…say, to December of last year…(I know…I know…)…

…you may recall how I was furtively engaged in describing the harrowing adventures of our trepid nerds with DA MAN! As we last left it, I was just about to get into a brief explanation of how circuitous the journey was in getting a signed NDA in place…

…so here we go…

If you’ve spent any serious time in a startup, or any high-tech company, you’re probably already somewhat knowledgeable about the legal instrument called a Non-Disclosure Agreement or NDA. It’s usually just a few sheets of legalese that describe a relationship between two or more entities (people, companies, aliens, etc…), where they each mutually agree to talk about things with one another that they both prefer to remain “just between them.” There are a number of reasons for doing this, and if you consider the problem long enough, you’ll come up with them, so I won’t go into them here.

Usually, the legalese sets the context and reasons for this exchange of secretive data, describes the nature of what might be discussed, indicates its significance to each party, and a strongly encourages each of the parties to keep their respective traps shut on fear of serious legal (i.e. financial) consequences.

The thing about NDAs, though, is that the language of the document is usually so straight-forward and globally applicable, that many a young entrepreneur (and I can say this, ’cause I’ve seen it happen) will take the most strongly worded NDA they themselves have had to sign, and gank it, doing little more than replacing the company logo.

Enterprising sorts, however, usually get their lawyers to draft up an airtight NDA right after they incorporate, only to find that almost no company of any size will even dream of signing it. There’s a reason for this, and if you think about it, it’ll come to you, so, again, we won’t cover it here.

Now, having said all this, the Nerds at AppleSeed did the smart thing, and had our lawyers vet an exceedingly well-written NDA that we ourselves had to sign, and made it our own. But, of course, still being a wee-bit naive, we pushed our NDA through the aether to DA MAN and asked him to sign.

We should have known better.

To put it bluntly…our email was ignored…

Well, maybe not ignored, actually, but unacknowledged. Instead of a signed, partially executed, piece of well-worded, previously-vetted, legalese, we instead got an email with 2-page document attached. It was a form, mostly highlighted in yellow, that DA MAN called a “Proprietary Information Exchange Agreement,” in the nicest language possible.

We were scared. I could just see “Cancer Man” smiling through the smoke, and chortling to himself.

Without even thinking about it, we got our lawyer on the phone.

Then, we called our friends…all of them.

What the devil was this? First we had this request for a “capabilities briefing” and now this? It’s one thing to speak a different language from your potential client/customer/vendor/partner, but when you’re both speaking English and you still don’t understand one another, there’s no place to go but straight down - and down in this context could be someplace where “Civil Liberites” are considered a four-letter word.

It took the better part of a day for us to calm down, while our lawyer went to work. He’d never seen anything like it, and he’s seen it all — he handles cases for the big telcos. He laughed out loud at its complexity, but assured us that after a close read, he found it a pretty simple doc. Nothing to be concerned about.

Turns out that what we got was a sort of checklist that we had to fill out that explicitly spelled out, not only why we were meeting with DA MAN, but who among DA MAN’s henchmen was allowed to talk to us, which one of us were allowed to be spoken to, whether or not the information we were going to exchange was of a classified nature, or could eventually be made classified, which third parties might need to be imdemnified, etc, etc, etc…all with little Microsoft Word checkboxes beside, so filling it out would take no time at all.

Did I mention already that we were scared?

So, we start filling it out, trying not to read it too closely, for fear that somehow, DA MAN would know we were filling it out, right then, in our tiny, little New Jersey office. Never can be too sure, you know.

5 days later, I sent the completed doc to the lawyer again, to have him make sure we didn’t just sign our souls over to the Military-Industrial complex…in blood.

He assured me, again, that we were gonna be ok. He was gonna keep around a copy of the docs in his files, just in case anything strange happened, but nothing should.

I didn’t believe him. Still don’ t know why, but there was a part of me, then, as now, that thinks back to my college-days, sitting under the tutelage of Spike Lee (yeah, that one), and watching with all the college-age paranoia I could muster a screening of “The Spook Who Sat By The Door.”

Heady stuff, back then, but moreso in this moment, ’cause somewhere in the bowels of Harvard’s admissions department, there’s a file with my name on it that says I took that class. And God only know what else we may have done, all of us at Nerditude HQ, prior to the day we received the “Proprietary Information Exchange Agreement.” What if something in our details sets off red flags for DA MAN?

Deep breath…I send the doc, hardly finishing the nicely worded note I’ve appended, that dares to ask the question, “Will you please sign our rinky-dink Mutual NDA now, please, Oh, Purveyor of Untold Darkness….?”

