Great Q&A on entrepreneurship.

Marc Andreessen is soft-selling his new VC fund, but he does it in a way to provide a real value to listeners beyond letting them know about his investment philosophy.

On criteria for selecting a business idea.

It is quite similar to criteria of selecting an investment:
1. Biggest market (new or existing)
2. 10x change in technology (or economic change). The premise is that existing companies "generally do a good job" at what they do, so you need a leverage of a profound change to start a new company
3. Team that includes at least one technologist. Two is better than one.
4. A product that becomes a company is better than a company that decides to build a product.

Q: "Can a mobile app company have enough potential to fundable?"
A: "It depends".
He is avoiding category-based investment decisions or presuming anything about company's potential simply by the fact it belongs to one or the other category. Example he gave is "enterprise software" was considered dead category in the begging of 00s, but resulted in great investments.

On building a team:
Recruiting and talking people out of quitting are the two hardest things to do at a startup. Selling a vision is a key skill for the funding team.

Great point about the value of "polarizing" product. It is OK to have lots of people hate the product as long as there are people who really love it. Describing your company in stark terms helps filter out candidates who aren't the right fit anyway.

Montreal is a happening place. There’s StartupDrinks. There’s the launch of a new seed fund, Founder Fuel. The announcement of another StartupCamp. There comes two new players: StartupSquare and MontrealNewTech.

StartupSquare

StartupSquare is hosting their kick off event on April 13, 2010. The group is made up students at McGill University, Concordia University, HEC Montreal, and other local universities. The goal of the group is to help promote entrepreneurship and commercialization to create growth companies. It is roughly modeled on Aalto Entrepreneurship Society which was started by StartupSquare co-organizer Riku Seppala.

Montreal New Tech

Montreal New Tech is headed by Felipe Coimbra aka TwtFelipe who got some coverage this week by Mark Suster around US immigration policy and the Founder Visa. MTLNewTech is a great example of the evolution of community. It has taken the best part of DemoCamp, Web Innovators Group, TECHCocktail and other events over the past formative years. And it has evolved to help enable, educate and connect local tech entrepreneurs, i.e., it’s Felipe doing the things that help him with 63 Squares and YowTrip!

It is great to see entrepreneurs take responsibility for ensuring that the events and activities they need and want are created. Make sure you check out both of these groups, they are doing great things.

Many have some to realize the revolutionary notion of multitouch, but this video really make the point crystal clear. I cannot think of another general-purpose computer user interface that can pass such a test.

Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail service has supported standard API protocols like POP and IMAP at no extra cost to our users. These efforts are consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.

In addition to making it easier for users to export their data, we also enable them to authorize third party (non-Google developed) applications and websites to access their data at Google. One of the more common examples is allowing a social network to access your address book in order to send invitations to your friends.

While it is possible for a user to authorize this access by disclosing their Google Account password to the third party app, it is more secure for the app developer to use the industry standard protocol called OAuth which enables the user to give their consent for specific access without sharing their password. Most Google APIs support this OAuth standard, and starting today it is also available for the IMAP/SMTP feature of Gmail.

The feature is available in Google Code Labs and we have provided a site with documentation and sample code. In addition, Google has begun working with other companies like Yahoo and Mozilla on a formal Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP (learn more at the OAuth for IMAP mailing list).

One of the first companies using this feature is Syphir, in their SmartPush application for the iPhone, as shown in the screenshots below. Unlike other push apps, Sypher's SmartPush application never sees or stores the user’s Gmail password thanks to this new OAuth support.

We look forward to finalizing an Internet standard for using OAuth with IMAP/SMTP, and working with IMAP/SMTP mail clients to add that support.

By Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager

I was going to say this is very similar to http://dummyimage.com but with more options, but it looks like they've also added colour and text options too.

trovster - 20th March 2010 16:03 - #

I believe that one of the reasons for the lack of innovation in the email space is the lack of a simple yet powerful email access protocol. Every developer that wants to try something with email needs to first jump through the hoops of IMAP and MIME, or worse, the Outlook Object Model and MAPI. A new protocol like reMAP would lift this burden off their shoulders. We've seen what open, simple standards can do for innovation with Twitter's and Flickr's API. Now imagine unleashing the same sort of creativity to the vast ocean of data that is email.

Web apps that generate and host personal information are providing that information to apps via OAuth. Email - on of the key datatypes of personal information - is still only accessible via non HTTP protocol. It is time for a change.

I suspect that Google re-hiring Gabor (and killing reMail in the process) has a lot to do with this vision.

Every so often you experience a technical problem you can’t find any information about and which takes you forever to solve. Then, after you finally solve it, you are left scratching your head saying, “I don’t get it­—there must be millions of people with this problem—why is there so little information about it?

This post is a powerful illustration that the design online identity are much harder to get right than it seems. Unfortunately there the industry didn't yet find the design pattern that works. And the problem is growing with the number of people that have multiple email addresses and multiple identities.

Google clearly didn't get it right. Anyone else has?