rBlock

Geographic Verses Personal Interests

rBlock has a proprietary way of correlating residents to blocks and blocks to cities.  This enables anyone to quickly transform his/her block into an active community.  Most importantly, the community interacts initially around the geographic interests of its block rather than around the personal interests of individual residents.  The distinction between these two types of interests is important, so some examples:

Geographic Interests:

• the neighbors on our block
• the nearby factory that pollutes
• the lovely hills behind our house
• the busy school across the street
• the deli near my office

Personal Interests:

• my friends in my network
• the nearby factory where I work
• the lovely hills where I jog
• my child's school across the street
• the deli with the best pastrami

Today, online applications do a wonderful job of serving our personal interests, but they have yet to serve our geographic interests.  In fact, they generally work against them.

How rBlock Is Different?

The Company knows of no other service on the web today that geographically constrains where users can post their content, leave alone systematically automates the formation of private, geographic groups.  Because Yahoo!, Google Groups and others are designed to serve a group’s common interest, these platforms function as networks.  In contrast, rBlock's service is designed to also serve a group’s common location, and so functions as a community.  As a result, its applications and the interests that it serves are unique and extremely valuable.

Distance-Based Email

rBlock has filed another patent application.  This one covers distance-based email.

Unlike eMail, where you choose the recipients, with distanced-based email you will select the radius of your communication (from your home).   This new form of electronic messaging will have wide-ranging implications for how we share information locally.

rBlock Directors Update

rBlock is delighted to announce that Don Fowler has joined its Board of Directors after informally advising the Company over the last two years.  He will be replacing Charu Rudrakshi who has provided me with valuable advice and direction for almost four years now (Charu was informally advising me well before rBlock was formed).  I am grateful that Charu will continue to advise us on an informal basis. 

rBlock Advisors Update

After working hard in the slow lane for several years, rBlock is delighted to announce that Fastlane Advisors is now helping the Company on multiple fronts to make sure that it attracts a great management team and an investor group that adds significant value to its business.

Congratulations to Fatdoor

Fatdoor has just announced in Private Equity Hub their first-round financing through Norwest Venture Partners and their new CEO, Jennifer Dulski, from Yahoo!  Here is a quote from Jennifer, which I know is true from my own experience:

"Building online local communities that scale is an extremely difficult problem to solve, but the market opportunity is immense and consumers are craving a solution that will make this vision a reality."

To address this immense market, any platform needs to first solve some very difficult problems in four areas - boundaries, applications, verification, and privacy.  rBlock believes that it has solved them all by giving its users the ability to make popular choices in each area.  However to win a big share of this immense market, rBlock’s solutions must be integrated in a manner that leads to viral growth.  This requires, among other things, a user-interface that's easy-to-use and scalable.  rBlock believes it has solved this too, paving the way for more plan execution than experimentation.

Google's OpenSocial Announcement, In Context

Announced today, Google's decision to launch a new set of social networking development tools was impressive from both strategic and timing perspectives.   The new tools will provide the developer community with an open standard for writing applications that will work on many different platforms and environments that comprise a much larger user-base than that of Facebook.

From a strategy perspective, Google gains an quick entree into social networking by teaming up with a group of social networking sites that have good reason to be concerned about Facebook.  And it will boost Google's existing monetization strategies for relatively little investment.  Google's stock price said it all today, so hats off to them.

From a timing perspective, Google's recent interest in Facebook seems only now to have been a good corporate bluff, to make sure that Microsoft followed through with it's investment into Facebook.  After all, Google has been working on this for a while, and today's announcement must have taken some of the edge off of Facebook's delight.  Perhaps, but perhaps not.

rBlock has two slightly different takes on this whole affair, which I'll elaborate on soon in subsequent postings:

1. social networking is a relatively young phenomenon, and companies that are built solely around it (My Space, Facebook, etc.) have yet to prove that they have long-term, sustainable business models;
2. the term "social" has been over-used and over-extended in its application to the online world, and really ought to be reigned in.  I look forward to drawing some distinctions between the relatively few online models that clearly have a positive net social impact, and the many more out there that do not.

Vehicular Defibrillation

Last week I caught part of a segment on Charlie Rose featuring a distinguished panel of cardiologists that cited ventricular fibrillation (when the victim dies suddenly, often while standing up) as one of the number one killers related to the heart (40% of heart-related fatalities, if I recall). They explained how many of these deaths could be prevented if only the education, equipment and laws were in place to enable swift intervention. The segment hit home for me, as my step-mother, Helen Armstrong (63), was one of those victims 17 months ago today, while standing tall and playing her violin to an adoring audience of friends, musicians and classical music enthusiasts.  The paramedics reached the private residence where she had been performing in about 15 minutes, but that was about 10 minutes too late.  rBlock's service will help neighbors on every block in the United States to acquire and make use of all kinds of medical equipment and training.

Section B in today's San Francisco Chronicle struck another chord with me.  In an article entitled Senators Hear Ideas For Reducing Bay Area Traffic Congestion, a quote read, "Getting people to drive less - and use public transportation more - won't be easy, the 16 speakers told Senators Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and Tome Torlakson, D-Antioch, who sit on a transportation sub-committee."   I thought of the clogged streets and arteries that we all face every day, and figured I'd call this entry Vehicular Defibrillation.

While the Bay Area transportation panels that presented their findings are no doubt correct that this will be a particularly difficult challenge, I am convinced that rBlock has a solution, and one that will always be free.  As the first spatial platform on the virtual web, our end-users are residents.  As we scale our service throughout the Bay Area and nationally, we can help to solve all kinds of transportation issues that plague our daily lives, not to mention the environment.   rBlock is committed to driving a market change that is long overdue, so that a greater share of the traffic volume on our streets comprises carpooling, delivery vans, and a new form of public transportation.

Andre Lewis

rBlock is pleased to now be working with Andre Lewis of Earthcode Studios as we share a strong interest in geo-spatial networks.  Here's a selection of Andre's work that he recently shared with us:

- hotspotr
- shapewiki
- GeoKit (open-source Ruby spatial library)
- DragZoom (taken on by Google)
- placeshout

Residents' Journalism?

Much has been written and debated about the changing media landscape and the future role of citizens' journalism.

The subject once again grabbed my interest in the summer of 2005 with the launch of several hyper-local news sites, some of which are no longer around.  And I remained engaged through the fall, leading up to a fabulous panel at Columbia's School of Journalism.  Executives representing Craigslist, NYT, WSJ, Providence Journal and a few others debated what was happening and what might emerge. There was little concensus then, and I'm not sure there is any more now.

At rBlock, we've had little time to keep up with it, and instead focused entirely on what features and tools are most useful to neighbors who share a block.  I'm convinced though, that our model could incorporate a very special brand of citizens' journalism called residents' journalism.  Three aspects to what we're doing address some major challenges for the future model of journalism:

1. high clustering, where a large number of local readers and writers raises the quality and coverage of user-generated content;
2. restricted distribution, making the content highly relevant;
3. trust, without which quality, coverage and relevance have little meaning.

We'll be looking at this much more closely as we scale up our service.