“You Want Answers?” “I Want the Truth”

By Brad on February 18, 2011 in Freemium Business Model. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .
A Few Good Men

A Few Good Men.Credit: Sony Pictures

The guys over at knowabout.it recently did a blog post where they gave Straight Answers to Tough Questions. Apparently they received these questions from a friend/Angel Investor who they don’t name. (To bad, I’d love to link back the original source of the questions.)

We’ve given most of these answers before in previous blog posts.

So, just in case any Angel Investors are out there looking at Bscopes and we don’t know it… here are our answers to these six questions:

 

1. What problem are you solving?

It’s the frustration from the eventual overload from too many sources of information to keep up with.

Bscopes addresses this problem of overload by picturing the massive information so that you can tell what things are hot at a glance for both general topics and your specific set of info.

2. Who is your target audience to use the product?

The most overloaded folks struggling to keep up with the fire hose of information coming at them all the time. Like who? Well, some folks recognized this early and have been complaining about this for quite a while. The rest of us will continue to feel this more and more in the future. Eventually, everyone will be on this list along with these folks at the front of the curve:

3. How are you going to get it in their hands?

It’s ironic, the very people who most could use Bscopes to solve their information overload are too busy to being overloaded to find out about Bscopes. For a while now, we’ve written blog posts… We’ve coded features… We’ve commented on other people’s blogs… We’ve tweeted… So we are going to continue to try and tell anyone and everyone we can that there are tools out there to help with the overload. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a Purple Cow (a la Seth Godin).

4. Who is going to pay you money and what value are they going to garner (even if it’s a guess today)?

Who? The most overloaded of all those trying to keep up with the many blogs and changing content on the internet. The ones who don’t just want, but need, to keep up with more and more information every day. That’s why we are going with a Freemium model for now, right Fred?

What will they get?

  1. Relief from the pain of overload, and
  2. The right information, not just the ability to consume more information, and
  3. Guilt free use of the mark all read button.

And are those are things worth paying for? @lysglimt certainly thinks so.

5. Why are you better than the competition?

Bscopes is unique. It’s a picture, not just more text. A visualization, not simply filtering. We cut through the clutter by visualizing the blogosphere.

6. How can I help?

Well, if you are the mysterious Angel Investor, then you are welcome to help us quit our day jobs so we can focus on Bscopes full-time.

Everyone should come and participate in the Bscopes community

The biggest thing you can do right now is to tell someone that there is hope and point them to tools like Bscopes. Spread the word so we can continue to innovate.

And if you have something you’d like to tell us, the comment button is right below.


Yet Another Internet Meme on the “Death” of RSS

By Brad on January 6, 2011 in Information Overload. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

It’s déjà vu all over again.

— Yogi Berra

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

— Mark Twain

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

— Chevy Chase

I’ve lived long enough and been on the Internet (Usenet? Arpanet?) long enough to know that everything repeats itself. But I wasn’t expecting the “RSS is dead” meme to come back again so soon. We probably should just brace ourselves for an every year or so rerun.

Apparently this round started with a web designer named Kroc Camen. He was really ranting about the lack of an RSS button Google chrome and the position of the button in Firefox. But no matter. If you want to see the evolution of this round, check out the summary by Matt Ingram.

The 21st century internet has Magpie Syndrome and loves the shiny and new. RSS is over a decade old. It isn’t being talked about in the media. It’s not a buzzword typically used in Twitter trending topics. No one mentions it much on Facebook. Although… it is being discussed over at the latest web darling: Quora.

RSS, is plumbing. It is a fundamental part of the web’s infrastructure. And this is a good thing. It takes an authority like Seth Godin to stop folks in their tracks and explain how to use RSS.

Then, another blogger in my RSS reader, Rex Hammock, puts up a post about how RSS is a long way from dead. In it he makes several great points about how RSS is really the technology behind all those links being shared on Twitter and other social networking/media sites. That it is RSS that enables the prolific bloggers to even get to the point of Information Overload — just like we wrote about.

