Arizona is full of cool startups, and I love to write about them all, in no particular order, and without judgment. These are not necessarily the “hot” ones, or the funded ones. They are the ones that start and grow in Arizona because of the excellence of  their concepts, their business models, or their founders.

For instance, I bet you have never heard about Unicorn Media. It has been operating in “stealth mode”  for a couple of years, seeded by its founder, Bill Rinehart, who used to be CEO of Limelight, another Arizona company that operated under the radar for years until it raised some money from Goldman Sachs and finally went public.Its offices are in Tempe, where having outgrown one space, it now splits its company offices into corporate and development.

Unicorn had been a content delivery network for independent artists, and then began delivering content to larger players. Today Unicorn unveiled a new and improved website  with a streamlined message that puts the focus on a new offering,  Unicorn Once, that will probably elevate the company to rock start status very quickly, because the ability to deliver content easily to mobile devices, whether Android, iPhone, or tablet, has become unbelievable important to advertisers in the past year. Mobile advertising is on a tear, and without getting too technical, I can tell you that one of the big problems with mobile is the formatting. Every Android phone is slightly different, they’re all different from iPhones and iPads, and who knows what mobile innovation is coming down the road. For an advertiser, the ability to upload video once to all those formats is a major time saver and revenue generator..

It took Bill a couple of pivots to get here, but now the company has the only patented product to deliver big gains to big media companies, and you will see elsewhere the news that Msnbc Digital Network selected  Unicorn Once™ technology to deliver, monetize and analyze mobile and OTT video content for all its  brands. Unicorn Once™ lets Msnbc Digital Network to easily reach devices such as iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Roku and countless others for  msnbc.com, TODAY.com and NBCNightlyNews.com.

What else can Unicorn do? It can give detailed reporting in real time about user behavior on any channel, and can tell whether content is being viewed on the web or on a mobile device. That means video content can be adjusted in real time across any device or platform so you, the user, can view it optimally.

So from my vantage point, the Valley startup community looks textured. complex, and vibrant. As they say on the soon-to-be-public Facebook, it’s complicated. I’d be lying if I said we were Silicon Valley, but in the ten years we have been running entrepreneurship training, and the six years we have produced the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, I’ve unearthed plenty of talented teams building businesses every bit as interesting as those anywhere else in the country. It’s my intention to  shed some light on the world of Arizona startups.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Rock HealthHealth Innovation Summit on

Image by mariachily via Flickr

Jan.20th. It was the third day of a conference that highlighted development, design, and business issues around the potential for health care transformation through technology. The room was full, and the audience stayed until the end, even on a Friday afternoon.

Why? Because they knew something big was up. What’s up is the awareness of the Rock Health accelerator and the move to change a system only a young person from outside the industry could even hope to change. For three days, enthusiastic developers listened to cynics like me talk about business models, chasms, and challenges. I hope our doubts didn’t make a dent in their drive.

A year ago, there was no Rock Health, but more important, there was no community pulled together around the cause of health care innovation brought about by young people largely focused on digital and mobile technologies. A scant one year later, there is a vibrant health tech community in San Francisco, supported by large hospital systems, insurance providers, VCs, angels, entrepreneurs and mentors. The need is recognized, but until Rock Health, there hasn’t been a community. Health 2.0, another wonderful step in the direction of change, focused more on showcasing change than on financing or mentoring change.

The second class in the Rock Health program kicks off this week. Some of the grads from the first have already received additional funding or gotten to revenue.

They won’t all succeed. They have no concept of how complicated this industry is. But here’s the most important point: Rock Health has drawn together all the people inside and outside the system who want it to change, who are willing to take chances, and willing to support the effort to move the needle.

And thus I feel like 2011 was a tipping point for health care as an industry. After last year, for many reasons, it can’t remain the same. The larger providers and payers have already begun to circle the wagons around Obama’s health care reform law, because they are realists and know it’s not going to be repealed completely no matter who gets elected. So they’ve begun the journey toward bundled payments, Accountable Care Organizations, medical practice acquisitions, and better electronic health records. The battleships are slowly changing direction.

