Posts tagged #business

Christopher Drum's Improv retrospective has people asking me about Lotus Improv again. It turns out I've been writing about it on this blog, on and off, since 2004. So here they all are in one place.

Where the idea came from. The newest post tells the oldest part of the story. In Lotus Improv Pre-History I describe reading a pile of "how to run your inventory in 1-2-3" books and noticing the same formula, copied by hand across groups of columns, over and over. Write it once and let the program apply it. I called that the semantic spreadsheet. Showing the same data with its dimensions flippe...

In the last few days I've been asked a couple of time about Lotus Improv. I think it was triggered by a wonderful Improv analysis and retrospective by Christopher Drum who I never met, but really dug deep in his research. It was great to see such in depth attention to this app from 40 years ago. I mean really, that's research! I was asked on the discussion thread about where the ideas for the Pivot Table came from. Instead of giving a throwaway answer, I sat back and relived those early days...

How the Pivot Table Came About

Just for the heck of it,...

Coding agents as normal technology

Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s…

Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. 

In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked them to do

As an experiment, we asked interviewees to cheat with ChatGPT during their interviews and share who got away with it. Here is the experiment

A LaTeX CV/Resume Framework. Contribute to sinaatalay/rendercv development by creating an account on GitHub.

Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT series have shown remarkable capabilities in generating fluent and coherent text in various domains. We compar

Open Source Scheduling: Send a link and meet or build an entire marketplace for humans to connect.

With over 10 million hours of instruction provided since 2005, Wyzant.com is the nation's largest marketplace for in-person...

The Worst Programmer I Know –The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.

GigaBrain finds the most useful discussions on reddit and other communities. We sift through the noise and analyze billions of comments for you. Get real answers from real people.

In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let's do this!

The Founders Talk podcast –In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let's do this!

Three-Bucket Framework for Engineering Metrics –Deciding what metrics to track and report to stakeholders. This article is common sense but very useful advice on how yo think about what metrics make sense to measure an engineering team.

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What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? –I was in a Barnes and Nobel again after many years. Actually many years before that I would go to a B&N more than once a week. Then between Amazon and terrible inventories at B&N and Kindle and Nook I stopped going. Then a few weeks ago I visited one and it was a revelation. I had a great time browsing books and books and books. Great article:”Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?”

Several million people employ electronic mail for some significant portion of their professional communications. Yet in my experience few people have figured out how to use the net productively. A great deal of effort is going into technical means for finding information on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their own careers. These notes are a first attempt to fill that gap, building on the most successful practices I've observed in my twenty years on the net. I will focus on the use of electronic communication in research communities, but the underlying principles will be applicable to many other communities as well.

Networking on the Network –Several million people employ electronic mail for some significant portion of their professional communications. Yet in my experience few people have figured out how to use the net productively. A great deal of effort is going into technical means for finding information on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their own careers. These notes are a first attempt to fill that gap, building on the most successful practices I’ve observed in my twenty years on the net. I will focus on the use of electronic communication in research communities, but the underlying principles will be applicable to many other communities as well.

Too many people are left wandering through Reddit threads and Quora posts looking for advice on what to say. Communication is tricky. We all bring our own biases, emotions and histories to the table. This site will help you navigate those tricky subjects, allowing you to build healthier and happier relationships.

A very interesting overview of companies and their spproach yo coding interviews. Good if youre applying for a job there. But also good if you are designing your interview process. Author says: “Take the guesswork out of coding interviews with codinginterview.com. Explore comprehensive guides to hack the process at top companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and more “

From speech to insights: The value of the human voice –Live voice contacts are essential for customer experience. In this McKinsey article, we explore how new speech analytics technology is driving lasting results.

The Growth Hacking Playbook: Your Ultimate List of Growth Hack Resources –Growth hacking is a popular buzzword, but do you know what it means? Learn about the best growth hacking resources with this playbook.

Poster printing services and pricing guide.

Marc Andreeson is a somewhat legendry technologist. His advice may not fit you, but it is still worth listeneing to: "Some people argue that college will be your one chance in life to pursue your passion—to spend four years doing nothing but studying whatever you love the most, whether that’s Renaissance literature or existential philosophy.

I disagree."

Why products should be “slick”, not just viableI hate the term MVP.

Over the past decade, it’s been overused and misunderstood to the point where something labeled as an MVP is automatically assumed to be pr

This is a really good video which anyone who is looking for a new position should watch!

M43 Lenses: Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List

Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List | M43 Lenses M43 Lenses: Interactive Micro Four Thirds Lens List May 31, 2022 at 06:56PM

5 Programming Languages With the Least Competition Yet Command the Highest Salaries You will get employed quicker than in other languages May 11, 2022 at 02:45AM

Freedom Robotics Freedom Robotics creates powerful control and monitoring software to enable the next generation of robotics companies to build, operate, and scale robots and robotic fleets. April 14, 2022 at 02:41PM

Scheduled Jobs and Custom Clock Processes | Heroku Dev Center Schedule recurring or time-based jobs on Heroku with the Scheduler add-on or by implementing a custom clock process. March 28, 2022 at 08:19PM

11 rules for buying an ebike, and the 11 ebikes to buy now You thought your family was going to be talking about web3 this Thanksgiving. But they’re actually talking about ebikes. Let’s help you prepare. Ebikes are about to change the world. They are already the best selling electric vehicles, and are selling as fast as factories can make them. March 20, 2022 at 02:22PM

Looks great, but I have not tried it! Foxglove Studio is a visualization and debugging tool for your robotics data, conveniently packaged as a desktop app.

Why You Should Find Product-Market Fit Before Sniffing Around For Venture Money When you first start out the only thing that matters is finding a cohort of customers who truly value what you offer. Growth alone means next to nothing. March 4, 2022 at 02:56PM

Portfolio or Resume? When To Use Each Learn when to use a portfolio versus when to use a resume when you’re searching for a job, and what the differences are between them. January 22, 2022 at 07:40PM

Welcome to ServoCity where you can get the parts you need to bring your ideas to life! From servos to switches, from actuators to Actobotics, we work hard to bring you the best components backed by unparalleled technical support

John Cleese’s 5-step plan to have shorter and better meetings – from 1976! John Cleese (Monty Python) nails it in this classic 1976 work “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”, and his hilarious portrayal of meeting culture seems worryingly accurate today. That’s why we created MetaMeet. MetaMeet is a workplace app that helps employees reduce time spent in meetings: https://ift.tt/2WHDMKB

Help us on our mission to stop the meeting madness!

