BendTech

Possibly the most important trend in technology and the web is the emergence of tools that let us introspect about who we are as a people and the impact we’re having on the world around us.  For example, the IHME has a very cool tool for visualizing Life Expectancy in the U.S. by County from 1989-2009.    Locally we see …

1989

Deschutes – Men: 73.2, Women: 78.8
Crook - Men: 72.1, Women: 79

1999

Deschutes – Men: 76, Women: 80.6
Crook - Men: 73.9, Women: 79.7

2009

Deschutes – Men: 78.7, Women: 81.7
Crook - Men: 76.1, Women: 80.9

One can’t help but speculate about the nature of the changes shown here.  For example:

• Urban centers have the longest life expectancy
• The Bible Belt has the shortest life expectancy.  (Cause or effect, that? )
• Life expectancy is much more varied across Oregon than it used to be 20 years ago.
• How much of the increase here in Deschutes is a result of a wealthier population (i.e. with access to better health care) immigrating here?

Visualizations like this – be they for life expectancy, meat consumption, national budgets, investment strategies, or police tactics – are “tale of the tape” for our society.  We live in a unique time where we have unprecedented access to the tools necessary to analyze the world around us and act accordingly.

I.e. It’s an election year.  Do your research.

VentureBox, our local business accelerator program, is throwing a “Wild Pitch” session next week.  So if you’re starting a business, or just have a hair-brained idea for one, this is a great opportunity to get a bit of outside perspective.  The full flyer can be found here (pdf), but here are the juicy bits:

What:  Founders; 10 minute “Wild Pitch” Presentations
When:  Friday April 20, 2012 ‐ 12 Noon till 5:00 PM
Where: Bend’s Old Cigar Building
Why:  Get feedback on your idea and presentation.
How: Fill out the (brief) Wild Pitch Profile

Google apparently slipped their April 1 joke out early with an 8-bit version of Google Maps. Be sure to check out Bend before the feature disappears!

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Matt Kern recently tweeted:

Realizing that what startups need is *not* more accelerators. What they need is bigger ideas.

… with some followup on Facebook:

I mean too many startups are aiming for quick exits and minimal innovation. Paul Graham wrote a great essay this week about big ideas that’s worth a read. For god’s sake, now Microsoft has it’s own “accelerator” even.

Separating this into it’s constituant parts:

1. The market for accelerators has peaked; there’s little incremental value (to startups) to be had in starting new accelerators.
2. Startups should pursue bolder ideas with higher risk-reward profiles.

What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them move.

I think the real question here is whether or not communities outside places like the Bay Area, New York, and Seattle can incubate (and keep!) enough viable startups to sustain an accelerator program.  Or, conversely, if an accelerator program can be run efficiently enough that it can work with the startups available within it’s local community.  I don’t have an answer to those questions, which is why I’m excited to see how things turn out with VentureBox.

Regarding #2, there are two facets to this.  First is the question, “Does it make sense for startups to pursue big ideas?”  In looking at Graham’s Big Idea list, the common theme is a dependency on radical social and technical innovation.   That’s an essential element of a big idea, of course, but such changes are difficult or impossible to control.  My favorite example of this these days is the Lytro camera – a new kind of camera that let’s you decide what to focus on after you’ve taken the shot.  It’s got a killer coolness factor but is Lytro a good investment? I’m very skeptical.  They need to somehow garner the support of consumers and the entire photo industry (you know, all the sites and services that let you do stuff with your photos once you’ve downloaded them).  Developing that support is by far their biggest challenge, and they need to do it in a timescale consistent with their investors’ expectations.  Wanna know how that sort of thing has turned out in the past?  Check out TiVo – a crazy innovative product at the time but not the best investment because of first-mover disadvantages.

Second, riffing on the above… does it make sense for accelerators to drive startups to pursue Big Ideas?  I would argue this only makes sense for the most elite of programs, who already have broad portfolios that can mitigate the risk.  This is what we’re seeing with Paul Graham and Y-Combinator.  They’ve reached a point where Paul has the luxury of going about how nobody is doing anything really “Big”, and even playing matchmaker  between teams and ideas.  But that strikes me as a very special case.  For most accelerators, I think they need to stay focused on startup-plays that have a timeframe consistent with they’re investor expectations.

Does this drive accelerators to prefer startups with smaller, less interesting ideas?  Yeah, probably.  But I don’t have an issue there.  I don’t think the problem is a lack of big-idea startups, it’s that there’s so many more small-to-middlin’ idea startups these days.  But there’s nothing wrong with that.  I suspect the real problem is that Y-Combinator has gotten to the point where they’ve realized they can’t scale the number of companies they invest in, they can only scale by investing in larger magnitude companies.

From Thomas L. Friedman’s recent, So Much Fun. So Irrelevant.:

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future.

There’s weeks worth of conversation about Central Oregon’s tech ecosystem wrapped up in that one quote!  What’s crazy is I honestly don’t know how we stack up.  We have a thriving community college, but only a nascent 4-year university program.  We have an educated populace, but most of them are too intent on their Real Job to have much of a presence.  We have a dynamic business community, depending on how you define “dynamic”.  We have one or more first-rate ISPs, but are they in the “fastest broadband on earth” category?  And then there’s the potential c-c-combo breaker of Facebook (+ other???) datacenters popping up in our backyard.

So much progress, so much yet to come.

Chile has been making headlines recently with Start Up Chile, a government backed initiative to attract foreign startups and investors. .   Recently Arnon Kohavi of Yarden VC spent 6 months in Chile in an attempt to build out a $40M fund.

As always, I see a lot of parallels between this sort of thing and our humble efforts at bootstrapping the Central Oregon startup scene.   Which is why I find Mr. Kohavi’s interview with The Next Web interesting.  He talks about what he learned and why he eventually decided to pull out. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy hell, if this doesn’t qualify as local tech blog news, I don’t know what does!

Local hacker, Timmy Crawford has put up ConePatrol.com, a site that lets you sign up for SMS notifications when Bachelor gets new powder.  So sweet!

I just signed up for alerts when it snows 4″ or more. (And you know what they say about a guy and his powder notifications … )

Just found (and instantly fell in love with) walkscore.com. Rates any location based on proximity of the nearest park, library, coffee shop, bank, etc. For example, downtown Bend is a “Walker’s Paradise”  at 92/100 points, while (interestingly) Northwest Crossing is “Car Dependent” with only 49/100.

Any of you NWX residents care to agree with or dispute that?

The “commute” tab provides good info about walk/bike/drive times, including elevation profiles, which I always love to see.

An light-yet-thought-provoking read for entrepreneurs, The 10 Mistakes I’ve Made So You Don’t Have To.

Statesman.com reports that 30 CEOs from Austin are gathering in the Bay Area to recruit technical talent.  Interesting proposition.

This is hardly a new idea – recruiting Bay Area workers to come  (in our case) to Bend.  But I’ve always been somewhat skeptical.  It’s a tough sell, although it does happen.  As I recently told Lloyd Fasset, CEO of Azteria, you have to find people who place an exceptionally high value on the one thing Bend offers: quality of living.  And even then, you have to sell them on Bend, from among all the other communities that offer similar value propositions; Aspen, Boulder, Austin, Portland, Nashville… it’s not a short list.

‘Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s an uphill battle for sure.  Hat’s off to the Austin crew for doing something innovative.  If nothing else, they’ll get some good press and raise awareness, so it’s worth a shot.