These questions are very old, and there is no solution. Hopefully, this post will at least help people to understand how Myxer currently feels about some of these topics, and will provide enough background to demonstrate that we take these issues very seriously - probably far more seriously than a casual visitor to our website thinks at first blush.

Discussing potentially offensive topics without offending

Speaking of blushing, one of the problems I face in writing this post is figuring out how to talk with any specificity about profanity, nudity, drugs, guns, or any other fun stuff (ha, ha) without actually offending anyone.

Oops, too late.
Inside our company, I think we've gotten to the point of being able to communicate relatively efficiently about these topics. For example, our meetings on the subject no longer consist of each of us taking turns blushing, laughing nervously, or avoiding eye contact while gently lofting various uncomfortable words in an apologetic and barely audible manner. But it has taken time to get here. And were it not for the fact that all of us here are good friends with a high degree of mutual respect (and generally a long history together), this would've been almost impossible. If we weren't so close we wouldn't know, for example, that he's not a pedophile and she's not a racist and this guy doesn't kill baby seals for fun on holiday.

Not much fun for little Harpo

Let's get the obvious out of the way from the start: Everybody is different. Even the same person is different from one situation to another. So every visitor to our website is going to have a different idea of what's offensive (and what's fun), leading us to admit defeat from the get-go: it is absolutely impossible to insure that people are not exposed to something they find offensive unless they are exposed to nothing at all. Dory said something along these lines when she commented on a promise Marlin made to his son Nemo. Marlin promised that he would never let anything happen to Nemo, to which Dory said, "Well you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo."

If we want to be fun (and we do), and we want to allow independent voices to express themselves in ways that differ from the prevailing "mainstream" (and we do), then we will sometimes offend some people. I'm sorry. Sortof.

Communities form, and form from, shared values

We all have values that are uniquely our own. They are, of course, shaped and shared in many very complicated ways by our family, friends, neighborhood, teachers, personal experiences, and probably a few hundred million years of evolution (if you're into that kind of thing), among countless other factors. Part of what makes a community a community is, I believe, some set of shared values. So I think one might imagine it's not out of the question that a litmus test could be developed that would determine, for some particular exhibit, for one particular community, whether it should be considered inappropriate or not.

It was this idea that led to the original method used on MyxerTones to identify what material should be considered inappropriate. What we did was add a "report as inappropriate" link next to every item, putting the job of identifying what shouldn't be included in our catalog into the hands of the user community. (The original idea was that we would automate the process of removing inappropriate content from the site after it reached some threshold of "votes" by users, though we're still doing this process manually).

What I really like about this approach is that, in principal, it allows us (Myxer) to remove ourselves from the position of being some moral authority. The community would use its shared values to determine what was allowed and what wasn't, and we wouldn't have to spend our time making lists of what were vulgar words and which configurations of human flesh would trigger an "inappropriate" label.

And if the Myxer user community had stayed a small one, and had intersected with a relatively small set of other communities, this might have been sufficient. The set of shared values might've stayed large enough to allow the "flag as inappropriate" scheme to be a fairly efficient filtering mechanism. But the Myxer community has grown to be larger than the population of many countries, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of people from very different backgrounds and external communities that - at least when it comes to determining what constitutes vulgarity or pornography or violence (or indeed whether these things are even offensive at all) - have a relatively small set of shared values.

This problem is just one inevitable result of the fact that the world is made up of an almost infinite number of overlapping, constantly changing communities of varying importance and influence. At one extreme exists "the world community", a community that shares a relatively small set of common values. At the other, every individual can be thought of as their own personal community, with a rather more complete set of values. (I resist the notion that each individual has an entirely complete set of personal values, because it's been demonstrated to me that even a single person often has multiple ideas that are put to use in different situations. Las Vegas has built a multi-million dollar advertising campaign around this idea ("what happens in Las Vegas...").)

Divide or Dilute?