Then, we wait. We wait for four, long, ridiculous days, coding like fiends, and trying to forget that DA MAN has a piece of paper on it with our names and contact info. We’re expecting some black-suited FBI agents or some-such to come by, ringing the doorbell, needing to clarify a few things on the “Proprietary Information Exchange Agreement” we submitted for approval.

Where is Jason Bourne when you need him?

Finally, the fairies of the Internet bring us another email, this time with a four-page document attached. At first, we don’t even bother reading it; we just hit the forward button on the Thunderbird mail client and send it off to “The Law Offices of…”

But, then we started feeling like punks…You know why, so I won’t go into it.

We’re professionals right? They can’t put us into Gitmo for just reading an email, can they?

So, we crack open the doc, and find that just another NDA, although one covered in the kind of government-related legalese that us normal folks just don’t have the pleasure of needing. Anyone ever heard of “DFARS 252.227-7013?”

Me neither.

Of course, all that info we provided in the earlier document had a place in this new one, which bugged-us-out more than a little, but on the whole, it didn’t look too bad. All that panic, and for what?

Hour or two later, our lawyer gives us the go-ahead, and we sign it, agreeing to meet with DA MAN sometime the following week. You know there’s more, but that’s another story for another post. Until then, be well.

Shame on me. I repent - I’m sorry.

I only have two hands, and lately they have been in everyone else’s cookie jars but my own. Jobby requires a wee-bit of bloggin’ durin’ the day, and I find my writer-ly juices dryin’ up on me in the wee hours.

But all that’s gonna change, RIGHT NOW!

Gonna make a commitment RIGHT NOW to blog more often, with each blog post being a little less susceptible to my occasional logorrhoea. Hopefully, that will mean you guys are more informed about what we’re doing, and how. Maybe, I’ll even find a way to cross-post outside the firewall (on the stuff that ain’t secret, ya’ll) and you’ll see where the AppleSeed geek mind is drifting. So, on with the show!

To wit…

• HQ has been picked out finally, and we’re signin’ contracts. We’re gonna be in SoMa like we wanted, in a space that’s literally in the middle of everything. Hopefully, there’ll be so much buzz in the air we won’t be able to stand it and will have to close the windows. More details when the t’s are crossed and the ink don’t drip, but it looks like we’re in the home stretch, and able to get back to coding on a more full-time-like basis.
• We’ve been a-travelin’. MIT Media Lab’s Human 2.0 Symposium, the follow-on Things-That-Think conference, and Where 2.0. Mad props to the peeps we met along the way who have educated us more than a wee-bit. We owe you guys and gals a lot for the inspiration. AppleSeed is already better for just having been exposed to your work.
• SavaJe got bought - big-time. Follow the links for the details, but I’m not tellin’ tales out of school to offer congrats to the team that’s putting the umpf in the Java FX Mobile platform. Way to go team!
• We’re workin’ on puttin’ together some swag for the Nerditude. Hoodies and Ts most likely to start, as that seems to be de rigeur for the Left Coast set. More on that when we get closer, but anyone with some insight on how we can get XXXL hoodies for the full-bodied-nerd set should drop us a line.
• Last, but not least, we’ve been doing some serious integrating of some of our services, moving closer to the vision we’ve had for the AppleSeed tech. Of course, we can’t be specific, but when we’re done, the only excuses for not launching will be on the handset side - not in the network. So maybe, just maybe, we’ll do a really, really secret soft launch for a few peeps to see how we hold up under strain.

That’s it for now, more in a couple of days.

Founding duo…life’s blood of a rag-tag and financially-challenged startup, gets sucked into the money, politics, and intrigue of work at a publicly traded company and loses sight of the important things in life: like puppies, and walks in the park, and changing the world…

…yeah, like that…I know.

You don’t think I know, but I know.

And three months of silence on these pages doesn’t help.

Time to fix that. No cloak-and-dagger stuff for now, just the facts of a much-needed update.

To start, AppleSeed has semi-completed its move, lock-stock-and-dreadlock to the mixed-bag of sunniness and cloudiness that is the San Francisco Bay Area. The company which now employs Desi and me (and thusly funds this lovely effort), is ok. Way too big and too sluggish for us to be truly satisfied, but the money is good, and with the arrangements we’ve made, AppleSeed continues.

