Asterisk, open source telephony software, will benefit from $13.8 million in venture capital funding for Digium, the company behind Asterisk. According to Om Malik, “the company will use these funds to expand its operations by selling a variety of Asterisk-based IP-PBX systems to small business and large corporations.” Asterisk has been growing in popularity recently as companies make the move away from older, expensive PBX systems to VoIP. I know of several companies who have already moved to Asterisk, and people seem to be happy with the Asterisk solution.

From the official press release:

“We believe Digium has the potential to become one of our most successful open source companies, as every company in the world relies on telephony and the use of PBXs in order to run their businesses,” said David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners and JBoss board member. “As companies continue to be attracted to the cost savings and powerful new capabilities of Voice over IP, the opportunity for Digium becomes massive. Digium is definitely in a position to become the next big open source company, behind Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL. Their current revenues, profitability, and growth rates are extraordinary.”
With the anticipated growth of IP-based communications and the continued acceptance of open source, Digium has a unique opportunity to become a dominant player in the telecommunications market. Additionally, because of the built-in flexibility of Asterisk, companies are able to build hybrid PBX solutions (a combination of legacy and VoIP equipment) in migrating to a VoIP system. (Digium)

I always like seeing venture capital money go to strong open source products, like Asterisk.

Guy Kawasaki posted a snippet from Seth Godin‘s new book, “Small is the New Big”:

For an idea to be spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one sends an idea unless:

1. They understand it.

2. They want it to spread.

3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind.

4. The effort to send the idea is less than the benefits.

No one “gets” an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation.

2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea.

3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time.

Notice that ideas never spread because they are important to the originator.

Notice, too, that a key element in the spreading of the idea is the capsule that contains it. If it’s easy to swallow, tempting, and complete, it’s far more likely to get a good start. (Signum sine tinnitu)

The idea that “ideas never spread because they are important to the originator” is the part that caught my attention. This seems to be a difficult concept for many companies trying to capitalize on the web 2.0 phenomenon. Companies see how influential viral marketing can be and frequently fail when they try to replicate it. The reality is that you never know if a new video will be the next Lazy Sunday or just another unwatched video taking up disk space. Too many attempts at viral marketing look forced and artificial, while the really interesting examples of viral marketing seem to be the ones that are accidental successes. It is important for companies to participate in web 2.0 whether it is through blogging, encouraging user collaboration, social networking sites, or other methods; however, it may be impossible to predict whether a concept will be spread virally across the Internet.

According to Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital (a FeedBurner investor and board member), FeedBurner is testing a new series of blog “networks” designed to contain collections of the top blogs within a specific category. Feld is the coordinator / gatekeeper for the Venture Capital Network, which is the only network that I have been able to locate so far (FeedBurner does not seem to have announced this new feature yet). Feld lists several benefits:

There are benefits to subscribers:

• It’s easy to find high quality relevant bloggers / feeds for a specific topic through the aggregation into a Network.

• There will be a “micro-portal” for each Network – you’ll be able to go to a landing page that lists all the members of the network, selectively subscribe to their feeds, or explore their blogs.

• You’ll be able to subscribe to the spliced Network feed (for example, here is the spliced feed for the Venture Capital Network).

There are also benefits to publishers:

• The “micro-portal” will be another place for subscribers to find your blog / feed.

• You will get new readers as a result of people that subscribe to the spliced feed (this will show up in your subscriber metrics.)

• Advertisers will be able buy ads in the Network with higher quality advertising that is relevant to the readers of feeds in the Network.

• You’ll have Network oriented publicity tools (think stuff like “Widget with the latest X headlines in the Network”, or the Banner that I have on the top left of my blog stating that I’m part of the network) which will help cross-promote feeds in the network.