Faced with a large user community that has divergent tastes and values, the "flag as inappropriate" approach becomes problematic. It's rather obvious in hindsight, but as we've continued to add people to our Myxer community, the percentage of contributed content that is considered "appropriate" by everyone has become smaller and smaller. This has forced us to consider whether we should maybe:

1. Lower the threshold of what is considered inappropriate to accommodate the values of the most (hard to find the right word here) conservative users in the community-at-large.
2. Define more than one threshold for offensiveness, along the lines of the MPAA ratings (PG, PG13, R, etc.)
3. Segment the population into smaller sub-communities that are more likely to share the same values, and allow each sub-community to set its own thresholds on inappropriateness;

The first option is essentially continuing on with the status quo. As our community grows to include people like advertisers who complain about images of butts-in-thongs, etc., we can crank down on our content to make it more and more sterile. This has the obvious effect of purging from the system a lot of things that are actually interesting to a lot of members of the community.

When your web community has a large number of 18-24 year old males, the probability that some of the images and videos they want to put on their phone and share with others could have subject matter that falls into the "potentially offensive" category for people who are not 18-24 year old males is pretty darn near 100%. At the risk of further offending a certain slice of my current audience, I submit that this last conjecture is virtually inescapable given the aforementioned millions of years of evolutionary biology.

The second option is actually already in use by Myxer in some fashion. We currently allow users to turn "content filtering" either "on" or "off". When "on" (which is the default), content that has been flagged as inappropriate will not be shown. When the user chooses to turn it "off", even inappropriate content will be shown to them. The main problem with the current implementation is that it's only a binary thing, and it doesn't account for people that want to, say, allow "profanity", but still block...Julio Eglasias or something.

We're actually in the process of trying to understand whether we can adopt some of the (admittedly very flawed) guidelines maintained by the MPAA (gag) or TV ratings people for Myxer. I don't have terribly high hopes, but it might turn out that implementing something like this will at least keep people who don't consider the issues as carefully as we do happy enough to give us their money for advertising.

Allowing sub-communities

The third option is philosophically really interesting to me, but it has implementation details that are difficult to wrap one's head around. How does one choose the sub-communities? Is it possible to allow the sub-communities to self-evolve such that one need not define them ahead of time in a top-down manner? And then just the logistics of running an "appropriateness" test when displaying content from the Myxer catalog becomes computationally expensive and prone to error.

There are some specific segmentation use cases, though, that seem like they would pragmatically really useful. One thing we know from operating our website is that there is a rather large community of people who are really into hip-hop as a genre and as a lifestyle. The hip-hop community often makes use of language and imagery that, to people outside the community, is considered profane or hateful. The most often-cited example is probably "the n-word", which we see used colloquially on Myxer in contexts where no offense is apparently intended.

Calling attention to the fact that I practice self-censorship when referring to "the n-word" above wasn't my original intent, but it occurs to me that it illustrates the point fairly well. In my personal value system, that word is tainted to the point where I feel it is inappropriate for me to even spell it out - in my community, it's just not acceptable. And yet I think it's a word that should not be redacted in communities where it has acceptable and even very important connotations.

So I was trying to show an example of how segmentation of the user population into sub-communities could be useful. I'll try to finish it off: if we had a hip-hop sub-community, that community could be allowed to self-police with the same "report as inappropriate" functionality we originally implemented site-wide. The ever-changing values of this hip-hop community could be tapped into to evolve what Myxer considered 'inappropriate' for people within that community. So if you were in that hip-hop community, it might be that there was a completely different set of words that were considered (by our system) to be profanity, which would prevent the values of other communities from restricting the speech of the hip-hop community.

Unfulfilling Conclusion

That's really all the typing I can justify doing on the background of this topic right now. Needless to say, we at Myxer are extremely interested in doing The Right Thing (or at least The Rightest Thing Possible) to preserve the empowerment aspects of our technology while maintaining a comfortable and friendly atmosphere for people who visit our site. We want neither to censor nor to offend, but we understand these are impossible goals toward which we can only hope to ever advance.

We do have some specific refinements to our internal policies that we are putting into place that are too specific to warrant getting into, but this is just a small step and we will continue to adjust course time and again as we continue to grow and learn. I hope this discussion has been useful for at least one of the two people who made it all the way to end, and I would welcome any comments or suggestions you have on how Myxer can further improve.

Peace,

Myk

When we named our company mVisible, we already had the name Myxer (along with MyxerTones) being used as our product name. But we weren't really sure, at the time, that this first product of ours was going to be large enough to encompass all of the things we wanted to do with the company, so we were hesitant to make the company name and the product name one and the same.

There was a bigger issue with domain names that factored in heavily, as well.

