Wireless Electricity Update

iContact co-founder and my partner Aaron Houghton has posted a great update on the state of the commercialization of wireless electricity on his blog TechInnoVenture.

He and I have been keeping each other updated on what we hear about wireless electricity–the ability to transfer electric power from one place to another without wires. It’s possible and it’s happenning today.

On August 21, Intel demonstrated their ability to transmit electricity wirelessly over a distance of approximately one foot to power a lightbulb. This Intel R&D was based of prior research at MIT by Marin Soljacic. Profossor Soljacic has dubbed wireless electricity, “Witricity.”

The near-term market opportunities revolve around low-wattage charging of electronic devices like phones, DVD players, and GPS units. But a visionary world of a “house without wires” and “neighborhoods without wires” can be imagined.

Aaron notes, “I envision a go-to-market solution here where 15-20 feet is considered good enough for the first round of devices because it accommodates the size of a standard private office, cubicle, or room of a residential house. Since all of these are already hard-wired from an external source to the outlet the big advantage here in the short term is from the wall outlet to the end device: the cell phone, laptop computer, monitor, projector, digital camera, etc. I think the first company that moves in this space will establish a brand name with builders who will install the wireless electricity sending devices into each room they build alongside traditional plug-in devices. These relationships will then later be leveraged as a product with the required efficiency at longer distances and through more obstacles (walls being the important ones to consider) becomes available and they go into production as the infrastructure that moves power from an external source to every outlet or end device within a building. I haven’t done the math but my gut (Steven Colbert reference) tells me the first opportunity is at least a $50 billion annual market with the latter being 3-5x that annually. Then of course the opportunity that remains is for long distance regional power distribution through the air.”

While our focus is email marketing software for SMBs, it’s always fun to talk with Aaron about what future technologies could bring ranging from wireless electricity to fusion power. As Thomas Friedman says, the ET (energy technology) revolution is upon us.

Well I’m off to read more about the effects of Lehman’s possible collapse and Merrill’s purchase by BOA. Remember, as Buffet always says, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Tomorrow may very well be the best U.S. equities buying opportunity we see in our lifetimes.

$1M Prize for Best Developing Country Technology Innovation

Legatum Group, founded by Chris Chandler and based in Dubai, has announced today at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Half Moon Bay, California a $1 million prize for the best technology innovation from a for-profit company in the developing world. I will update this blog when they post details on how to enter.

I wanted to write this post as from all appearances, Legatum seems to be making a concerted effort to invest in long-term sustainable development in developing countries and putting their money where their mouth is. They are a sponsor to the Fortune conference here, and are mostly unheard of. Even their original company Sovereign Global, is nearly unheard of. Yet they manage over $4B in capital invested in India alone.

Legatum is the donor to the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. They invested $50M in the Center to obtain naming rights. Here is a short video I took this afternoon of Iqbal Quadir who is the founder and Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT.

Although Dubai-based, the group is made up strictly of Westerners, mainy of whom previously worked at Chris Chandler’s Sovereign Global. They claim a 40% CAGR over the lifetime of thier original fund started in 1986. The President of Legatum, Mark Stoleson, attended Occidental College and Duke. The other chief team members attended Wharton, London Business School, Babdon, Oxford, and University of Brisbane and has worked at law firms, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and PWC.

I do wonder if most of these individuals are based at the head office in Dubai, which is slowly on its way toward challenging London and New York for the global capital headquarters. If you can find any statistics on capital under management for equity investment firms based in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Dubai please let me know.

Legatum Group is also the creators of the Africa Prize, which gave away $450,000 in 2007 to the most innovative businesses in Africa. Their philosophy is simply that for-profit businesses are more efficient at creating positive social improvement than bi-lateral foreign aid which in their Easterlyan-like view too often has created dependency.

At Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Half Moon Bay, CA

Today through Wednesday I am the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, about 45 minutes south of San Francisco. After a Segway tour along the Pacific this afternoon, the sessions began at 4pm. We’ve heard from Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit.

Here are some notes on what some of the panelists spoke about:

Dell

• 500,000 people per day who come onto the internet for the first time
  large majority are outside the United States
• Long term bull on the long term impact technology can have on society
• Came back as CEO for second time
• Put his ‘big ears’ on, listened to the employees
• Thought of themselves as a company that listened
• Will have about 2 billion conversations with our customers this year
• centrally controlled tops-down is not most response way
• We should have fiber to the home

Benioff

• It’s not just company talking with customers, but customers talking with eachother in a one to many conversation
• Customers are able to gang up on us
• The acceleration of the soul of the world
• Fareed Zakaria - Post-american World
• The internet is the great accelerator in societal evolution
• A change in the world can only happen if there is a change in conciousness
• Dalai Llama - world peace comes through inner peace
• web 1.0 - transact
• web 2.0 - collaborate
• web 3.0 - innovate (via platform)                                                         

Brad Smith, 5th CEO of Intuit in 25 years

• 50 million end users
• Connecting florists with florists in different zip codes
• Intuit now 50% SaaS

Other livebloggers at the conference include:

• Joi Ito
  Chief Executive Officer, Creative Commons
• Rebecca MacKinnon
  Co-founder, Global Voices
  Assistant Professor
  University of Hong Kong
• Amy Messenger
  Managing Director, U.S. Technology Practice Head
  Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Chris Elam
  Founder and Director
  Misnomer Dance Theater
• Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz
  Chief Executive Officer, vpod.tv
• Aaron Houghton
  Co-founder and Chairman, iContact
• Frank Shaw
  President, Microsoft Accounts, Worldwide
  Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
• Richard Edelman
  President and CEO, Edelman
• Ryan Allis
  Co-founder and CEO, iContact
• Ross Mayfield
  Chairman, President, and Co-founder
  Socialtext
• Thomas Crampton
  Director, New Business Development
  Next Media
• Per Mosseby
  Chief Executive Officer, Islanders
• Steve Jurvetson
  Managing Director
  Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Bart Becks
  President International and Director
  Netlog
• Julia Boorstin
  CNBC
• Oliver Marks
  ZDNet
• Bruce Carlisle
  CEO, Digital Axel
• Susan Hassler
  Editor in Chief, IEEE Spectrum
• Daniel Kaufmann
  Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption, World Bank Institute

This Page May Contain Content That is Not Consisent With the Moral Cultural, or Social Values of the UAE

I was in Dubai for a night two weeks ago on my way to Uganda and tried from my Holiday Inn Express in Dubai Internet City home of the Middle East campuses of Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and EMC and to access a blog called Secret Dubai Diary. The site came up in a Google search for Dubai nightlife. When I tried to access the site, I got the lovely “Surf Safely” message above, indicating that this site was “inconsistent with the moral, cultural, or social values of the UAE.” Unfortunately for the government censors in the United Arab Emirates, they didn’t think to block the Google Cache version of the page.

It was very reassuring that UAE recognizes the Internet as a “powerful medium of communication, sharing and serving our daily learning requirements.”

If you wish, you can send an email to “safesurf[at]du.ae” to share your view of Internet censorship.

The Move Toward Agile Development & ChannelAdvisor’s Open House Tuesday

Our good friends at ChannelAdvisor are having an Open House celebrating the launch of their Agile Development Center on Tuesday from 6pm to 8pm. You can learn more and register to attend at http://www.channeladvisor.com/openhouse/. If you are interested in web software development or web software entrepreneurship I encourage you to attend.

Over the past two years, I’ve seen the rise of Agile Development within web-based software companies. In the old days, companies would often write long fairly rigid product requirement documents and then work for four, six, twelve, or even eighteen months until all the features and improvements were completed and tested (hopefully) and then deploy a large version-incrementing product update. One of the most common forms of this sequential type of development was called the ‘waterfall model’ which was created in the 1970s and involved the phases of determining requirements, designing, coding, quality assurance, and maintenance. The next phase could not begin until the previous phase completed.

At iContact, we used a similar longer model of software development until early 2006. Then in March 2006 we switched over to a new model called Agile Sofware Development and began using a form of agile development called scrum methodology, which involves short sprints (4-6 weeks), daily huddle meetings, sprint reviews, and sprint planning meetings. This adherence has greatly improved our ability to develop quality product rapidly. While I’m more a marketer than a technologist, I’ve been fascinated to see the rise of Agile Development.

In 2001, a group of 17 influential thinkers got together in Utah to create the Agile Manifesto, which spelled out the key principles of Agile Development. The wrote that they valued:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

The key principles core to their Manifesto were written as:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The efficiency of software development is certainly key for any web company. The Agile methodology is a fascinating movement and I look forward to watching it continue to evolve. You can learn more about Agile Development at:

http://www.unboxedconsulting.com/about_us.php
http://www.envisagenow.com/meth_ov.asp
http://magpiebrain.com/blog/2005/02/14/the-agile-release-process/
http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/agileLifecycle.html
http://www.rallydev.com/implementing_agile_process.jsp

blackjack vs treo… blackjack wins

i’m listening to xm radio on my samsung blackjack (while blogging from it), the smartphone the cingular rep recommended to me this afternoon when I went into their store with the intention of getting a treo 680 to replace my broken 650… ive had the blackjack for 12 hours now and must say i’m impressed… the streaming xm radio, that’s now livening up my living room at 6:24 in the morning, works because of the superfast 3G internet access, that makes downloading email and web surfing (and moblogging!) much faster… other differences with the treo include the 1.3 megapixel camera and the windows mobile os (the treo 650 and 680 have the palm os). the windows mobile os seems to just be better designed than the palm os. the sales rep shared with me that the bugginess of the windows os on treos is what is causing the delay of the treo 750 launch, but it seems to work fine on the blackjack.

The only complaints I have with the blackjack are that it doesnt have a copy and paste function and it doesn’t automatically capitalize the first letter of each sentence like the treo or add apostrophes where needed, but oh well at least the keypad works… and did I mention the xm radio? 3G has it’s killer app.

blogging from treo

I’ve finally got web access on my treo going, so i’ll probably be blogging more often. treo 650 keypads break way too easily by the way. i’ve already had to replace the phone once. i’m making this post with a stylus on the on screen keyboard. i’ll have to pick up the 680 soon. 20 days past warranty expiration.