• You might make some new friends via your fellow Network members. (Feld Thoughts)

The VC network looks pretty good (I have already subscribed to the feed), but Michael Arrington is a bit skeptical:

The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience. (TechCrunch)

I agree with Arrington, the FeedBurner Networks may not be successful depending on the quality control and politics involved in the selection of the feeds. With poor quality control these networks may be no better than the many other blog directories and aggregated feeds already available; however, at this point, I am still cautiously optimistic. If FeedBurner can find high quality coordinators who use an objective selection process combined with good judgment, these networks could be valuable. I anxiously await the next wave of networks and the official launch of this product to get a better feel for how useful these networks will be.

I recently talked about how several high profile bloggers including Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, and Mark Cuban were making job offers via their blogs. This week, Michael Arrington introduced the CrunchBoard job site to help match the right people with the right companies leveraging the strong community of web 2.0-savvy readers of the TechCrunch blog.

Om Malik has a nice summary of why niche job boards like CrunchBoard work better than traditional sites:

CrunchBoard, 37Signals and PaidContent – they are all bringing attention to the fact that narrow niche sites work, and the job boards don’t seem to have the necessary impact or perhaps get the right kind of users. These three sites have very strong communities, and as a result their job boards work and will continue to work. These three boards should enjoy success, because the number of technology job listings in on an upswing. Indeed.com reports that there are 121 job listings per 1000 people in San Jose, and 74 job listings per 1000 in San Francisco. (GigaOM)

Like many people, I have been on both sides of this coin: job seeker and hiring manager. When looking for a job, the big online sites like Monster.com have so many positions that it can be hard to sift through everything to get past the scams and undesirable jobs to find something interesting. As a hiring manager, these big job boards tend to generate hundreds of worthless resumes from people who are not even remotely qualified for your position. I like the niche approach of sites like CrunchBoard to allow companies to find smart, qualified people more easily, and I will be curious to follow the progress of CrunchBoard and similar sites.

I am in the Portland Airport, and this is my final blog post before heading off for the next 7 days. I will be spending the next week (July 28 – Aug 3) offline in rural Ohio visiting my family. This is the land of dial-up Internet, no television, and newspapers as the only link to the outside world. It is too remote for DSL or Cable, and the closest high-speed access is the Starbucks at a truck stop about 20 miles away.

I’ll be spending the week on low-tech pursuits like hanging with my family, playing with my nephew who turns 8 on July 30, playing Scrabble, and drinking wine with my Mom.

I will have my CrackBerry … just in case 🙂

R0ml’s presentation was the highlight of the keynotes today. I will try to capture the gist of it; however, for those of you who have seen him present, his presentation style is so dynamic that it can be difficult to really capture the essence in just a short paragraph. I will give it try. “Open source is like a tomato”, but how much is healthy? According to Stallman, everything should be open source, which R0ml compared to vegans in the world of food (just for full disclosure, I am a vegan). He believes that both the Stallman and vegan approaches are a little extreme and that fanaticism is not good on either side. We should be striving for a balanced approach with open source; some open source is great, but both can coexist. I agree with R0ml on this one; open source is great, but we do not need to exclude proprietary software from the mix.

Danese Cooper led a panel with Mitchell Baker, Tim O’Reilly, Geir Magnusson. David Recordon, and Susan Wu talking about what happens when money enters the picture in an open source project. OSS projects have a free agent model where the project contributors / leader positions are not held by the company. When Mitchell left AOL, AOL did not seem to grok that she would continue to lead the Mozilla projects and that they could not just usurp her title / responsibilities. Open source projects make it more difficult for management to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the project because of the transparency inherent in the open source model. They also discussed how the lack of money is not necessarily a nirvana. Lack of funds reduces monetary corruption, but it also prevents scale. Tim worried that the worse thing he ever did for open source was to hire Larry Wall to work full-time on Perl. Some people thought that Perl 6 was a piece of performance art. Perl was originally rooted in Larry’s ability to resolve real world problems; however money may have removed Larry too far from the real problems and into more theoretical and academic concerns. Too much money can have as big an impact as too little. When developers are sponsored by a corporation do you lose the grassroots feel and the people coding for the joy of it rather than because they are being paid (Apache is seeing this now, especially since most of the incubator projects are being submitted by people being paid to do it). My key takeaway from this session is that money changes the dynamics of an open source community both to an advantage and disadvantage.

