Startups suck and to push past that you need passion for your business and something else, anything else. For me, it’s family, Haiti & Luke, http://on.fb.me/YTFFwD. For @RobertWight @ReecesRainbow drives him.

On the hardest of days, passion, not the valuation keeps you going. After two hundred “no”s, you want it to work and you know it can work, but the passion pushes you to dig in, do the unpleasant work and make it happen.

I heard Rob Wight, mylist.com CEO, talk at the Florida Venture Forum last week. Keynotes can be hit or miss but this one got me to put down the iPad, step away from investor correspondence and listen. I can relate to the mission of @ReecesRainbow and RODSRacing. 

If you can help us bring Luke home, awesome, but definitely help yourself by checking out @ReecesRainbow. Consider what passion drives you to keep going. 

My wife is a Haitian drug runner and I’m proud of it. So are some of her best friends and she met another man doing it. I’m proud of that, too. Just last weekend we dropped off thousands of pills to one of her friends and she’s getting ready leave for another run to Haiti this week.

Of course, she’s sending pills in the wrong direction to make any money (north to south is much less lucrative), so she holds two jobs and started a business to support her Haitian habit, this other guy she fell in love with, and our family. By the way, this other “man” is really cute but short. Standing next to her, I feel lazy and selfish and I want to do more. Brenda has that effect on people and I love her for it.

She’s an amazing mom, and always pushing herself to do anything she touches better. We both have a tough time accepting things as they are and want to tinker until it’s right. For me it’s tech & business, for her it’s people. That’s how we’re alike.

Friends and acquaintances who know her from one activity often get surprised as they learn about other things she’s tackling. It’s pretty common for friends & family to tell me we should “slow” down but Brenda’s response humbles me. “Sure, but Luke needs us now.” That’s pretty much the argument for the kids she bore, the ones we only get to hold for a little while as foster parents and the ones we hope to add to our family.

Apparently, Brenda inspires other people, too. Bringing Luke home takes time and significant money. The generosity of friends and strangers supporting Brenda’s trips with People for Haiti and our efforts to bring Luke home leaves me speechless. As a startup CEO, I ask for investment all the time. Strangely, I find it much more difficult to ask for help growing our family and get emotional about even the smallest support from others. That’s even more so when the support is significant, whether dollars or labor. I’m driven to make Carvoyant better to support all of her crazy, worthwhile activities, so that she never has to balance the needs of one child against another.

Brenda often shares what’s she’s doing out of frustration but I want to share out of pride. I’m blown away by the passion and deliberate focus she brings to her work as a NICU nurse, mom, foster mom, nurse in Haiti, helping out in our community, and now, building “Lockets for Luke” to cover the costs of his “Gotcha Day”. She’s amazing and I’m proud that she let help me raise four kids of our own (soon to be five(ish)!) and that she pushes so hard to be a deliberate mother to them and provide love to all the others she comes across.

She makes me a better father and man just by association with her but I’m also proud of the types of people and groups, like People for Haiti, which Brenda builds her circle around. If you feel even a little bit of the way I do about Brenda, let her know. Say something nice or support her work through “Lockets for Luke”, People for Haiti or some of the fundraisers we’ll be doing in the coming months.

Thank you, Brenda. You’re amazing, I love you and am grateful for every day together. 

I’m a brewer/entrepreneur and can completely relate to craft brewers attitude to selling beers over businesses!

In venture backed technology, you build to sell, acquisition or IPO, but we’re striving @Carvoyant for the same passion with our team and customers as craft brewers have with theirs. So, go have a good regional craft brew while thinking about your next great enterprise. Just make sure you have a safe ride home;-)

Drive safe & smart. 

This is something we’re very close to, especially as we ramp up our engagement with developers, partners and investors. Externally it’s why we say “Your Car, Your Data, Your Control” because we lean towards respectful transparency. Internally, it’s why we’re torn about sharing interesting traction and tipping a partners hand too early.

You’ll see Carvoyant all over the place in the coming months, promoting connected cars as part of the API economy. Absolutely integral to that promotion is balancing our values of transparency and privacy in what we build and what we say.

The deeper data divide exposed by the dust up between Elon Musk and The New York Times

2013 started off so well for the marriage between car and technology. It seemed like every car manufacturer at CES was rolling out a developer program. In car Facebook for all! Calendar sync on the dash! Spotify finally putting terrestrial AM/FM radio out of its focus-group programmed misery!