And so does the work. Along with continuing development on our platform, we’ve been taking some time to look for new digs (currently, the first AppleSeed node hums beneath the staircase in the corporate apartment we live in). Nothing found yet., but ideally, we’d land somewhere in below Market Street or thereabouts, in a loft space with a buncha space. We’ve got a real nice real estate guy helping us navigate the choices, so I’m thinking this will be the month.

Beyond that, we did a not-so-quick, 2-stop convention tour: 3GSM in Barcelona and Etel in San Francisco over the course of February. Nothing fancy, but you can see some of our trails at places like Hub Culture. Mad props to all the folks we’ve had the chance to meet along the way. Thanks for chatting us up, feeding us when appropriate, and helping us stay excited about what we’re doing.

And for those of you who “got” it, stay in touch - the digits are the same regardless of which coast we’re on.

Now for some bizzi-bizzi-business. We’re making some decisions ’round these parts on handsets, platforms and launch dates, and I’d like to share some of them with you guys to get your feedback. Initially, we’d hoped to launch our platform with a pair of devices (probably separated in time by a few months). The first, owning to our history with SavaJe Technologies was to be a Java-based handset (and I don’t mean some truncated J2ME brick either, I mean real Java).

Now that our pals at SavaJe are in flux, we’re shifting some of our energies to what was to be our second platform, Linux. To that end, we’ve already become fans of both Trolltech and OpenMoko, and will be building our goodies on top of their goodies. Question is, which is the platform that excites you guys most?

And don’t worry, once SavaJe settles, wherever that is, we’ll renew our work there and press forward with it. We really like those guys and their code.

Timelines next: we want to try and do a softlaunch of our services for up to 300 subs within the next 6-8 months, the Fates willing. The date is aggressive and as yet unspecified, but we want to get the word out to find out if 300 is the right number, or if we should save a few ducats and buy fewer phones, or blow-out the bank and buy more.

More info will follow as the time comes nearer, but drop us a line at the email addy above and let us know what you think.

For those souls who reached out to get another helping of our journey with DA MAN, a post along those lines should follow in a few days

You guessed it, DA MAN!

But before I get into all that, lemme first apologize for the lateness of this post. I had wanted to wait until I was able to formally announce our new and unusual financing plans (re: our new jobby-jobs) before finally rendering our harrowing adventures with the Military-Industrial Complex. Sadly, it’s has taken this long for those plans to finally firm up.

But now the wait is over, and it’s official - APPLESEED IS RELOCATING!!!!

We’re relocating our servers, handsets, offices, home-stuffs and our pretty lil’ selves to the glorious climes of San-Fran-cisco, Cal-i-for-ni-A.

Feel me now, people! The Chili Peppers will be singin’ our theme song soon.

More on that when we’ve actually started at the new jobby, but for now, just know that Desi, our intrepid CTO, and I, the hapless teller of these yarns, have accepted an invitation to become a part of a newly-formed Technology Innovation team at a publicly-traded concern.

Don’t even try to guess who, ’cause I guarantee you’ll be wrong.

Anyway, now for the good stuff…dinner…a nice dinner…with DA MAN…

So it all began with an email: a rather sinister sounding email, addressed to the nice lady who heads our Incubator. The email asked for a formal introduction to the principals of AppleSeed Networks - at least that’s they way we’ll tell it to the VCs who will eventually want to know about it.

In actuality, the email asked for a “capabilities briefing” about AppleSeed…and you know they did that deliberately…scaring us…

So of course, we had a thorough freak-out, thinking the NSA was going to take us out, steal our software, hardware and souls, and put us in a bunker beneath a mountain in the Dakotas or something. Immediately, we hit the batphones, contacting everyone we knew who may have had any experience with DA MAN, and his stealthy, undercover mechanations.

The feedback we got was legion: thank you very much peeps. We were told not to fret: that a “capabilities briefing” is just four-star-military-lingo for a meet-and-greet, and that there was little liklihood that we’d see our babies and bodies sold into total right-wing evilness with a first meeting.

We were warned, however, that because of the obvious benefits to some three-letter-acronym’d agencies, and the new 800lb. gorilla on the block, Homeland Security, that there was the possibility, however slight, that an undue interest might be taken in our work. Undue interest can quickly become something pretty darn scary, getting our work declared a “munition,” or a “matter of national security.”

In such a event, AppleSeed could be legally seized by one or more of those aforementioned agencies, and me, Desi, and the Nerditude would be forced to get security clearances to in order to continue our darn project.

If I told you no one slept a wink that night, would you believe me?

