Bulldog Financial’s Bullblog

I know that’s it’s been a while (about 7 months) since I last blogged, but this is an event that has brought me out of retirement. South by Southwest, more commonly known as SXSW is a two-week juggernaut of an event held in Austin, while the University of Texas kids on on Spring Break. The SXSW conference is split into three distinct but overlapping sections - Music, Film and the most important to me, Interactive. SXSWi is unquestionably the Superbowl of tech related events in Texas. It’s a five day bacchanalia of 5000 (I hear 2008 has 8000 registered) Web luminaries, New Media Mavens, Web Designers and general tech geeks drinking Shiner and Twittering each other silly in between attending panel discussions. This will be my fourth SXSWi and I’m very proud to say that I spoke at the one in 2005 with my friend Blair Garrou of the DFJMercury VC Fund. Since a friend of mine, Imelda Bettinger (an accomplished photographer and Twitter Meetup planner) asked me to talk her into going this year, I put together a few links in an email that will hopefully help sway her decision to come up to Austin:
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I’m really glad that you are going to try to make it, since it’s going to be a blast. SXSW is pretty overwhelming and there is no way that anyone can do it all. I would suggest going with the flow and don’t hesitate to leave something if you don’t think it’s worthwhile. Here are three SXSW guides that should help you figure how to maximize the experience:

http://cruftbox.com/blog/archives/001488.html - short and sweet

http://www.jwphill3.com/2008/02/24/beginners-guide-to-sxsw/ - detailed and very good

http://www.airbagindustries.com/archives/airbag/hampton.php - long, but a bit negative in my opinion

As far as parties go, the best place to check them all out is on http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/3519/ and http://www.facebook.com/s.php?n=-1&k=400000010&q=sxsw#

Here are two sites you should be on http://www.sxswbaby.com and http://sxsw.ning.com

Three parties that are not on the official SXSW radar, but you should definitely attend are BarCampAustinIII, Ewan Spence’s SXSW Social Media Breakfast and Laura Mayes and the Sk*rt ladies are putting on a coffee meeting at 9am on Sunday at Austin Java in Downtown. They haven’t put out the invite yet, but I spoke with her about it yesterday.

I also think that you’ll probably want to join the Worldwide Flickrite meetup on Saturday:

Not that you’ll get to do everything you want or planned, but this is a good start.

There is this little gadget that no one seems to be talking about from an obscure technology company called Apple (formerly Apple Computing) named the iPhone. I am not going to buy one for a variety of reasons - cost, locked carrier, EDGE internet - but it is undeniably a cool device. It is also a “game-changer” in terms of what it means to the consumer electronics industry, even in the very first day of it’s release. The hype surrounding the iPhone is arguably well-deserved, but no other company on earth could produce such a vortex of public interest and media coverage. I have heard rumors that Apple will sell 1 million units this weekend alone at a unit cost of $500 or $600. Whether that is true or not, the fact that that idea is even plausible is a testament to how large Steve Jobs “reality distortion field” is in the scope of the business and popular culture.

Because I wanted to check out the hype for myself, I took a little field trip to three places in the Houston area selling the iPhone.

The first was the Galleria Mall - I got there around 1:30 and found the line around the Apple store wrapped around center walkway all the way to the elevators - about 90 people overall. I ran into a friend, Imelda Bettinger, who took this picture of me on the phone with Ed Schipul who was traveling and needed someone to buy him an iPhone (Imelda ended up doing Ed the favor). I sent a message that the Apple employees were shutting down the store at 2pm and Dwight Silverman picked it up in his blog.

I then went by the big AT&T store on 59. There were maybe 40 people camped out at 2:30pm with lawn chairs and umbrellas in the heat of a Houston summer. There were also two live camera trucks - ABC 13 and NBC 2 with some on the spot reporting.

By the time I got to the Meyerland Plaza AT&T store, 25 or so people had already set up on the sidewalk. I left around 5pm and the mood was upbeat, especially when they saw several boxes of pizza being delivered.