Instagram: https://ift.tt/3gQRqBM

Facebook: https://ift.tt/3gRlcq5

LinkedIn: https://ift.tt/3yB3IEH

Twitter: twitter.com/meta_meet

CREDITS:

© Video Arts Limited (1976)

Director: Peter Robinson

Writers: John Cleese, Antony Jay

Stars: John Cleese, Robert Hardy, Timothy West

December 5, 2021 at 02:08PM

How to use the SUMPRODUCT function in Excel, one of Excel’s math and trig functions, using multiplication, addition, subtraction, and/or division to return the sum of the products of corresponding ranges or arrays.

Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007,2003, (isbn 0789736012, ean 0789736012), by Jelen B., Alexander M.

Did you know that Microsoft Excel’s first version was released almost 35 years ago, as of the date of writing this article? Initially, our beloved spreadsheet program was available exclusively for Macintosh, back in 1985, with a version developed for Microsoft following in 1987. During its life, Excel has undergone a number of different transformations to become the powerful spreadsheet software that we know and love today.  Driven by our love for Microsoft Excel,

The Invention of the Pivot Table | Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007,2003, (isbn 0789736012, ean 0789736012), by Jelen B., Alexander M. October 19, 2021 at 12:31AM

Versions of Excel Explained [Updated 2021] » The Spreadsheet Page Did you know that Microsoft Excel’s first version was released almost 35 years ago, as of the date of writing this article? Initially, our beloved spreadsheet program was available exclusively for Macintosh, back in 1985, with a version developed for Microsoft following in 1987. During its life, Excel has undergone a number of different transformations to become the powerful spreadsheet software that we know and love today. Driven by our love for Microsoft Excel, October 18, 2021 at 04:54PM

The history of spreadsheets In this article, we briefly cover the history of spreadsheets starting with their origin, evolution, and the current scenario. October 18, 2021 at 04:55PM

An Introduction to Pivot Tables Using Excel 2000 An Introduction to Pivot Tables Using Excel 2000. What are Pivot Tables?. The Pivot Tables facility is a feature of Excel which is used for summarising data in a spreadsheet or database – e.g. by adding, averaging or counting without having to create formulae. October 18, 2021 at 04:54PM

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Nail Your Startup Pitch: Use Pixar’s Story Formula to Win Over Investors – by Ashwin Kumar – The Startup Pitch A framework to make your pitch 10x more compelling in a few minutes August 16, 2021 at 09:30PM

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oora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care of their babies once they get home. They're in 165 hospitals now. And because they know the numbers before and after they start at a new hospital, they can measure the impact they have.

Every year since 1982, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences!

Really good article about him

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Crowd sourced projects like

Drone is a self-service Continuous Delivery platform for busy development teams

When we build products, we use a methodology. For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. But too often when it's time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. We're easily convinced by the argument that all we need to do is "build it and they will come." And when they don't come, well, we just try, try, again.

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

Bitcoin exchange?

To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea, a great market, a great team, a great product, and great execution.

Write/generate a reference letter or letter of recommendation in 7 quick steps. Hundreds of phrases and sample letters available!

A collection of timing-related mistakes that startups make, like hiring aggressively just before fundraising, or overlooking seasonality or sales cycles when creating a fundraising roadmap.

It’s no secret that investors don’t like hardware businesses. Despite the eternal frustration of startup founders, investor distaste in physical product businesses is actually entirely logical. It’s…

Many of us have a problem following through on our intentions. And it’s more than just a difficulty in predicting our future desires. It’s ...

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It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.

I just finished Antonio García Martínez’s excellent memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, and it…

Hello, I'm currently hiring and most people sharing their GitHubs have very poorly maintained profile and projects so I decided to write a little...

Useful ways to think about choosing your technology platform!

Interesting thread of good answers for new grads on how to prepare to get a job in the software world.

"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades."

I am not sure I agree with all of this but it does make for interesting and thought provoking reading.

This is worth looking at: Is the internet destroying journalism? In a piece at Salon, writer Andrew Leonard argues that it is — primarily because “the economics of news gathering in the Internet age suck,” as he puts it. Link: "http://ift.tt/1qrLoY6"

Interesting story…

“My summer internship was full of many positive experiences. I won’t forget, though, the burning sensation I felt in my face every time a secretary walked into a room to remind a partner his next meeting had arrived. Or the strange pride I felt when the only woman on our bowling team hit a strike, putting her ahead of some of our male colleagues — even though we were on the same team, mind you! It will take years for the fealing of outsider-ness to fade. And I count this experience as one more step towards educating myself, a part of the millenial generation, that a lot needs to change in our time at the helm.”

— http://mitsloanblog.typepad.com/mba2015/2014/07/venture-capital-women.html

Maybe I’ve been out of the corporate world for too long. And I do wish Microsoft well because Google and Facebook and others need competition so they don’t totally ruin our world. So I read with interest Satya Nadella’s email to employees which is available for all to read.

The first thing that caught my eye is this abuse of logic and English: “We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world….” This phrase is all over the place. Do you see the problem? ...

Email I just sent to Amazon.

Dear Amazon: I can’t believe you stoop as low as that and hide the ability to close my account so thoroughly that I now have to engage in a multi-message email discussion with you to convince you to do so. Please CLOSE my account!

If you want to close your Amazon account, good luck, you will be playing hide and seek with them. Kind of lame.

Ok, I sent them that email, and it seems they still won’t let me go! Lame^2. Here’s what their response email says:

Dear Pito,

Here are some things to keep in mind:

— If you use your Amazon.com log-in on other sites (e.g., MYHABIT.com, Audible.com, international Amazon sites except for Amazon.cn/ and Amazon.co.jp, etc.),...

