too legit…

If I ramble, you’ll have to forgive me…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!