Four NYU/Courant students are busy correcting a disturbance in The Force.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy stopped talking about the privacy shenanigans of dominant social networks and started building a better decentralized solution: Diaspora.

Their timing couldn’t be more prescient — The Social Network, a Scott Rudin/Kevin Spacey produced movie (IMDb) releasing in October based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, sheds light on the real genesis of Facebook — and it ain’t pretty:

There’s your deadline, Diaspora.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital offers an intriguing path forward.  Ping me if you need bitchin IP strategy/defense — I’ve yet to lose an IP battle and for your cause I’ll do it for free.

One of my earliest Ingk Labs SaaS spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG) and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.

Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]

My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%.

At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology. The exit will further fuel Ingk Labs investments supporting New York entrepreneurs.

http://bit.ly/isartg2

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He based this conclusion on just two data points: rapid Internet adoption (1990s) and dial-up-to-broadband switchover (2000s) have both petered out.  Only the irretrievably lazy would buy into this crap.

When did investment upside get tied exclusively to broadband growth?  By that measure, television must be a horrid business to get into – you know, ’cause everyone already has a TV.  ~  [ eye roll ]

Let’s briefly consider some further data.  The largest year-over-year rise in broadband subscription growth added 11 million households.  Perhaps impressive, on the surface.  I can fathom this used as supporting evidence for an investment in 2003-2005, but it is hardly the industry-wide bellwhether for Internet startup potential that Dear VC is pitching.  Oh if it were only that simple (minded).

How many new users first venture onto the Internet each year?  Annual United States births have risen to 4.29 million, ranking 137th worldwide.  International growth is even higher, yet US births alone accounted for 1/4 of the largest broadband spike in Dear VC’s data set.  By the nature of the world they enter, Millennials use technology at higher rates than previous generations (2007, Junco and Mastrodicasa). They’re characterized as goal-oriented with a desire to make a difference, a need for immediate communication (SMS, chat, email), and access to the Internet everywhere – not merely from their home broadband connection.  Startups need to build tools that Internet users want to use.   Empower them to achieve their goals and your success will have little if any correlation to broadband growth (or cement).

If a business can’t find a market amongst tens of millions of new customers arriving every year, it wouldn’t likely have survived during a broadband boom.  Who is this genius* venture capitalist? Entrepreneurs would do well to avoid him.