Back in early 2005, the domain name mixer.com was owned by some cybersquatter who wanted tens of thousands of dollars for the domain. We were in pure startup mode, working out of my house without salaries, and we couldn't justify paying more money than we had (!) for a domain name. We had myxer.com, of course, but there was always this worry that we would lose viral growth because people would tell their friends to "go to myxer.com", but their friend would hear it as "mixer.com." So, we often put a lot of emphasis on our sub-brands, like MyxerTones and MyxerTags. We owned the more popular phonetic spellings of those domains (mixertones.com, mixertags.com, etc), so there was less to worry about from a viral growth point of view.

Because it turned out that ringtones were the most used part of our platform, MyxerTones gained prominence. But because we didn't want to be thought of (in the investment, mobile, and internet communities) as "a ringtone company," we continued using mVisible whenever the corporate entity was being discussed. The platform stayed "Myxer", so whenever we get airtime, we juggle between (1) mVisible, (2) MyxerTones.com, and (3) the Myxer platform.

This was a mistake. And continues to be a mistake.

From where we stand now, Myxer is undisputedly an extremely valuable platform. It delivers something like two ringtones, wallpapers, video clips, or songs every second of every day - and the volume is increasing month over month at something like a 30% rate. I really wish I could get statistics from other mobile content companies to compare this with, because I think we probably deliver more mobile content than anyone else in the world.

But more than a valuable platform, Myxer has become an extremely valuable brand. It is synonymous with simplified mobile content and services. This is a testament to its power and simplicity, because our marketing efforts have been decidedly inferior to our technological exploits, and we have abused and neglected the brand over the years as we dragged it behind mVisible as if it were somehow just a toy. But it's clear now that the Myxer name is, in fact, big enough to encompass all that we are trying to do with our company.

To take us to the next level -- to establish our platform and products as the de facto, undisputed, only way to mobilize your stuff -- our platform, products, messaging, and our company itself all need to regroup around a single, unified, easy to understand brand. And in my mind, there is no rational choice for that brand other than Myxer.

To be continued...

I'm going to sound like a crazy hippie here for a minute, but every time I watch the sun lift up over the ocean, when the sound of that warm salty breeze mixes with the subtly crashing waves, I feel like the world becomes a mirror possessed of the ability to simplify and refactor and strip to the essence any problems or worries incident upon it. It presents an austere but elegant reflection to an observer that accentuates that what is important and discards that what is trivial.

I told you I'd sound like a hippie.

So this morning, I went to the beach looking to clear my mind of some heavy thoughts related to work. The whole reason I was up at 5AM in the first place was because of said heavy thoughts, so it's a good thing for me that the sun rises in the morning when I needed it!

Redux: The whole point of mVisible and MyxerTones is to radically simplify mobile content and services. Over the past two years that we've been operating, we've basically lumped the factors contributing to the complexity of developing mobile content and services into two camps: technical challenges and bureaucratic hurdles. What I've come to understand is that the technical challenges, while real, are really just engineering exercises. Not to belittle the scope of the technical challenge, but the fact is, you can (and we have) put together a competent team of engineers and build a platform that is technically capable of delivering content to just about any device on the planet.

And while we've framed the other class of problems as bureaucratic in the past, I think I have to now reclassify them as institutional. It's not, as I've believed in the past, simply a matter of going through all of the required mating dances with the mobile carriers and the sea of companies in the so-called "value chain" beneath them. Yes, you certainly have to do the dance. But No, that doesn't solve all the problems of complexity.

It turns out that the mobile industry as a whole has a tremendous amount of inertia behind the notion that delivering mobile content and services should remain complicated.

Carriers like Verizon force device manufacturers to cripple the phones they distribute to prevent consumers from using their full capabilities. They intentionally break existing applications with firmware "upgrades" not requested by subscribers. They take 50% of the revenue from any purchase made through their premium SMS channels - and at the same time contractually forbid partners from using any other competitive payment processors. Even if you don't call it larceny, it's an ugly oligarchy to be sure.

Speaking of ugly oligarchies. The recording industry, for its part, has apparently determined that its best chance of self-preservation is in assembling an assortment of extortionists, fear-mongers, and racketeers to harass and intimidate the very same people to which they market their limited catalogs of plastic pop stars and on whose computers they install spyware rootkits.

It must be a really weird thing to work in an industry that has harbors such blatant disgust for its own customers.

