Fun with Funding

So we (mVisible) just announced our Series A financing round, in which we raised $3M to advance the company’s goals of making mobile content and service delivery as easy as possible. I don’t want to get into all of the details of how this came about; let’s just say that raising institutional money is an extremely long and often frustrating process. But now that it’s finally “in the bank” so to speak, what’s to be done?

Basically what this funding round has given us is the ability scale out the Myxer platform and MyxerTones website by bringing in more people in product development, marketing, and business development. Adding a few more carefully chosen people to our existing team is going to significantly increase the amount of stuff we can get done. We have a big backlog of planned product and service features, and partnering opportunities, that we’re going to start making a big dent in and quickly.

It also gives us the flexibility to make really aggressive moves on the product front to support the continued rapid adoption of MyxerTones. When you read the announcement we’ll make in a couple of days with regard to the pricing structure of our MyxerTones services, you’ll understand what I mean. Well, OK, I’ll just tell you, because that’s the kind of company we are. We’re making the use of make your own ringtones completely free. No more pay-as-you-go, or credits, or anything – it’s just free. We’re really going to blow the lid off this thing, because we want to make sure we establish MyxerTones as the undisputed best place to make and share mobile content.

It’s been funny to read some of the commentary that analysts and others have written regarding the Series A press release. Red Herring suggests we would be more interesting if we did targeted advertisements and charged $1 per ringtone delivery. They didn’t know that we removed these things very intentionally because they are inhibitors to growth. The reason we’re raising money is so that we can grow our user base, and add value to our products and services that we will ultimately monetize far more effectively than we could by, e.g., squeezing more money out of our existing traffic.  Advertising is certainly a valid revenue model these days, but it is dependent on large volumes of high quality traffic.  We’re focused on creating that traffic.
And as to RH’s thoughts that support for full-track audio would be interersting, well.  I think someone would have to be rather naive to think that a company successfully raising money to advance their mobile delivery platform wouldn’t have a pretty developed plan for full-track downloads, video mobisodes, etc.  Trust me, continuous innovation in product and technology is part of our DNA, and bite-sized personalization content (ringtones and wallpapers) have just whet our appetite for what’s possible in this space.

And it’s funny to see how differently the same press release was interpreted by people. Like, I did a quick interview with John Letzing of Dow Jones VentureWire in support of the press release (cool, right?), and was surprised to see how the story was subsequently spun when it went across the wire:

• Citrix CEO, Others Back Mobile Content Co. MVisible
By John Letzing 10/20/2006
MVisible Technologies Inc. has raised $3 million in Series A funding to reach out to more potential users of its mobile phone content service. [...] The connection to [...] Citrix is not random, as both Willis and mVisible Chief Executive Scott Kinnear are former Citrix executives, Willis said.

So, our Citrix connection – which plays almost no part in either our day-to-day or strategic operations – somehow came out as being the most interesting part of the story for Mr. Letzing (“Citrix” is the first word in the story title!).  Oh, and for the record, I was never a Citrix executive (though ScottK was) – I was a developer.

I don’t blame the author for highlighting the connection, but I think we (mVisible) need to work to make sure people understand there are newsworthy aspects of our company and products that don’t have anyting to do with CTXS.

It’s been a long but interesting experience, but now I’m looking forward to spending all that money!

[science] fiction

To hear Ian Stewart tell it, the world just isn’t ready for transcendentalistic science fiction. I think the problem is that people these days expect more than just cool ideas from science fiction authors. In fact, the science bit is relatively unimportant, to wit: The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. Fantastic science fiction set in the 1600’s that uses some scientists as characters, but dwells rather more on swashbuckling, romance, and intrigue than upon science per se. Science fiction seems to me to have become more of a literary attitude than a genre.

Compare with Asimov’s work. Rubbish. PKD? Sophomoric at best. Here are guys that were definitely thinkers, and definitely prescient, and ideas a plenty, but damn if they could write a story one tenth as engrossing as Stephenson.

In his book Transfer, Stewart tells the story of George Casey – or rather, George Casey’s consciousness – as it becomes the first human mind to exist in a non-biological medium. That other medium, we come to learn, consists of some few hundred terabytes of RAM scattered betwixt the battered nodes of a cluster of old Dell workstations running in the basement of George’s home. It sure seems like there’d be an interesting story in there somewhere.

But between the tired inside jokes for Slashdot readers (it is a beowulf cluster of those!) and the mindless synesthetic droning on (colors experienced as tastes, images as feelings, &c, &c, ad nauseum), one fails to find a soul.  How ironic. And a story’s soul is ultimately what makes it worth experiencing, regardless of its shelving category. So I think Mr. Stewart needs to worry less about impressing people with how long of a run on sentence he can write with a straight face and more about what makes people bond with a story.

infinity of scale

For some time, it has bothered me to consider that the universe may actually be infinitely large. That’s quite a commitment.

I’m willing to accept infinity as a numerical concept, because numbers – or mathematics, at least – is a human invention so far as I can ascertain. If we want to invent some axioms that play out until not only are there infinite numbers, but an infinite number of prime numbers, and values of infinity that are bigger than other values of infinity, well that’s just fine by me. It’s more or less a game when it starts with rules we humans invented.

But the universe. That’s, like, the Real Deal. It seems like a lot of things would get really difficult if there was an infinite amount of mass and energy occupying an infinite amount of space. With all due respect to Stephen Wright, where would you keep it?

