Motorola CTO on What’s Next

Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Motorola, had some interesting things to say at Fortune iMeme last week in San Francisco on the “Tapping Technology’s Global Opportunity” panel with John Chambers. Here were her very insightful pre-conference Q&A responses:

Padmasree Warrior
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Motorola, Inc.

“1) For you personally, what technology has taken the most unexpected turn in your lifetime?

For me personally, the technology that has taken the most unexpected turn in my lifetime is what I refer to as “the device formerly known as the cell phone.” I still remember many predictions that by 2000 there would only be about a million cell phone users. Boy, were they ever wrong!

Today there are about 2.9 billion mobile device users, i.e., roughly half the planet uses this technology for so much more than a phone call. Today people call people, not places! Today a new language called text speak is practiced across the globe with the characters “< 3" meaning "love" the world over. This new speech crosses language and cultural boundaries, bringing us closer. Today's mobile phone retailing at less than $40 has more processing power than the spaceship that first put man on the moon; and the 13-year-old using it may well know more than the 1969 Apollo engineers!

The mobile device of the future will be your persona. It will carry your mail and keep your calendar, it will be your wallet and the jewel you wear, it will be your camera and television, it will remind you when you forget, it will entertain you with music and games, it will help you get there from here, it will show things that you may miss, it will understand and talk to you, it will allow you to share your experiences and your worlds - and all this as easy as a simple phone call.

The first call from atop Mount Everest, the farmer in India earning a livelihood using SMS, the lifesaving weather information for fishermen in Africa via the mobile, the videos and TV shows that people watch in Korea and Japan on their commute -- no one ever expected any of this on the mobile device. It is the first computer for many people, and it is the platform for the next internet.

2) What, for you, has been the most surprising infectious idea of the past year?

The most surprising and infectious idea in the past year has been the ability to time-, place- and device-shift media. Think of how viewing habits have changed with DVR's that allow people to take control of program schedules. People are now creating their own video programs and sharing them online for others to watch. We are now moving TV and video content from the living room to the mobile device. This shift is revolutionizing the video and broadcast industry.

Media and entertainment will change dramatically compared to the past five years. A significant amount of content creation will be spontaneous generation in addition to planned production. Content distribution will include "persona-cast" and not just broadcast. Content presentation will shift to multiple screens from one screen. Content delivery will move beyond the living room to time-, device-, place-shift. Content consumption will become more participatory rather than remain passive.

It is no longer about "always on;" the future is about "always on-demand." There is a third screen enabling this - on the mobile!

3) What really drives innovation in technology?

Innovation is hard work. It takes remarkable thought leaders with vision, passion and energy to drive ideas into reality. It is about letting a few geeks and gadflies change the game. There are no rules in the ethos of innovation - that has been my mantra for the past several years.

I passionately believe that innovation is birthed from the union of technical IQ, business IQ and entrepreneurial IQ. It is nurtured by a handful of persistent individuals debating a seemingly stray idea, and asking why it may or may not work. It grows with tweaking and twiddling, unglamorous and fast-paced iterations called experimentation.

Innovation happens by bringing together diverse thought: sociologists, technologists, marketers, and well, sometimes even those lawyers! Agile, small groups working towards a defining vision may be not always in perfect harmony, but always moving in the right direction.

Innovation in technology is driven by people solving real problems. It is catalyzed by people with provocative ideas to create an impact on the marketplace. Often they swim upstream against the tide of conventional thinking, having a strong passion for their vision. Cultivating an environment that encourages and protects such people is imperative in fostering innovation in technology. I often ask five questions to stimulate innovation: what relevant problem does this solve, what are the competing alternatives, what differentiates this solution, what are the barriers to entry, and what is the business opportunity?"

Padmasree maintains a blog at http://blogs.motorola.com/author/padmasree-warrior/

Follow Bill Clinton’s Journeys in Africa

Bill Clinton will be in Africa for the next six days working on some important initiatives of the Clinton Foundation. You can follow his journey at clintonafrica.com.