We also held our Art of Community Session today at OSCON. I thought that it went very well. The speakers were interesting, the session moved at a rapid pace, and we had a fairly large audience of engaged listeners. The notes from my portion of this session are posted on my Trends in Web 2.0 blog.

The most interesting session (from a comedic standpoint) was Measuring Open Source Popularity by Luke Wellington from Hitwise. He started with the quote: “Hi, my name is Luke and I am a data addict”; however, it was quickly apparent that he was not able to effectively present his data. Michael Tiemann even suggested that he read some books by presentation guru Edward Tufte … Ouch.

My favorite moment of the day was when Matt Asay referred to himself as a naive little waif (accompanied by an interesting waif-like little dance across the stage) to describe his early sales experiences thinking that if he set a fair price that big customers would not want big discounts. Matt had 9 lessons learned from doing business in open source. A few of my favorites included 2) Friends (downloads) are nice. Cash (customers) is critical. Make Both. 4) Think “user community,” not “developer community” and 9) Be permeable (open and acknowledge mistakes).

I always like to keep track of what is on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar. This year, a few of these include Firefox as a platform, Voip / Asterisk, Ubunto, and O’Reilly Labs.

Scott Yara from Greenplum had an interesting open source and rock & roll comparison encouraging people to not to jump in because open source is popular, but to start a project to make something great (do you want to be as popular as The Backstreet Boys or as good as Jimi Hendrix?)

Anil Dash from Six apart talked about how the key to web 2.0 is connecting to people that you care about through blogs and about how people can find niche communities to connect with co-workers, peers to help anybody get connected.

R0ml gave Part III of his Semasiology of Open Source (semasiology = study of the change in the meaning of words over time). It was highly entertaining, which made it impossible to take notes on it!

Probably the best session of the day was How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick. They talked about how attention and focus are your scarcest resources – you must protect them (esp when dealing with poisonous people). These poisonous people can take the form of trolls that actively disrupt the community or perfectionists and process obsessed people who unintentionally derail forward progress (talk forever & never finish anything). The had a few suggestions: understand the threat, fortify against it by building a healthy community, identify poisonous people & look for warning signs, deal with infection / maintain calm & stand your ground.

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first half of the executive briefing; however, the portion that I attended was immensely valuable.

Favorite Quotes*:

• Michael Tiemann (Red Hat): “You can look at cost all day, but it is really about value.”

• Matt Asay (Alfresco): “Tim is being too nice, I’m going to be Danese.”

Matt’s quote about being Danese referred to a previous session where Danese Cooper had the honor of grilling, oops, I mean interviewing Bill Hilf from Microsoft. She asked some tough questions, including this gem: Danese asked about Microsoft’s previous disinformation campaigns, and Hilf responded by saying that Microsoft did not have disinformation campaigns, but that in the future, they will do a better job of targeting these campaigns to the right people. Interesting … they do not exist, but they will be more targeted in the future. Hmmm.

For those who regularly read my blog, you know that I have been interested in how we can use the lessons learned from open source software as web 2.0 evolves. There were several interesting points along these lines:

• Brian Behlendorf from CollabNet talked about how the best model for open data is less about the open API and more about seeing the discussion. For example, when looking at a controversial Wikipedia page, it is good to be able to see the back and forth that happened. From my perspective this highlights the desire for more information and the desire to participate in the creation of information that users are coming to expect as web 2.0 becomes more prevalent. We are no longer content to read static web pages; we expect to be able to read and comment on the content or in some cases make corrections directly to the content in the Wiki model.