And then, whammo! Elon Musk and The New York Times go at it like two NHL goons over a less than stellar review of the Tesla S. The public brouhaha not only exposed the allegedly seedy underbelly of the automotive review media, but also the power of data coming out of today’s new, computer-led automobiles. It also flipped the power model in the traditional consumer-company relationship.

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that the Musk-Times rumble in the asphalt focused on a $100,000 electric car and a reviewer who buys ink by the barrel. Musk’s response started lots of conversations about just who your car’s data belongs to. And, more importantly, it put a bright as a Russian meteor spotlight on the emergence of data as the primary driver in automotive tech…and the lopsided access to it.

And, lest we forget, we’re really today only talking about new cars. Tesla’s at the absolute bleeding edge of automotive tech. What about yesterday’s cars and trucks? The ones you and I drive back and forth to work or use to shuttle the kids around town. Don’t they deserve some tech, too?

There’s more “lost” data held up in older model vehicles than all of the new vehicles for the next several years, combined. But it’s locked down, inaccessible. Elon Musk used his access to the Tesla data to argue about a simple battery charge with a reviewer. My wife just wants to know if the kids left a light on so she can avoid a dead battery on a cold morning. I suspect most normal drivers would be happy starting there.

Imagine if you had Musk’s power with the car in your driveway, now. Imagine being able to:

• get a message from your car about its battery status, oil life, gas, etc…

• know what that check engine light really means (something giving drivers more access to data could’ve saved BMW from a 750,000 car recall this past week)

• have your car (or a service connected to it) look for the best deals near where you are or where you normally go

• Imagine enabling a relationship between your car and your mechanic in the same way your kids have a relationship with their pediatrician.

Once your car is talking to you (and the cloud) these represent the tip of what that machine can do for you beside just moving the family around. Luckily, a ton of work is underway to let you get at that data and connect it to your life. Automakers are making huge strides, but there are also solutions coming to bear for all the cars on the road, now.

• Startups like Livio are helping redefine the entertainment experience unique to the vehicle.

• A number of hardware startups, like Mojio, should be delivering connected car devices with new capabilities by late 2013.

• Academic and broad framework initiatives are starting to emerge, like the “Cloudcar” offshoot of MIT’s RFID Lab.

• In the same way Twilio made VOIP & telco accessible for developers and channel partners, Carvoyant is doing the same with connected cars.

• Beyond just automotive, your car can start interacting with the “Internet of Everything” through platforms like Kynetx’s SquareTag or Mobiplug’s connected home.

Getting the data is one thing, getting it to you, the driver, without compromising your privacy is another. The landscape around personal data had changed but has automotive caught up with that? What your car does and where it goes is pretty personal. Musk obviously took this personally and started throwing some of that data back in the New York Times’ face. Imagine if you could use your car’s data — not for slamming the local paper — but to develop a better relationship with your local mechanic. How does that superhero line go, use your power for good?

Since this started on Valentines Day, it’s good to remember that a controlling relationship is not a loving relationship. Harvard’s Berkman Center and the work of Doc Searls on “VRM” or Vendor Relationship Management describes this shift toward “good” nicely in The Intention Economy. Industry groups like the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium are helping define the rules of a “loving, respectful” relationship between your data and the companies you engage with. Being able to grab the data and engage meaningfully works for one side of a relationship. Putting that data and the engagement in a driver’s control, now it truly becomes a conversational relationship, not a confrontational relationship.

While Musk and the NYTs skirmish is over whether a reporter manipulated a review (or whether the Tesla S is, in fact, consumer-worthy), the larger war is being fought to unleash locked and lost data that already exists in your floorboards.

I love Twitter questions! Short answer: Drive U & other drivers’ $$cost down.

Crowdsourcing evolves and we’re using Jumpstarter to drive our customers’ costs down. Kickstarter and other sites have been great helping companies start building a product (we’re past that), or help finance the company efforts  (in process for us, but ok there). Carvoyant is a data tool for drivers and developers and frankly we want to see the cost of hardware and connectivity as low as possible.  We launched JumpStarter to drive everyone’s costs down, up front.

Doing all we can do to drop the cost and friction of connecting your car includes lining up sponsors and aggregating volume. Combining just the initial Jumpstarter orders with those from dealer sponsors already let’s us reduce hardware by $20 and drop the cost of the first year data. If the number of Jumpstarter orders goes high enough, we can continue to drop the cost of devices, too (so tell your friends!). That sounds like a win I want to give our drivers.