From the Clinton Foundation Newsletter:
“Tomorrow President Clinton begins a six-day, four-country trip across Africa, his sixth visit to the continent since he left office in 2001. He will see first-hand the Clinton Foundation’s work in action and highlight the accomplishments we’ve already made - including bringing life-saving ARV treatment to 750,000 people living with HIV/AIDS around the world, half of whom live in Africa. He will also make exciting announcements about our work in progress - including our partnerships to help cities such as Johannesburg use energy efficient technologies to minimize their carbon emissions. Read more about our accomplishments in Africa.

President Clinton will meet with children in Zambia, emerging young leaders in South Africa and farmers in Malawi, all of whom have been directly touched by the Foundation’s efforts. Today, four of our initiatives are at work in more than 28 countries:

- curbing the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other global health threats
- combating global climate change
- expanding access to water and sanitation
- helping farmers improve harvests through access to innovative agricultural technology”

I am glad Clinton is working on highlighting some of the biggest issues in the world.

Children’s Applications on the XO Laptop for the Developing World

I just ran into Idit Harel Capterton, founder of the WorldWideWorkshopFoundation in the iMeme hallway who was demoing the green XO laptop that I just mentioned 30 minutes ago. (picture of me holding XO laptop coming soon!).

She demoed the MamaMedia Multimedia Learning Center application running on the XO Laptop. It is an open source learning application for children that allows any child with the laptop to create cartoon animations with sound (picture of an elephant jumping off a circus platform on the XO screen coming soon), poll their friends, and find other laptop users in their village, among many other learning activities.

The World Wide Workshop Foundation is an “organization dedicated to conceptualizing and developing applications of Internet media technology to enhance learning, creativity and understanding among children and youth in developing communities around the world.” And is also working on issues like the digital divide.

I’m now listening to Vint Cerf talk about IP v6 taking over IP v4 and real time/streaming video vs. downloadable video.

Jimmy Wales on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Yesterday at iMeme there was a large discussion on the XO Laptop, being produced by the One Laptop Per Child initiative, a non-profit out of MIT–with the goal of getting a low-cost laptop to as many children in the developing world as possible.

Some iMeme participants felt that children don’t need computers that will easily break, but food. Others thought that the laptops will enable education which will create human capital which will create jobs and help end famines.

Here is what Jimmy Wales had to say on the XO Laptop this morning:

“I think the XO laptop will have an enormous impact. I have visited tools in townships in Africa that had Wikipedia on their computers. They have a local copy–they don’t have the internet. And that’s fine because it’s freely licensed. The sharing happens left and right all over. There are groups coming together to write opensourced textbooks.”

OLPC made peace with Intel today, one of the former major opponents.

From their mission:
“Most of the nearly two

GigaOm Pick Up: Dumpster Diving

GigaOm network blog Found + Read had a nice pickup on our iContact bootstrapping story today in an entry called Dumpster Diving. Thanks Om!

Excerpt: We had planned last week to post on GigaOM about Durham, North Carolina-based iContact. The four-year old email marketing and blogging software startup closed a $5.35 million round of funding from Updata Partners and IDEA Fund Partners on June 29

Crowdsourcing and Communities Breakout Session at iMeme

Crowdsourcing and Communities Breakout Session at iMeme

MODERATOR:
Jeffrey O’Brien, Fortune

PANELISTS
Richard Barton, CEO of Zillow
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp
Max Levchin, CEO Slide
Jim Buckmaster, CEO Craigslist

