information overload on a number of levels. There is just too much crap to pay attention to, and just too many information sources (that I actually DO care about) to watch. Either my brain too slow in evolving, or I need a better filter.

2. Flashbacks are bad: Every morning I get my daily dose of updates via FeedBlitz, and it’s usually the stuff I read in TechCrunch that freaks me out. I am again amazed at the number of companies appearing on the radar every day that have a questionable model and provide a nice-to-have feature at best. Didn’t we learn anything the first time around? True, there are an impressive number of useful, high-quality web based apps and tools available today (I’ll post another article on this). There is also a growing balloon of me-too sites that will not be around in a year that offer features not products. In an inflating market with accelerating capital investment, this is bound to happen. Many of the companies launching “featurettes” or Myspace value-adds are out to get acquired quickly. This is not a problem in itself, as thoughtful acquisitions help grow businesses, fund future projects, and enables companies to build quality apps inorganically. In the meantime we get overloaded with the noise and hype from all of these companies trying to provide you with something you think you might want. So, I’m having a flashback to 1999.

3. What’s my username again? With the proliferation of new sites and tools online, It feels like I’m signing up for an account on a new site every freakin’ day. I need a new account everywhere I go in order to use the site or service. I end up either having the browser remember my passwords (bad security practice), use the same credentials everywhere (worse security practice), or write down the ones where the website wouldn’t let me use my usual credentials (even worse security). Hmm…I need an online, single-sign-on tool that also is a general account/password manager. Encrypted password managers and single-sign-on tools have been around for the better part of 10 years, but somehow I haven’t stumbled upon one that actually works.