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Why does founding a startup sometimes feel like the loneliest journey on the planet? Yes, you may be surrounded by family and friends who want to support you emotionally, but do they really understand what you’re going through?

The answer: Find yourself a mentor.

No "Yes Men"

Surrounding yourself with “yes men” is a stupid startup move. Instead, “all” you need to do is find someone who’s “been there, done that,” and is willing to tell you the truth. Don’t scoff. There’s true value having someone you can bounce ideas off of or who can offer a different perspective.

“Why wouldn’t you want to learn from the experience of others?” says Bob Godlasky, a mentor and counselor with SCORE OC in Santa Ana, Calif. SCORE, a nonprofit partner of the Small Business Administration, has more than 13,000 business experts and offers free mentoring and low-cost workshops nationwide. “There’s value in getting nonfamily, nonfriends' points of view. It’s amazing what we can’t see until someone with no particular bias reviews the same picture or the same data,” Godlasky adds.

Janet Crowther and Katie Covington, founders of For the Makers, a website for DIY design and crafts projects, met while designing jewelry for various fashion houses, including Kate Spade, Anthropologie and Marc Jacobs. As first-time entrepreneurs, they had tons of product and design experience, but had never worked in the tech field. “We went everywhere and asked questions of anyone that would listen,” says Covington about the startup of their social community website. “We set out looking for validation of our ideas, but over time found mentors who can help with more specific questions.”

Ask Questions

How do you find the right mentor for your business? “The only way to find mentors is to be out there, meeting people and asking questions,” Covington says. “We’ve met people at events, through friends, on Twitter and by following blogs. As long as you are respectful of time, mentors are almost always willing to help you and your company evolve. We look for mentors who believe in us, have experiences that are vastly differently from ours, and are always creating.”

Crowther and Covington were fortunate to find tech entrepreneur Cindy Gallop (pictured above), founder of the websites If We Ran The World and Make Love Not Porn. “Often the smartest, most interesting people all seem to know each other and are happy to make introductions,” Covington explains. “After talking with Cindy for 10 minutes, she was making parallels between For the Makers and a handful of other people she knew.” The companies don’t have a ton in common, “but both of our companies are about giving people tools to create something for themselves,” Covington says. “Mentors can use their experiences to frame your business in a unique way.”

And don’t worry about the relationship being too formal or structured. Gallop, like her mentees, is a busy entrepreneur. “Sadly, I cannot possibly mentor all the people who approach me asking me to be their mentor,” she says. “I mentor a small number of chosen startups on an ad hoc basis [for] sporadic, intensive hourlong discussions of a particular issue or consultation on a particular situation.”

Gallop’s advice for a great startup-mentor relationship: “Don’t just fall in love with someone’s reputation, perceived celebrity or name. Identify someone who could be directly relevant to what you want to do, or who is pursuing a similar vision. And someone who is likely to have the time and the inclination to help you.”

Slow and Steady Wins

And take it slow. “It’s like any other human relationship,” Gallop explains. “You need to have established a direct personal relationship and rapport with someone before you ask them to take the relationship to another level.”

The best mentor/mentee relationships are ones that are mutually beneficial. My mentee is a Jamaican entrepreneur who launched Study in Jamaica, a successful website that already ranks in the top 250 for traffic in her native county. I always get one or two takeaways from our monthly hourlong conversations. So if you’ve already hit phase two of the startup cycle, consider mentoring those just launching.

The European Union has been taking a leisurely pace investigating Google over possible antitrust abuses, but it's now accelerating to a full-on sprint. European Commission competition head Joaquin Almunia has given Google just a "matter of weeks" to propose how it would patch things up and soften fears that it was unfairly pushing its own web services over others. If Google makes the Commission happy, Almunia says, the whole investigation might wrap up and avoid fines. Google hasn't responded yet, but we wouldn't guarantee that it makes a deal: its execs have usually argued that there's nothing keeping users from going to another search site, and the company has been eager to emphasize that competition still exists. That said, Google only has to see what happened to Microsoft to know how expensive an EU antitrust fight can be.

EU competition head gives Google a 'matter of weeks' to offer an antitrust fix originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 May 2012 09:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Startups like SocialCam and Viddy, two of the fastest growing social networks for sharing video on smartphones, may be on a collision course with Google-owned YouTube. While initial indicators are far from conclusive, rumblings of a possible market tsunami are afoot.