BUCKMASTER - Craigslist
24 employees

LEVCHIN
Our slideshows are TVs–they can switch channels. The users can express themselves and put whatever content they want on them. The next step is allowing users t take whatever content they find interesting, including professionaly produced content and include that on their TVs. This allows the millions of pixel areas have the ability to carry advertising. Transactions can happen within the widget itself. The widget economy is real. People are realizing that these widgets are programmable mini-desktops. The real challenge is but how to make it relvent. The question is how do you find interesting content–especially those that can make money. Yes, we are generating revenue. I can’t tell you how much yet. We are generating revenue through ads on our site. We are the 31st largest site on the internet. We passed Paypal–my personal victory over myself. Yesterday I turned 32 and Slide was the 32nd most popular site on the Internet. We are trying to figure out what people like. The long tail reality applied. The top 5% is interesting. 5 out of 7 playmates are using Slide products–those are popular–vs my personal birthday show. You need to analyze for longevity and relevance. The most interesting thing we’ve done, we are letting out users associate themselves in their little TV boxes with brands. Users can say, wow I really love Nike, I really want to incorporate the Nike swoosh on my slideshow. The user chooses this for themselves. No one in the equation gets offended. The next step that will happen is that you can incorporate bling within a transaction. The bling will be free. Users might get paid to display bling. Sparkle might get you to a movie preview.

OBRIEN
Zillow has raised $57 million in funding. You are also a partner at Benchmark capital. Tell us your vision for Zillow.

BARTON
The broad goal of Zillowis to light up the dark information to allow information to come into a bustling, vibrant bazaar–centered around homes, remodeling, and reconstruction and neighborhoods. If we can accomplish this, we think that a massive brand can be created online. With real estate online there isn’t a brand that exists. Heretofore if you were good about doing research on a neighborhood you go knock on the doors of the neighbor. But that barrier is high. We are working to lower this barrier. My favorite feature on Zillow is the MakeMeMove. We have had 65,000 listings and 100 transactions from MakeMeMove. Negotiations on houses are hapenning whether or not a house is for sale. Before it was black or white–it’s either for sale or not for sale. But we know there are thousand shares of gray. We are looking up into the dark supply side of the market and asking what would you really take for that. When we have 1,000,000 listings it gets interesting, when we have 2,000,000 it becomes a new marketplace. 17% is the delta between Zestimates and the MakeMeMove price. This increases liquidity and the velocity of t

OBRIEN
It’s an acknowledgement that we all have our price. There is the tale of the honeymooning couple where the guy writes the note under the door of the house they want and the little old lady says oh yes I was going to move anyway.

The rest of the panel included great comments by Craiglist’s CEO Buckmaster that Craiglist hasn’t added Adwords because not many users have asked them to. Classic. Unfortunately my battery died so couldn’t capture more of it. I dream of a day when laptop batteries can truly last for 9 hours and not lose power with each recharge.

Catherine Cook from MyYearBook.com: Her iMeme

Catherine Cook, MyYearBook.com, 17 years old, starting at Georgetown in the Fall

Provacative 15 year olds cannot be the future of user generated content. YouTube capitalized on the iMeme of widgets and spread them through MySpace. The F8 platform is a logican step in empoowering content creators and developers. But programming still matters. The YouTubes and Facebooks of the world become the infrastructure for a new media company. Most viewed and favorited will not be the only standard.

There is such a thing as quality in content. A more efficient way of developing top content exists. MyYearBook has more uniques than Bebo and Hi5. We are the top Battling site. We have a tool that allows the best content to come to the top in a way that is better than most viewed.

We will see content evolve in ways that are in predictable. The days of low quality user generated content is numbered. The next big iMeme is great user generated content made possible through battles.

The growth of battles has surprised me the most. A battle is an image contest or video contest. Since we launched this in February our pageviews have grown 5x. A video battle for the best touchdown would be a way of improving the quality of touchdown video content. MyMag is a 100% user generated magazine. Teen authors that want to write about anorexia or drug abuse can do that. We are getting 3000+ comments on each article–for an author that otherwise would not have gotten exposure.

iMeme: Opening Panel with Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, and Philip Rosedale

MODERATOR: David Kirpatrick from Fortune

PANELISTS:
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (SecondLife)
Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience, Google
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce

Question 1: Zuckerberg
Thoughts on F8 Platform
“Most natural way for people to communicate is through their friends and their connections, their “social graph”. We don’t think we’re building that, it exists in the world. We are allowing the world to map it out. We want to allow anyone to develop an application on top of the social graph that we built. We wanted to become a platform. We wanted to build something people would feel comfortable building on top op. There is a large amount of trust required to do that. We are going to give you the same tools we give ourselves. It has grown faster than expected. There are more than 20 applications that have more than 1 million users. 2/3rd of our users have added an application. The results were greater than our expectations. Platform might be an overused term. We just want people to be able to create applications. Building a platform is the essence of being a technology company. Allow people to build things on top of you.