But, there was a silver lining…

As it happens, it would very likely be in Uncle Sam’s best interest to allow us to continue our efforts with as few obstacles as possible. Even the government knows that an unhappy engineer is an unproductive engineer - and unproductive engineers don’t build spy weapons so good…

So, we were assured, that we’d probably be kept pretty happy, but would likely have to produce, not one, but two kinds of AppleSeed Networks - one for the powerful, and one for the rest of us.

You know, I should be careful with language like that — they may be watching. The above should have read: “One for law enforcement and capital “I”, intelligence, and the other for commercial purposes.” Remember, we strive for inclusiveness in the Nerditude.

So, after much procrastinating, and Googling, and sweating, and conniving, we sent a reply to DA MAN…

As far as you need be concerned, it said, “blah blah blah, blah blah blah, would welcome the opportunity to introduce you to AppleSeed Networks…blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah…”

Then, we waited. Two days we waited. Was our email being analyzed as some kind of encrypted terrorist “chatter” or some thinly-veiled threat? Would NSA stormtroopers, or some black-clad, Gargoyle-wearing, X-Files-thought-police be kicking in the door of our beloved HQ? Was DA MAN testing us?

No chance, DA MAN was just busy. I guess he has to scare the bejesus out of more folks than just us in a given week.

Eventually, he reached out via a polite phone call to introduce himself. And guess what? DA MAN ain’t nothing like you’d think. He’s not Michael Ironside in “The Falcon and the Snowman”, or the guy who played “Cancer Man” on the X-Files.

You know what he’s like?

Remember the cat who played DA MAN in E.T.? I do, ’cause it was the first time I remember seeing Peter Coyote do his thang on the big screen. DA MAN is like that: chill, but determined - and soft spoken in a way that almost makes you think he’s not capable of total right-wing evilness.

So, DA MAN called us on the phone, and explained in a very mellow, chilled-out way that he was a retired navy guy, who was now working for a gigundus government contractor. The contractor was actively seeking small businesses that might be interested in partnering with them on an SBIR project or two, and our work seemed to impresses them.

You can follow the link to understand more about the SBIRs, but in a nutshell, for a company like AppleSeed, it can mean up to $1Million in government grants to solve problems that we’re probably already solving. That’s grants, not loans - you don’t have to pay them back.

So, without any additional fan-fare or explanation (who needs an explanation when someone is waving $1 Million in your face?), we invited him to our offices, agreeing, like we would do with any kind of commercial interest, to sign a mutual NDA, and then hold a reasonably open conversation.

Now, a little something should be said about this NDA. But I’ve gone too long on this already, and I owe you guys a second post this month anyway, so I’ll stop here, and pick it up from here next time.

So, until then, Merry, Happy, Holy Holidays from the Nerditude. Be good, and if you can’t be, then at least don’t piss off DA MAN!

Well, a lot has happened in those 30 days, fellow nerds. So much so, that I’m rushing today to pump out yet another 15-day-late post. Expect more of the same, next month, as I don’t believe the Fates are yet done with us.

You see, what we didn’t know while on that flight was just how different the horizon would look for AppleSeed once we reached the ground again. Perhaps, we should have been paying better attention - the signs were all there - but somehow, our Jethro Bodine “cypherin’ skills” just weren’t up to snuff.

I could blame it on the jetlag, but if I’m honest with myself, we were just too busy, navel-gazing into the deepest recesses of our Nerdiness, to catch the changes.

Lemme take a step back. When we founded AppleSeed in September, 2005, we knew that the company we were creating wasn’t going to singlehandedly change the mobile industry, so we didn’t try. We just hoped it would empower us enough to give a gentle nudge to some folks, so that they might understand that they were in our way, and politely step aside. Seems friendly enough on the surface, doesn’t it?

Within a few months, we had a host of positive feedback from our advisors, and some really favorable market indicators (i.e. - the costs of getting access to mobile O/S sources plummeted). Patting ourselves on the back at the 2006 3GSM show in Barcelona, we assured ourselves that we were on the right path.

So, of course, we were a bit surprised when some of the “nudgees” pushed back a little. Nothing so bad as a lawsuit or denial-of-service or anything, just an admission by the guys with the purse strings that while they really did like what we were doing, they just didn’t get it.

That’s understandable. One must drink a lot of kool-aid in the Nerditude, and our brand of kool-aid is an aquired taste…

The one thing these money-folks never did compain about, though, was our business model. It was a little complicated, sure, but in the end, it made perfect sense. It was always the one thing in the slide deck we never got a ton of questions on, so we assumed we’d gotten it right.