From January to March, people spent 10% less time watching YouTube videos online, while users of mobile video apps increased their viewing time by 52%, according to San Francisco-based Flurry, a mobile advertising and analytics platform provider. In March, each active user averaged 425 minutes on YouTube and 231 minutes on mobile video apps.

While the numbers are interesting, Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, acknowledges they do not prove that mobile apps are taking viewer time from YouTube. That kind of proof would have to come from a statistical study.

Nevertheless, Farago believes the numbers are a canary in the coal mine. With increasing processing power, higher bandwidth and high-definition cameras, smartphones are becoming a good platform for capturing memorable moments and then sharing them with friends and family. So, it is certainly possible that people are spending less time watching online video, and more time creating and sharing it. "When you put all that together with a Viddy or SocialCam, which are very cool, fun, editing, sharing tools, you start to get the perfect storm, or the planets align," he said.

So what's so special about apps like Viddy or SocialCam? Simplicity. YouTube has a mobile app, but it can be a multistep process to post video. While the steps may not seem difficult, they're enough of a hassle to prevent people from bothering. That weakness is what mobile video apps are attacking. SocialCam, for example, does not require a separate step for uploading. The app automatically moves the video to SocialCam servers, which then shares it based on the user's preferences.

This kind of simplicity is only possible from startups that begin and end with the smartphone or tablet. The online world of websites and PCs is so last generation to them. The generational shift from the PC to mobile devices in accessing the Web is the kind of rapid change that can mark the downfall of companies as powerful as Google and Facebook in as little as five years, Eric Jackson, founder and managing member of Ironfire Capital, recently argued in Forbes.

In roughly 20 years, the world has seen three Internet generations starting with the Web portals (Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, eBay and Google), then the social media companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon), and now mobile. Each new generation brings changes that the older generation can't quite adapt to fast enough, Jackson argues. Yes, the seniors can try to buy their way in, such as Facebook paying $1 billion for Instagram, but they are still left with trying to bolt the new platform onto the older platform, which is still driving profits.

While older companies struggle to reinvent their legacies, Viddy, SocialCam and other startups remain focused on the technology people are quickly moving to today - in this case, mobile devices. This razor-sharp focus has led to Viddy and SocialCam amassing more than 60 million users. Meanwhile, the previous generation is reaching for the oxygen mask to try to keep up.

Of course, with Google's billions of dollars behind it, YouTube, which has a mobile app, has the resources to adapt. However, having money and even millions of users may not be enough to keep up with the speed of change. Just ask Yahoo and AOL.

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File this in the "we-try-it-out-so-you-don't-have-to" category. So.cl is a derivative social network that may be useful to students, but it won't fly elsewhere.

Over the weekend, Microsoft opened to the public an experimental social network called So.cl. It's a mix between Google+ and Storify. Users are encouraged to search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results - textual content, images and videos - into a single post. So.cl, which launched in beta at the end of last year, is initially targeted to students. It may end up being useful to that market, but it's unlikely to get traction as a mainstream social network. Here's why...

Microsoft is calling So.cl "an experiment in open search," in that anything you search for on the network is viewable by other users and made available to third party developers. That description makes it sound like a direct competitor to Google+, which was Google's attempt at combining search with social networking. It certainly has similarities, but So.cl is ultimately an academic tool moreso than a social one.

To get started, you can sign up using either your Facebook or Windows Live profile. Microsoft had little choice but to leverage Facebook's social graph, given that hardly anyone uses Windows Live (Microsoft's ID platform). Sure enough, Facebook gave me a good leg up into the So.cl network, enabling me to auto-follow over 50 people.

The Features

When it comes to using So.cl and finding value in it, the flaws become obvious. The Storify-like aggregation feature in So.cl is nifty, but everything else has been done before in hundreds of other social networks: posting, commenting, tagging, liking, sharing (two options: to Facebook or email!).

The attempts at innovation in So.cl seem forced. An option labeled "riffing" is supposed to be "a new way to interact and improvise with content" - but in reality, it simply means to re-share a post and optionally add your own comment or content.

It is nice that you can add extra content to a post and I can see this being useful in an educational setting; for example, a student in a science class adding more data to a thread about an astronomy topic. But this isn't something people need or want in a mainstream social network. When it comes to re-sharing, all most people want to do on a social network is paste that inspirational quote or solar eclipse photo to their profile page - so their friends can see it too.