So why “Jumpstarter” and why now? Guidelines and curation made Kickstarter awesome but that also creates gaps. If 2012 was the year crowdfunding/crowdsourcing “took off” then 2013 is going to be the year it naturally evolves to fill all the niches not covered well by the sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Carvoyant supports hardware already available (and hopefully a bunch of the new stuff we saw from CES!). The features promoted on Jumpstart are extensions of capabilities we implemented over the last couple months for vehicle service providers. Since Carvoyant didn’t clearly fit a profile used on other crowdfunding sites but tapping that community push fits our culture, we had to step out from the “Kickstarter” processes.

Lockitron recently hit a similar issue with Kickstarter curation, prompting them to launch their “Self-starter” campaign. I’ve been an informal advisor to those guys for a little while and was thrilled to see their success and how they paid it forward by releasing Selfstarter.us on Github. 

The kickstarter process model works, so use it. Lockitron/Selfstarter made it easier than ever. Since we’re not funding hardware development or manufacturing runs with the proceeds, even a modest “jumpstart” on volumes and Carvoyant drivers get lower costs.

Carvoyant devices are shipping through sponsors, effectively now, and our developer outreach was commencing in earnest. No one wants to sign up just before a price drops. With the kickstart/selfstart/jumpstart process we thought Carvoyant can give you the “discount” on the frontside. The noise and interest generated from various CES connected car activity in stuff we’re shipping now, validated our choice to go without waiting on permission.

That’s why our effort went up this weekend, warts and all, because we felt it was better to ship than to talk. Between sleep deprivation and the car space, Jumpstarter seemed a logical name the effort to drive a community’s cost down at the start rather than waiting for scale. Kickstarter is great but not for everyone. A “Jumpstart” is working for Carvoyant and maybe a different crowdsourcing evolution will work for you. 

So, crowdsourcing evolves: Kickstarter»Selfstarter»Jumpstarter. Key in all of those is “Start”.

Since when did your“Could I get a copy of the last six months of my heart data?” and they said, “Sorry, sir, this is proprietary.”  WTF? 

That quote came from Rick Smolan (the creator of the Day in the Life series of books) talking about his project, The Human Face of Big Data.   

My reaction was completely personal but it mirrors Carvoyant’s perspective on how we enable connected cars. It’s your car generating your data. We have fun at Carvoyant re-connecting drivers with their data and folks to help them make better use their data.

We often get asked how much will we sell the driver’s data for. The short answer is, it’s not ours to sell. It’s our privilege to work with your data and the minute we stop respecting that, Carvoyant starts to lose our reason for being. 

Frankly, there a lots of companies already selling your data and becoming just another one doesn’t take much innovation. On the flip side, by working with the driver we can create a huge range of new value (which can be monetized ;-) by comparing and deriving new information without compromising our relationship with the driver. That’s where Carvoyant is breaking new ground. 

We’d love to hear what data concerns you have around connected cars (@carvoyant)  and how we can help. Keep watching for more information about the controls Carvoyant is building for drivers. It’s your car and your data. It ought to be under your control. 

This is the kind of deal that makes sense for a large company and will add to the background “satisfaction” for some future Volvo owners. 

Other than a handful of very large app providers (like Spotify), Volvo and Ericsson, there are still questions about who this “works” for.

For developers, why choose the “Volvo” platform over others? Unless you’re huge, you’re probably just going to stick with Android & iOS.  

For drivers, that ultimately means the question revolves around how useful is a “connected” car infrastructure tied to just one automaker? 

It’s your car, of course you can hack it to make it better for you! If mounting a tablet in your dash makes it a better experience, go for it! Automakers are making great strides at embedding technology but the pace of change for tech is much faster than designing and building new cars. 

Beyond that, we’re keeping our cars longer and our expectations about the way we use technology is getting even faster. At Carvoyant, we’ve been working quietly but furiously over the last few months to make it easier for your car to get connected, now.

We believe getting “connected” offers different advantages for every driver, from repair to insurance and whatever new applications and services someone else is dreaming of. Hats off to the amazing engineers and designers building connected car technologies but Carvoyant thinks you should determine what’s valuable for your cars, your family, today. 

So go ahead, hack your car to fit your life. Stay tuned over the next few days for more on what Carvoyant will help you do in 2013 and beyond.