There was a good piece in the Wall Street Journal back on March 13th titled “Baby Sitting Start-Ups”. It touched on a few things we all knew – less exit strategies, VCs holding onto their investments longer, more emphasis given to management teams, etc.

It also describe how certain VCs are offering new value-add services to their portfolio companies, such as educational seminars. While this is a nice service to offer, holding seminars simply isn’t enough to carve out a valuable competitive advantage in the changing VC world. It’s an incremental improvement in services offered but the real opportunity to shake things up would be for a VC to grant their portfolio companies access to such advice and input on a regular basis, not simply through a single seminar.

The article concludes that the CEO and the venture backers should view their “relationship like a marriage”. A healthy marriage survives difficult times when each partner helps one another grow. The same will increasingly be true for venture relationships – and the rewards will be significant for the VC that offers innovative services that help their partner grow.

Update: The article has some comments from a CEO of a company, Jigsaw, that has benefited from these educational seminars. I didn’t know anything about Jigsaw but lots of people are wondering if some of the seminars hosted by El Dorado or Norwest Venture Partners should have been about ethical business practices.

Thanks to David for having this article waiting for me when I arrived in Florida last weekend.

[Posting has been sparse - I'm moving in a week - but I assure you I'm filled with thoughts and ideas I want to share]

After a fantastic long weekend relaxing in Florida I had the pleasure of seeing the Arctic Monkeys play a small venue in Toronto tonight. They put on a great show, playing their entire album (I believe) plus a new song.

At times I thought I caught them getting caught up in the excitement – which was refreshing to see. They played off the crowd nicely and showed a bit of humour (see the posts’ title).

Surprisingly there was no encore. My friend argued that that was great – that they only have one album and have to earn an encore. Who knows.

Tonights concert kicks off 3 weeks of great music for me. I have tickets to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Hard-Fi and I’m eagerly anticipating both. I’ll let you know how they go.

Go see Arctic Monkeys if you get the chance, especially while you can catch them in a small venue.

There has to be a more sustainable long-term strategy to addressing a disrupted industry than lobbying government to jam cellphones.

“Movie theater owners faced with falling attendance are considering asking federal authorities for permission to jam cell phone reception in an attempt to stop annoying conversations during films”

Even better is that while media is changing at a rapid pace, the theatre owners are spending time considering solutions like this.

David Beisel talks about edge aggregation and does a much better job articulating some of the issues I’ve had with the idea. Give it a read.

His final thought touches on a crucial concept that I think many are currently missing: “Consumers want to produce content how they want to, where they want to, and when they want to. And it doesn’t seem to be that that’s necessarily on the Edge.” Truthfully, I think David misses the mark by a single word: “need” rather than “want”. As in, “consumers need to produce content how they want to, where they want to, and when they want to.” A single word, a major difference.

David’s best thought is this one: “Perhaps it’s not an either/or proposition. Is the real answer services which mix both effectively aggregated decentralized content and provide easy-to-use methods for creating it as well?”

This is the thought bouncing around my head that I’ve been calling The Struggle – there’s a complicated task/challenge to David’s thought and it’s being able to appropriately identify and integrate acceptable consumer-centric web-friendly practices with the promise of aggregated decentralized content. I don’t think this idea is prominent enough when the edge is discussed, and until it is I don’t think we’ll see the edge successfully adopted.

I like that we both ended up concluding our current thoughts on the subject with a disclaimer for having scattered commentary. There is no better reward to blogging than sharing a scattered thought and having its form take shape with the help of brilliant conversations.

The roadmap for filters, along with their potential future and their current challenges, is nicely illustrated through Scoble’s brief love affair with tech.memeorandum.

At it’s birth, tech.memeorandum was a personal filter for Scoble – it was built around the 1,300 some-odd RSS feeds in his reading list. Scoble loved the site. It was a personal filter, aggregating the information that he wanted and presenting it in an easily digestible form.

Over time the site grew, changed, and adapted – becoming an aggregator for the commons. Scoble has now sworn off the site and moved back to his RSS reader.

Can you blame him? He uniquely enjoyed an early taste of the treat that is on the horizon – personal filtration and aggregation of content. He then had to suffer as his personal filter eroded as it became an aggregator for the commons.

For the rest of us, we like the first iteration of filters and aggregators, but readily admit that they’re not perfect. They’re allowing us to efficiently receive filtered content in a format that is easy to digest. The filters have a long way to go before they become personal aggregators, and it’s at this point where they’ll add the most value.

The fact that aggregators aren’t perfect doesn’t mean we should decrease the amount of content being created. The reality is that we should create more content because of this imperfection. This will help drive their development and maturation.

Scott Karp has a nice post on this idea:

“In a world of infinite content, it’s the filter that creates a coherent media experience. The problem right now is not that there’s too much content, but that the filters are still too primitive.”

As the filters grow from aggregators for the commons to personal aggregation the exploding amount of user generated content will no longer be seen as noise; rather, it will begin to deliver on its enormous potential.

In my opinion it already has, and will only continue to do so. Those who think there’s too much noise need to start building and implementing their own rudimentary personal filters. The tools currently exist (aggregators, discovery pages, individuals, …) and to not utilize them now is a mistake – there’s some incredible stuff to discover within the noise.

Scoble’s had a taste of the future and he wouldn’t stop raving about the benefits. Eventually we’ll all get to enjoy the fruit. I can’t wait.