Part of all of this is the repeated mantra of “RSS is hard to use”. And part of this is “RSS is invisible”. In both cases, along with the issue of information overload, we think that the core solution involves visualization.

We think that Heatmaps are a start to getting a handle on the dual problems of Blog Overload and of finding RSS hard to use. We really want to know what you think. And what your overloaded friends think. So… check out the new heatmaps. Then let us know what you think. Either here in the blog comments, or directly on the Bscopes website. Then tell a friend or two and have them let us know what they think as well.

P.S. If you do check out Heatmaps and decide that you’d really like to be able to see a customized heatmap of your own set of RSS feeds, then make sure you’ve clicked on the big, orange, RSS button in the sidebar. Because when that feature gets turned on, we will announce it right here on the blog.

Bscopes Heatmaps are now Live!

By Brad on November 12, 2010 in Bscopes Features and Concepts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Butterflyphoto © 2010 Morgan | more info (via: Wylio)

We are happy to announce that Bscopes has a brand new feature to help with your Information Overload: Heatmaps of RSS Feeds.
The initial release is a FREE service. We’ve generated Heatmaps on more than 800 topics. Each Heatmap helps you find the hottest blogs within a topic and shows them to you from cold (blue) to hot (red) as ranked by the new Bscopes Secret Sauce.
These Heatmaps will update daily. So, as new posts are written, the blog’s temperature will change. Some will get hotter — read those first. Others will get colder — you can safely ignore those.
Next, we will be giving you the ability to create Heatmaps from your own topics and feeds (your OPML). These will come in free and paid versions.
Try out the new Bscopes Heatmaps by clicking here.
Look for more info and details here on the Bscopes Blog. Leave a comment below.
Let us know what you think of Heatmaps.

We Are Emerging From Our Chrysalis

By Brad on October 1, 2010 in Bscopes Features and Concepts. 1 Comment Tags: .

Monarch Butterfly Birth

We know you’ve been wondering……..what’s going on at Bscopes? Anytime we aren’t regularly blogging, it is because we are writing tons of code. As we’ve mentioned in the past, we can’t seem to walk and chew gum at the same time, yet.

We’ve been busy refining a new Scope that will be intuitive and quick to consume. We call it a Heatmap.

It’s almost ready to share with all of our favorite Information Overloaded friends.

In the meantime, here’s what our new concept looks like:

Sample Heatmap

More soon.

If you’d like to be the first to know when Heatmaps go live, you an signup here with your email address and we’ll let you know. You can also watch this blog.

We are interested in any feedback, so leave a comment below.

Brad and Steve

Chris Anderson’s Book “Free” Is Worth The Price

By Brad on July 14, 2009 in Freemium Business Model. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Disclaimer: I was sent a review copy by Chris Anderson for free on the promise to write about the book, because the Bscopes business model is one of those described in this book. Neither Chris nor his publisher dictated the content of our review.

Further dislaimer: As a living example, all of the links to the book on Amazon are affiliate links. So, if after reading my review you want to buy a copy of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, then please use one of our links to buy the book on Amazon. That way Bscopes will earn a little revenue while providing you this blog post for free.

In this book, Chris Anderson traces through the many meanings of the term “free” especially as they apply to the Internet. As a business book, it’s a nice read. I was able to work my way though it over the course of a few days in my (copious) spare time. It clocks in at around 275 pages and alternates between fascinating reading where you want to pour over every word, and repeated information where I felt like a could skip ahead to the next section.

One of the things this book does best is to serve almost as a history text book. It documents, describes and catalogs the different kids of free. A detailed analysis is provided on the 20th century model(s) of free that apply mostly to the world of atoms versus the 21st century model(s) of free that apply to the world of bits. It serves as a great compilation of the early days of free on the Internet right up through Web 2.0. This is invaluable in proving wrong those who say “it can’t be done” by showing how it already has been done. There is a wonderfully detailed section that reproduces many of the most common arguments against “free” that have already appeared and Chris refutes them point-by-point.