I went home and had to watch some of the live coverage over the internet - most notably the Higginbothams and iJustine in the Mall of Americas. After a quick trip for gelato with the family, I dragged them back to the Meyerland AT&T store so I could actually play with the phone itself. It worked as advertised from the moment you pick it up. The learning curve is effectively zero. My wife, not the most technically oriented, even remarked that it was cool and the interface was intuitive - which was a pleasant surprise. By 7:15pm they were completely sold out which indicates that the 1m unit number might not be so far off.

Overall, I thought it was fun to be a part of a historic moment in consumer electronics history, but I still think that I’m going to wait for version 2.0 before I buy one.

I enjoy tracking some pretty obscure internet niches. One of them is webcomics which is a different sub-genre than digital comics, which is differentiated further still from the copyright-flaunting, underground world of scanned comics.

Something popped up on one of my RSS feeds that bears repeating. A fan of the Simpsons re-imagined an iconic picture of the characters in her own (manga-esque) drawing style. It came to the attention of creator Matt Groening (Simpson’s triva - it rhymes with ‘Braining’) when it was voted to the front page of the massively popular DeviantArt site - and subsequently dugg. He liked it so much that he contacted her and commissioned her to produce her own comic under his Bongo Comics label and is now in discussions to work on the relaunch of his other wildly creative show (and one of my personal favorites) show, Futurama.

The question I have is why can’t other big media industries embrace this kind of thinking instead of suing their customers like the RIAA has been doing for years with music samples, then re-mixes, then mash-ups?

Here’s the story told better, along with the picture itself - which I think is pretty good:

I was fortunate enough to attend the first meetup of MamaDramaConQueso - a very nice blend of the Houston Chronicle MamaBloggers and .

It was focused of course on the mommy bloggers, but a handful of men (and Houston Internet Celebrities) were in attendance including: Ed Schipul, Lawrence Simon, Ed T., Robert Nagle , and the Houston Chronicle’s own Dwight Silverman.

It was Dwight’s blog post listing all of the major local Houston technology community meetups that alerted me to the event in the first place. I am very proud to say that I have either attended or been part of the planning committee for every one of these events, except Science Cafe - something I hope to fix in September. I’ve always thought that Houston had a vibrant tech community, but local awareness of events like this has hampered our growth.

The event itself went very well, with lots of interest being generated about forming a new organization for Texas bloggers. I was able to meet and chat with one of the co-hosts - Laura Mayes who launched a “Digg for Women” called sk*rt with smashing success early last week. I was happy to see that she had the opportunity to speak with the OpMom founders Carrie and John Pacini.

Although I’m a dad and a semi-competent blogger, I’m not a DaddyBlogger by any strech - but I was very glad to be able to socialize with this terrific group of MommyBloggers and I’m looking forward to the next one.

As an infographics (or Data Visualization) aficionado, I stumbled across this map that overlays US States with the names of countries with similar GDP’s from this site: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Texas has a similar GDP to the entire country of Canada, which makes sense considering similar populations - 22m vs. 20m

I spent a couple of days in Toronto on business last week and I can tell you that it’s a really happening town, full of entrepreneurial energy. I was a little disoriented by the fact that our dollar and theirs have reached virtual parity - gone on the days of taking a 40% American discount on everything they sell. The only other disappointment was the fact that I missed the Mesh Conference due to my schedule, because it looked like it had a killer line up of speakers. One of them was Mark Dowds an Irishman living in Toronto who founded a co-working site called Indoor Playground. At the suggestion of my friend Robert Brackenridge I actually had my client drive me to the building in the hope that it would be open and I could see the setup - but it was a long shot and the door was locked at the time. It gives me a reason to go back however.

Since the fire alarm went off in my building at 4:30am I caught up and wrote a bunch of twitters to pass the time that I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’m really getting into twitter of late since I like knowing what people are doing - even if it’s just eating breakfast. I’m know that Jaiku is “better” technically with more features and less breakdowns, but I really like the community on twitter and I’ve made some good internet friends so far. Add me if you’d like at marc1919.