So what's happened is that we, as MyxerTones, went into this whole "simplify mobile" endeavour bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, taking as common sense the notion that the easier you make it for anyone to offer their own content and services for mobile phones, the more value there will be in the entire ecosystem. Rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing. Anyone who has taken even a casual interest in understanding the history of the internet knows that every billion-dollar internet company (as well as the aggregate trillions in small companies doing business on the internet) is directly and unequivocally indebted to the uncompromising openness built into the network.

To think that mobile phones are anything but an extension of the internet is to embrace a legacy mindset. So to think that what's best for the mobile industry is anything different than what's been proven to be best for the internet in general is either arrogance or ignorance, neither of which is likely to bring longevity.

And what's happened is that we've gotten caught up in the machine a little too much. We've started making product decisions based on who might sue us as opposed to what would bring the best value to our customers and to society as a whole. That's what the sunrise made clear to me, and that's why I'm so glad I watched it this morning, because I'm now 100% refocused on what it is we have to do.

There was a recent incident involving Digg a couple of weeks ago that you may have heard off. Turns out some super-secret magic decoding ring for DVD copy protection was figured out by some hacker somewhere. (Probably the Ukraine. They've got a lot of crazy number-smart people out there. ) So people started posting the magic decoder ring to Digg. Digg apparently gets served with a cease-and-desist or some such thing, and yanks references to the key. The users basically revolt, until Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, eventually overrules their own lawyers and says screw it, we are a service, we are by and for the people, and we will not get in the way of what the people want to do.

Gutsy move. I mean, wow. It's still not clear what the ramifications are for that. When Kevin refers to "a bigger company" in his post, he's potentially guilty of a felony understatement.

This is my point: I, like Kevin Rose, believe that the pendulum has swung waaaaay too far toward the special interests and entrenched oligarchists, and away from The People. The entire reason I am involved with computers in the first place is because I was inspired by the early hackers who saw the great potential for individual empowerment through information. (Oh, and video games. I really loved video games.) So I'm going to make sure that when we're building features into MyxerTones, we're always thinking about enabling, and we're going to stop spending so much of our time worrying about this guy or that guy suing us or whatever.

Mobile phones are the first exposure to the internet for most of the world's population, and it would be a lost opportunity of unparalleled scale if the openness of the internet didn't follow to the new devices. Like, lost opportunity akin to losing the recipe for penicillin on the way home from the lab.

Lighten up, Myk. It's just bloody ringtones.

No. No, it isn't. The whole bloody reason people think mobile content and services is just Madonna ringtones and the Pope's "Thought of the Day" is because the platform has been locked up so tightly, with so few people able to address it. It's only when the barriers to entry are removed that we will start to see the truly innovative applications arrive.

I don't pretend that there aren't issues to be confronted by opening the mobile internet airwaves to anyone to share and sell anything they want, but I believe the issues need to be be framed in a larger frame of discourse than the narrow-minded worlds of the mobile industry or the music industry. Our society still has a very long way to go before it has a mature understanding of how best to balance individual rights with those of rights holders, and the way things are right now it's clear to me that society would be much better served if companies like MyxerTones was less timid and more focused on enabling rather than restricting.

Let’s talk products.

Products is what it’s all about. Technology is really fun to work on, and it’s extremely important for us to continue to push the envelope of what’s possible on the web and on mobile phones. But all of the technology, when it works, should be truly invisible, exposed to the world only through a sanitized viewport that is a product. As we say on the MyxerTones website, “the technology is mvisible.”

The focus of our entire company is the product currently called MyxerTones (with the Tones part giving off a kinda shimmery semi-opaque vibe like the picture of Marty in Back to the Future when he was in danger of never having existed). But we really have three distinct families of offerings, because the people we sell on our services can be divided into three main groups: web surfers; independent artists; and partners.

Web surfers are people that are interested in getting mobile content. These are people that we market to with “make your own ringtones” types of advertisements, and the people that we’re really going to start selling MyxerMagic to. They’re normal people – not power users, not content owners, piercings optional, etc. They have a run-of-the-mill phone from their carrier, and they want to get some cool stuff on it. They’re the people that get the most attention from the product team, because they’re the people with the biggest numbers.