The book is a business and case studies text that documents how people have made money using “free”. In addition to a ton or references and citations, Chris’ book does a nice job of tying together information provided in other books that are related including Dan Ariely‘s Predictably Irrational and Seth Godin‘s Unleashing the Ideavirus. For example, he uses Dan’s description of the difference between 1¢ and 0¢ to help explain the uniqueness of free. He also provides detailed information on multiple “case studies” that break down the specific pattern used by that example product or service to earn money using “free”.

Where the book seems to fall down is when it acts as an economics textbook. The analysis and estimates of various market sizes of free are so full of qualifiers, assumptions and weasel words as to render them nearly useless. This effort weakens an otherwise useful section on concepts such as reputation and attention. The shallow and incomplete nature of this part of the book takes away from the thorough style in the other sections. I think it might have worked better to simply describe the incomplete nature of what is known for certain in these areas and then move on.

Much of the book’s content has already been made available online for free. If you’ve been reading Chris’ blog over the past few years, then you’ll have seen the information as it evolved. Even now you can go back and scour those posts and put together the information yourself from the original pieces. Or, if you go to Chris’ blog you’ll find some recent posts describing all the ways you can get an electronic version of the book for free.

In true meta fashion, there are then three markets that this book appeals to and several ways that Chris attempts to monetize each one:

  1. His faithful blog readers: They’ve already consumed much of the content:
    • So they have no need to buy the book unless they are willing to trade $ for their time and convenience.
    • Or unless they view the book at a souvenir that they can keep and display
    • Or as something they wish to lend or give to others
  2. New people who heard about the concept and who have the time to obtain the info:
    • These people are also willing to trade time to save $. For example, college students.
    • They can find an audio version as well as a written version for free on the Internet. So not much revenue, but he’ll gain exposure.
  3. New people who heard about the concept but lack the time to deal with obtaining all the info:
    • These folks are willing to pay for the convenience of having it all in one place.
    • They may also be willing to pay for having it in hard copy book form for reading away from the computer screen.

As a content creator, this experiment neatly summarizes the two trade-offs of this free pricing model: A bigger pie (audience), where 2/3 of the audience may obtain the content for free versus and contribute no revenue versus a smaller pie where all of the audience brings in revenue. The first case’s bigger pie is due to the word of mouth, attention and reputation gains that giving away the content for free brings. Plus, secondary revenue streams are increased as well. I’m sure that Chris will make a tidy sum through speaking engagements based on the book’s (and his) reputation.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price shows itself as an example of Chris’ adage that to compete against something that is free, you must offer something of greater value. In my opinion, this book does that. I’ll be spending much time over the next few months looking to this book for new ideas on how Bscopes can continue to make money (we still to pay our mortgages and deal with college costs) while we provide a useful product where much if it is free.

Bscopes Welcomes Fever To The Community

By Brad on June 25, 2009 in Freemium Business Model. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Welcome Late last week a new tool was unveiled in the war against Blog RSS Overload: Fever. Here’s how they describe this new tool on their website:

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether.

Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

Users of Bscopes and readers of the Bscopes Blog may find this familiar. This is great. For too long now, we’ve felt like the only ones trying to do something radical with the existing feed reader approach. Shaun Inman seems to be a kindred spirit. Someone who is also frustrated trying to keep up with the information overload. It is good to see that he’s trying to do something about it too.

Dan Romero at TechCrunch has a nice write up about all this too which expresses this hope:

Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user.

I’ve heard the first two terms, but “unbold elbow” is a new one. I like that term, and if you don’t mind too much Dan, I might just use it from time to time. I hope that having more people focused on solving the problem of Blog Overload for those RSS Power Users will help to let those overwhelmed users know that help is available to them.

Good luck to Shaun and to all of us out there trying to keep from drowning in this sea of RSS feeds.

Don’t Kill Your RSS Reader! Add To It

By Brad on May 5, 2009 in Information Overload. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Crime Scene TapeFarhad Manjoo wrote an interesting blog post on Slate Magazine on Friday (thanks to @johnmjones on Twitter for pointing it out). In it he describes a classic case of Blog Overload. He describes his joy at discovering RSS and Feed Readers. And his frustration at the eventual overload from too many feeds that he can’t keep up with. Then he describes his radical solution: quit his RSS reader and go back to manually checking for updates on a regular schedule in his web browser.

