The problem with putting all of one’s effort into a startup is that one is no longer free to pursue other ideas. Such is life.
The benefit of having a blog, on the other hand, is that one is free to give away ideas. This one has the potential to have a meaningful little life — it’s not the next Google, but neither does it try to be, and would be a great social experiment, taking a wave and riding it to its logical conclusion. If it tickles your fancy, by all means, run with it. I only want a token percentage of your company, the rest is yours ;-) All the technological components already exist, and many have been put together in somewhat similar ways for different purposes. This one’s unique not because of technology, but because of what it uses that technology for.
Conferences have lately been shedding their formal structure. The unconference trend is the most prominent example, typified by Foo Camp and more lately the grassroots BarCamp. Others are more targeted at specific purposes and niches, such as Startup Weekend. All are characterized by spontaneity and a shift in focus from the agenda to the participants. Today, this trend is mostly centered in the hardcore techie world, but there’s no reason it should remain isolated to that niche.
At the same time, it’s becoming clear that social interactions online are growing exponentially, from Facebook to Twitter to TokBox, facilitated by the sudden ease of accessing rich functionality while armed with nothing more than a browser.
Pico Conference – which needs a better name – would take the trend of informal, highly interactive, niche conferences to its extreme by forming impromptu conferences online with only a handful of attendees interested in a particular topic.
First you hit the Pico Conference site (or use the corresponding FaceBook app) and tell it what you’re interested in: clothing design, Ruby development, investing, indy filmmaking, whatever. For each topic, you let the system know roughly how experienced you are. You give it your email address or IM or what-have-you, and you’re done.
When enough individuals have expressed compatible interests (allowing for the fact that only a particular fraction would actually be likely to attend) — e.g. 20 intermediate-level Haskell users, or 10 novice poker players and one expert — the system automatically sets up a pico conference and notifies the prospective participants. Repeats for individuals are avoided; that is, if Joe has attended a conference for wilderness survivalists recently, it won’t invite him to another for a while.
The conference is held in the browser, letting people tune in through one- or two-way Flash-based video, or audio only, or even just IM. There would be a simple, minimal shared workspace to publish slides, throw up images, send links around, etc.
From there, it’s up to the participants, strangers with common interests. The goal is to have casual, intimate, and optionally highly-targeted conferences where attendees can learn from one another and freely discuss subjects of interest. If you’re a novice, you can learn, if you’re an expert, you can teach (and gradually become well-known as an expert in a field), and everybody can exchange ideas and share experience. Some conferences would set up a clear set of expert presenters to start things off, others would be purely among peers.
Variations are possible, of course. “Serial experts” would host a cross between a video blog and a conference. These individuals would host semi-regular sessions on topics of interest to them, and subscribers would be notified of upcoming sessions (a day or two in advance, perhaps, and possibly with a topic) so that they can attend if they like. But these aren’t just live video blogs, they’re fully interactive discussions — preceded, perhaps, by monologues by the host — moderated as much or as little as the host likes. Ask questions, disagree, whatever.
The system would even set up topical mixes for one-off conferences — such as “XML + Java” or “third-world travel + photography”.
Even though the basic service would need to be free, monetization isn’t tough — freemium with any of a variety of limits; or ad-supported; or even having money flow from attendee to presenter for a subset of conferences.
Well, there it is. I’d love it if somebody tried it — it shouldn’t be that hard to set up, and could be a very interesting (and useful) experiment.
Me, I’m back to working on Jectiv.