We were going to ignore the low-hanging fruit of ad-revenue (to the consternation of some) in favor of offering a subscription to a new combination of goods and services for the mobile-internet space. We called the package our “whole product service bundle.”

With this model, an AppleSeed customer wasn’t just a customer, she was a subscriber. Sure, she bought a handset, our handset, but she was also buying an AI, and a webhosting environment, and a whole bunch of new tools and services that she would pay for every month, and use to whatever end she liked. And since we were only going to initially target our handsets and services to Nerds like ourselves, who were already paying for webhosting, we would have a growth curve that was manageable, and not likely to cost us much in “ad spending.”

For us, this was the perfect business. Big enough to serve our subscribers well, and small enough, and niche enough, to survive amid all the fragmentation that’s going on in the mobile markets. I mean, who cares if Vodafone, and T-Mobile and Orange own the lion’s share of the mobile market? We don’t need those kinds of numbers to be successful, and frankly, we wouldn’t know what to do with all those non-Nerds anyway.

But then we got on that plane, and everything changed.

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? It isn’t really.

You see, some 60 days or so before, we’d decided at Nerditude HQ to start exploring some alternative methods of financing our work. Since most of us already had day-jobs, it made sense that the remaining crew would join the bootstrapping-ethic whole-hog, and follow suit. Soon after starting the job hunt, though, we had our first communication with DA MAN, who, asked us, through our incubator, for a “capabilities briefing.”

For the sake of length, I’m gonna save DA MAN story until next month, even though I promised it for this month. Trust me, it gets better with age.

Suffice it to say, after surviving an initial meeting with DA MAN, my CTO and I got on a plane, following behind some phone interviews we had with some companies.

We went out looking for regular, ol’ jobby-jobs, but we came back with something else: a business model we’d been told before was never going to work because the markets were too hostile, and a list of potential customers who each wanted to prove that wrong. So much for regular ol’ jobby-jobs.

It’s still too early for details, but what we’ve learned is that there are some folks out there who want to take some of OUR stuff, and integrate it into THEIR stuff, and pay us to allow them to do it. We’re talking software licensing, people, and it’s never been a path we’ve pursued.

The thing is, with even just a couple of paying customers, building on work we’ve already done, AppleSeed would be able to fund itself, building the company organically, without needing to carve 40+% off to the money men (and women). Think of that, someone paying you, funding you, before the product’s even finished!

Now for the reason for the title of this post. We started out wanting to build an ISP-like, subscriber-based, mobile-internet business, funded initially by the same VCs that were funding so much else. But, if things indeed progress in the way we’re being told, we may wind up with a very different company.

Sure, we’ll keep the ISP-like, subscriber biz — that’s our joy. But in addition, we may have to deal with the harsh reality that other people in the industry are going to see how happy our subs are and want to offer similar levels of service to their customers, even if those customers are not Nerds.

Strange thing is, one of our first advisors, told us to expect this kind of thing. Not the licensing model, specifically, but the confluence of events that would change our company from what we created it to be, to what it wanted to be, what the markets wanted it to be. His assertion was that successful companies rarely end up how they started. They become successful by listening to the markets, and allowing themselves to change to respond to what they hear.

So, we’re listening, and we’re going to consider a change. We’ll explore this new market and model with you, and see where it takes us.

Just be gentle with us…heh heh…

On my third trans-continental flight this month as I draft this…racing the clock and my belabored laptop battery to get this post out.

And as much as I’d like to blame our just being busy, I have to admit that we probably spent too much time ruminating on a theme for this month’s post. So much as happened in the past 30 days, dear reader, that we just couldn’t decide which events were the most important to share.

So, let’s start with you. Among the multitude of little discoveries we made this month was the simple fact that you actually exist — that a whole bunch of people out there in the aether are following our progress via these posts. We know this because we’ve been meeting you, one-on-one, and enjoying every single encounter. Thanks a bunch for the encouragement and the strong votes of confidence. It makes us feel pretty good to know that you all want to see us succeed.

Now to brass tacks: money. We’re still shakin’-the-cup, but the emphasis has changed. We’ve gotten wise to the VC-rap-game, we think, and have pretty much decided that as of this moment, it may not be for us.

That’s the collective US, not the “royal” us.

Among the influencing-agents are these: that most of the VCs we’ve spoken to couldn’t appreciate the ethical and business logic of our plan, which for reasons of not selling out our soon-to-be-subscribing subscribers, we’ve decided to stick to.