We all have heard more than once that “VCs will NOT sign NDAs, don’t even ask!”. And we’ve also heard and said many times that “Ideas are cheap” and that many first time entrepreneurs are far too precious about their great ideas. They keep them top top secret, ask prospective customers to sign an NDA, and in general undermine their own ability to get useful real feedback on the thing they want to create. The attached article is interesting in its analysis of those tradeoffs:

“Not everyone agrees. Thom Ruhe, vice president for entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, said the declining use of N.D.A.s “is certainly not in the interests of entrepreneurs. It favors the V.C.” Although it is rare that an investor steals an idea, Mr. Ruhe said, it does happen. “But in the skewed echo chamber of the Valley, and the sycophantical networks that aspire to be just like them,” he said, “they’ve made the easier and less morally defensible position — no N.D.A.s — the coin of the realm.”

I’ve been using mint.com for years now but every month I hate it a little bit more. It’s too big, too slow, and too buggy. But it’s solving a problem that I need solved which is a comprehensive cloud based personal finance tool that covers banking, investments, credit cards, reporting and analysis. I can’t say that their decline corresponded exactly with when Inuit bought them but… it didn’t help either.

I’ve wondered why no one is tackling this space. I try them all and they all are lacking in one key way or another. Here’s a review from the New York Times From those, I’ve...

Other than the headline, which is amusing, I am not sure about the methodology or significance of this study in US News (do they still exist?). And it seems that many professions, e.g. College Professor, don’t even get mentioned. Is it because they don’t even make the top 100? I doubt it. Anyway, Here’s more about the US News and World Report’s assessments:

“All jobs aren’t created equal. In fact, some are simply better than the rest. U.S. News 100 Best Jobs of 2014 offer a mosaic of employment opportunity, good salary, manageable work-life balance and job security. Some careers offer just the right mix of these compone...

This article: The Only Interview Question That Matters” makes a pretty good case for this being the most important single interview question:

What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?

After a glorious run of almost 10 years, regretfully, I’ve decided to decomission BlogBridge. My longtime freinds and blog followers will remember that I and Aleksey worked on BlogBridge quite intensively for several years, and then gradually less and less.

Over the last several years BlogBridge was more or less on auto pilot, but still with a decent set of devoted users. And every week and month brought in additional users. Not a huge amount but enough to keep it interesting.

Our pricing model was very lopsided, w...

Point Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design – NYTimes.com:

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

A fascinating article about the “Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford” also known as the D.School.

Everyone knows that Design Thinking is great and the new hotness. I love great design, and am in awe ...

From an email I sent, just because:

“Dear CU:

I bet you won’t print this one! But maybe you can respond to me personally.

Check this out

CU itself is a bad actor when it comes to magazine subscription renewals.

I get misleading requests that my subscription is about to run out when it actually has months, as many as six months to go! And if I am not on my toes I could easily be fooled into a premature renewal and extension of my subscription.

This is a very misleading practice.

You say everyone does it, which is true. You say that it’s part of your business model and it really works to maximize renewals, which is also true.

But it still very misleading bordering on deceitful and I bet you would call out another company for something similar or even less evil – for example, a simple typo in an advertisement which is a clearly sloppiness but not purposely deceitful.

What say you?

Pito Salas, longtime subscriber.”

A fascinating although quite long article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis is an amazing non-fiction writer, best known to me for Moneyball (about baseball) and Liars Poker (about Wall Street.)

Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? | Vanity Fair:

A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of stealing computer code, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Investigating Aleynikov’s case, Michael Lewis holds a second trial.

Today my first Amazon order with sales tax. Too bad for me, but good for our state!

I want to direct your attention ton interesting article about $1 Billion Startups – “Unicorns” – on TechCrunch today. Some myths debunked and others confirmed:

So, we wondered, as we’re a year into our new fund (which doesn’t need to back billion-dollar companies to succeed, but hey, we like to learn): how likely is it for a startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? Is there anything we can learn from the mega hits of the past decade, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Workday? (from: Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups | TechCrunch🙂

Tim Kreider’s essay could apply as easily to all those people who complain that an iPhone app is not free, or is so so expensive at $5.99. Not too long ago a piece of software would get $99 or $495. Makes you wonder how long Adobe can keep on charging through the nose for Photoshop and Illustrator. Anyway, here’s a bit of the article:

“People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing. They often start by telling you how much they admire your work, although not enou...

Amazing story of a great looking product, and awesome demo, on the spot investment of $100,000 and still… It didn’t work. The story was told by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe:

“Today, GreenGoose is out of business, and Krejcarek is grappling with $80,000 in credit card debt — his approach to funding the company after investors’ money ran out earlier this year. When he says, “I’m trying to scrape together spare change to buy gasoline,” it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding.” (from The Boston Globe)

You have to admire that the founder of Green Goose (Brian Krejcarek) was...

The only difference is that Amazon seems to know exactly every little item is in this crazy warehouse. Look here for a bunch more amazing pictures!

Harvard Business School Case Study – Gender Equity – NYTimes.com:

The administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively: whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to recruit on campus. “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is,” Ms. Frei said.

You should read this book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It’s shocking and insightful.

Basically the book explains and teaches that when you hear, for example, that Egypt is getting a billion US$ in military aid, that’s not what it sounds like. We are not sending them a check for a million bucks. We are actually sending the million bucks to US millitary corporations.

Why? Because the funds that Egypt gets can only be spent with specific US companies on sp...

I haven’t read it, but, it’s free 🙂

A couple of entrepreneurs asked me whether I’d be interested in investing in their project at a very early stage. The question arose, what kind of information would I need (and by extension would any other potential angel need) to see before even considering this?

Most obviously, what would the investor get for their funds. What are the legal/financial terms. Exactly what would the ‘paperwork’ look like. What is the total amount they want to raise this time around? What they plan to do with the money and what do they think they will need to accomplish before needing to go back to angels for more. Any references, recommendations, early validation from experts in the field, or potential or ac...