• One of the panels talked about how the nature of software development is with a small group of people, which is why you see a small core of developers; extensions allow thousands of people to contribute in a modular manner. I think that this is part of why Firefox has been so successful. Developers can write an extension that they find useful without having to make it mainstream enough to be accepted into the main source tree, and users can customize their experience to install as many or as few extensions as they want. The extension model allows us to fill small niches way out in the long tail, while keeping the main Firefox code base lean and efficient for the masses.

• Jim Buckmaster from Craigslist talked about how they have only 22 employees, and they rely on users to create content and to flag inappropriate content. He also said that they rely mostly on user feedback to make changes and add incremental features – new cities, etc., but they do not feel like they need to build the next big thing. This makes Craigslist is a great example of the user created content model at its finest. They make it easy for users to create their content, and they stay focused on doing one thing and doing it better than anyone else.

• Ian Wilkes from Second Life talked about how more of our lives are moving online, how eventually everyone will have an avatar, and how real life and virtual interactions are merging. This is something that I have been noticing, but I will not rehash it here, since I blogged about this idea a few days ago.

OSCON is one of my favorite events. O’Reilly does a great job of taking a topic (open source) and expanding around it to get us thinking about new ideas. I am looking forward to what I will learn over the next couple of days.

Do not forget to check out our session on the Art of Community on Thursday at OSCON!

* Keep in mind that these quotes and the rest of the information in this post are approximate and are based on my imperfect note-taking abilities and my recollections from the day.

I have been observing a difference in the way that people use IM and email as younger people move into the workforce. I have young friends and co-workers (mid-20s) who I communicate with frequently on IM and never / rarely via email. Even some aspects of dating seem to have moved to IM with long, intimate IM chats replacing what used to be long phone calls for many couples. I also have a few techie friends my age and older who are IM addicts, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. From my perspective, IM is great when you want to have a discussion or need a quick answer to a question, while email is handy for business where you need to keep documentation or need complex information for reference (documents usually).

I just read an interesting piece on CNET summarizing this phenomenon:

Email is so last millennium.

Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favour to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The shift is starting to creep into workplace communication, too.

…

Beyond that, email has become most associated with school and work.

“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”

…

“Adults who learn to use IM later have major difficulty talking to more than two people at one time – whereas the teens who grew up on it have no problem talking to a bazillion people at once,” Boyd says. “They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better.”

Kirah, at Microsoft, even thinks young people’s brains work differently because they have grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

…

“Nine to five has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline’,” Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 am that night. But I will do it all on my terms.”‘ (CNET)

It will be fascinating to watch the changing dynamics of the workforce over the next couple of years as employees who have been raised with IM, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking technologies enter the workforce in larger numbers. I am looking forward to the changes that this generation could bring with them: innovative approaches, quick and nimble decision-making, a focus on the results obtained instead of an 8-5 butts in chairs mentality, a resistance to bureaucracy, and more. With these changes, we may end up with a new set of problems; however, I think that the corporate world could stand a good wake up call.

I recently blogged about an interesting trend of making job offers via blogs. The two highest profile examples were Calacanis offering the Unboomed Amanda a job at AOL/Netscape and Scoble speculating about how he could go about hiring Calacanis.

Yesterday, Mark Cuban put a new twist on this trend by putting out a call on his blog offering a job to anyone who can solve the problem of getting people out of the house to watch a movie in the theater without spending more money on marketing than what the movie can earn.

This is an open challenge. You come up with a solution, you get a job. Seriously.

…

So if you want a job, and have a great idea on how to market movies in a completely different way. If your idea works for any and all kinds of movies. If it changes the dynamics and the economics of promoting movies, email it or post it. If its new and unique, i want to hear about it. If its a different way of doing the same thing you have seen before, it probably wont get you a job, but feel free to try.

So go for it. Come up with a great idea that i want to use and I will come up with a job for you to make that idea happen.

for real. (Mark Cuban)