danhou.com

For the past year, I’ve been experimenting with, starting and running a few online small businesses.  The most recent is a startup guide that I co-authored with my fellow Wharton alumni and former Microsoft colleague Peter Burchhardt.

I’m extremely pleased with the way Fundamentals for Founders: A Practical Guide to Kick-Starting Your Business turned out, and feel it does an excellent job distilling the learnings from both my entrepreneurial and corporate career.

If you only have a passing interest in startup and aren’t remotely interesting in purchasing an ebook, then the blog might be a good place for you to begin.  We’re still learning at a ravenous pace, so definitely check back periodically for updates!

- Dan

For those of you who know me well, I’ve been dreaming about long-term ’round-the-world travel since college. I’ve done a fair bit of traveling since then, taking side trips to Mexico and Japan, but nothing remotely approaching the epic scale that I had originally envisioned. Like many, I became caught up in the typical whirlwind of life - career, mortgage, pet. All elements absolutely enriched my life, but were equally threatening in that they created complacency.

Now, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve given 4 weeks notice, made arrangements to sell my home, purchased RTW airfare and will be traveling throughout Asia, the Middle East and Southern Africa for most of 2008!

I could have taken the plunge years ago, and I very nearly did on a couple of different occasions. So why now? How are my circumstances different?

• My girlfriend was getting frustrated at work, and was ready for a change of pace. Grad school was definitely on her horizon and we had always talked about traveling together.
• I purchased my home in 2006. I’m pretty fortunate in that the Seattle real estate is one of the few markets that has continued to experience gains. I’ve also lived in my place long enough now that I’ll be exempt from capital gains tax.
• I’ve been busy the past few months with a new role within Motorola, developing high end entertainment handsets. Its super exciting with plenty of visibility, but I finally realized that there is always a great opportunity just around the corner that entices you to maintain the status quo. If I wasn’t careful, I’d wake up one day in my mid-40’s being very accomplished professionally, but still not having checked off one of my lifetime to-do’s.

The current itinerary is pretty rough and takes into account my slower, more lethargic travel style. Sarah and I will start out in Beijing, working our way through Central China and end up in Lhasa in time for Losar. After spending a month or so in Tibet, we’ll head over to Yunnan to mix things up with some of China’s more interesting minority ethnic groups. From there, we’ll meander down the Mekong, passing through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

A long, long flight connecting in Frankfurt takes us to Cairo, where we’ll spend a couple of months in Egypt and Jordan (and perhaps Israel, if I can assuage Sarah’s safety concerns). Then its off to Johannesburg, which will be our window into Southern Africa. We’ll definitely visit Mozambique, possibly Zimbabwe or Botswana, and the plan is to spend some serious time volunteering in South Africa.

At the moment, my top choices in terms of non-profits include Kiva and OLPC. If you’ve got suggestions on organizations where my tech/business background would come in handy, feel free to send them to me.

I’m starting to appreciate the irony of Pandora’s choice in brand.

Pandora is an online music service that has taken an interesting approach to personalized internet radio. They’ve identified over 400 attributes that capture the essence of a given piece of music. I don’t know exactly how this works, but I imagine some of these attributes must include aspects like tempo or major vs minor keys or which instruments were used to create the music. By mapping out the music genome of hundreds of thousands of songs, Pandora is able to create streaming radio stations tailored to your tastes.

Its a pioneering music service that does an incredible job exposing listeners to obscure yet relevant artists. Unfortunately for music aficionados, Pandora seems to be living up to its namesake.

While Pandora (the webcaster) hasn’t necessarily introduced new evils to the world, by attempting to create a truly innovative digital music service, it is calling attention to evils which already exist.

In this case, Pandora’s box is the music industry and when it was open, out came SoundExchange, the Copyright Royalty Board and international music licensing. Here’s a quick recap of two litigious events which have recently besieged this company:

• SoundExchange is the branch of the RIAA which governs radio. They’ve gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to approve a request to increase the royalty which internet radio companies must pay by 300% - 1200%. This rate hike makes most internet radio business models completely unviable. The only option small companies like Pandora have for survival is to strike deals directly with the labels. This something which would almost certainly entail handing over programming control and ruin precisely that which makes Pandora so great. Major labels will either further line their pockets or gain enough control to promote their top 40 stable of artists.