I always thought that startups are over glamorized. They are not for everyone. On the other hand, some people also over stress about the ‘risk’ of joining a startup, which I don’t by either. Check out: Alex Payne — Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup:

Maybe a startup is the best way to meet a goal, and maybe it isn’t. If the goal of the young man described above is to run a business – any business! – then perhaps a startup is indeed his best path forward. For others, though, I often wonder if they’re fitting their goals into the format of a startup because it’s an approach that’s lauded, admired, and easily understood (if not easily accomplished).

This bit of advice rings very true to me. Read the whole article, but here’s a tasty bit.

@andrewchen: New essays for 06/03/2013:

1) Learn to make something. Anything. First and foremost, I think it’s important to learn to make something. Anything. It could be an app, blog, table, YouTube channel, video tutorial, or anything else. Then study the people who have become successful enough to support themselves in this craft, and study them, copy them, stalk them, and meet them.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zngK13FMgXM&w=560&h=315]

I remember when this project was first announced and ‘PR’d. It’s just another good reminder about the unpredictability of these world-changing projects. Sad but interesting:

Electric car company Better Place shuts down after burning through $850M | VentureBeat:

Better Place is the electric car company that hoped to change the world with its ambitious battery-swapping stations. But today it said it’s shutting down. The closure brings to an end arguably the most audacious “clean tech” company ever attempted.

Yahoo, Tumblr, and the Loyalty Factor – Ben Gomes-Casseres – Harvard Business Review: a blog post analyzing f some of the strategic issues underlying the Tumblr/Yahoo deal:

“…Still, after the initial shock subsides, can Yahoo count on Tumblr users staying on? That is probably how the investment bankers framed it — as a question of switching costs, lock-in, network externalities, and the like. Where are these users to go? There is no equivalent forum of this type, richness, and network size (at least not yet). It would seem that the 18-24 year-old demographic that Yahoo is pining for does not have an easy exit choice….” (...

How to Be a ‘Woman Programmer’ – NYTimes.com:

But none of it qualified me as extraordinary in the great programmer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished me is the fact that I was a “woman programmer.” The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

Here’s what I think: If economic analysis says that technology does not contribute to the overall productivity of the country, check the analysis. It’s incorrect.

It’s self evident and obvious that technology – computers, smart phones, tablets, cloud computing, robotics, and on and on make us more productive. I say, send the economists back to the drawing board to look again.

Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology – NYTimes.com:

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

In Venture Capital Deals, Not Every Founder Will Be a Zuckerberg – NYTimes.com:

It’s the dream of entrepreneurs to sell their company for millions of dollars. But the dirty secret of venture capital is that the dream can be dashed as the venture capitalists make millions in a sale, leaving the founders with nothing.

This is from the New York Time’s article about Curt Shilling’s ill fated game company “38 Studios”:

“It just felt really good, when this all started, to have the sexy sports celebrity from Boston who seemed to like Rhode Island and showed up in Rhode Island, and who built this exotic new business, even though no one knew what it was,” says the historian Ted Widmer, who grew up in Providence and works at Brown. “It seemed like the digital economy, or biotech, or whatever. But then it turned out that it wasn’t the new digital economy. It was some 13-year-old’s medieval fanta...

A long long time ago there was a product called Lotus Improv. Our premise was that complex spreadsheets were very difficult to maintain, to audit and to modify. So much so that we had heard stories about companies fearing making any change to the spreadsheets they run their business on.

Maybe the person who created the monster was no longer with the company or maybe the spreadsheet was so complicated (and untestable) that the benefits of making a change did not outweigh the risk of introducing an error. That was around 1987.

Here we are 25 years later and shockingly the situation seems to still be tolerated. From an article in MarketWatch:

“Suc...

Here’s a really interesting article: “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead”?from the New York Times. It’s about a Wharton Professor that sounds just too good to be true:

“For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a time-sapping diversion from the actual work at hand; it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity. In some sense, he has built a career in professional motivation by trying to unpack the puzzle of his own success. He has always helped; he has...

Tom Friedman, quoting Tony Wagner, describes what he thinks should be taught today (that isn’t really being taught:)

““Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to ta...

I’ve used the now-famous internetty car service Über a couple of times. The prices for the two rides I took were about 20-25% more expensive than taxis. Which made me wonder about how the prices are set for Über rides. Are they set in Silicon Valley by some all-knowing limousine wizard? Does it allow for competition, that is, can an enterprising Über-enabled driver choose to offer a lower price?

I worry because if Über actually becomes dominant they could through monopoly drive up the prices of black cars (which we used to call limousines, but that sounds too fancy I guess.) Could they in turn drive up the prices of regular taxi cabs?

Pretty good review of a broad topic: Negotiating Your Startup Offer

I am a really big fan of the book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. So much so that I am using it as a “textbook” for the Entrepreneurship course I am teaching at Olin College.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the word “market” in the index.

Andy Payne wrote an interesting analysis about the future of the “software industry” or whatever we should call it nowadays (e.g. is Amazon a software company?)

Not long ago a classic “put down” of a business idea was: “that’s not a business, it’s a product”, or worse, “that’s not a product it’s a feature.” Andy asks:

“As friction goes away, things become much more fine-grained. You don’t need $5m anymore to start a company: a laptop and a cafe wifi connection will do. This enables an explosion of new projects, but with smaller teams and narrower ideas. The industry gorilla platforms fuel a “feature ecosystem”:...

Long time ago I worked at a company called eRoom Technology where we developed a product called… eRoom. It was pretty successful and it was bought by a company called Documentum, that in turn was bought by a company called EMC. Today, on a lark, I was wondering what had happened to eRoom and I can’t really tell for sure.

Do you know: did eRoom become Documentum Centerstage? Or is that something else?

Do you know: does eRoom still exist? Or is the only thing left eRoom.net?

I was surfing around preparing for my class and happened to look at this page on the Harvard Business School web site. The page is called “Entrepreneurs” and it says, among other things:

“A video archive that captures insights from learning members of the School’s entrepreneurial community. Entrepreneurs speak on a common set of themes including their development as entrepreneurs, strategies for identifying opportunity, and leadership. (from Harvard Business School)

Notice anything?

[](http://www...

