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You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. - Steve Jobs

I was at a networking event out here in the Valley a few weeks ago where a bunch of companies went up on stage and presented their companies to the audience. I'm fairly certain that at least one of them might have been interesting, but to tell you the truth, I don't really know because I didn't really pay attention to any of them.

I already knew about the ones that mattered and a quick glance at the program showed me that the others weren't worth listening to because they were me too clones of other start-ups.

After the presentations were over, a friend asked me what I though of them, to which I replied, "Don't know, didn't pay attention" and he responded, "yeah, but are you actively a hater like me yet?"

I think that I got his point, and that is that there are times lately where I just want to slap people when they tell me what their company is doing.

I know that innovating is one of the hardest things in the world to do, but lately, I've been disappointed in 99% of what I see. As far as I can tell, there seem to be two main reasons for this:

1. The first reason is because of what I call the "me too" start-up. For example, when I first moved to SF, Flickr was the big thing out here, so for a few months everyone seemed to have a crap photo sharing site. Then this changed to Youtube/crap video sites, Facebook Platform/crap widget sites, and on and on. Some degree of competition is a good thing, but it's all a little much. If you have a substantial improvement to an existing product then, by all means, go for it. However, if you're just doing a feature for feature copy of a competitor's website then, please, invest those resources in doing something else. Or at least don't try to pitch it to me as something new and exciting.

2. The second reason, and the one that bothers me more, is the "aim high, fall fast" start-up. This is the start-up that has lofty goals, and falls into the trap of selling them out to meet some sort of smaller and less interesting short term target. This is all too common (hell, I did it at my last start-up), and I think that a big part of it comes from the fact that it's so cheap to start a company now that sometime it's easy to forget just how hard you really have to work to make something great. These are the companies that VCs need to fund at their "aim high" stage to keep them from plummeting. Sure, they might have an idea that's way off in left field, but companies like that are usually the ones that grow into something huge and interesting.

So, I guess that I'm asking everyone out there for one thing, and that is to think bigger than we are right now. Think outside the box, don't water it down in the early stages or once a little revenue starts to trickle in the door.

When I run into you at a networking event, make me say "damn, that's a crazy idea, but it just might work" and when I run into you 6 months later don't make me shake my head at you because you've turned it into a clone of another idea.

Perhaps if we all start using our heads, the innovation will start flowing freely once again.

Both of my last two companies have been involved in the aggregation of large data sets.

At the company I co-founded, Ten Ton Labs, we collected and normalized music reviews from across the web to support our music search engine, Squishr.

Our original plan, however, was to collect all reviews, of anything and everything, and then build an application that analyzed and tracked various metrics from the data to find out how consumers felt about certain products. We scaled the idea back to focus on music to allow us to continue building the underlying review platform and to have an easier application to implement on top of it to prove it out.

At my current company, Collaborative Drug Discovery we collect huge amounts of data about experiments in the field of chemistry (there are about thirty million known chemical compounds) and allow people to search through the data in various ways, as well as add their own data. Our users can use our toolset to keep their data private, but search across the aggregated dataset.

Both of these companies have a lot in common. When I was at Ten Ton Labs, our music search engine held a huge amount of short-term value for us. It was the cool thing that we could show to investors to get them excited about the company, and it gave us attainable short-term goals to go after. CDD is very similar, we currently put most of our effort into our cheminformatics application that runs on top of our data, because it's what we sell to people and show to our investors.

Long term though, I don't think that our music search engine or the CDD cheminformatics app is really where most of our value lies.

It lies in the cloud.

A huge amount of value is created by building tools to make it easy to get data into the cloud, and to make it easy for people to process the data and get it back out in a manner that they're used to. Once you have those tools, especially if you're allowing people to build applications and communities on top of your data, you're creating real value.

You've created an app that people will come back to everyday to see what's new.

And you've created an ecosystem around your data that won't allow it to die. People will build tools to interact with it in ways that you never even thought of, and again, more value will be created because of it.

I think that building a platform for data like this, not just a one-off application, is where the opportunity for huge value creation eventually lies.

Today marks the official beta launch of Triggit, the tech side of which is run by my friend Ryan Tecco (who co-founded Ten Ton Labs with me a few years ago).

So what's a Triggit? It's an easy way to insert images, videos, or text links into your blog, without downloading or installing any software.

All you have to do is add one line of code to your blogging software template. You can then use a cool Javascript based tool to insert objects into your blog on the fly. As you can see in the picture below, the Triggit interface just overlays itself on the top of your site to allow you to insert things:

You just select what type of object you want to insert and then drop it into the page wherever you want. For instance, I've used Triggit to insert this image, of Ryan dressed like a cow from Halloween a few years ago, into this post by searching for it on Flickr through their interface, and simply dropping it in below:

This is a game-changing sort of tool that will make your life as a blogger much easier. If anyone wants to try it out, I have 300 invite codes to the beta to hand out. Just use the access code 'kurt' when you sign up.

Update: More coverage at TechCrunch , GigaOm, and WebWare.

There are a ton of social networks out there nowadays, but how many of them are really useful?

I mean really useful. Useful in the sense of helping us to get our job done or making our lives easier.

