CNN ran a news segment on a new protype car, the XH150, that was unveiled yesterday at the Detroit auto show.  AFS Trinity Power Corp built its car using existing battery and electronics technology to show what the Big 3 could conceivably deliver to the market: a car that drives 150 miles per gallon. If you drive like many folks, under 40 miles a day, you won’t have to pay for gas. The only ergonomic hitch is that you do have to plug the car up everynight to charge it up. After you’ve driven more than 40 miles, the car converts to gas; it can drive highways too. Estimated cost is still TBD, but they only expect to charge a premium of about $8,700 over the price of hybrid cars that start at $25K. Very promising. If none of the Big 3 move to license Trinity’s patented technology, they will move to raise VC funding. If that’s the case, I hope they relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area so the company can build upon the new auto manufacturing hub taking root in Silicon Valley (ie: Tesla Corp.).  Nevertheless, this car could be available in as little as 3 years and if gas today in CA cost $3.50/gallon, I believe this type of benefit would be widely embraced like the Prius.

Never mind that it’s supposed to be Year of the Rat. Basex recently picked Information Overload as its 2008 Problem of the Year.

Email, phone calls, IMs, twits and tweets, LinkedIn Questions, Facebook pokes… Interruptions such as these contribute to the Information Overload problem that research firm Basex pinned at $650B in loss productivity. We take pleasure in Basex’s prediction but not because we’re gluttons for punishment. Rather their call to attention is an indication of how serious the problem is and perhaps a prelude of better things to come.

As we get ready to ring in 2008, I challenge myself and all of you out there to make email and IM etiquette part of your New Year’s resolutions. Check out a few tips that Basex suggest to help manage information overload. These include:

-“I will not e-mail someone and then two seconds later follow up with an IM or phone call.”
- “I will read my own e-mails before sending them to make sure they are comprehensible to others.”
- “I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, especially one word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!”, and will use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.”

To all of our friends and family of Ignite, we’d like to take the opportunity to wish you a happy, healthy, and very Happy New Year!

Cheers,

-The sirens of Ignite 

The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) hosted a forum yesterday evening titled, “Web 3.0 and New Opportunities on the Semantic Web.” First of all, the moderator, Paul Saffo, was outstanding and entertaining. He kept things lively and humorous.  The panelists (Paul Kedrosky, Alex Iskold, Nova Spivak, and Robert Cook) were also fantastic and represented some excellent startup companies. My takeaway from the event is that a good foundation has been laid for moving the semantic web forward to the next stage. Paul pointed out Flickr as the best early consumer app example of how people are using collective intelligence to make searching and finding the right content better. Alex’s company, Adaptive Blue, and Robert’s company, MetaWeb’s freebase, are prime examples of companies making strides with the semantic web. Alex has a written several great posts on the topic. Here is one in particular that I think is very insightful as to the direction that websites are headed with respect to ‘web 3.0.’ (View Post)

Nova’s startup company, Radar Networks, is certainly one to watch but evidently some of what they are doing is still under wraps. Nova did an exceptional speed-prezo in about 2 minutes and shared this most excellent slide with the audience that lays out where we currently are on the path to arriving at the semantic web. Here is a link to some of his posts on the subject as well. (View Post)

The semantic web is indeed on the cutting edge of transforming search, advertising, content distribution and commerce. Some of the companies that panelists mentioned that are doing interesting things and helping to push the semantic web forward included Powerset, Hakia, and MapLight. What is exciting about the semantic web is how down the road (okay we’re talking 2030 or so) literally all of the information and disparate databases on the web will interconnect and the computers will be far more intelligent in how thyey read, process and deliver information to people. At the end of the forum, Nova pointed out that no one in the audience or on the panel mentioned where there is likely an untapped opportunity with the semantic web, and it is the one that really drove people to the web — the sex industry. I certainly hope and expect that there will be far greater and more useful arenas that will propel the semantic web faster to it materializing.

New York Times Saul Hansel posted a provocative piece around the concept of Inbox 2.0, which has since set off quite a buzz happening in the blogosphere. We’re delighted to see a renewed interest in email. Most recently, the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney & Vauhini Vara wrote an excellent article titled, “Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?”