Here’s a new product I just saw, Igloo. It’s very nice and it reminds me of what eRoom might have looked like if we designed it 15 years later. They have a beautiful product. Here’s what they say:

At its core, Igloo is about communication: In your day, you might give updates, have discussions and share files with your team. With Igloo, that all happens in one place. Igloo helps you communicate in an elegant and integrated digital workplace. You get visibility into what’s happening throughout your whole team and your whole office. (From Igloo Web Site tour)

I have a regular need for a small project to be done, a little bit of research, some following up on projects and so on. I’ve thought about using a “Virtual Assistant” for this but there is now so much noise in the area that it’s hard to navigate. An example of many many is Zirtual.com

My needs are definitely episodic, so I don’t want someone that I pay a fixed monthly amount to unless it’s pretty small, knowing that it can go up and down depending on the work.

Any feedback on your experiences or thoughts about this would be really interesting!

I am a big fan of this book, so I was really surprised to find a freely downloadable copy of the file in pdf form. I snooped around and the site seems legit but it’s odd that a very popular book is made available for zero dollars.

Here’s the link to Lean Startup on PdfBook.co.ke

If you are wondering, .co.ke is Kenya. I posted a question to them to explain whether this was above board. I wonder…

Here is a good cheat sheet on how to build products that people really want. It is cribbed from this article on TechCrunch.

Draw On Previous Experience and Understanding – The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem. Chase what you’re passionate about; you’ll probably already have knowledge in the space. Have A Hypothesis About How You’re Different – Have a point of view about your startup. Why is there a special opportunity for this now? Never Build Without Sketching – Mike says he and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom would go to a cafe with little iPhone desi...

I’m excited to tell you that I just accepted a position as Visiting Lecturer at Olin College for Spring 2013! Actually the full name is Olin College of Engineering.

Olin is a small engineering college, actually in the top ten of engineering colleges according to US News’ Rankings. ...

Everyone (almost) has heard of Kickstarter, right? It’s the best known (I think) of the so-called Crowd Funding services. Let’s say you have a project – it can be anything – a record, a book, some kind of invention – and you need funding. The crowd funding sites give you a tool to propose your project to everyone on the web and it makes it easy for you to motivate them to donate or fund, and it makes it easy for them to do so. Cool idea.

And like any cool idea, there are lots of variations. I don’t want to say that their knockoffs because they all have different flavors, focuses, types of users, size of funding and so on. Here’s a helpful list that ...

I like this quote:

“Everyone here introduces themselves as an “entrepreneur.” It’s as if they hand out the title at the airport when you arrive. “Welcome to San Francisco, you are now an entrepreneur! Which start-up T-shirt would you like?”

This belief that everyone is an entrepreneur has a stultifying effect. It can drive founders to seek an easy acquisition instead of a quest for true innovation and a sustainable, profitable business — a truly entrepreneurial challenge.” (from Bits Blog, NYT)

An interesting fact:

“In the last years of the nineteenth century, Charles Dow created an index of 12 leading industrial companies. Almost none of them exist today….[…]… Four years after Dow invented his average, a group of 14 leading research institutions created the Association of American Universities. All of them exist today.” (fromThe Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak)

The article goes on to talk about where Higher Ed’s staying power has come from:

“I think that rule is going to change, and soon. Many factors explain the endurance of higher education institutions—the ascen...

As you may know, I’ve been working on launching Bootup Academy, which will offer applied computer science or engineering programs to college students who want to supplement their studies with an intensive 10 week summer program. That’s why you may have seen more posts here labeled [EDUCATION].

We’re now adding an additional focus, Booting Up experienced technical folks who have never put together a web or mobile application, have not worked in an agile environment, and so may not have the right check boxes on their resume.

We think they may be interested in rapidly bring themselves up to speed, develop skills, knowledge, contacts, and importantly, a por...

I totally agree with Frank Bruni’s account of the Facebook’s IPO. It seems to me that if the current price of FB is pretty close to the offering price, then the bankers were doing their job.

I mean, as I see it, their job is to open the stock at a price that’s as close as possible to it’s true price, that is, what the market will think its worth. And common sense says the only way to find that out (‘what the market will bear’) is to put it on the market and see what the market will bear. If their research is excellent they will be able to somehow figure out what the market will bear, ahead of time, and offer it there.

I think that’s just what happened! Good on them. From Frank Bruni’s Article:

“Instead, virtually everyone who bought Facebook on that first day was making a one-day, get-rich-quick calculation. It didn’t work out. Too bad.” (from Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster – NYT)

I would love to see this trend accelerate:

“The five-year-old [Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship] program, [Wake Forest University’s] most popular minor, requires students to learn the practical aspects of starting a business. It is a sign of change in liberal-arts colleges, which are grappling with the responsibility of preparing students for a tight and rapidly shifting job market while still providing the staples of academic inquiry.” (from ...

I have often been heard to say: “Ideas are Cheap”, by which I mean to say that my admiration goes more with the implementation, the making real and tangible, of an idea than the idea itself. It’s much easier to come up with something that would be cool and useful (“A solar powered ambulance”, “a retractable and reusable parachute”, “email on steroids”) than actually design it, build it, realize it.

I believe that as much about my own ideas as about anyone else’s. BlogBridge was supposed to be “an RSS reader done right”.

I have a few wonderful ideas for new products, like “Twittepedia” which is an encyclopedia with 140 character definitions. Wouldn’t it be nice not to be able to learn what ...

This book looks good: “Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup”. I came across it in the “Startup Lessons Learned” Blog, which may be the best blog about leann startups.

This excerpt talks about a common scenario with startups, where the founders assume that they way they chose to split equity on day 0 will continue to work for them as time goes on:

“How should founders deal with such developments? In short, by assuming when they do the initial split that things will change, even if the specific changes cannot be foreseen, and therefore structuring a dynamic equity split rather than the static splits used at Zipcar, govWorks, and many other startu...

A provocatively titled article (Why Youth Has an Advantage In Innovation) argues that to innovate you have to be an omnivorous and promiscuous consumer of new stuff. Try this list on for size, does it fit?