Clearly, the vast majority of the social networks that we use on a day-to-day basis are little more than time sinks. Myspace and Facebooks are prime examples of this.

Twitter? Even worse.

The question remains then, how can we use the power of social networking to make our lives easier? How can we harness it to help us better do our jobs and manage our free time?

The company that I am currently involved in, Collaborative Drug Discovery, is trying to answer those questions, at least for the domain of drug discovery.

We take data from academic chemistry labs all over the world, some of it sitting in dusty old lab notebooks, forgotten for years; and feed it into our system. This data can then be shared with all of the other researchers in the system.

Suddenly all of these researchers have access to exponentially more data then they had before, as well as the means to search and explore it.

Take just a minute and imagine the possibilities of that.

As an example, say a researcher in Poland finds a chemical that slows the growth of a certain type of cancer. They put it into the CDD system and then find 10 other similar chemicals that have already been studied by researchers from all over the world. If one of those chemicals has already been tested in humans and proven safe for other uses, the researcher might be able to head directly to human testing for effectiveness against the cancer that she found it worked against. This is a stage in the drug discovery process that usually takes many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get to. We've just routed around it, all thanks to the power of social networking and data sharing.

Millions of dollars and years of people's lives were saves

And just possibly, and most importantly, hundreds of lives might have been saved in the process.

That's our vision, and I'm excited to be a part of it.

When I was starting my first company and moving out to San Francisco a year and a half ago, I remember attending one of the first meetings of SFWIN. I took place in the backroom of a sushi place and had about 20 or 30 people at it. Everyone there was an entrepreneur first and foremost, but I remember the meeting having a distinctly geeky feel about it.

Fast forward to the present day, and the geeks are pretty much gone. I've been to a ton of networking events since that first one, and I've watched them fill up with more and more suits (and a bunch of geeks, me included, turn more and more into suits). This is good, as it means that there's lots of money floating around the Valley right now, and it has helped me learn a ton about business since those early days, but there isn't really anyplace anymore that has that geeky edge to it.

It looks like someone is finally taking steps to change all of that. I got an e-mail today from Christian Perry of SF Beta announcing geekSessions, a new networking event in the SF area that tries to inject a bit of the geek back into things. It's not quite in the back room of a sushi place anymore, but hey, we're all used to spending our time at throwing down drinks at 111 Minna now, so I guess the upgrade was inevitable.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

It's yet another review aggregation site. This time for gadgets.

Marshall says:

The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100)

This is the same thing we've been doing at Squishr with music for a while now.

This is actually a bit of deja vu for me, as we originally had our technology working on gadgets, but we moved to music because we found that gadget reviews just didn't end up that useful in the grand scheme of things. People tended to say the same thing over and over again in their gadget reviews (good/bad interface, good/bad battery life, etc), and let's face it, if you're going to buy an mp3 player it's going to be an iPod.

I do agree with Marshall when he says that there's room for a lot of entries into this space. Things should be interesting.

I can't believe that Kevin Rose is up in arms about paying the people that make his site valuable. Calacanis isn't a genius, he's just right.

I get the feeling that the era of people making millions off of user generated content is quickly coming to an end.

Apple apparently doesn't want anyone to know what they have in their Music Store.

I've been trying to add links into Squishr this morning to connect albums in our system to iTunes through their affiliate program. The problem is that you have to use their "Link Maker" to create links into the store. The Link Maker is a simple web form that lets you search for albums or artists and returns a list of links. That probably works out all right for Bloggers or other one-off cases, but I'm not going to do 25000 searches by hand and then feed them into my database.

It would be trivial to add a REST front-end to this service, but one doesn't currently exist, so it looks like I'm going to have to scrape their HTML to get what I want.

What a waste of time.

Come on Apple, I want to send you business, at least make it easy for me to do.

UPDATE: It looks like I'm not the first one to have this problem.

Following the lead of any number of failing technology companies, Friendster has announced that they have a patent on a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.” It should be interesting to see what sort of affect this has on the big players in the space.

At the very least, I've got to assume that they’re a much more attractive acquisition target today then they were a few days ago.

It looks like the Farecast airfare prediction site has finally opened up their beta site to the world. I checked it out and it looks pretty impressive out of the gate.

My first thought when I saw that they currently only have fares from Seattle and Boston was, "great, the two places in the US that I never end up flying to." Once I got over that though, I decided to do a search for a flight from Boston to San Francisco, which I figure is close enough to the SFO to NYC flight I'll be taking later this month. Sure enough, the prices looked similar and the site suggests that I "buy now" which is what I expected it to say. (I was on 98 flights last year and I booked most of my own travel, so I have a fairly good idea of about how much flight on these routes should cost, on average.) There is clearly a lot of data mining going on here, and I was amused by some of the graphs that showed up while I was playing with the site. Take the one below, for instance:

Why in the hell did the fare go up $11 on that one day? I've got to imagine that airline pricing models have gotten to the point where the airlines themselves don't even know what's going on anymore. Perhaps Farecast will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and causes them to reassess their model (although doing so would probably screw over Farecast).

Overall, I really like the idea behind Farecast and how things are set up currently (although, to be fair, I'm kind of a closet data-mining geek, so I almost always like stuff like this). I can't wait until they add additional cities so that I can actually use it.