Several startups are also emerging that are each taking different approaches aimed at bringing relief to the ongoing email overload madness. The evolving landscape includes a wide array of options, ranging from spot solutions to content-based email solutions to comprehensive email management solutions.

Our client, Deva Hazarika, the founder & CEO of ClearContext, has a great blog focused around the subject of email. He posted an insightful piece titled, “Inbox 2.0: Email as a Social Networking Platform,” that highlights some interesting bloggers’ viewpoints that were part of today’s firestorm in the blogosphere. Summarizing some of Deva’s key points:
1) The real value of using the information within email lies not in the prioritization itself, but in doing interesting things with that information. Combining all of that data within the context of email, and paying attention to what people are actually DOING in the client, provides the ability do things with email that are a lot more intelligent than simply displaying a message or finding out who your most important contacts are.
2) Intelligently using that information to make the entire email experience more powerful and productive for people. And done right, it will also make people’s experience with any email/contact based site or application more powerful, because it will be driven from a set of rich profiles full of deep context, not just a list of names.

ClearContext aims to bring help to the endless deluge of inbound messages and interruptions consuming in-boxes is taxing employees’ resources and reducing time they can devote to priority work. Studies show that email overload causes people to work anywhere from one to two extra hours a day. Email overload coupled with multi-tasking, constant interruptions and ad-hoc projects are drastically impacting workers’ effectiveness and productivity loss to the tune of up to $1 billion (yes, with a ‘b”) dollars annually for knowledge-focused companies having 50,000 or more workers. ClearContext’s IMS 4.0 helps users save an hour or more a day (260 hours annually) with smart, automated features to gain a much better handle on their daily email management. For fans of GTD, IMS does everything that the “Getting Things Done (GTD) Outlook Add-on” can do and then a lot more.

Valleywag, one of our favorite reads here at Ignite, had an interesting post today titled, “Wired editor in Snit over unsolicited emails.” The post points to Chris Anderson’s “outing” of 329 PR people who took aim at the Editor-in-chief, pitching him on their clients’ products or services. Boy, did his own blog post set off a firestorm of great debate, as evidenced by the comments too numerous for yours truly to finish reading. (I feel bad for any non-PR person who got accidentally ensnared in this public flogging.)

Whenever I see the title ‘editor-in-chief’ or ‘publisher’ on ANY of our lists that we are building, I immediately cross them out and remind our staff that those titles should not be there. (period)!! (Actually, there are a few exceptions here but these are typically with smaller publications or newsletters that are usually focused in vertical market sectors.  In these cases, the editor-in-chief is indeed the go-to-guy or go-to-gal. ;-)  I, for one, would welcome PR folk applying the basics here. Among the two camps, I fall on the side of supporting Chris for getting fed up with the hundreds of PR people and PR firms that do not bother to do the basic quality control when it comes to promoting or trying to interest reporters. Herein, lays the key — the operative word being “reporter” not editor-in-chief. There is a big difference and if a PR person doesn’t know this, doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care, well then I guess they continue to face public lambasting.

Is it, as Chris is suggesting, laziness by lots of PR folks? I know that, like reporters, PR people are also typically under the gun but, quite frankly, it takes a minimal amount of time to prune out any odd titles (copy editor, publisher, and editor-in-chief). I can understand why, in this age of email overload, there is an even bigger backlash at this type of spamming practice. I guess this quality (and perhaps basic training) or lack thereof is essentially up to each agency to either put in place or disregard.

The NYT’s weighs in on this today as well.

The WSJ posted a great piece today about Silicon Valley’s unique barometers for predicting a bubble burst. The article accurately points to key indicators that were abundant during the dot.com era. Silly names, ridiculous company services (like this one highlighted in TechCrunch’s complimentary post titled “Bubble Indicators.”), recycled dot.com ideas that flopped, and over funding in saturated sectors.

