About Me 0113: Making Money Opportunities

Funding

In May of this year, Tomio Geron at the Wall Street Journal summed up the funding story thusly:

Etacts, which completed the Y Combinator incubator program in March, has just closed a $700,000 seed round from prominent angels including Ron Conway's SV Angel; Eric Hahn, former chief technology officer at Netscape; Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious; Jim Young, co-founder of HotOrNot; Barney Pell and Lorenzo Thione, co-founders of Powerset; Jawed Karim, co-founder of Youtube; Ashton Kutcher, actor and now angel investor; Robby Walker and Wayne Crosby, former Y Combinator participants; and Irene Pedrazza, founder of CheetahMail.

Etacts raised the funding quickly - in just over a month - and had intended to raise $500,000 but decided to let in more investors because of the strong interest, said Liu, who co-founded the company with classmate Evan Beard after the two graduated from Duke University last year.

You don't take Ron Conway money and then just give up in six months.

Rapportive raised a small round from other impressive funders 3 months later. Gist raised $4 million in between those two announcements, in July.

Etacts hasn't replied to our request for comment, but an acquisition certainly seems the most likely explanation for the service's decision to shut down.

Email as a Platform

We wrote about email as a platform for application development most recently in August. Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, then working on developer relations for Yahoo Mail, explained why so many companies are interested in this space.

"It's pretty clear that email provides a huge potential for extensibility, given the wide range of ways people use it. The inbox is much more than just a place for incoming mail, it is the primary dashboard for many web users - it is how they manage their lives. So when looking at email as a platform, the opportunity of making it more useful and productive reaches most areas of online activities.

So far the focus has been on taking social information to help better manage email overflow, but the platform has much more potential beyond that."

What will its likely acquirer do with Etacts? Presumably displaying the social networking profiles and past conversations we've had with the people who sent us emails is just the beginning. How will other email providers respond, lest they fall behind in richness of user experience? That's where things will get really interesting.

Personal Data as a Platform

Perhaps even more interesting is the way that all of these services use data about the people who have sent you email that they have acquired through services like Rapleaf. Services that scoop up and wholesale personal profile data ("the person attached to this email uses this LinkedIn profile, this Twitter profile, owns a home, has kids and loves short videos about kittens") are wildly controversial but also very useful. Nowhere is that usefulness more clearly demonstrated than in the email CRM services like Etacts, Rapportive and Gist.

Perhaps if Etacts' feature-set goes mainstream in some big email program, the story of value built for everyday people (not just marketers) from aggregate online personal data as a development platform would become easier to tell.

That would be very good news.

“The obesity epidemic is a genuine public health emergency, with vast implications for the nation’s well-being, economy and even national security. And yet, could anyone really be against children eating healthier food and getting more exercise? Could anyone really object to White House assistant chef Sam Kass trying to interest Elmo in a vegetable-laden burrito?

“Well, yes, if Michelle Obama is for it, someone will be against it. Someone like Glenn Beck, for example, who was moved to rail against carrot sticks, or Sarah Palin, who warned that Obama wants to deprive us all of dessert…

“Insinuations from her critics notwithstanding, Obama has not endorsed nanny-state or controversial remedies such as ending sugar subsidies, imposing soda-pop taxes or zoning McDonald’s out of certain neighborhoods. Instead, she is pushing for positive, voluntary change: more recess and physical activity, more playgrounds, more vegetable gardens, fresher food in schools and grocery stores, better education on the issue for parents and children.

“All of this makes total sense, and historians will marvel (much as they will at climate-change deniers) that anyone could doubt it.”

***

“In an editorial, the Journal pointed out that the first lady’s efforts to date are in keeping with what Palin herself has supported in the past.

“‘Health-care reform on an individual basis is often just this simple: we could save a lot of money and a lot of grief by making smarter choices,’ Palin said in her 2009 State of the State address, according to the Journal. ‘It starts by ending destructive habits and beginning healthy habits in eating and exercise.

“‘Mrs. Obama’s campaign is grounded in similar sentiments, and in that sense is unusual for this White House in emphasizing personal responsibility,’ the editorial continues. ‘Mrs. Palin would be more effective if she made some distinctions among the Obama policies that really are worth opposing.’”

***

“America’s national perspective on obesity is marred by two principal misunderstandings – one evident in Palin’s flippant treatment of the epidemic, and the other apparent in Obama’s misdirected policy agenda.

“First, and cardinally, obesity is a slow epidemic, and therefore does not elicit the same sense of urgency as less deadly, but more rapid-acting epidemics, such as the H1N1 flu epidemic (which only killed 4% as many Americans as obesity did in 2009). Second, while exposure to other diseases seems independent of individual choices, obesity appears to be completely dependent on individual lifestyle choices. This is untrue. Convincing epidemiological research demonstrates that factors beyond individual behaviour – factors such as race, poverty, neighbourhood, national region and even personal contacts – can influence obesity risk by influencing access to healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity, and cultures of diet and exercise. So, obesity is more complex than the simple choice to go for a walk or to ‘eat dessert’…

“To her credit, Obama has attempted to tackle the issue in a non-partisan manner – in fact, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, legislation endorsed by the first lady, passed in the Senate by unanimous assent. However, a major flaw of the “Let’s Move” agenda is that it primarily addresses individual behaviours, largely neglecting the structural factors that are so important in shaping them.”

***

“iven how much sugary drinks contribute to obesity and, therefore, impose costs on society that their prices don’t reflect, modest soda taxes aren’t a bad idea, either. Something like a cent and ounce, which a group of doctors, researchers and policy advocates proposed last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Every time I write something like this, one of my colleagues pulls me aside and reminds me, “But McDonalds fries are delicious. Every now and then, I need a few.’ True. So don’t ban them, or dessert or sugary drinks. But don’t expect everyone else to help you pay for them.

“You may not feel it, but if you pay taxes, you’re subsidizing others’ unhealthy lifestyles every day, either through direct subsidy of their ingredients or through higher medical bills, the costs of which are often socialized. These policies aren’t about making bad-for-you foods unnaturally expensive. Sugary drink taxes and other such things are about not making pancreas-busting foods deceptively cheap.”

bench craft company scam

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Opportunities

Funding

Email as a Platform

Personal Data as a Platform

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