And the best part, Rock Health was founded and is run by women — the very people who make most of the health care decisions anyway.

Writing predictions is always/never fun, because you take a moon shot in advance and can always turn out to be wrong. That being said, I try never to predict things I don’t already know something about, and then I try to spread word about what’s coming to people who aren’t expert in what I’m predicting. For that reason, some of my predictions can appear out of the mainstream. What a surprise.

1) The success of Louis CK‘s unusual distribution strategy will once and for all change the publishing and entertainment industries. Right now, the publishers are wildly trying to control the distribution of content with legislation pending in Congress. Let’s assume it will fail, as there are petitions all over the internet to fight SOPA (otherwise known as the Stop Online Piracy Act HR3261) and its sister in the Senate. By the time you read this, the chips will probably have fallen one way or another on this particular attempt to screw up the internet by people who don’t understand it, but the legislation won’t matter, because of Louis CK.

Louis CK is a comic who had a hilarious show on HBO that later went to FX. He decided to produce a single ”

concert,” or whatever you call it when a comic stands up there and is funny in front of you, and distribute it himself over the internet. He offered it free, suggested a $5.00 donation, and made $750,000 profit after covering his $250,000 costs. He keeps all that profit. He shares it with no “label,” publishing company, network, or whatever. HE and WE are the network.

This will continue to happen. Once content goes from atoms to bits, “piracy” can’t be stopped, and neither can the worker (Louis CK) owning the means of production. Louis CK is now a publisher. There’s a train moving in a certain direction here, and  many lawyers and even creators think that standing in front of it and waving their arms in fear about the coming trains wreck will stop it. No way.

2) Just as Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt changed our views about social privacy, the number of data breaches this year will make people think twice about the privacy of health records. This year more than any other has been the year of electronic health records, and most of the small physician offices that installed them with ARRA (Stimulus) money are just figuring out how to use them. These providers have consultants, and some of these consultants are already privy to patient information, and bound by HIPPAA rules. But laptops get lost and stolen, physician staff turns over, and our records are not secure, no matter what anyone says. In fact, the only person who has real trouble getting access to medical records is the patient, who has to sign forms to receive his/her own data.

We are going to learn to live with our health information being “out there,” both intentionally and unintentionally.

If you are a patient with a serious or chronic condition, you may already have chosen to put it out there by joining a support group or a site like Diabetes Connect or Patients Like Me. You may also be monitoring your weight or blood pressure with a Withings scale and an iPhone app, wearing a Fitbit or a Jawbone. Slowly, we are learning to reap the benefits of sharing our health information and crowd sourcing our treatment plans.

3) The global startup movement will continue to accelerate, even though the funding for companies that need follow-on rounds will dry up. My friend Mark Suster from GRP Partners predicted that 2012 would be a “shitstorm” for startup companies seeking more money for expansion. There are several reasons for this. First, angels and VCs have funded too many of the same thing. Some of the clones will have to disappear. Second, VCs are having trouble raising funds because their institutional investors (pension funds, university endowments) are still reeling from losses in 2008 and have lost the taste for alternative investments. Nevertheless, there are now enough incubator/ accelerator programs in most cities to provide a richer ecosystem than we had five years ago, or even three. And since capital will come where there is a good deal, even states and countries without indigenous VC communities will get noticed.

4) Rapid fire technological change in health care  will taken place in advance of “Obamacare.” Obama’s health plan may not be ideal, but it has done something I have been waiting for. It has shaken up the industry and forced it to consider new business models and ways to deliver service. Both insurers and providers are facing about 32,000,000 formerly uninsured patients, coupled with the need to spend 80% of premiums collected on actual care. Look for (finally) the rise of technology in remote patient monitoring and wellness incentives. Look also for an increase in primary care docs, retail facilities that treat non-urgent illnesses, and fewer conversations with the actual doctor, who will become the medical director of her own practice. And employers are already beginning to penalize  us for some health conditions like high blood pressure or smoking, shifting a larger percentage  of our health insurance premiums to us. There’s an amazing amount of activity around using technology to produce behavior change. Let’s call this human engineering.