When a new device or operating system comes out do you rush out to get it as soon as possible – just because you want to play with the new features? Or do you wait for the dust to settle so that you don’t make a mistaken purchase. Or because you don’t want to waste your time. Do you use LinkedIn for all of your recruiting, or do you mistakenly think that LinkedIn is o...

Paul Graham’s new essay is “Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.” From my reading of it, it talks about great startup ideas, fear and cynicism. The meat of the article is a series of shall we say audacious startup ideas, most of which you’ve had yourself and in each case you may have thought: “You’d have to be crazy to try this!”.

I once read, “If you’re not a little bit nervous, you’re not pushing yourself enough”. I like that mantra. It works for me. This essay is related to that thought:

“One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are.” (from ...

The Launch Conference is starting today. It is descended from many venerable conferences, particularly like Demo. I was a fairly regular attendee at the Demo conference over the years, and so far, Launch seems to be continuing that heritage in a very impressive way.

Basically this conference is about Products, Products, Products. Particularly software and web and mobile products. There’s a really good energy in the room, like the start of another gold rush 🙂 It is overlaid with the usual Silicon Valley attitude and posturing, but that’s ok, I kind of like that.

Each launching company is given 5 minutes to demo/p...

This interesting, and I think, correct article, makes the argument that the word ‘innovation’ is being watered downand even getting cheapened. It says, about “innovation”,

“Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense.” (from ...

Should it be ok for students to take notes during a class and turn them into a marketable product that they make money on?

If I am teaching the same class again this year, students could buy the course notes and potentially do better, or learn more. That’s a good thing, right?

However is it fair to me? After all these students are becoming multi-millionaires by reselling my work, my intellectual property. Yeah right.

One professor has an amusing solution to this dilemma, but I think it still misses the point;

Precisely. Besides which, I’ve figured out a much more fun solution to the problem: I’m going to buy some of these note sets and outlines being sold for my classes. ...

An interesting article in Forbes about Software Developers and Development in general, The Rise of Developeronomics. While here and there he is promoting old chestnuts which may or may not be true there is a core argument which is quite intriguing. It goes something like this:

All companies are becoming software companies, meaning they are driven by software whatever their business actually is. Hence a key resource to a successful business is an effective, efficient and scalable capability to create innovative computer driven systems. Programmers are scarce. Hence the way to invest in the future is to culti...

From an article called “Effective Customer Consultant Relationships”:

“As a customer, how can you get the most out of your consultants? As a consultant, how can you deliver what your customers really want? I have been on both sides of this relationship and experienced both successful and unsuccessful results. In this post, I will go through the typical aspects of these types of relationships and identify action items that I have used to forge effective and lasting customer consultant relationships for both parties.” (from “Effective Customer Consultant Relationships”)

If you are a tech consultant or are thinking of hiring one, this article has some excellent advice.

This happened: I had a book on my Amazon wish list for several months.

Yesterday, I finally placed the order at around 3pm and today the book is in my hands, just about 24 hours later. And this is with regular Prime shipping, which is supposedly two days.

I wonder. Amazon is pretty clever. What if they used the presence of a book on wish lists as a clue to where to inventory the books, in effect pre-positioning them closer to the probable shipping destination. Wouldn’t that be clever?

Of course a book on the wish list may or may not be ordered. And also, you wouldn’t preposition a single book in Massachusetts because Pito might decide to order it.

But let’...

I have a warm spot in my heart for independent bookstores, as such a store paid for my college education. My family business was a bookstore. It is no longer around however, having gone out of business years ago. Blame Amazon?

Secondly, I read lots of books, and own even more. (Yes that implies that I buy books that I don’t read. I don’t feel bad about that. I enjoy books.)

Thirdly, I love, I mean, I LOVE Amazon.com. What convenience, what great prices, what free shipping. I even own some AMZN stock. In truth I bet in the last year I spent more money on books at Amazon than from local bookstores.

See the conundrum coming?

Whenever I am in a strange town, o...

Where in the US is hottest for Cloud Computing, or for Big Data, or for No Sql? Curious? Yeah, then you’re a geek. Here’s a quick interesting set of graphs that cover questions like that and others.

US Tech Hotspots: San Fran, Boston and Utah? from GigaOm

One of the lessons that Guy Kawasaki learned from Steve Jobs, which really rings true to me:

“Experts are clueless. Experts — €”journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t €œdo€ so they advise.€

They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one.

They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary.

For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.” (from How To Change The World)

I’ve been playing around with each of the major tablets while considering ‘my next move’ 🙂

Oddly I have not been able to find a side by side comparison of their weights. After googling for 3 minutes. So as a public service let me transcribe my notes on this vital topic.

Apple iPad 2: 21.1 oz Barnes and Nobel Nook Color: 15.8 oz Amazon Kindle Fire: 14.6 oz Barnes and Nobel Nook Tablet: 14.1 oz Amazon Kindle Touch: 7.8 oz Amazon Kindle 4: 5.9 oz

Interesting article by famous Guy Kawasaki about what he learned from Steve Jobs:

“But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.” (from What I learned from Steve Jobs)

I bought a Groupon for a local restaurant. About 1 week before it expired I went to make a dinner reservation and it turned out that they were booked up for the next 3 months – and so effectively I could not use the groupon for dinner. I have to use it for lunch, and given the price and the value of the coupon, I need to go with a group of 4 people!

I spoke to the owner about the situation, and based on his sad tone I asked him if the groupon promotion had been a good thing. He was adamant that it was the worse thing they had ever done and he would never do it again! They had sold tons of groupons and everyone waited till the last week or two to try to book and suddenly they are overrun.

H...

A useful article in the New York Times today, just in time for the holidays. Anew site that tries to forecast the best time to buy that item you really want.It seems to draw a graph showing how the price of, for example, a Nikon 50-300mm Zoom Lens has varied over the last 3 months and whether I should buy it today or wait till next month. It’s a very nicely done site and if it works, it could be very useful. The site is decide.com.

“Oren Etzioni writes articles about artificial intelligence for scholarly journals, is a renowned expert on data mining and gained fame when Micro...

Eric Riesis locally famous as being one of the strong promoters of the Lean Startup.

He writes an excellent and courageous article that explores why it is that there seem to be many more white males starting new technology companies than other genders, races, and nationalities.

