At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.
Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).
If you're curious to see what Fire Eagle can offer, though, ignore today's news about it. Fire Eagle itself does not, yet, have a useful interface. But since it's now open to developers, we should see cool apps soon. We heard this morning that Dopplr will have Fire Eagle integration shortly, and that the Bug Labs geolocation module will support the API. We'll report on these new applications when they show up for trials. Update: Dopplr has implemented the link to Fire Eagle. Very cool.
Your location checks in...
But it don't check out. Yet.
Read also:
TechCrunch: Yahoo's "Twitter For Location" Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality.
ReadWriteWeb: Location Aware: Smart Rollout for Yahoo! Fire Eagle.
Jeff Clavier at ETech: I can make mountains from your molehills.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it's clear to me that we are. Not that it's a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble.
Now Mr. Not-a-bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it's in the $300,000 a month range--a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card funded Amazon S3 account would kill for--is "noise" that distracts them from their potential.
Clavier, and other Web VCs, have a problem: start-ups are getting off the ground with minimal funding, and some are achieving moderate financial success very early on. That makes them think they don't need funding. Clavier claims that attitude limits them. So when Clavier is trying to sell a company his money, he first has to convince them that their cash flow is irrelevant and distracting.
For entrepreneurs who have dreams of building a real company--one that "scales," as they say--Clavier's position makes sense. But I argue that Clavier is looking for big wins in the wrong places. It's quite a trick to take a small (by VC standards) idea and make it big. Personally, I'd rather see the venture money funnel into truly big ideas, where there is only limited likelihood that profits will plateau, or even arrive at all, before the company is well established. As I've said previously, to win big, bet big.
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