StudioMinds

Mozilla’s Vision for the Future of the Web

Tod Simpson, Chief Innovation Officer, at Mozilla delivered such an insightful keynote at Wednesday’s ITS2011 that I left feeling a little woozy from all the pondering over where the web is going. Here are some concepts that I did not know about that you should probably look up as I certainly don’t feel versed enough to even try to explain:

• Boot to Gecko | a cross platform web operating system
• Web Activities 
• Browser ID

His main message was simple though, that the consumer (you and I) should be able to control all our information that is put on the web. At one point he asked “How many websites currently have your credit card and billing information stored?” To which the crowd nervously laughed at. So Mozilla’s vision for the web is an open one, where we are in the drivers seat, controlling our information. If what he talked about becomes true soon, there will be far fewer headaches in the world. 

One other exciting announcement was that Mozilla is launching an app store similar to the Chrome app store. However, when you download an app from the Mozilla store it will be able to work on all web browsers. Certainly some outstanding work being done over in California at Mozilla Labs…keep it up.

Meetup #1: Coworking Winter Park

On Tuesday morning, a group of individuals came together at Palmano’s in Winter Park to discuss, share and learn strategies for managing social media as it relates to business. The format for the meetup involved breaking the group up into 4 clusters with each cluster assigned a social media network to discuss (we did the big three - FB, LinkedIn, and the Twitter, plus Google+). After 15 minutes of discussion, we switched it up so people could go find a new group and network. Conversations were lively and real knowledge was shared. Thank you to all who participated and we hope to see you at the next one.

The “Salesforce.com Effect” and Corporate Coworking (from Emergent Research)

Interesting GigaOm article on the advantages of companies paying for or subsidizing the cost of employee use of coworking spaces. 

5 Benefits of Sponsoring Employee Coworking suggests these advantages:

1. coworking is like a non-stop trade show
2. coworking provides office structure without office stricture
3. coworking encourages work/life balance
4. coworking is creative
5. coworking is human

Our research leads us to believe larger corporations will eventually embrace coworking, but it will take time.  Almost all the corporate lawyers, HR  and facilities professionals we’ve interviewed have expressed concerns about encouraging employee coworking, with the security of confidential information being a key issue. 

Cost is also often mentioned, usually with a comment about Starbucks being free (at least for the company). 

Despite the lack of support from central groups, we expect departmental and business unit managers will increasingly allow employees to expense coworking facility costs - especially for employees that travel extensively.  The cost is too low and business logic too powerful for this not to happen. 

This “back door” use of coworking facilities will eventually lead to formalized policies and procedures for using 3rd party spaces at large corporations.  We call this the “Salesforce.com effect” because of their success bypassing central IT and purchasing groups and growing their cloud-based business by selling to end-users and department managers. 

Courtesy of emergentresearch.com

Central Florida’s Fragmented Startup Ecosystem

I have been meeting with an extremely successful entrepreneur turned VC for the past couple of weeks. Our discussions have centered around how Central Florida seems to show some components of a startup ecosystem (UCF incubator, Orlando Inc’s Trep Hub, Rollins Center for Advanced Entrepreneurship, etc), yet there is still a sense that an ‘ecosystem’ itself does not actually exist.

If we look to geographical areas that are havens for startups, we see Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Boston and London as the big ones. So why have these places been so successful in creating powerful startup ecosystems?

First, these places are where a lot of money is. The cold-hearted fact is that startups need to find money to develop and launch their ideas and they are going to these places to find it. So money is a huge driver. Second, is talent. The employment base that is attracted to these areas provides companies with huge advantages to hiring talented, smart people. Third, the quality of life that these areas have I’m sure outweighs Oklahoma City for instance. Lastly, large successful organizations usually are headquartered in these places and most of them get involved in helping startups in there own cities. 

So startup ecosystems have:

1. Money  2. Talent  3. Quality of Life  4. Supporting Organizations

Can Central Florida support such an ecosystem? Well, I don’t believe I need to run through these 4 aspects as they pertain to our city. We just need to do a better job of keeping startups here by highlighting the fact that we have access to capital, smart professionals, a beautiful place to live, and companies willing to help. 

Why Crowdfunding is Powerful

I recently saw a This Week in Startups episode (posted below) with the founder of Kickstarter.com. If you don’t know, Kickstarter is a crowdsourcing platform where people post projects that they need money for, while visitors to the site peruse projects and give money to those they want to support. Since launching, the site has helped fund thousands of projects and has processed millions of dollars of transactions. So what’s interesting about kickstarter is that in return for giving to a project, you don’t receive any equity in the project or company, rather you receive the satisfaction of helping someone create something. So, who are these people online giving to a whole host of random projects? I cannot tell you but they are out there and they are making a significant change to defining what traditional fundraising really means.