The Independent Artists is meant to include anyone from a local band to a small record label that might manage, say, a few dozen acts. We have specific functionality baked into MyxerTones to support the kinds of things that these guys want to do – mainly connect with their fans to build loyalty by giving out ringtones/wallpapers, etc., but sometimes sell their own content for profit. The piercing ratio is definitely a lot higher in this group than the other two. We built MyxerTags and FanLists especially for these guys, and we have some other things in the works (geotargeting, MyxerTunes, etc.)

It turns out that most of our artists identify themselves as HipHop/Rap, with Rock following not too far behind. We also have reasonable showings in Country and Latin categories.

Finally, the Partners bucket represents everyone from PohDunkBands.com to [LARGE PARTNERS]. There’s obviously a lot of variation in the kinds of services various partners want, but the constant stream of partner requests we get into our mailbox every day (honestly) is a real indication that we have an opportunity to make some turnkey products that target these guy’s wishes to add mobile functionality to their own websites.

I’d like to point out that, while we will likely talk about [BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES] at this meeting, those types of partnerships are not the kind of thing the products team is overly concerned with on a day to day basis. We are much more interested in bringing value to users at the other end of the size spectrum. That is, we’re trying to support the millions of people with audiences in the low thousands or hundreds, as opposed to going after the biggest companies out there. We believe in the long tail, be they musicians or small website operators or someone else. The key is making everything as simple as possible, completely turnkey from our website, requiring no human interaction.

This is directly analogous to how we don’t really care about going after the Madonna’s and U2’s of the music world – sure, we’d like to have a couple more big names in the “partner” bucket to add to our credibility in the business world and visibility in the “real” world, but our success is only going to be assured when we have products that appeal to the much larger aggregate of the smaller guys out there.

As Executive Vice President of Products, a fancy title I just last week created and am trying out today for the first time to see how it fits – I’m mainly concerned with defining the feature sets that we should deliver in the products we build to address the real needs and desires of our various constituents (product management), overseeing – and participating in - the development of the actual bits that make up the features (product development), and working to ensure that we expose the merits of our products in the best possible light to the largest possible market (product marketing).

The current state of things is that product development (and I include QA, support, and IT operations in that bucket, mainly because it’s all handled primarily by Bill) is as healthy as it could possibly be in an organization of our size. Product management, which is mainly myself, could perhaps benefit from another worker bee to spend time, for example, fleshing out partner programs. But the need for a high level product marketing person isn’t as clear as it seemed a while ago.

We have a PR firm handling traditional PR, and while we weren’t overly impressed with the results of PR efforts last year, we do feel that we’ve made a lot of progress and are pretty well positioned to start reaping some very tangible benefits from our PR efforts in the coming year (news stories, bylines, speaking engagements, etc.). We have a part-time (but in-house) PR/Marketing consultant that is helping PR considerably, while at the same time helping to hone the marketing message more effectively.

And we had the VP of New Media at [A LARGE RECORD LABEL], while viewing the MyxerTones website look at us and say “obviously you guys are marketing experts.” I’m sure there will be more discussion on this as we go forward, but marketing is building a brand, and our brand is definitely building.

Enough organizational talk. Here’s what’s going on with our products.

We released MyxerTones 2.0 just a few scant months ago. The traffic grew that day, and hasn’t stopped growing since. I think it’s funny that we call it MyxerTones 2.0, even to this day, because we’re probably on like the 200^th version of the website that we’ve deployed to production. That’s the way we like to do things – we try to update the website every week or two, which might not seem like a big deal to some of you, but the difference between this type of development environment and one in an enterprise software company (how many years did Vista take?) is staggering.

What this means is that we can really quickly bring new features and bugfixes to the site, which keeps things fresh for the users. It’s awesome to be able to write some new code and have it live on production two days later.

So what are some of those features? MyxerTones is the best place to make and share mobile content. I’m going to save the statistics for Bill, but I can certainly tell you that it’s probably one of the most popular places to make and share mobile content anywhere. We’ve been innovating like made in the last quarter; after releasing 2.0, which was a complete redesign of the entire user interface of every page on the site, we’ve added: fan lists, comments, tags, search capability; image support; video support; MyxerMagic; artist profile pages; and that’s only what I’m able to recall off the top of my head. The site is alive with activity and change, and is really turning into a first class community site.

MyxerMagic, which I’ve alluded to, is the latest and greatest feature. It’s a tiny little piece of software that integrates into the web browser to add a “send to phone” option to every image on the web. It’s going to be huge.