I say courageous because no matter what one says about the topic, he (or she) is sure to be attacked by some corner.

“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every di...

I was excited to hear about the Kindle Fire. But I was waiting to read some impartial reviews of one before running off and buying one. After all I am a big fan of the Kindle (gen 2) and enjoy reading books on Kindles. And, believe it or not, I don’t yet own an iPad.

So the Fire seems like a match made in heaven, right?

Well, today David Pogue, tech reporter of the New York Timeskind of reviewed the Fire (along with the other new, low end Kindles.) Well, the punchline is, he loves the new inexpensive Kind...

Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group has a great post bemoaning how entrepreneurs are driven to invest their time and energy and (other peoples’ money) on more and more vacuous projects:

“Indeed, the collective attention of young entrepreneurs seems be have been hijacked by all things trivial. How many knock-off AirBnB sites does the world need? Or new vertical social networks for niche groups that can’t figure out how to create a Facebook page? Or Foursqure meets Match.com meets World of Warcraft?

Presumably, these proportedly hot startups are endorsed by the taste makers of the angel investor scene. And if you’re an investor, these busines...

Interesting article with a provocative title: “The Designer’s Notebook: Passion Versus Professionalism“. This is a topic that interests me. He says:

“Passion” is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees. Your passion is supposed to make up for the insane hours and low pay for which the industry is notorious. Many job ads emphasize the importance of passion in applicants; few emphasize the quality of life that the employer offers. (from Passion vs. Professionalism”)

Reading the whole article, in the end I don’t agree with his argument. I think in general passion is a very important t...

Pricing software is a perennial challenge. I came across this ebook, “Don’t just roll the dice” by Neil Davidson. It’s a very nice introduction to a tricky topic. I am considering a major revamp of the BlogBridge web site, with pricing and feature changes and this guide helps me think through those questions.

Check this post How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition from Steve Blank. Of course you know that Steve Blank is one of the gurus of the Lean Startup. This blog post is meant I think for his students at Stanford but you too can benefit from it 🙂 ** "But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?” (from**: How to Build a Web Startup)

I read about Quirky.com in the paper the other day. From my perusal it’s a site where people (you and me) can submit ideas for manufactured products.

For example, let’s say I have an idea for a dog leash with a built in flashlight. Clever eh? Well, you can describe it to the best of your ability and submit it to the Quirky.com site.

Ideas are socially curated (translation: visitors to the site can vote on how much they like the product.) Once they reach a certain threshold then the Quirky staff analyzes the idea from a design, marketing, manufacturing perspective, ...

Marc Andreeson has a really good, optimistic article in the Wall Street Journal about the future foundational role of Software in all industries of the world’s economy:

“[…snip]Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.

I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell ...

Check this post With Skillshare, everyone can be a teacher "The New York City-based startup launched its service in April, offering a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. The service, which rolled out in New York first, is now poised to branch out to San Francisco and Philadelphia starting Aug. 15 and is looking to expand to Boston and Los Angeles later this year. It’s already built a strong community of users, who are leveraging Skillshare in much the same way Airbnb has transformed short term room rentals, Kickstarter has evolved project fundraising and Getaround is changing car sharing." (from GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends)

I can’t wait to see this in Boston!

I still don’t love Microsoft. I used to, actually, use Windows day in and day out, for years. But I am known to frown a the thought of sitting down and usingn Windows 7 or whatever it’s called these days.

But isn’t Bill Gates awesome? After building Microsoft into a hugely successful business behemoth he takes his money and builds an awesome charitable behemoth:

“”We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year,” he says. “Well, I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?’ (from The Wall Street Journal)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of preparation college students need as they graduate to pursue their futures. Thomas Friedman writes an excellent column in the New York Times where he says:

“Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. ...

This isn’t a huge new insight but it’s interesting to see history kind of repeating itself.

Sometimes a product is so locked in and so entrenched that it looks like it will never be beat. After all, no one ever got fired for buying IBM right? And you’d have to be crazy to try to build a new spreadsheet to compete with Excel, because companies large and small have an unbelievable investment in training, familiarity and documents so that any change is extremely hard and costly.

It is said, correctly, I think, that such entrenched software products often get unseated during a platform switch. When a dominant technology platform (e.g. PCs or Windows) is losing it’s dominance in...

It’s hard to comprehend people who feel that it is reasonable (let alone ethical, let alone bankers) to get paid on the order of $50 MILLION a year.

You should watch the documentary Inside Job. It’s nauseating.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFfTcAcGjcU]

Mike Taibi writes in Rolling Stone about some fairly outrageous doings between Washington D.C. and Wall Street during the various ‘bailouts‘: “Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.” (from The Real Housewives of Wall Street)

Robert Krulwich gave this graduation speech. While it is aimed at Journalism students, it has some good stories: “As I say, he was a news writer, writing copy off in a corner, sometimes for Murrow, but he’s pretty much an indoors guy, and he’s dreaming of course, of getting outdoors where things are happening and one night – in the middle of the night, on the graveyard shift, two a.m.—the bell on the wire ticker goes off and says an airplane has just fallen short of the runway at LaGuardia Airport and is sinking in the East River, right now.” (...

This article, “Anatomy of a Trending Topic: How Twitter & the crafting community put the smackdown on Urban Outfitters” is interesting for two reasons:

Photographs that show graphically that Urban Outfitters, in at least one case, seems to have totally ripped off an independent jewelry designer.

A case history of how that accusation spread through a relatively small set of twitter users and tweets and seems to have forced Urban Outfitters to pay attention.

There is lots of stuff on the web about ripoffs in general – “You thought we wouldn’t notice”. Also an interesting comment thread on this page: “Did Urban Outfitters rip off an indie designer, yet again?” where you can see a bit of a debate of whether in fact the original design was truly original.

Things are never as simple as they appear…

Check this post Why Microsoft bought Skype from I, Cringely:

There is so much to write about but I’ll begin with Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion. The pundits are debating whether this move by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes good business sense, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. The better approach is to wonder what would have happened had Microsoft not bought Skype? Based on the high price alone I’m fairly confident that Ballmer felt he had no choice but to buy. In fact I’m fairly certain he felt that not buying could have doomed Microsoft.