ROSEDALE FROM SECOND LIFE
I previously thought a platform was a bunch of wooden boards. Platforms allow companies to reduce the time and costs of development. Platforms allow us to do online what we can do in the real world, extremely fast. Platforms win when they build exponentially. Second Life wanted to simulate the world in a lifelike way. Business leaders are naturally protective of their intellectual property. Ebay is a great example where certain types of platforms have the property that once you use them you can get off them. A smart company can use this opportunity to open themselves up. We recognize that more platforms have network effects and exponential growth possibilities. If this is true, then you can take your hands off some regulatory handles. You can be more open than you think you can–and if you are you will profit more. People’s perspective in 2002 said that if you do it in an open unrestrictive context people would hate it. We waited, and it took off.

MARC BENIOFF
What is exciting about this panel is that there is a tremendous door that has opened for all of us. We are able to create platforms on the internet. The internet is the new OS. It is creating communities of innovation that are attracting development. This is a whole new chapter in our industry–the emergence of an Internet Operating System. None of these companies are ties to Microsoft or that Vista stuff. It’s a new door for innovation.

That is the power of the platform. It’s not about our companies’ success, it’s about changing the way people interact online. There is an innovation platform and an economic platform. The companies that don’t end up with ecosystems, that never make the leap from killer app to platform. Like Siebel never made the leap. SAP did work hard to do this with Netweaver. If you don’t make that leap, you don’t become a major player. We talk about APIs, logic running on the service. You look at what made Oracle a killer app was in 1990 when we introduced the ability to have logic running on our servers and a customizable UI. Your own customizable scheme and sharing model, user roles, and work flow. All of these things together make a killer platform. We did not invent these things, but are redefining those old technologies models to show what they mean in this new world of Internet platforms. People forget that Windows used to be an application on DOS. Windows became a platform over time. Once you get a company’s data- your contacts, accounts, opportunities and meta data–friends’ names, your network, how things are interrelated, your business processes, it prevents switching. Why are so many people still on the IBM mainfame? It’s not because mainframes are exciting, it’s because the company’s metadata is not movable off the IBM mainframes. They are sustainable because they are ecosystems–not just because they hold the data, but the metadata.

ROSEDALE
You couldn’t build a business on notes. YOU ARE A PLATFORM WHEN YOU CAN BUILD A BUSINESS ON TOP OF YOU. In SecondLife we have 40,000 people who are making a profit on our service.

MAYER
Platforms often happen naturally in technology companies. You have to make it easy for your employees to build your software–so why not open it up since all the great developers in the world don’t work for you. We have ads for search, then had ads for content, allowing more information to be profitably brought online. Smaller things have been successful like Google Maps. Before we released we had people trying to look at the AJAX calls and map Craigslist on top of it. We now have 10,000 developers, working essentially for free, and tens of thousands of gadgets. Google Gears makes it easier to develop AJAX applications. It allows you to utilize Google Reader and Gmail without having an internet connection. You cache the application.

ZUCKERBERG
It’s funny to talk about platforms. I agree with Marc’s point. Opening things up allow more people to innovate on top. But you have to have a great app at the core.

BENIOFF
You’re able to extend a great app and get more users. They got a 25,000 user contract with Merrill Lynch because of what Thompson and DowJones created that just happened to be built on our platform (AppExchange). Platforms get you into more hands, and with more capability.

ROSEDALE
The Internet is human scale–or will get there.