MyxerFlix is what we’re calling video support in MyxerTones. While the first releases simply allow for the delivery of video clips that are manually uploaded from a PC, we’ll soon enhance MyxerMagic with video capabilities which will allow, for example, any YouTube video to be sent directly to a user’s mobile phone right from the browser. How sweet it that?

Finally, as a teaser, these are the things that I expect the labs to kick out over the next months. MyxerFlix is basically an extension of the system to support video content (up to 3 minute video clips) alongside images and ringtones. MyxerTunes will be OTA delivery of free or premium full-track, high quality audio. Given recent industry trends with regard to increasing bandwidth availability and more capable phones, we believe that 2007 is a practical year to offer this service.

My next title is Chief Technology Officer. So let’s talk about technology.

First of all, we are unabashedly a technology-focused company. We make no apology for that, and we will continue to be a technology-focused company for as long we exist. We rely on our technological savvy to enable us to build the kind of compelling products we’re becoming known for. The novelty, reliability, simplicity, and sheer power of our products is dependent wholly on our technology.

We have a tagline on the bottom of our Myxer web pages that says “the technology is mVisible.” That’s a shorthand way of saying, yes, there’s a hell of a lot going on under the covers, but you don’t have to worry about that. We’ve welded the hood shut. Punch in your phone number and click “send to my phone” and we’ll do the rest. It’s invisible.

We’ve got a platform that can ingest content in virtually any existing audio, image, or video format, chew it up, and spit it out in a nice little package delivered to the doorstep of just about any phone on any carrier out there. We’ve got huge tracts of really cool technology that allow us to automatically identify the phone model of a requesting user and the carrier they’re with, we’ve got a database of phone characteristics that’s plugged into an automated feedback loop so that it stays constantly updated with new information, we have multiple messaging gateways giving us redundancy and flexibility, we basically have this whole content preparation and delivery thing down. That is soooo last year.

We leverage web services extensively in our platform, and intend to do so even more in the future. Already we depend on Amazon S3 for storage and backup, mBlox web services for delivering premium content, Google Maps for geocoding, RSS feeds from Blogger for our news capability, and I’m sure I left off a couple in there somewhere.

We believe that companies that embrace the loosely-coupled, scalable nature of cloud computing are going to have tremendous advantages over companies that fail to take advantage of them. And that advantage is coming a lot sooner than some people may think.

We work with what’s there, in terms of software. Forcing a local installation of software on a user’s PC is a definite disadvantage for any company, and requiring special software on the phone is about 10x worse. Aside from the logistics of actually developing the software and testing it on all supported platforms, there’s the huge hurdle of getting users to actually install it successfully. It’s just not worth it. See point #1.

In our short history, we’ve already created an impressive track record of innovation. Building on the core Myxer platform, we’ve developed innovative technologies like MyxerTags, allowing our users to effectively host their own ringtones from their website or MySpace profile page; MyxerCodes, allowing automatic shared use of the MYXER shortcode for mobile originated content purchases; dynamic delivery, providing the possibility for ultra-personalized content to be delivered through our system by our partners; and most recently MyxerMagic, which promises to make all web content just one click away from being mobile content.

We’re just now rolling out core support for video delivery, the technological challenges for which are mainly architectural (spreading the CPU load efficiently, storing and caching files, etc.) in nature rather than innovative. I expect the next jaw-dropping technological advancement we’ll make is when we delivery the MyxerMagic + MyxerFlix technology that will let anyone with MyxerMagic send any video they see online directly to their mobile phone.

We’ve filed for patent protection with claims covering aspects such as the core architecture and the (really smart) way we harvest metadata about a song unknowingly contributed by one user and use it to improve the experience of subsequent users that use the same song. Most recently, we’ve crafted claims around the recent MyxerMagic and dynamic delivery inventions.

We have a regularly scheduled process with our IP legal team when we file provisional applications that cover our newest innovations, and convert previous provisional applications to full-fledged utility applications when appropriate.

So from a core technology point of view, we rock. We have probably one of the most robust mobile content delivery platforms available anywhere; we have unique technologies that take full advantage of the internet; and we have a group of awesome engineers churning out a lot of really cool stuff every day just waiting for the right time to spring out of the labs.

