Chris Sacca's 'What is left?'

Yahoo for lunch!

Though I frequently celebrate the lunches to which we lucky Google fools are treated, the title above refers to a lunch I had on Friday at Yahoo!. (Is that how I punctuate such a sentence? I thought I would check how Yahoo! themselves do it. However, it appears they have an unwritten PR rule against ending a sentence with the word "Yahoo!".)

Anyway, I headed over to grab a bite and catch up with my friend Jeff Bonforte. Jeff and I met when he was heading up Sipphone and I was trying to bake some thoughts on what would later become Google Talk. Soon after launching the Gizmo Project, Jeff was offered a sweet gig at Yahoo! heading up a bunch of their communications efforts.

I had never been to the Yahoo! campus, so my eyes were wide as I was repeatedly struck by the comparisons to the GOOG.  I have never been much of a documentarian, suffice it to say, it is a very different place. The lunchroom itself had good energy and there was a wide variety of food from which to choose, but it was hard to miss the price tags next to each of the selections. (Note: sometimes I do wonder if Google should charge a nominal amount for the food just to remind folks of how fortunate we are for such a perk and hopefully deflate the few entitled jerks who seem to take it all for granted. Alternatively, maybe we could only charge the ungrateful lot. Hmm.)

The lunch conversation was interesting and almost reassuring. Essentially, two former startup guys comparing notes on what its like to be staying afloat inside very big, if very different, companies. Despite the fact the walls where he worked were all purple and yellow and not in primary colors like chez moi, our experiences of navigating increasingly diffuse and polarized organizations were very similar. As these places get bigger, employees and their roles are increasingly specialized. In contrast, startups require and encourage wholesale generalism. In a startup, you basically help wherever you can. Not so in a big company. People have clearer roles and territories start to emerge. That said, rest assured neither of us have ever been known for being constrained by bureaucracy and I doubt it will start now.

Overall, I enjoyed getting a chance to stop by that place. I like Yahoo! and think they keep us on our toes. So far, they have played very fair and proven to be a formidable competitor. I think Yahoo! inspires a good deal of our effort and creativity.

One funny note: as we were getting up to leave, we walked by a table in the lunchroom and heard this snippet from one Yahoo! employee to another:

"If I take this job at Google . . . " 

Climate Crisis - Taking the Bus to Work

Al Gore came by campus ten days ago to deliver his wonderfully rich and compelling talk on the very real and current climate crisis facing our planet. His presentation starts with some slower foundational and expository slides and then builds over a stimulating and visually entrancing hour and a half to an exciting, frothy, and inspiring finish with a concrete call to action. Not afraid to take on detractors, a much more engaged Gore than you have ever seen in a political campaign addresses head-on many of the classic naysayers denying the impending environmental disaster. The result is an intellectually and aesthetically captivating presentation.

For the last couple of years, Gore has been incubating this speech and delivering it to small groups at fundraisers and green events, evolving his take as new data becomes available. I have been lucky enough to catch him at the UN World Environment Day and at the Aspen Institute, in addition to the Google gig. That said, he is taking the covers off and blowing this preso wide open. Working with Lawrence Bender (producer, Pulp Fiction), Gore has converted his talk into a feature film that played the festival circuit and will see nationwide distribution soon. Though I missed it at Sundance, judging by the trailer, An Inconvenient Truth promises to be required viewing.

On a related personal note, though I have always considered myself environmentally aware and concerned, one glaring inconsistency is that since graduating law school, I have driven an SUV. My affinity for skiing in Tahoe and surfing Pacifica have always mandated a rig with four wheel drive that can fit piles o' gear. I know, there are vehicles with a smaller footprint that could suffice. Argh. I am such a hypocrite.

When I first started at Google, I used to ride Caltrain to work. Though the aggregate trip was ultimately 25 minutes longer than driving, I relished that time. Pre-EVDO, I found the journey to be a welcome break from ubiquitous connectivity and took the opportunity to focus on some complex deal thoughts. I would arrive at work feeling ahead of the day and in a great, relaxed mood.

Soon though, I caught the morning surf bug and started making daily treks out to Linda Mar to paddle into the frigid lineup of beachbreak closeouts. Don't get me wrong, I loved most every one of those mornings (there is always the occasional ass-kicking surf day in which the ocean dishes more humble pie than you can stomach). However, surfing meant that I had to drive to and from work in my truck toting my longboard. Now, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is how hairy work has gotten this past year, I have not been surfing in the AM as much as in the past.