Well, it wasn’t GeeksonaPlane, but the past ten days have given me another lesson on the global startup culture. I spent three days in Paris at LeWeb, and then a week in London. And everywhere it is the same: smart, wonderful people with good ideas and Silicon Valley envy.

Anywhere outside Silicon Valley, for all intents and purposes, is Phoenix. By that I mean the people think they lack something only Silicon Valley can provide. They either want to be in Silicon Valley or they want Silicon Valley capital and mentorship in their city. Never mind that people are now leaving the Bay Area faster than they are moving in because of high housing costs, poor educational systems, diminished quality of life, and inability to compete with their more successful neighbors (few people in the Bay Area feel rich, satisfied, or happy)

.Fortunately, I am both part of and apart from the Bay Area ecosystem. I’ve invested and mentored there, even lived there part of the year, but always had Arizona as a reality check. And now I’ve got most of the rest of the world. I have even visited entrepreneurs in Uganda. But now I know that even London does not feel up to par with SIlicon Valley.

Silicon Valley capital isn’t stupid. If there’s a deal to be made in another city or country, it is already there on the ground. Just yesterday, stepping outside Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street, a glance at my Waze app told me Benchmark Capital had an office across the street. And the incubators already exist in London, despite the perception of a resource shortage. Tech Stars is in Cambridge, Tech Hub is on Old City Road, and there’s a Seedcamp, a Leancamp, a Digital Entrepreneurs Club, Ecademy, and an event every night.

In most of the places I’ve visited through GOAP, the same thing is true. From Santiago to Seoul, from Shanghai to Sao Paolo, there are startup outposts and events for entrepreneurs, who are already connected through social media and sharing best practices. For the past decade, VCs who understand these forces of globalization have been on planes chasing deal flow, while entrepreneurs have pined for the place the VCs fly from.

So what’s missing in these cities that causes the entrepreneurs to feel so inferior? At first I thought it was training or mentorship, but now I am coming to the conclusion it’s a feeling of community.Every city needs more collaboration, someone to pull the pieces together. And someone to stay involved for the long term, because there is no such thing as an overnight success. Companies may need to be mentored and supported for five or ten years.

Look at Twitter. Not out of the woods yet and almost six years old.

The biggest problem I see outside Silicon Valley is continuity– the existence of a group of local entrepreneurs who make it themselves and then turn around and reinvest in the younger people coming up. The best example of this is TIE, which began as a way for Indian entrepreneurs who profited from the diaspora to mentor and give back to people back home. About ten years ago, TIE was the way a graduate of IIT found a job in the US, and a way Indian entrepreneurs found funding. It was, and probably still is, an ecosystem.

No Silicon Valley luminary who flies in for a Lean/Seed/bar Camp can ever have the impact of an ongoing entrepreneurial community that collaborates and encourages its own. In Arizona, everyone bemoans the lack of local founders who have experience with large exits. They think the state doesn’t have them.

It does, but after their liquidity events they retreat on to the golf course. They don’t stay engaged. They aren’t trained to give back like Silicon Valley guys do.

I propose a global series of screenings of a documentary I saw last month called “Something Ventured.” It is about the entrepreneurs and VCs who invested before Silicon Valley had acquired its mythic sheen, when it was fruit orchards. Back then, the capital was in New York, and had to be persuaded to take chances on young entrepreneurs.

That’s how it is now in London, Phoenix, Shanghai, or Sao Paolo. In fifty years, one of those places will have the luster Silicon Valley enjoys now. Successful people in every city need to be shown how much satisfaction there is in mentoring and financing their successors. And in the meantime, be advised: a very small number of startups get funding even in the Bay Area. And 90% of startups still fail. Let’s not use the wrong metric to measure success: for every Mark Zuckerberg there are thousands of failures. But that’s okay as long as we don’t condemn them. Perhaps the next time, having learned, they will succeed.

Remember, everywhere but New York and California, entrepreneurial communities are still in the first generation. In fifty years, who knows where the grass will be greener.