Inventions and the core technology that power our platform are only part of my concern as chief technology officer. High on my list of priorities is the scalability and reliability of our platform. Operating a website is serious business, especially when it gets the kind of traffic that Myxer is now getting.

Our website scaling plan is built to support the business model we’ve developed. The business model has conservative growth estimates that require the website to support ten times the current user load in the next year. That’s ten times as many visitors to the site, ten times as many ringtones delivered, ten times as many SMS messages sent, ten times as many files to store, ten times everything. And because the business plan estimates are conservative, we’re very likely to need even more capacity than that.

Late in the year, it became obvious that disk storage was a real bottleneck for us. We didn’t have enough local storage to hold onto the hundreds of gigabytes of files we needed to operate the site, and every time we needed to expand the amount of storage it required physical changes to our production facility. So, embracing the web, we built our own hierarchical file system based on Amazon’s S3 storage solution, to effectively give us infinite disk storage scalability at extremely reasonable rates. Following our commitment to automate everything automatable, this new system will basically operate on autopilot from now on; as local disk storage becomes sparse, files that haven’t been touched in a long time are simply deleted. If they are needed again in the future, they are retrieved from Amazon’s servers over the backbone without anyone ever knowing what happened. It’s really cool stuff.

What’s even cooler is that we built the system so that it can recover from a complete local disk failure, or even an obliteration of our production facility. If, for example, the great state of Texas (where our production facility is located) is swallowed up by a giant rabid sinkhole, we can bring up a new web server, point it at a backup database server, and the new web server’s local disk will be populated with all the files it needs from Amazon, as it needs them. We haven’t tested the bit about swallowing up the production facility yet, but the other stuff seems pretty solid.

Other scalability growing pains will come in the areas of page serving and transcoding CPU. The next few months will see us bringing up our web capacity with additional web servers and potentially a dedicated transcoding server or two to handle the CPU-intensive tasks of translating input media into the various output formats needed by our target devices. We’re also planning to mirror our front end web servers for extra capacity as well as fault tolerance.

Continued in Part 3 (Products)...

Board of Directors

of

mVisible Technologies, Inc.

Myk Willis

Founder, CTO, EVP Products

2 Feb 2007

[Note: this is based on the original presentation script, and not an actual transcript. Also note that some confidential information has been excised where necessary by contract.]

First of all, I’d like to welcome everyone to the first really formal board of directors meeting for mVisible Technologies, Inc. I guess it’s still not really all that formal, but this is the first time I remember wearing shoes at a director’s meeting, so I guess we’re moving more in that direction. Quite a few more lawyers here than I remember, too…

Let me start by saying that it is truly an honor and a privilege to be addressing my fellow board members, my fellow shareholders, and my friends (some of you are all three), all of us compatriots and companions on this crazy journey into the uncharted waters where the mobile industry meets the internet.

As I sat staring at Microsoft Word last night, trying to figure out how to segue from here into the meat of my soon-to-be-written presentation, an email dropped into my inbox announcing IDC’s estimate that over 1 billion mobile phones were sold last year alone. Holy crap. That’s a lot of ringtones!

Unfortunately, that didn’t make for a very good segue, so I’ll have to engage the abrupt gear-shift method instead, before I run out of time.

In preparation for this meeting, in true corporate America style, I whipped out PowerPoint and started building the scaffolding for my presentation. The handy little outline view on the left side makes it really easy to craft a perfectly balanced presentation – the intro slide, the agenda slide, the 3-5 slides for each item on the agenda, the summary – in about 5 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to simply fill in the bullet items at your leisure (for example, in the backseat of Bill’s car on the way to the meeting).

You may note that we’re still on the intro slide, and so you may be quietly wondering to yourself, if not quite concerned about the matter, precisely how many items are there on said agenda slide to follow?

Let’s cut to the chase. I’m the founder of mVisible, so I get to talk about the Vision (capital ‘V’) of the company. I’m the chief technology officer, also, so I’m going to spend some time talking about the state of the technology we’ve been growing. Finally, I’m responsible for Products, so I’m going to talk about our product management, development, and marketing activities.

Now might be an appropriate time to point out that mVisible doesn’t have a Vision statement, nor for that matter do we have a Mission statement. If you vaguely remember seeing some such thing in a document resembling a business plan for mVisible that may or may not have been distributed prior to our recent Series A funding round, well, I’m sorry to report that you must be mistaken, because we don’t have a business plan either.