So, it was with great joy this morning that, in lieu of rumbling my 19MPG rig down Highway 101, I caught the biodiesel Google Shuttle from San Francisco. The stop nearest my house is at 8th and Market, so it is very convenient that, last night, I picked up a new hot rod to wheel myself over to the Civic Center. The whole trip couldn't have been easier. Pedaled over to the bus, strapped my bike on the rack, dove heads down into my email using the on-board Junxion-backhauled WiFi, and popped my head up an hour later at the Googleplex.

Convenient, productive, efficient, and environmentally sensitive - not a bad way to get to work.

Device Convergence vs. Concurrence

Back at Speedera, in the Spring of 2003, we won a contract to deliver the website and streaming files for a very popular TV show (still bound by NDA, so I can't name it). We had been delivering sites and video for networks and studios for years by that point, but in the Spring of 2003, we noticed something we had never seen before.

For the years prior, when a TV show aired, we would see a perceptible increase in traffic to its website during the airing, but that traffic was never too significant. In fact, visits to a particular show's Internet site were often higher during the morning of the next workday when bored employees would close their office doors and surf to their favorite show sites.

That all changed in early 2003. With this particular show, when the show came on back East at 8EST, traffic to the site would spike. But, even beyond that initial spike, these visitors stayed at the show's website during the entire show!

Were they abandoning their television sets and running into the den to surf? To the contrary, they were feverishly clicking right there from the comfort of their couches while continuing to watch the show. Sure enough, when the hour was up, traffic to the site steadily fell off over the next thirty minutes until reaching its lows.

So what was different about 2003? Why hadn't this happened before? Why was it that all of a sudden web surfers were hitting these TV show sites during the show itself? Our guess? Home WiFi networks.

That was a huge year for proliferation of residential WiFi. With WiFi in the home, the computer moved out of the den and into the family room. Now untethered, users, particularly kids who were used to multitasking throughout the rest of their lives, could now bring those laptops to the couch. They had already been SMSing with each other while tubing out, so it seemed only natural they would break out the full browser experience at the same time. These were just our speculative musings, and I never had any data to back it up. 

So, it was with a chuckle that I read the notes from a colleague who just got back from the MipTV Conference in Cannes, France. They noted that everyone in the content creation business is now talking about creating content for multi-platform / multi-screen (TV, PC, mobile, iPod, etc) and enabling simultaneous interactivity between them all.

My colleague mentioned that we should keep our eyes peeled for a new show on the BBC called the Wannabes in which the web will provide a realtime interactive experience that complements the broadcast view providing viewers with alternative perspectives and viewpoints on the big screen action.

Before, all the talk used to be about convergence. Pundits predicted each of our devices would be merged into one for all of our communication and entertainment. However, it looks more and more like what will really emerge is the concurrent use of many devices optimized for the time, place, network, activity, and the person using them all.

( . . . while I type this on my laptop and churn SMS messages on my Blackberry and watch a DVD on the TV.)

Wireless Broadband - For Email Only?

In the Denver airport today, on my way home from the mountains, I sat down to collect my thoughts for a talk I am scheduled to give as part of David Isenberg's and Jeff Pulver's Freedom to Connect conference in DC this Monday and Tuesday. This timely gathering will bring together a pile of smart, progressive folks (author excluded) working hard to ensure neutrality on the Net and a diversity of affordable access alternatives for all.

Last week, Google hooked me up with a Verizon Broadband Access EVDO card. So, rather than wrangle with the unpredictable melange of paid WiFi providers in airports, I just fired this thing up. The connection came together pretty painlessly with the throughput clocking in at 409kbps. Not bad.

With an hour to burn, I put on my headphones, turned on iTunes radio and dove in to tackling email. One of the first things I came across was a forwarded link from Google Video showing a slim, young, geeky Sun executive named Eric Schmidt honing his public speaking skills. Soon thereafter, a friend called me on Google Talk, so I chatted for a bit.

Cool user experience, eh? Exactly the kind of connectivity  I had been seeking. Except . . . well . . .  apart from the email, everything else I did above was in direct violation of the terms of the VZ Access Acceptable Use Policy (you will have to enter a location to view the policy).  The relevant section, which Verizon emphasizes in bold for our convenience, reads:

"Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess services cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, or (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections."

No music? No video? No VoIP? Come on. I wish I could believe that Verizon was trying to act in the best interest of the network's health by limiting overall traffic consumption. However, it just seems like too much of a conflict when movies, music, games, and of course, voice are all conveniently available (for an additional fee) from Verizon and their flashy new VCast service. 

Hmm. I see things like this, and I am increasingly looking forward to this conference . . .