I have been travelling a lot lately, and it has given me time to reflect on the state of the airline industry (well, the state of British Airways, American Airlines and Southwest). As you probably know, the airline industry is one of the most volatile, least profitable businesses ever. Since 9/11, things have gotten much worse. And the people who pay for the service suffer the most.For example, I do a lot of international travel, which used to be the last refuge of civility in the industry. Long after I had begun to shove other passengers to make sure I had overhead bin space on Southwest, I still looked forward to the pace of the long flights, where they served you real food, gave you eyeshades and slippers, and served free drinks.All that remains on British Airways of that former civility is the free drinks, probably because they hope if we drink enough we will not remember there are no real pillows (they’ve been replaced by cotton wads), no slippers or shades, and barely enough toothpaste to go around a mouthful of teeth.And the food? Unspeakably bad. Sugary fruit cocktail and unrecognizable entrees.Why have things deteriorated so completely? The corporations would blame the workers, the union rules, the fuel prices, and so forth. But I blame marketing, or the absence thereof. Back in the day, when everyone wasn’t global of necessity (this latest trip is a combination of conference, meetings, and grandchild), people had to be enticed to fly. It had to be presented as sophisticated and alluring. My parents actually dressed up for flights. I am wearing Uggs, a tribute to my current conditions.But air travel is now a utility, and the airlines treat us like the gas company does; they provide little more than the service they must to keep us from dying in flight. There is no marketing, because we are going to sign up to fly like we sign up for electricity; we don’t set the price and we no longer get the service.Something’s fundamentally wrong with our economic system, and the airlines are a symptom, not a root cause. I will leave you to draw your own conclusion; I have to put my Uggs back on for landing.

Although i live in Arizona, i was in New York this weekend and i went to show my support for OccupyWallStreet. it was one of the most exciting things i have seen in my life, for as i suspected, this movement is not about left and right, it is about up and down. But it isn’t about class warfare either; it is about crowdsourcing solutions.

The Occupy movement will never be understood by the media or by the current political establishment, because it is a movement of questions, not answers, and circles, not poles.
Early this morning when I was there, two circles of “residents” were seated on the concrete. One was listening to a lecture on the Fed, and what it does and means, and discussing how to get more educated about the financial system. The other was talking about what to do (or more accurately what not to do) with donated funds (“let’s not use them to make ourselves more comfortable because that is not what this is about”).

When I went to the Press table there were several representatives of the people who take notes on little pads, otherwise known as Journalists. They’re the only people who don’t take notes on smartphones, recording audio, video, and photos. That’s only for citizen journalists and tourists, who want to make sure they share reality.

The people with the pads all came with rehearsed questions. You could see they already had a concept, a point of view, a story they wanted to write. And it was the job of the poor, sleep-deprived spokesperson, crawling out from under a blue tarp, to say “we don’t know the answers yet.That’s why we are here: to find them”

From all the signs I saw today, the common purpose is to unite against a financial system that has cheated most of America. If there is an enemy, it is not one political party or the other, it is government that has been bought off by banks and multinationals. It is not an anti- business or an anti-government movement ; it is more like an anti-greed and anti-selfishness movement.

It doesn’t involve giving up all your worldly goods to show solidarity; it involves just showing up to show your solidarity. The goal is to make the people’s voices, so long drowned out, heard. It’s to remind the banks and the government that the citizens are the people, and that the American people are getting angry and impatient at the top 1%.

Oh, and it is by no means all kids. Plenty of people my age are out there. We may not be sleeping in Zuccotti Park, but we are there all the same, some in body and many more in spirit.

Image by TimDuran79 via Flickr

The Apple announcement today was like  90 minutes of foreplay with no orgasm. Here we are going into Christmas with no products we can’t do without. No iPhone 5, and no new IPad. And I already have a Nano watch.

That being said, yes, I am going to get the iPhone 4s, but not because I think it’s a major improvement. I’m faking it.

I’m getting the iPhone 4s for practical reasons, not for love. I am getting it because a major issue  with the iPhone for me is not being able to change carriers when I travel overseas. A phone that’s unlocked represents more in savings than I’d spend on the new phone.