Another noteworthy feature in So.cl is something called "video parties." This is basically a video playlist with a chat area - kind of like YouTube's playlists. It's probably the most innovative feature in So.cl, but that isn't saying a lot. The reality is that Facebook or Google+ could easily replicate it, if they wanted to.

The Verdict

So.cl is a largely derivative product and there's no way this is going to go mainstream. What slim chance it had to capture the imagination of a public that is already using Facebook (and may or may not be playing around with Google+), was dashed with the decision not to have a mobile component. As Robert Scoble rightly pointed out: "We're in the post-PC world now. Why didn't you start with just working on mobile? That would have been at least interesting."

I can see why So.cl is PC focused, with its reliance on aggregation and multimedia elements like "video parties." But that doesn't change the fact that any social network launching in 2012 that isn't mobile-based, is most likely doomed to fail if it wants to reach a mainstream audience.

So.cl comes from Microsoft's FUSE research group and the resulting product shows its academic roots. It may become a useful tool for students, with its focus on aggregating topical content. But So.cl won't get any traction outside the education sector. It's too unoriginal and wonky.

Editor's note: In the Summer 2012 issue of SAY Magazine, Dan Frommer chronicles the history of tech blogging. For the rest of this week, Richard MacManus, who founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003, will be looking back on the early days.

In our final look at the leading tech bloggers of this era, we profile a couple of guys who have cornered the market in a certain brand of hipness. Gruber is the ultimate indie voice in Apple news, with his one-man blog Daring Fireball. Topolsky is the leader at The Verge, a new style of tech blog that makes heavy use of video and colorful imagery. I haven't met either of these two fellows, but I admire their blogs for a similar reason: both have established themselves by doing something unique and different.

An excerpt from Dan Frommer's Rise of the Tech Bandits:

Gruber, a Web programmer initially and now a storyteller, journalist and Apple-geek figurehead, started the site as a hobby in 2002 and made it a full-time job in 2006. “I’ve wanted to write about this stuff as long as I can remember,” he says.
Through his website, 400,000 RSS subscribers and 200,000 Twitter followers, he’s a healthy one-man media company — the shining example of how self-publishing can work online. In addition to running small banner ads, Gruber, 39, also sells a weekly sponsorship for $6,500 — and he’s almost always sold out. If he’s actually getting that rate, Daring Fireball could be pulling in at least $400,000 a year. To borrow one of Steve Jobs’ famous punctuation marks, “Boom.”

At first glance, Daring Fireball and The Verge have little in common. Daring Fireball has a minimalist design, based around the color grey. The Verge is bursting with colors and its homepage is crammed full of stories. Daring Fireball is written and designed by one person: John Gruber. The Verge has a large editorial and design team, with Topolsky at the reigns as Editor-in-chief. Daring Fireball focuses on one topic: Apple. The Verge casts a wide net across all technology.

But the two blogs have at least one important thing in common: they are originals. Nobody covers Apple like Gruber - his mix of Apple fanboy-ism and penetrating analysis is both endearing and insightful at the same time. The Verge may cover the same things as other gadget blogs, like Engadget and Gdgt, but it has brought a new design aesthetic to the tech blogosphere. Dan Frommer summed it up well in his Rise of the Tech Bandits article:

The Verge is not just another gadget blog. There is the look — an apparent nod to sci-fi novels. Topolsky, 34, and Patel, 31, cite influences such as early Wired, Computer Shopper and videogame magazines such as GamePro and Mondo 2000. There is the production quality, especially in video reviews, which far surpasses the competition. [...] And there is an offline talk show, On the Verge, shot in a New York theater.

Too often, success in the media is thought to be had by copying other, previously successful, tech publications. After Mashable got popular by covering anything and everything PR agencies sent its way, newer tech blogs followed suit. When TechCrunch bullied its way to some big stories, other bloggers raised their voices and began to shout too.

But the biggest success stories are usually originals. Sure those brave ventures fail more often than not, but every now and then we get a unique voice like John Gruber or a game-changing new product like The Verge. Thank goodness for independent media!

Google unveiled the Knowledge Graph. SlideShark makes giving presentations via your iPad easy peasy. Learn more about these stories and many more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things

Google released the Knowledge Graph this week and Jon Mitchell explains the ins and outs:

In the new Google, with the Knowledge Graph online, a new box will come up. You'll still get the Google results you're used to, including the box scores for the team Google thinks you're looking for, but on the right side, a box called "See results about" will show brief descriptions for the Los Angeles Kings, the Sacramento Kings, and the TV series, Kings. If you need to clarify, click the one you're looking for, and Google will refine your search query for you. Learn more about how this will affect your search experience by reading Jon Mitchell's Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things.