So I’ve been pretty keen on trying to visualize this model of the universe as a curved space-time thing that is finite in size, and yet without edges. Like the surface of a basketball to an ant who lives on it (and can’t look up and down, natch), but extended by a dimension or two. If that’s the case, I think I’ll be able to sleep relatively soundly. I mean, I’ll still have to grapple with this whole “what if my life is just a synthetic dream from which i’ll wake up and actually be in some completely different (imaginary?) universe and then I’ll wake up from that dream &c, &c, ad nauseum”, but at least the currently-dreamed universe will seem – while vastly, mind-bogglingly huge – at least conceivable.

There’s one little thing left to settle, though. These crazy physicist dudes keep coming up with more and more subatomic particles. I don’t know where they’ve all come from. I swear that when I was in junior high, all we had were protons and neutrons, and these whimsically orbiting electrons that orbited them playfully, sometimes taking long trips around nearby nuclei to make little communities called molecules, but always being happily, well, atomic.

The I start hearing about quarks and all kinds of other nonsense. Every time I pick up a science magazine there’s some new particles being proposed or discovered. Quarks, muons, gluons, Higgs bosons, all kinds of greek letters flying around. Is there no end to this? Will we continue to build better and better instruments and experiments, and never get to the smallest possible particle? In the world of computers, we get a cheap way out, because we’re playing in this artificial world where we’ve decided that bits are the smallest ‘particle’ and you can’t split a bit. End of story, go write some Fortran or something.

But in the real world, how can we have a smallest particle? You have to be able to split it don’t you? The alternative is that there’s some magic inflection point at which the smallest piece of matter pops into existance. It just seems so…impossible. But, then, it’s less impossible than what I’ve previously thought was the lone competing explanation that, indeed, you can keep finding smaller and smaller particles…forever.

But…What if it is indeed turtles all the way down, but there’s an important twist. Say you start at the nearest turtle, call him Yertle, and you start climbing down the stack from there. Of course, it’s turtles all the way down, so you can climb down and down and down and never get to the bottom. After you’ve been climbing for a few hundred thousand years or so, you get this funny feeling of deja vu.  Something seems familiar. One turtle in particular, Mack, is intriguing enough that you stop and speak with him briefly. After this little sojourn, you continue on your way down the stack.

Years pass, you continue climbing down, and after a very very long time, you start to get that funny feeling again, and who do you see, but Mack!  Right there under your foot, when you’ve been doing nothing but climb down for the past epochs since you last saw him.

With Google Earth, you would see this by starting in space, then zooming in on, say, North America, then aiming for the Great Lakes, centering on Leeland, Michigan, and then zooming in to a particular property, then a particular tree, then a single needle on that tree, and so on, through cells, atoms, subatomic particles, who knows what else, and then you see – the Earth in the distance just like where you started from. You’ve come back to where you started by looking at smaller and smaller things.

Could this happen? Well, I’ve been assured by a mathematician friend that one could construct such a universe in principle.  Could such a geometry be a model for the actual universe we live in? Heck if I know.  As I’ve pointed out before, I’m a bit of a bystander when it comes to advanced mathematics. But it sure seems like such a geometry would make a lot of things easier. To wit, we could have a finite number of subatomic particles, and yet still have no “smallest” particle.

Just as how you could walk in a straight line on the surface of a sphere and find yourself back where you started, so too you may ‘zoom in a straight line’ and fine yourself back at the same place after a long, long time.  So there really might not be a smallest particle, and at the same time, you can always find something smaller than the particle at which you’re currently looking.

Wanderlust goes Boink

In a stunning development that shocked the high tech world today, former software tool vendor and high tech consulting company Wanderlust Software, LLC today announced it is no longer in business. The president of the now defunct company, Myk Willis, explained that “well, uh, we’ve actually been closed down for a really long time. But there was this health insurance thing…” before his lawyer whacked him upside the head and stammerred something about “no improprieties implied or evidenced…prolonged wrapping up activities…”

I formed Wanderlust after leaving Citrix Systems, Inc., where I’d worked for about five years. September 20, 2002 is what the articles of formation say, but I haven’t had a chance to make sure I had actually quit Citrix by then, so don’t quote me on that. I had this idea of building a small but sustainable company that I could run by actually writing code, instead of planning for potentially doing things in the future, or working on things for 9 months before having them cancelled just as we were going to beta, or working 80 hour weeks for months at a time cleaning up someone else’s mess.

When I was in college, I worked for StratosWare Corporation, which was a small software tools company (I joined the company as the only programmer outside of founder Keith Bluestone) that made the once quite popular MemCheck products. We consistently ran runner-up to NuMega’s BoundsChecker, like the Washingon Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters, but it was a great experience for me. We wrote products used by other programmers, and had to learn the intricisies of the development and runtime environment. I got to design and implement entire products in x86, C, and C++ while most of the people I went to classes with were struggling with Pascal or Fortran.

I’m not sure that I wanted to emulate StratosWare with Wanderlust, but I definitely wanted to get back to a time in my professional career when I was doing what I think I do best: write code. Sure, I like strategy, product management, business development, even a touch of marketing now and again, and of course philosophising (some might argue that my, err, unstructured thoughts tend more tow.ard bullsh*t than philosophy, strictly speaking), but the only time I find myself truly in the zone is when I’m heads-down in a code editor.

But enough already. Wanderlust ended up being more of a contract development house than a developer of software tools. Too hard to turn down fun jobs and big $$$. File systems, low-level networking code, native NT applications, device drivers, hard to turn down that kind of work. When all was said and done, as it was and is now, I can look back and say it all wound up quite nicely. One large chunk of technology that had been developed in house was sold to a large company (which itself was then sold to Microsoft) for enough money to pay back the development costs plus some, and the rest of the assets were rolled into mVisible Technologies, my current company that’s behind MyxerTones.com.

Funny how there are so many books written about starting companies, but very few about shutting them down.