Am I happy about a better camera? Of course. I don’t have a digital camera anymore; the iPhone camera is the only one I use. So the better it is, the better I will like it. Especially with 1080p video, which I will use to take better pictures of dogs.

Will I try SIri? Of course. But I tried it once before, and found it good for only a limited number of things. It can’t answer your every question, or solve all your problems. I wonder if I will work it into my every day life. I hope it will help me when I am driving.

And where is the Facebook integration Scoble thought would be there? So much appears to be missing, and I don’t know whether it’s because the rumor mill was really off base, or whether something else was supposed to happen and just didn’t materialize in time.

Actually, as a result of the announcement today,  I’ve decided I will do something I have been meaning to do for a long time: get an Android phone. I already know it will be whatever is introduced at CTIA next week, which is supposed to have Ice Cream Sandwich. I will use that Android phone on Verizon, so I can finally make a phone call. I will use the iPhone 4s to play out the end of my contract with AT&T.

I’m so sorry Steve Jobs is so ill. He would never have played things this way. And I absolutely know this is the future of Apple. It’s over, baby. The coolness is over. The floodgates have been opened for competition in every product line.

Unless artificial intelligence becomes the iPhone’s unique selling proposition. I hope that’s true. Only truly exceptional artificial intelligence is worthy of the Apple I know.

Not every entrepreneur we coach is a geek. Here’s a cool video about one of our participants who had to pivot several times before getting his aquarium store open. I hope he does really well; he’s passionate about kids, fish, and local shopping.

Ordinary people and small businesses using Facebook are going to come to grips with two new terms after the big announcements Mark Zuckerberg made today at f8, the Facebook Developer conference. The first is “self-expression,” which means your friends will know a lot more about what you read, what music you listen to, and even what you cook. The second is “serendipity,” which means if you see a friend of yours has watched a movie on Netflix, you can click on that app in your timeline and begin watching it immediately from within the app.

This could lead to a great deal of inadvertent oversharing. Facebook’s new idea is to make its platform a 21st century form of scrapbooking, and to help you “scrapbook” your entire life “frictionlessly.”

But you might want a little friction as you try to interact with all these changes. Let me see if I can give some tips on how to make the most of the new features and not fall into their traps.

As CTO Brett Taylor says, “when you change from the current profile view to the Timeline, you forget how much stuff is there.” That can work for or against you. We’re used to burying much of the past on Facebook and hoping it went away. Now it’s all going to be very retrievable, by anyone you friend.

In the next few weeks, you are going to get an entire new interface that will convert your life into a timeline. That timeline will have photos, updates, and a new set of “OpenGraph” apps.  While in the past, you could authorize apps and nothing might happen that you didn’t expect, that’s no longer going to be true,

Much more “passive sharing” will now be possible. Be careful what apps you authorize, because by default, much of what you do on Facebook with apps, or even outside Facebook with Netflix and Spotify, and  Facebook’s other integrated partners, will be shared automagically. Once you add an app to your timeline, you don’t have to give it permission to add stuff to your feed: “Adding an app to your timeline is like wiring a real-time connection between your app and Facebook…There is no step two,” says Facebook CTO Brett Taylor.

Third, you will be encouraged by the new interface to make Facebook your permanent home on the internet, which means the “walled garden” is pulling more partners in, rather than helping you get out to the wider world. So if you are a business, and you have a Facebook presence, you are going to need a much broader Facebook marketing strategy in order to find your new customers solely within the Facebook platform.

Well, the good news is that 800,000,000 from all over the world are now on Facebook. The bad news is that creates a lot of noise, and doesn’t necessarily help you reach the “right” people, especially since Facebook search is notoriously inferior.

The good news is that Facebook’s new design is based on better data visualization.  The bad news is that all that data is probably better for Facebook’s advertisers than for you. Remember that as long as you do not pay for Facebook, you are the product, not the customer. That’s why when you complain, Mark Zuckerberg

So Step !) Be careful who you friend. Step 2) Carefully explore your privacy settings and make sure you understand and Step 3) Think twice about adding apps.

Timeline Beta starts today, and with it, the common news apps that you might want to see. Watch out — it’s all coming soon to a neighborhood near you.