• The beauty of the internet is that it gives anyone instant global distribution for digital content. As word has spread virally about Pandora, listeners from all over the globe have begun tuning in and creating their own custom radio stations. Unfortunately, due to licensing constraints, Pandora is being forced to block access to their service outside of the US. Knowing how fragmented the international licensing landscape is, it could take years before Pandora is able to open its doors back to foreigners.

At the end of the day, its the small, innovative music services and ultimately music fans everywhere that lose.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end here. House Representatives Jay Inslee and Donald Manzullo are introducing the Internet Radio Equality Act which if approved would neutralize the rate hike. SaveNetRadio is a newly formed grassroots coalition of artists, listeners and webcasters with the same goals in mind. Pandora is actively working on acquiring the licenses needed to operate outside of the US.

Much like the Greek myth, Pandora finds that in spite of the tragedy, there’s still something left at the very bottom of the box - hope.

I realized the other night that I’m a gamer, through and through.

The significant portion of my past times revolves around games - sports, video games, board games. I’ve recently become obsessed with pickup soccer games, Gears of War and Settlers of Catan.

I saw a show the other night which claimed that games are appealing because, unlike real life, they have clearly defined rules. People enjoy games because it puts them in a restricted environment that they can easily grasp and maintain control over.

I find that hard to believe, because in many of the most enjoyable games that I’ve played, the best aspects of the games were where the rules were loose, or there were no rules. Take Settlers, for instance. Some of the greatness of the game stems from the fact that players are free to negotiate trading terms with each other. Its just so much fun to develop creative deals that helps you and hurts your opponent in extremely devious ways.

The same goes for soccer. Sure, there’s supposedly a penalty system that constrains the game. But if anyone has watched UEFA, you’ll know that the penalty system only matters if you get caught. Every game has its fair share of shoving, pushing, shirt pulling, shit talking. Zizou nearly got away with the infamous headbutt - the refs didn’t even realize what had happened until they saw a replay of it on the jumbotron.

Point is, the notion that games have strict rules is a fallacy. So why do people enjoy games so much then?

I would argue that its not about the means, but the end. The fact that there even is an end is why games are so appealing. In real life, you might have a short term goal. But inevitably, once you’ve achieved your objective, it gives rise to a dozen new ones. Or there’s something else completely out of left field for you to tackle. In the work place, is your job ever truly done? What about renovating a house?

Any game has a clear end to the struggle. Win or lose, at some point the game is over and there’s a chance to start fresh again with a new game. If only we could say the same about life.

It’s funny. Just last week I had mentioned to Jason how the timing is ripe for someone to completely revolutionize the way we communicate with one another by seamlessly integrating voice and text. Meebo has already bridged the gap between chatting applications, and Skype has crossed the chasm between phone and PC.

Lo and behold, MobileCrunch conveniently released exclusive coverage this morning about Nimbuzz, a startup based out of the Netherlands. As Oliver writes:

Nimbuzzes primary value proposition is that it connects the 2.2 billion users of mobile with the 1.1 billion Internet users in real time and for free. The application supports voice, presence and messaging and it does so between mobile devices, PC’s, and mobile to PC or PC to mobile.

This is definitely a step in the right direction, but there is so much more that could be done around a truly unified messaging system. What’s ultimately required is a single point of contact across communication medium. With a combination of presence and personalization functionality, a Nimbuzz-like service should be able to identify which medium is the most appropriate to contact you, using natural language processing to convert between voice and text.

If you’re at work, a business partner trying to call you should be automatically re-directed to your work phone. If that doesn’t work, the call should again re-direct to your cell phone. In the same instance, if the caller had been deemed a lower priority, the call should automatically go to voicemail, which gets converted to an email and dropped into your work inbox. It would be similar to having your own digital admin.

This is a very real scenario which could be supported with existing technologies and becomes even more viable with the advent of IMS and IPv6. I wonder when we’ll see someone with the right skill set to step up to the plate and make this happen.