Nooooooooooooo!

So close yet so far. Farhad is in pain. That I understand. But to try and solve the pain all he could do as to cut off the use of his only tool. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Then the conversation erupted. Other folks started to chime in.

On Slate’s forums, the usual suggestions were made for things like filters by people like Horatio Nelson. Over at Mashable, Ben Parr joined in to ask the musical question “Do You Use an RSS Reader?” And his informal poll currently has 72% of his readers who use one “all the time”. Just after that, Steven Cahill wrote a blog post proclaiming that “RSS is Not Dead“. His conclusion, “Give me RSS any day.”

Once again I see the same need to combat Blog RSS Overload. And, I see the same frustrations and proposals. When people ask why we created Bscopes, this is exactly what drove us.

But, I don’t want to just go on and on summarizing this problem. I want to try and point out to Farhad, Ben, Steven and all the others suffering out there that we think we can help. Not to replace your trusty RSS feed reader, but to supplement it.

In Farhad’s original Slate Magazine post, there was this plea:

Moreover, I hated the software’s bland interface; when you read blogs through RSS, you’re only getting text, not design, so every blog looks like every other blog. But I didn’t want Gawker to look like the New Republic; I needed a visual difference, in the same way that I want the National Enquirer to look distinct from the New York Times.

That is the essence of the Bscopes approach. A picture, not more text. A visualization, not simply filtering.

For example, here is a Bspace (a picture of multiple blogs) that I added based on Farhad’s initial post.

Bspace of multiple blogs related to Farhad Manjoo

Rather than get overloaded and then just hit “mark all read”, try picturing a slice of the blogosphere using Bscopes. Check out one blog. Or a group of blogs related by a tag. Or even a Bspace of all the blogs you read.

Use Bscopes to give you an overview of what is happening. You can check out the relationships at any given minute betweeen blogs. Or, over time, look for changing weather patterns in the blogosphere (a la Christophe).

But the key thing is to not give up. Don’t kill your feed reader. After all, a mime (type=”application/rss+xml”) is a terrible thing to waste.

Continuous Feature Release — Business at the Speed of the Internet

By steveg on May 4, 2009 in Bscopes Features and Concepts. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Escher's Drawing HandsWe have been thinking about how we’ve structured things here at Bscopes. Several recent exchanges with bloggers like April Dunford and Seth Godin have been helping us to articulate our philosophy of product creation.

Our Fundamental Business Rule

For a Web 2.0 startup, IONSHO, the fundamental thing is to be prepared to move at the speed of the Internet. No matter what your size. It’s not like dog years, it’s worse. This is a direct contrast to how we spent 25 or 30 years in the product and services industry. 18 – 24 month product cycles were common there. On the web, people talk about 60 or 90 day cycles. We disagree. We say that a continuous approach to product development is required. Product creation both drives and is driven by the business needs and goals. Our new name proposal: The Escher Business Product Model. Let’s be clear here, if you are Microsoft or Oracle, then you do what you want. When you are two guys in your garage you are much more constrained. This model is based on that situation and those constraints. If you already have VC funding, you can stop reading now.

Constraints Of Small Companies (Two Guys in a Garage)

Many people view the lack of resources as a hindrance, we see it as an advantage.  Things that used to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time and expertise are now able to be obtained for a few dollars a month with just a few clicks of the mouse. The services available on the Internet provide enough leverage to enable an entire company be built and launched in a few days. And then continuously evolved over nights and weekends. There were two books that helped to reinforce this Escher Business Product Model.  Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. Both provided vision and helped us formulate our ideas. We had a product idea and Purple Cow helped us understand that such a unique idea could be successful and was an advantage. Guy’s book reinforced our notion that two guys could bootstrap the entire operation. This approach came with constraints:

  • Reach Exceeds Grasp: We couldn’t build even a fraction of our vision for Bscopes up front
  • No Users: We couldn’t spend months building hype with some secret “invitation only” private beta test period
  • Can’t Wait: We couldn’t wait two years to release version 2.0 — improvements would have to come quickly and continuously
  • No Revenue: We couldn’t wait until the site was “done” to provide enough value to attract a user base

This brought us to the understanding that we had to have a continuous development and release model to turn our constraints into advantages.