You see, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be had in exploiting the technologies produced by AppleSeed. We’ve talked before about our system’s ability to learn about you from your behavior, and use that knowledge to anticipate your needs. Our belief (perhaps our central belief) is that you, the subscriber, should be the one in control of that knowledge: where it goes, what it’s used for, and who is allowed to see it.

You should control what the system knows and says about you: not Google, not Experian, and not some Internet marketer looking to spam you with “more relevant, better targetted” ads.

Now we’re not dumb, despite what you may now be thinking.

If you as an Appleseed subscriber decide to share with Wal-Mart that you have an affinity for Chili Cheese Fritos on Thursdays and Fridays of every alternate week at 5:30 PM PST, then ok - we’ll have tools to make sure that Wal-Mart can find that out. But YOU have to be the one to grant Wal-Mart that kind of access.

In most of our discussions with those holding the purse strings, however, there has been strong encouragement from the money side of the table to scrap our plans for the sake of possibly creating another Google-opolis.

Perhaps we’re just hardheaded, but we’d much rather put our tools, our handset, and our servers into your hands to see what you do with them, rather than do what it takes to secure invitations to the Larry and Sergey show.

Nothing against those guys, but we just don’t see eye-to-eye with how they’re using your data. And let’s not mince words: it is YOUR data - every email, every web search, every digital artifact to your network behavior.

So, alternatives: we need to eat, clearly, and we need to keep the Good-Ship-AppleSeed afloat. Thank goodness there’s no financial imperative to have an immediate solution. Good living means we can take our time with finding a workable solution.

Our approach has been a bit scattershot: emails to friends and colleagues, as well as floating a couple of message-in-a-bottle resumes to see what might come back. We’ve also started some very fruitful discussions with DA MAN, but I’ll save that for a later post when we know more about what HE and his awful machine may want with lil’ ol’ us…

The responses have been legion. We’ve gotten some requests to consult to the financial community in its attempts to overcome the real lack of solid mobility options from the big mobile players; a bunch of straight-on, day-jobby-job interviews; and a lot of face-to-face meetings with some less-than-compelling Web 2.0 plays.

Not to diss all those folks working hard in the Web 2.0 space, but it really does suck that even though AppleSeed seems to have one of the coolest projects going, people (and I don’t just mean finance people) would rather invest time, money, and energy in just another AJAXie web site, targeted at some couldn’t-care-less vertical, and built upon the premise that once it’s running, advertisers will come in droves to give it (and not the googleplex) vast quantities of cash.

Anyway…

…while the jury is still out on our direction, we have managed to find a couple of options that involve exercising our considerable and varied talents to help some pretty solid companies innovate. And we can do this while we continue to build AppleSeed.

In fact, for a couple of these potential employers, our maintaining AppleSeed as a going concern is a pre-requesite for landing the job.

So, how cool is that?

Once the dust settles, I’ll deliver some more details about AppleSeed’s new funding sources, and give up what goodies we have on our dance with DA MAN!

Knock yourselves out…and don’t worry, we didn’t forget the top-10 goodies.

In one of our late-night coding sessions at Nerditude HQ, we got around again to the subject of explaining ourselves. We manage to fall into this discussion a lot lately, as it seems that most folks experiencing us for the first time have neither read the same sci-fi books we have, nor watched the same anime. I guess it does make sense that not everyone can have enjoyed the same misspent youth we did. Heh heh…

It’s a shame really, because had they wasted as much time as we did consuming tattered paperbacks, and watching badly dubbed “cartoons,” we might have a common shorthand - an essential ingredient in easily propelling the AppleSeed Networks pitch. What we get instead are questions like:

Q: So, how’s this like mobile-darling-of-the-minute, Company X?
A: In general, it’s completely different…

and

Q: I’ll be able to download this onto my Razr, right?
A: No, not unless Moto is reading our email…

The inevitable conclusion of our late-night HQ pow-wows is usually that we re-realize there are a couple of major leaps that people seem to need to make to really understand the problem that AppleSeed Networks is trying to solve.

Q: So, this is like a better, smarter, cellphone, right?
A: Uh…sure, but there’s more, a whole lot more.
Q: Cool, so does it play mp3s?…

So, let’s take one of those leaps, one bigger than the one we addressed in June.

The Leap:
Forget everything you know about web servers
– they ain’t just for websites anymore.