There are still several more indicators that have yet to surface, including:

• Absence of office space
• Extremely tight housing/rental market in and around Silicon Valley/SF
• Job-seeking nomads descending in droves into Silicon Valley/SF
• Entry-level candidates demanding company perks typically reserved for senior staff or management
• Excessive burn rates by startups on marketing

Thankfully, the dot.com/stock market meltdown resulted in tighter controls and public skepticism that largely prevents companies that have zero revenues from going IPO en mass.

A perusal of TechCrunch’s company archives show that since around mid-2005 about 1,800 startups have been profiled. It would be interesting to find out the percentage of these that are actually making money. Further, many more startups exist that weren’t able to make the cut into TechCrunch, so we clearly have a lot of fledgling companies looking to gain traction, user adoption, and revenues or that are hoping to be acquired by a deep pocketed, white knight.

Today my colleague and I were discussing the importance of clients being upfront with their PR team about issues or internal weaknesses that they’d prefer didn’t exist or that they presume aren’t relevant to PR. It is not wise for companies to undertake “partial disclosure” with their PR team. Inevitably the company’s “issue or deficiency” is bound to surface publicly, and it may not be a pretty scene when it does. Or it may simply and quietly drive away customers. We’ve seen this bad habit enough to recognize it is not an isolated situation by any means, and I’m sure happens with regularity at large companies just as it happens with the startups. Here are more reasons why full disclosure with your PR firm is the best approach:

• PR firms can be like your legal counselor. By undertaking full disclosure with your PR, they have all the pieces on the table, whether those are good, bad, or (yes) ugly, but they can help you put a more effective long term strategy together. This strategy will help the company navigate what should have been the avoidable!
• When your PR team knows straight up all of the company’s potholes and otherwise, they are in a much better position to counsel the client on the pros and cons. PR can give you the possible fallout: if you do x, then y might happen, etc. That way, the company can make better decisions on how to proceed — or not. So, for instance, don’t oversell your product/service prematurely. Why? Well, when reporters and people begin to try your product, guess what? They probably won’t come back—ever, or anytime soon. When a company publicly launches but the product wasn’t ready for prime-time, they cannot have a “do-over.”
• Rather than have your PR team unknowingly communicating hyperbole on a product, feature or benefit, if the PR team is truly “in the know,” they can adjust their emphasis on that benefit or feature that really doesn’t live up to the claim. Or, PR can tone down promoting a company’s position or approach vis-à-vis the competition, when in actuality; the company’s claim might be viewed as duplicitous by the press or blogger community.
• If a product or service is really buggy or essentially vaporware, companies need to realize that this type of smoke-and-mirrors strategy is not likely to succeed for a sustainable period, so they should resist prematurely marketing a product or service that isn’t ready for prime time. They’ll be spending their resources more effectively, and they will gain more credibility with the public for releasing quality products/services when they are ready to go to market.

While this all sounds reasonable, we often see an overconfidence on the part of entrepreneurs that they won’t get called out publicly for this nonchalant approach. Then when something does surface, they call in PR asking for help.

Yesterday, Brad Stone broke in the New York Times’ blog a rumor that the once high-flying Industry Standard, which crashed and burned during the dot.com days, will be resurrected soon. The timing is interesting. Ordinarily, I think that the Industry Standard would be facing an uphill battle. Here’s why I think they have a strong chance to succeed; they have the full backing of IDG, its track record in rarely stumbling, and its financial resources. The ownership of Industry Standard, circa 2000, was atypical—especially for IDG to be involved. Now it sounds like IDG will be fully in control of the success or failure again for this publication. Another reason why the outlook looks good for Industry Standard is because of the unfortunate death of Business 2.0. As a subscriber to Business 2.0, I believe that a void does exist. Business 2.0 took a unique perspective at high tech business and no other publication really took the same slant and approach that they did in finding and introducing readers to interesting companies, technologies and trends. Now, perhaps Industry Standard can take over the baton and fill the void. Lastly, I think it’s smart for IDG to test the waters slowly via an online site only. With once powerhouse tech pubs like InfoWorld going virtual, IDG knows firsthand the uphill battles they face in today’s publishing environment.