Build a little. Build a lot.

Bscopes couldn’t afford to be wrong in a big way. But we could afford to be wrong in a small way. And wrong a lot of times. As long as we learned and grew. We have a vision of what we want. One key to turning these business constraints into product advantages is to ensure that we bound all feature investments.  This means breaking our big ideas into small pieces. Incrementally building and releasing them. And then, getting feedback on them ASAP. This is not possible when it takes 18-24 months to go from v1.0 to v2.0.

You Can’t Always Drink Your Own Bathwater

From the Tuned In guys and the product management blog of Steve Johnson, we developed a better understanding of where we were right and where we were wrong. And, more importantly, that sometimes it is not relevant if we are right or wrong: “Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant”. This became our mantra and we use it to beat each other up on a regular basis. Part of the juggling act in Escher Business Product Model is to provide the user with enough capabilities so that they can use the product and give feedback, while not over-investing time in the development of any feature. The feature might be rejected, so keep sunk costs small. The key to doing this is to break everything that needs user feedback into mini-functionality releases. It’s like Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It’s a continuous effort to maintain the discipline of breaking multi-month cycles into week or two features. And to make sure that week or two long features are supplemented by a number of even smaller tweaks, improvements, and bug fixes. An hour here improving the clarity of one window based on feedback from Twitter. An hour there clarifying the structure of the Bscope graph based on email responses. Continuous small investments, continuously released, yield big results for the users.

Rules For Small Startups

  1. Develop and release continuously: Don’t go a week without some changes.
  2. Keep time investments small: Be prepared to abandon ideas that don’t work.
  3. Get some feedback: Release to the community and listen to what they think.

This is our approach to Web 2.0 development. We are very interested in your approaches or thoughts on our Escher based approach. Please leave some comments below.

Yet Another Successful Presentation [YASP]

By Brad on May 1, 2009 in Freemium Business Model. 3 Comments Tags: .

Steve and Brad ready to presentA big thank you goes to Lewis Berman and the folks out at Loyolla College computer science department for having us speak at their first Advanced Technology Forum on Tuesday night.

There was a great crowd who was full of interesting questions and suggestions. They gave us some much needed praise and feedback on Bscopes. It is fun to get to have a real-time dialogue to exchange concepts and ideas.

Next time, though, Steve is considering wearning his high heels too!

Everyone in the Baltimore-DC area should keep an eye out for their next Forum. Their newletter is at www.loyola.edu/loyolacomputes. They are building a great new Software Engineering Graduate program. We are looking forward to participating again in the future.

Also, a big shout out to “He who must not be named” (who last appeared on Bscopes a year ago in this post) for making a special guest appearance in the audience. We’ll be watching for him this summer at a nearby theater.

Presentation on Bscopes and Visualizing The Blogosphere

By Brad on April 28, 2009 in Freemium Business Model. 0 Comments Tags: .

See… this is what happens when you get too busy. You forget to mention some of the important things. Even when you’ve known about them for a while.

Steve and I have been invited to do a presentation tomorrow at the Loyola College Advanced Technology Forum. Our topic is: “Bscopes: Visually Organize The Blogosphere”. (I’m sure that came as a surprise)

We’ll be discussing what Bscopes is all about and conducting a live demonstration of the Bscopes site.

Here’s the basic info:

Tuesday, April 28, 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Loyola College – Columbia Graduate Center
8890 McGaw Road, Columbia, MD 21045

Admission is free and they are even promising refreshements.

So anyone in the DC or Baltimore area is welcome to stop by tomorrow at 7:30 pm and get a peek at the two men behind the curtain.