Ryan A Graves.com

*click on the pic to watch live

This afternoon I watch the BearHug Camp hosted by Steve Gillmor.  The event was focused on the progress of the micro-blogging space. One of the main topics of conversation was around live search of the Twitter data. Currently there is nothing that is “real time” and for political purposes among others this service is much desired.

Evan, Biz, and Alex from Twitter came just before lunch and they really took a lot of heat. Many of the comments online stated that it seemed that Steve set this group up to “gang” up on the Twitter crew. My perception is that this is probably true. The guys were put on the spot big time about how they will listen to the developer community going forward. Alex’s response was that his email is an open door for suggestions, comments, concerns (alex@twitter.com).

In attendance from my point of view (online) was Loic Lemeur (Seesmic), Leo Laporte (TwiT Army) who livestreamed the event, Dave Winer (Scripting.com), Ari Steinberg (Facebook), Kevin Marks (Google Open Social), Angus Logan (Microsoft), identi.ca guys, among a group of developers in their respective fields. There was a lot of talk around XMPP becoming just as common as HTTP so that the web can be much more LIVE!

My take-aways: This event was interesting but the stubbornness of Steve Gillmor and the politically motivated conversations took away from the event. The best part of the event that I enjoyed the most was the time that Evan, Biz, and Alex were there. The conversation although tough for them was the most focused that it had been all day. I see a huge push for the web to become more and more “live”. The web used to be static, now it’s updated, next it will be live!

As many of you well know I’m a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV. Gary is authentic and uses that authenticity to build great businesses. A few weeks ago I reached out to Gary for a spotlight on ActionsTalk, my start-up that features great entrepreneurs and allows them to tell their story to our viewers.  We sent Gary the topic questions as a guide for his spotlight and he filmed this week. During filming and thinking about growing a business he decided to address the topic of small business growth and this video was posted on his personal site garyvaynerchuk.com.

Then Loic Lemeur chimed into the conversation (and referenced a conversation I earlier had with Loic!) with his thoughts on  content, community, and an intense step by step focus.These are the people that I listen to closest when fighting through the trials that come along with building a start-up. Their experiences and opinions are invaluable to my development as an entrepreneur.

So I know I’m fairly late to try out 12seconds.tv but I’ll blame that on my love appreciation for Seesmic. I have friends on Seesmic, some that I’ve met their and some that I’ve met in “real life”. Never the less a new “video twitter” social software is out called 12seconds.tv. As you may have guest (cause you’re a damn genius) the videos that you can post are capped at 12 seconds. Similar to Twitter’s 140 character limit 12seconds.tv limits your content.

Some people argue that this will improve one’s ability to scan many videos quickly making it more “checkable” and some argue that the content you can post in 12 seconds is bound to be terrible and thus not worth “checking” in the first place. Either way that is not what has attracted me to 12seconds.tv.  What has made me begin to use 12seconds.tv is that you can email in 12 second video to a custom to your account URL and they will automatically post to your account. Cool, right? Right. The reason that this is so cool is because most any cell phone now can take video and most any cell phone can send email and 1+1=2 right. So video + email = practically live videos directly to the web!

I’ve become a huge fan of video on the web. I have have my video posts with Ryan G TV, I very regularly use Seesmic, and I religiously use Twitter, and now I have short video’s from my mobile phone with 12seconds.tv.

Loic as soon as you guys at Seesmic give me the ability to send in vids from my mobile I’ll drop 12seconds.tv because honestly I don’t like the time limit. But for now this is easy and its accessible to the masses and that is what will make any web app work!

See widget to the right! ———————————>

This is a direct post from Loic Lemeur’s blog. I respect Loic very much and think that his thoughts on entrepreneurship and social software are worth sharing…

This is the type of content that we will be excited to share on ActionsTalk.com from entrepreneurs who are experiencing these challenges.

Challenges of an entrepreneur

-find a space (not an idea) and execute as fast as possible
-differentiate and innovate, no copycat
-launch fast in alpha and iterate, do not wait for a perfect product
-gather an initial community and get its constant feedback to improve the product based on the feedback
-find funding fast and try not to lose too much time on it
-gather a kick ass team (top challenge: engineers, especially in the bay area…)
-scale, open as fast as possible the service
-communicate constantly with the community
-keep momentum going after initial launch
-stay on your main market or localize fast?
-manage an international team (Seesmic is already on 3 continents…)
-create a great API and gather a developer community
-integrate in major social software (see my social map post)
-reach critical mass
-find the business model and grow revenues

Social software trends

-content versus conversation
-decentralized instead of centralized on blogs in the past
-immediate versus lots of thoughts (microblogging versus long posts)
-”disposable”
-open (API, open source)
-open customer service (see getsatisfaction)
-sharing as much as possible with the community to enhance the service
-more human (a face on the Internet users, Seesmic helps this in video)
-live versus asynchroneous
-the web in the pocket (iphone, Nokia n95) changes the deal
-ecommerce and recommendations through the filter of your friends instead of marketing
-news finds you through your friends instead of getting it from reading mainstream media home pages

As much as I’m a fan of Seesmic and and of the entrepreneurial process, I thought I would post this video that highlights both. This is Loic’s explanation of how he went about raising money for Seesmic and how he will continue to go out evangelizing Seesmic. There is a lot to learn from this guy…

This is definitely my favorite advice to getting a business started. It is the most difficult thing to do but it is definitely the most action inspiring and results driven advice I’ve heard.