Let me explain. Most folks, when they think about mobile handsets and services, tend not to associate them with web servers or web hosting, unless it’s in the context of mobile web browsing. A user flips open a handset, launches Opera (or whatever mobile browser she fancies), uses GPRS or WiMax or whatever the appropriate network bearer may be, and connects to a website which is really just a web server that delivers web pages. Lotta technology in that sentence, but for us, very little of it is relevant.

You see, the going logic in both mobile and internet industries is that web servers are for publishing or delivering or serving content, usually to vast numbers of semi-anonymous people, and always through the browser-du-jour. Granted, some of the Web 2.0 social software initiatives have begun to rewrite that logic (Furl, del.icio.us, last.fm), introducing the idea that servers can be used for other purposes, but, in the end, the intent is still to publish, to deliver or to serve content to that vast number of semi-anonymous people, through a web browser.

Now, for the what if…

What if we thought instead about a web server that was intended to satisfy only one person, YOU.

You might want to extend it to publish or deliver or serve to millions, but that’s really your choice. You’ll have the tools to do that. But the main reason this server exists is to learn about you, to discover things for you, to anticipate your needs and to inform you about things that matter to you.

It’ll give you a beat to think on that one…

…got it?…

Good.

So, let’s add another layer to that idea. What if this new server was fully integrated into the cellular phone or PDA that you carried around with you everyday, so that it was always available.

Now, wouldn’t you rather carry that in your pocket?

Time to shut up now and get back to the code.

This post was originally titled “the top 10 reasons VCs pass on ASN, or what’s wrong witchu, Mr. VC?” The post you’re reading now, is NOT that post in its entirety. After some conversation with our advisors about the intelligence (or lack thereof) of biting the hand that might feed, the top 10 has been removed. In the interest of full disclosure, though, the top 10 will be published on a personal blog of one of the founders, and we’ll post a link here…

The Post:

So, I gotta start with an apology. I’m truly sorry for missing last month’s installment of the Incredible Mis-Adventures of Them Crazy Geeks on Planet AppleSeed. We got mad busy over here getting to another milestone, and the time got away from us. To make it up to you, intrepid readers, I’ll commit to not one, but TWO posts this month…HA HA!

So, what was the milestone?…

…that, we cannot yet say, but it was VERY cool! Personal kudos to the team for pulling some long hours to make it happen, too. You may not get the praise of the Nerditude just yet, but you will.

I will say this though, because it’s just not fair to mention something this cool and not address it at least a little…

…the world is catching up to us…in a major way. There are elements of the mobile value chain that are beginning to recognize some of the collisions we alluded to in June, and they’re beginning to act on them. Expect to see a surge of interest in the comings-and-goings of developers, by operators, handset developers, mobile o/s vendors, software houses, and retail chains in the months ahead.

At first, I figured that the telcos were just getting tired of getting their butts kicked by Web 2.0. But now it’s clear that a lot more is going on…

…It makes us so happy…

So, now for the point. As the title implies, we’re preparing for the next leg of our “Shakin’ The Cup” World Tour. Given that much of our current momentum has come from industry partnerships, and not from funding sources, I thought it would be worthwhile for those of you out there with entrepreneurial aspirations to get a glimpse of what rejection from a VC can sound like.

I should preface this, though, by saying that we have NOT had more than our fair share of rejections. And while we’re not bulletproof-by-a-long-shot, we do have a level of conviction about our work that allows us to see the humor of these rejections.

Some folks just won’t get it. Period.

Regardless of what you do.

You just have to keep going, NO MATTER WHAT.

So…the top 10 reasons why VCs pass on ASN…

…that’s the end of the original post, sans humorous top 10. For the common good (I hope) we have censored ourselves, and I’d like to make sure you understand why. And no, it’s not just because we want VC money!

AppleSeed Networks wants to be as inclusive as possible. We want everyone to join the party. That everyone has to include all the telcos, financiers, handset vendors, power brokers…all the current players in the mobile and internet space.

Now, it doesn’t really matter that we might consider some of these folks, “dysfunctional,” they still need to be included, and including them sometimes means being sensitive to their needs, as well as our own, and the needs of our eventual subscribers.

We learned in 1st grade: being sensitive often means not saying the thing that’s on your mind, especially when it might hurt someone else’s feelings.

Say it with me: If you can’t say something nice…

So, we’re going to play nice, and hope the other kids on the playground will learn from our example. Check back for the link to the top 10. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days before it’s up.