It’s been ten days since our first OpenCoffee Club and I’ve already had several follow up meetings with some of the attendees and one in particular - Tory Gattis (www.houstonstrategies.com) who earlier this month launched www.openteams.com that builds structured wiki’s for corporations. OpenCoffee Club once again proved to me that the Houston technology startup scene is very vibrant. Two other companies that I know, www.berggi.com and www.opmom.com have made their public launches within the last week or so. I’m also eagerly awaiting Richard Yoo’s (www.richardyoo.com/blog/) new company codenamed www.hushlabs.com coming out of stealth mode soon. My belief is that for every startup I know or hear about, there are three that are being worked on in complete isolation. I’m hoping that I can foster a relationship with Kurt Stoll at www.startuphouston.com to help get some of those companies out into the open where they can grow.

I’ve come to realize that I haven’t posted in months, but leave it to the always brilliant Paul Graham to pull me out of semi-retirement. Not that I always agree with him. His latest post is about how angel investors are the seeds that create startup hubs is absolutely spot on. The fact that entrepreneurs are the likeliest sources of angel funding for new ventures, proves the old addage, “Success breeds Success”. The real issue that most budding start up companies have in terms of funding is where to find these sources.

I’ve spent a significant amount of my time getting involved with various organizations around Houston that helped foster the local start up community. In my recent internet travels (e.g. blog reading), I discovered an idea that I think has the best chance of putting entrepreneurs with early stage investors in a casual setting called OpenCoffeeClub. In a word, it’s a meetup - an informal time and location for like-minded people to get together. It was founded in London by Saul Klein and recently brought to our shores by Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld in Boulder who run an outstanding blog called AsktheVC among other things like running an early stage VC firm. These guys clearly “get it”. They have realized that social aspects of finding and funding companies (especially Web 2.0 companies) are an important factor in the new landscape of internet companies.

Based on their good example, I’m initiating OpenCoffee Club Houston at 8am on Friday May 4 2007 at CoCo’s Crepes and Coffee near the Houston Technology Center. I think that we’ll have a decent turnout and I’m very curious about the crowd that it attracts. I hope to make this a recurring event as I think that it will increase both investor education for startups and dealflow for investors over time. This will be sort of a standing mini-unconference in that the agenda will be set by the attendees at that time.

Wish us luck and pictures and a debrief to follow.

I don’t hide the fact that I think Paul Graham’s insight about startups is second to none. I’ve been one of his cult members for quite a while - long enough for me to covet a new Prius. Unfortunately, I have to take a major exception to one specific part of his most recent post. He lumps Houston in with cities that have “start up activity too small to measure.” I can tell you that this is categorically incorrect. I can go into the litany of the Houston Technology Center’s clients or the companies that have presented to the Rice Alliance or why Houston has the most entrepreneurially minded business community in the world. But that is not going to make his statement any less true from an outsiders perspective.  Since we’re not on either coast it means that Techcrunch and the WSJ don’t have the access to cover the companies that are here on a regular basis. Sometimes we’ll get an occasional Wired blog post, but it’s not the same as being able to go to the parties at night on a whim. The best local coverage we have is a radio program/podcast that I highly recommend from Russ Capper and John Beddow called The Business Makers.

I get to see emerging technology start ups based here every single day. Surely I make it my business to interact with them, but there are still a lot of them out there that I don’t know. Houston still tends to see more Energy (now alternative energy) and BioTech (devices more than pharmaceuticals) than consumer-facing Web 2.0 software deals, but I can assure you that we have more than our fair share that are struggling to raise themselves out of our swampy little backwater, that happens to be the fourth largest city in the US.

I just came across this Ebay auction for yet another Web 2.0 company called www.goldenfeed.com. I think that three companies ((Kiko, Huckabuck and now this one) doing this constitute a real trend. I do hope that they get what they want out of the auction and the site itself seems like a decent idea. I don’t know if this is good or bad for the liquidity of Web 2.0 companies, but I do know that it proves that Ebay is without a doubt the largest and most efficient capital market the world has ever known. More anecdotal evidence that proves this is the fact that I had lunch with a very good friend of mine yesterday who told me he sold his World of Warcraft avatar for $800 within hours of posting it earlier this week. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see an “Ebay for Web 2.0 Companies” cropping up soon.