ZUCKERBERG
Things trend toward more openness. You get there by providing the tools for privacy and tools for openness. When you’re the dominant player you don’t want people to innovate. I remind people that I’m 23, we’re going to be around and doing this for a long time.

KIRPATRICK: Is Facebook the new AOL?

ZUCKERBERG
It’s still early. It was open at one college and now it’s open to everyone. But we haven’t translated the site. We have many more tools we can provide to developers.

MAYER
I agree that things trend toward openness. The strength of the internet is distribution. If you want the information to be public you want it to be found through a search mechanism.

QUESTION FROM ESTHER DYSON
There is tension between the platforms and the users. Where does data ownership come in?

ZUCKERBERG
Not that difficult of a question. Just give them controls.

DYSON
So if I didn’t like it I could put my friends on LinkedIn?

ZUCKERBERG
Yes, you could. Many applications will have both a Facebook version if they’d like and a non-Facebook version.

ROSEDALE
There is a project in Africa on SecondLife. MacArthur Fund is beginning to work with us to see if we can help create jobs in Africa using SecondLife.

BENIOFF
This is going to be one of the key advantages of the internet. We make Salesforce free for non-profits, NGOs, and microfinance orgs around the world. The UN Food Program used Salesforce for the Tsunami relief efforts. Software as a service is great for the developing world because it doesn’t require the huge IT investments in servers.

15 Step Process for Raising Venture Capital: Part 5

Here is the last installment of The 15 Steps to Raising Venture Capital. Steps 12-15 are The Term Sheet Signing, The Full Due Diligence, The Final Investment Documents, and The Deal Signing…

1. The Term Sheet Signing: Agree to the general terms of the deal and either digitally sign the term sheet or sign in person.
2. The Full Due Diligence: Once you sign the term sheet, a more extensive due diligence list will be provided to you. This list may include items such as:
1. Detailed sales pipeline
2. Revenue by customer type
3. Detailed operational plan and budget
4. Full business plan
5. Hiring plan
6. Detailed revenue assumptions
7. Audited financial statements
8. Bank reconciliation detail
9. Product Pricing list
10. Detailed product roadmap
11. Customer, Employee, Insurance, and Lease contracts
12. Relevant whitepapers and analyst coverage
13. Details on IT infrastructure
14. Current partner list
15. Lead generation processes
16. Customer satisfaction survey
17. Customer reference list
18. Details on intellectual property
19. Current capitalization chart with options detail
20. Organizational chart
21. Salary and bonus structure for company
22. Employee turnover
23. Management background checks
24. Competitive analysis
25. Expected acquirers
26. Past board meeting minutes
3. The Final Investment Documents: Once this due diligence is complete, if all goes well, you will receive the final investment documents from the investment firm’s lawyers. Have your attorney review it closely and negotiate any needed changes. Pay especially close attention to any representations and warranties you are making as an officer of the company and personally. The final investment documents generally include a:
1. Share Purchase Agreement
2. Investor Rights Agreement
3. Right of First Refusal and Co-Sale Agreement
4. Voting Agreement
4. The Deal Signing: Provide your company bank account information, close the deal, watch the funds go into your account, breathe a sigh of relief, send out the press release, and welcome your new investor(s) and board member(s) to the team with a celebration open house, exchange of company swag, and thank you card. Then get going on growing revenue.

As you can see, the process can be arduous and long, especially if you are dealing with multiple firms and trying to parallel process to create a competitive round. At the end of the day, even if a firm is not interested, try to build a relationship for the future. 

In San Francisco for Fortune iMeme

I’m in San Francisco through Sunday. I’m looking forward to meeting up with friends with Ben Casanocha and seeing Tyler Dikman and seeing John Chambers, Jeremy Allaire, Marc Benioff, Jim Breyer, Vint Cerf, Richard Dawkins, Ester Dyson, John Fisher, Soctt Heiferman, Reid Hoffman, Arianna Huffington, Marissa Mayer, Stratton Sclavos, Craig Venter, Jimmy Walkes, Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others at iMeme starting tomorrow.

Next Page »