Back in July, Brad Feld wrote a post titled "The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere".  I’m not sure if he coined the term or not, but I like its meaning.

For those of you that are less of a physics nerd than me, dark matter is something astrophysicists have been struggling with for a while.  Simply put, the Universe doesn’t have enough stuff in it to work the way it does.  The most viable explanation is that there is a _lot_ of stuff we can’t see or detect easily a.k.a. Dark Matter.

In the case of the blogosphere, Brad was referring specifically to reader comments.  There’s a huge volume of user generated content out there in the form of blog comments, and for the most part it is unsearchable and effectively invisible.  Folks like Disqus and Intense Debate are working hard to resolve this.

But I think the concept of Dark Matter is very applicable to data in general. 

Think about all of the data in your life.  How much useful information do you have that is effectively hidden and invisible?  This is as true for an individual as it is for a corporation.  Some of this information is hidden by virtue of being hard to search or hard to access… and some is hidden because it isn’t explicit — it’s "implied" by the way things have been collected, organized, or used.

So lets take a quick look at each case…

Hard to search:

The original idea for disruptorMonkey stemmed from a personal problem…  Like many of you, I have the "big box of crap" that I’ve accumulated from many different jobs.  It includes CD-ROMs of data, printed stuff, handwritten notes and numerous other treasures.  About 18 months ago, I needed to put together some sales training materials for someone.  I dug in to the big box and it took me 4+ days to organize, recreate and assemble what I needed.  It was a nightmare.  Incensed at the stupidity of the process, I started looking for a better way, which quickly lead me to set up a wiki.  Wiki’s can be great, but they’re mostly hopeless with existing data unless you reformat it for the wiki…which is a huge pain.

The underlying issue was the fact that the data was hard to search, which made it difficult to organize and repurpose.

Hard to access:

Last week I was talking to a banker, who happened to have majored in IT systems.  I was explaining some of what we do, and he started telling me about some of his data woes.  The biggest one stemmed from the fact that some banking systems are built on fairly old databases.  You’ve probably seen the horrible green-screen terminal-window interfaces in use at your local bank.  These UI’s have zero flexibility and are the result of many years of development, much of it seemingly without input from the people using the product.

Even though the whole thing is just a database, he has no way whatsoever to run unique queries.  For example, he would love to be able to search for customers with a $5,000-$10,000 personal line of credit.  The data he needs is in the database, but he has no way to access it, so from a practical perspective it doesn’t exist in any meaningful way.

Implied Data:

The discussion I had with Brad before Thanksgiving was about how Exchange server contains a lot of interesting "implied" data, above and beyond the obvious email & social network info.  Your Outlook/Exchange account says an awful lot about you and the things your interested in… along with who you talk to and what you talk about.

That’s not data that is readily exposed in any useful way, although companies like Xobni are making some headway on that front.

All three of these scenarios are about "dark matter" data.  There’s a lot incredibly important information that’s there, waiting to be mined, but today’s tools mostly can’t see or use it.

One of our longer term goals at disruptorMonkey is to build a tool that not only captures all that dark matter, it’ll put it to work and make it useful.

There’s much to do, but we’re excited with the progress we’ve made so far…

Categories: Old Posts
1131 Comment »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/11/29/feldian-dark-matter-and-superabundant-data/Feldian+Dark+Matter+and+Superabundant+data...2007-11-29+22%3A16%3A00NickN

This packaging made me laugh. I’m just not sure those two phrases should appear right next to each other on the box… especially not in that order…

Maybe baked pony is tastier than the usual Easy-Bake stuff???

Categories: Old Posts
112No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/11/28/you-want-fries-with-that/You+want+fries+with+that%3F2007-11-28+17%3A47%3A33NickN

It’s a well-worn cliche to refer to a startup as a roller coaster — I think I’ve even used that analogy here
a few times.  But as with many cliches, it exists for a reason.

The past month has been a tough one.  We’ve been working on some big UI updates to the product and Logan has been stuck in debug hell for weeks.  It kills me to see a smart and talented guy beating his brains out to come up with workarounds for other people’s crappy code (primarily CSS/browser display bugs).

And of course, the fact that we didn’t have the shiny new UI has had a knock-on effect throughout the business.  We’ve held off on pushing beta accounts while we get the new code under control, and that means we didn’t have the updates we’d like to have had for potential investors.  Now the holidays are looming, so funding-related activity is going to slow to a crawl until next year.

On the personal front, there have been some bumps in the road too.  My daughter had a week of relatively high fevers and was home from daycare.  She’s an absolute trooper when sick, but it was pretty much impossible to get work done.  My poor wife was stuck with a sick toddler, needy husband and very little sleep.  My car was in for maintenance and the idiots failed AGAIN to fix what was wrong while keeping the car for a day at a time.

We’ve also had a bunch of unexpected expenses, which hits hard when you’re paycheck-challenged.  Our aged dryer bit the dust, and it turned out that the cunning tile work done by the previous owner of this house is EXACTLY the wrong size for any dryer currently being manufactured.

And to cap it all off, we were rejected by the Amazon Startup Challenge folks too.  I looked at the finalists, and even if I hadn’t already been in a foul mood, I have to say that mostly I don’t get it.  Some of the companies chosen sound very interesting, but a couple are, in my opinion, faddish crap.

But then this happened (yes, you’ll have to click to find out).  Logan has triumphed over many ugly bugs, and life is good again.  The sexy new dryer (trust me, if you saw it, you would agree that it is sexy) is (a) installed and (b) sextastic. 

The sun is shining (okay, only metaphorically — it’s 1:47am) and life is good.

Behold, the roller coaster

P.s. Thanks again for the incredible support we get from our spouses.  The wheels would have come off long ago without it.

Categories: Old Posts
1115 Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/11/26/weeeeeeeeeeeeeee/Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee...2007-11-26+06%3A51%3A29NickN

Last post before the holiday.

I’m a fan of "put up or shut up" philosophy: if you don’t like something, take steps to change it or quit moaning about it.

Early stage funding for NC-based software startups is a mess.  By early, I mean pre-revenue / trying to get to a proof-of-concept.  So very very very early by VC standards and merely very very very early by Angel standards.

Back in April, Dharmesh Shah posted some interesting thoughts on yCombinator and early stage funding at Onstartups.com.  In case your click-finger is inoperable, the gist of it was that Dharmesh committed to putting some modest early stage funds on the table.  It wasn’t much — just $15k — but that’s more than enough to get a ball rolling for the right kind of team.

So in the spirit of PuSu, I’m going to make a commitment:

Once disruptorMonkey is profitable, I will set aside funds to do the same thing.  It may only be one company a year, but we will figure out a way to make it work. 

Now it may take 2-3 years for us to get there, so don’t email me about it today… But consider this a promise I intend to keep.

And if I can convince other local entrepreneurs to do the same thing, maybe we can start moving the needle and get this area moving.

Categories: Old Posts
110No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/11/21/put-up-or-shut-up/Put+Up+or+Shut+Up...2007-11-21+21%3A52%3A00NickN

I just heard that Todd Barr has started blogging.

Todd is a senior marketing guy with a tiny company you may have heard of called Red Hat. 

Those of you that know me will doubtless have heard me talk about how dumb/useless/bogus most marketing/marketers can be.  Todd is one of the very few marketing people that I’m continually impressed by. 

If you have any interest in reading about marketing done right, his blog is well worth your time.

Categories: Old Posts
109No Comments »http://blog.nicholasnapp.com/2007/11/21/a-new-nc-blog-you-should-read/A+new+NC+blog+you+should+read2007-11-21+16%3A06%3A10NickN