So this part of the slide deck should go pretty quick, right?

The truth is, we do have a vision (and a mission, and a mantra), but instead of being some suitable-for-framing holy words that we mount above all of our desks (and put at the beginning of our PowerPoint presentations), our vision is a living being; an amorphous, low-frequency life form that lives inside us and uses us, the host being, to shows facets of itself from time to time; in late-night emails from conferences; in spontaneous comments to reporters or analysts; in job interviews; at the bar of the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, CO; in the products we build.

I’ve collected an assortment of mission- and vision-like emissions from my email Sent folder that will hopefully prove useful to show what we’re about. I’ll warn you in advance that I plan to spend a fair amount of time on this topic, because it’s extremely important to our success as a company.

“Myxer is a startup company founded with the intent of revolutionizing the manner in which people use technology for personal communication. Myxer is focused on bringing powerful and unique capabilities to the mass-market through existing wireless devices.”

10/1/2004

So even at the very beginning, in fact before the very beginning, we can see that our core beliefs (and even our trademark rights to the Myxer name!) were well-established.

“[Our mission is] to develop innovative enabling technologies and products that empower individuals through mobile phone technologies.”

10/1/2004

Innovate, enable, empower: these concepts were baked in from the very beginning of our company, and they continue to be what drives what we do.

“We’re working to fulfill the promise of the mobile phone as the first truly personal computer.”

11/10/2005

I used to hammer on that truly personal computer theme a lot, but it might have lost some of its luster after being co-opted by H-P’s new “the computer is personal again” ad campaign. Because that’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. The idea I’ve always tried to conjure up with that phrase is that what we’ve previously called personal computers are anything but. Sitting at a desk in a back room of your house, staring at a bulky computer screen - is that personal? The mobile phone should not be treated as a shrunken-head version of an IBM PC. It is a conduit that has the potential to enable communication and entertainment in a very personal way. But to reach that potential to be truly personal, we – as an industry, as a company, as individuals - have to rethink every application and try to unlearn a lot of how we did things when the computer was on a desktop.

Obviously, this is a very high level idea, which is why it’s in the Vision part of the presentation and not the “features coming soon” part later.

“We have a vision of a mobile internet in which everyone is empowered to use, produce, share, market, and sell content and services unique to the mobile platform, and we’re creating valuable products in pursuit of that vision.“

11/10/2005

Now this is something that’s a lot more concrete and I think we can all appreciate how we’re making dramatic progress on this front. The fact of the matter is, we are delivering on this vision every single day, when thousands of bands use our products to share or sell their content through Myxer.

“I have visions of cheeseburgers dancing in my head.”

ScottK, 7/4/2005

Now, I just had to use this quote from ScottK, from an email in which he was expressing glee (I think) upon some milestone achievement or another. I still have no idea what this means, but it’s obviously a vision, right?

“everything’s mobile”

1/7/2006

This is what Kawasaki-San would probably refer to as a mantra. It’s a tight little phrase that is meant to be repeated in a barely audible, semi-conscious manner, several times a day, to help maintain focus on what’s important to our company. The MyxerMagic product feature, which we’ll speak about later, is a direct bloodline descendent and concrete incarnation of this mantra, and many more offspring are in the works.

“Myxer is about […] leveraging the respective strengths of the internet and the mobile phone to make digital content easily discoverable and accessible anywhere you are”

1/25/07

This is a very recent glimpse of our vision in which you can see our product bias toward digital content leaking through. While perhaps this statement would be too limiting for a traditional Vision statement at another company, the fact that we are content to allow our vision to live and breathe means we can embrace it fully without losing our understanding of larger goals waiting to be achieved after this one is accomplished.

Now, before jumping into my next topic, technology, I do want to talk very briefly about the industries we’re involved with. We like to think that we’re positioned at the center of three more or less distinct industries:

The Mobile Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Music Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Internet – what a beautiful mess!

While the mobile industry struggles under the sheer weight of the carriers;

While the music industry struggles with how to stay relevant in a world where musicians can get their digital content to their fans without requiring the distribution that labels have historically provided;

The web continues to produce a beautiful, if fractured and unpredictable, steady stream of innovation, built on an open network. Today’s web applications are flourishing because of the ‘openness’ of web 2.0, and we’re right in there. It’s a great time to be writing software for the web, there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of expectations.

...continued in part 2...