Giving iPad PowerPoint Presentations Just Got a Lot Better

If you've ever tried to give a presentation with your iPad, you know it's virtually impossible if you want to use presenter mode. That all changed with the recent release of SlideShark. Get a good look at the app by reading David Strom's review of the presentation app, SlideShark. More Top Stories

[Infographic] Taking HTML5 to the Next Level for Mobile

By 2013, there will be more than one billion HTML5-capable browsers in use throughout the world. Applications for those HTML5 browsers will be created by two million HTML Web developers, according to research from IDC. There is no question that HTML5 is going to be a major factor in mobile development during the next five to 10 years. The rise of HTML5 does not mean the death of native applications, but as the standard progresses, many developers will begin to incorporate more HTML5 into their apps than native code. More

Study: Facebook Timeline Improves Fan Engagement For Brands

Facebook posts by brands live longer on Timeline than they did prior to the social network’s massive overhaul, according to a study released Monday. While the analysis by London-based social media analytics firm Sotrender is limited in scope, covering just 130 brands headquartered in the U.K. and 5,000 posts, it is the first such empirical review since Timeline became mandatory for all Facebook brand pages at the end of March. More

Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society. More

What Is the Point of: #Hashtags?

Whenever a new Web trend comes along, there are people who ask, "What is the point of this?" If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our "What Is the Point of..." series, we'll explain it to you. This week, we're asking, What is the point of #hashtags? More

Staying Off Facebook Won't Protect Your Privacy

Stay away from social networks and people won't know who you're hanging out with or what you're doing, right? Wrong. When it comes to social networking, a recent study suggests, you can run but you can't hide. More

A Discreet Guide to Using Mobile Devices in the Loo

Last year, British researchers swabbed 390 cell phones and analyzed what they picked up. Know what they found? One in six phones has poop on it. Four out of five are contaminated by some kind of bacteria. Sure, we all like to make our own calls while answering Mother Nature's, but that's just gross. Here’s a surefire way to avoid a crappy user experience on your smartphone or other mobile device. More

How and Why Your Startup Should Go Virtual

Working virtually sounds like heaven to many startups. After all, not having a central office staffed with employees saves money on rent, utilities, parking, etc., freeing you to invest in research, development or marketing. On the other hand, operating virtually is no panacea. Before you make the virtual leap, you need to figure out exactly what working virtually means to your business. More

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Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over alleged infringement of Java slipped from epic battle to soap opera this week: The relationships between the judge, jury, plaintiff and defendant have become a tangle of legal ambiguity and financial suffering — or is it avarice? The jury deferred to the judge on the extent of Oracle’s intellectual property protections. The judge, in turn, wrested from the jury control over the lion’s share of damages, yanking Oracle’s prize another few inches out of reach. With major issues still to be decided, it is becoming clear that Judge William Alsup holds the high cards - and that he has the tech smarts to play them intelligently and mercilessly.

The trial is unfolding in three phases: Copyright, patent and damages. The copyright phase ended last week with the jury convicting Google on one of three counts, namely infringement of nine lines of Java code known as rangeCheck. In a separate issue, the jury couldn’t agree on the question of whether Google’s use of the Java API was a so-called fair use, and thus allowable under copyright law. That question went to the judge, who hasn't decided yet. His decision could have a big impact on the size of Oracle’s payoff, as we'll explain in below.

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over alleged infringement of Java slipped from epic battle to soap opera this week: The relationships between the judge, jury, plaintiff and defendant have become a tangle of legal ambiguity and financial suffering — or is it avarice? The jury deferred to the judge on the extent of Oracle’s intellectual property protections. The judge, in turn, wrested from the jury control over the lion’s share of damages, yanking Oracle’s prize another few inches out of reach. With major issues still to be decided, it is becoming clear that Judge William Alsup holds the high cards - and that he has the tech smarts to play them intelligently and mercilessly.

The trial is unfolding in three phases: Copyright, patent and damages. The copyright phase ended last week with the jury convicting Google on one of three counts, namely infringement of nine lines of Java code known as rangeCheck. In a separate issue, the jury couldn’t agree on the question of whether Google’s use of the Java API was a so-called fair use, and thus allowable under copyright law. That question went to the judge, who hasn't decided yet. His decision could have a big impact on the size of Oracle’s payoff, as we'll explain in below.