Cutting to the chase: As you know, ASN is working on some big ideas. And some days, those big ideas are a little too big (or perhaps just a little too ambitious) for some of the people we’ve pitched them to. Perhaps, we’re just too far ahead of the curve, or maybe it’s just that we’re not good enough yet at articulating the company’s broad vision, its tactical plan, and its methods for executing on that plan. Most times though, we manage to convince ourselves that the vast majority of the folks who have heard the pitch are just not exposed to enough of the collisions we see happening in the our markets to understand why we’re relevant.

Nobody’s fault - folks just need to be educated.

I’m not sure if the metaphor will ring true to anyone outside ASN, but some days, pitching ASN (while avoiding an explanation of certain fundamentals like sovereign identity, or myware, or stupid networks or why any of these things are important to the futures of mobility, advertising, and user experience) can feel Sisyphean. Yet another big idea, sure, but you don’t have to know Homer or Camus to be able to appreciate the sinking feeling that even if you manage to make yourself understood, you can’t always be sure it’s really worth the effort.

Some, just won’t get it.

Ever.

Regardless of what you do.

Man, that sounds exclusive…and ASN is not exclusive. We want everyone to come to the party.

Back to the collisions: there are a lot of them, and even if we ignore the ones mentioned above, a “pitchee” (to have a fighting chance) would at least need exposure to some somewhat disparate nuggets like the work of Surj Patel, or the goals of the SVHMPC, or possibly access to the “open phone” rumors that currently circulate within the mobile value chain. There’s a lot going on before you even get to the sociological and theoretical stuff.

And don’t even get me started on the politics…

Frankly, it’s all pretty daunting. And until we can make it possible for people to become regular readers of ASN’s digital notebooks or concept feeds (neither of which I’m, technically, allowed to talk about), we’re going to continue to have this problem.

So we hatched a solution: we started explaining ourselves…

…from the beginning…in short sentences.

We put together a powerpoint that we called “Building Stuff From The Stuff I Like” and started trying to use it in our pitches. For the sake of clarity, we kept it short, and only focused on ASN’s “secret sauce,” some general observations and core principles. We deliberately left out any real talk about technology and marketing and finance.

You can find a 3-page excerpt here. I hope it proves useful to you in understanding where our “head is at.” In the coming months, we’ll bring more stuff like this online so that anyone who wants to, can get a front-row seat when the sum of the collisions becomes crystal clear.

Welcome to the Nerditude, ya’ll.

However, over the last few days, the truth of this statement has come into sharp focus for me, and so I decided to drop a word or two about it here. Some background: when I was a mere lad, there was a song I listened to everyday for days on end, while I studied in school (yeah, I went to a school where we could wear headphones and blast music during study periods). The song, by a band named Daniel Amos, was titled, “(It’s The 80’s, So Where’s Our) Rocket Packs?”

Despite the title, the theme of the song isn’t at all obvious, and if someday you want to look it up, ping me here via email and I can point you in the right direction.

But the title is what is germaine to this post. It implies a sort of ironic consumer frustration with the lethargic forward motion of human technical progress — an assessment of the current state of things, and how they rarely meet up with what we have been promised.

And we have been promised so much, haven’t we?

I could launch into a bit of a rant, here, about what’s wrong with the collective industries of which ASN considers itself a part, but I’ll restrain myself to just three points:

1. Despite how amazing the Web 2.0 vision of the future is, it’s a future that’s tethered to the desktop.
2. The mobile future, as delineated by the telcos and MNOs, doesn’t look much better - it’s cookie-cutter, corporate, closed, and exclusive.
3. The best thing about Open Source isn’t the free code; it’s the enthusiasm and cooperation of the innovators to build something that doesn’t have to make a financial killing to be successful.

So what does any of this have to do with a banned handset?

Plenty.

If you haven’t otherwise figured it out by now, ASN is a company trying to build something that hasn’t really existed before - a device and a network that knows who you are, and can be extended by you to do things that only someone or something with intimate knowledge of you, can. It’s open, and inclusive. It’s mobile, and its features are limited only by what you allow it to know about you, and what your imagination can create from what it figures out.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to call the device the “banned” handset, but over the lifetime of ASN, I suspect it’ll be called many other things, if only because the ideas behind it extend far beyond anything you could hold in your hand. It’s “banned” because of the great many forces that seem to be aligned against it ever existing - all those self-interested folks in mobile and internet and software and hardware and finance, who have good reason to be suspect of a future that won’t necessarily depend on them as the primary sources of innovation. Because, when the “banned” handset finally exists, all the markets these people care about will change, and there will be one fewer excuse for the lethargic forward motion of human technical progress.