Ok there’s not much to add to this stor...

“Oh yeah, I’ve started 6 companies, and right now I have 3 startups going. I just love starting companies. I don’t know what’s wrong with me….”

Have you ever heard statements like that?

I hear them, fairly often, and I am never sure what to make of them. My immediate impulse is to call “Bullshit”, but I don’t because part of me admires that attitude. It’s just like the moniker “Serial Entrepreneur” seems to have become a status symbol. It doesn’t matter if the result of your seriality is that you are broke or forced the indignity of becoming a ‘salaryman’ at a regular company, oh, like Google. Being a serial Entrepreneur is cool.

I hope you realize that I am being ironic. I happen to ...

A good read if you are interested in fast iteration in user experience design and redesign:

“By the end of the iterations and tests, every single one of the users liked the new version better than the old, and we had a very good idea why.” (from Case Study: UX Design and Food on The Table)

[Note: don’t assume you know what a Charitable Mutual Fund is. It’s an evocative but really misleading name but I don’t have a better handle for it yet. This is not an investment vehicle, it does not return any money. It is way to allow a donor to donate to one or more causes that match certain objectives. Please read on…] Scenario: What if I wanted to make a charitable gift to reputable non profits, who work in my state, who focus on homelessness? I could research it with various services (such as GuideStar) I might see one or two that speak to me, and decide to write a check or two. Now of course they would come back to me a year later (or sooner) to a...

After attending the Lean Startup Machine weekend a few days ago, I pay more attention to these ‘I created this startup in 3 hours’ stories. So when I saw this in Inc. Magazine:

“He’s an Israeli who sidestepped military service in favor of moving to the Bay Area to become Y Combinator’s youngest founder. Six months later, all eyes are on Daniel Gross, as he has almost $5 million in funding backing his search engine, Greplin. Oh, and he didn’t go to college.” (from ...

I had the interesting experience this weekend to attend the “Lean Startup Machine” weekend at the Microsoft NERD. It was kind of a hackathon for Lean Startups, which are startups that practice something refererred to as Customer Development, or CustDev. If you’ve not heard about it, here’s a 40 minute lecture about CustDevby one of the top gurus, Eric Ries. Another reference would be essentially the founding document:, “...

If you work with non-profit projects that collect or disseminate large amounts of public data, you would find this interesting.

Amazon offers FREE storage for huge public datasets. So in otherwords, Amazon’s ‘cloud based’ storage service (known as S3) will offer, for no charge, to store a dataset if it is open to the public and somehow for the public good.

From their site:

“Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. Learn more about Public Data Sets on AWS and visit the Public Data Sets forum.” (from Amazon’s Public Data Sets)

Here’s the link: http://aws.amazon.com/datasets

I recommend this article, “Fatboy in A Lean World”, (by Gordon Guthrie) if you are interested in ‘lean’ as in Lean Startups, Lean Production.

About why lean production is becoming so hot among us software entrepreneurs:

The great transformation of the industry over the last 10 years has been the availability of already-written (and battle tested) software which has slashed the size of a team that can build a functioning product and the crash in price of hardware. (fromFatboy in a Lean World)

About Y-Combinator’s...

Michael Arringtonis a famous Tech-pundit-commentator-blogger who recently left or got fired from AOL because he wanted to be a VC while being a journalist covering the companies he is investing in.

One way or another that led him and AOL and the super-popular blog he started, TechCrunch, to part ways. All that is interesting back story.

Arrington recently wrote a very ...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k&w=427&h=260]

The thing about a bubble is that while people worry about it, no one is actually sure whether they are in one, and especially when it will be over. The other thing about bubbles is that they keep happening because they are the result of human nature (greed and self-deception):

“Less than a decade after the dot-com bust taught Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors that what goes up does not keep going up forever, a growing number of entrepreneurs and a few venture capitalists are beginning to wonder if investments in tech start-ups are headed toward another big bust.”…

“The chief evidence, according to industry experts and analysts, is the way venture capitalists and established companie...

And, it’s leaving us: “The past four years have been a wild ride for us: growing something from nothing to substantial scale, providing a simple service that people love because it simplifies their lives. We’ve learned tons along the way, often by making big mistakes. We’re really sorry that this last lesson means that you’ll have to find an alternative to Xmarks, but the alternatives exist and you’ll have no problem finding them.” (from Xmarks Blog)

Again this shows how good ideas don’t always win.

This was an excellent idea, but perhaps it suffered from the classic-cliche-VC-quip “It’s a feature not a product”, or worse, “It’s a product not a company”. I...

We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on. What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searching with Google or one of the other search engines.

As I tell the story to many people, I summarize what I’ve learned by noting that it’s all more or less common sense, once you hear it. But for some reason common sense isn’t always so common. The source that I have learned the most from (and where I’ve learned to really appreciate educational podcasts is the ...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I think I might be entering a new phase in my music listening. I listen to a ton of music, on my iPhone, on my computer, in my car, all the time. And up to now it’s always been downloaded (purchased) music that I organize manually within iTunes. From time to time I’ve had subscriptions to eMusic and similar services. As a result I have a huge number of tracks on my computer and on my iPhone. And as my music taste develops, and I discover new artists and composers, lots of those tracks are listened to rarely.

The alternative services like Rhapsody, which has been around for a while. But I ...

Very meta. Who rates the rating services? I saw this in the Wall Street Journal, an article today called Stocks Wind Down a Brutal May:

“Trading was especially volatile in the afternoon after Fitch Ratings lowered its rating on Spain’s debt to AA+ from AAA, but said the country’s outlook is stable. The downgrade came despite this week’s passage of austerity measures by the Spanish government—a move that bulls had hoped would help the country avoid struggles similar to those of Greece.” (from ...

Mark Cuban comes up with a very plausible analogy: “The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the m...

Scott Kirsner summarizes a new book “Mastering the VC game” and re-tells a funny VC scenario: “He also talks about an exercise called the “rock fetch,” when VCs ask an entrepreneur to spend time finding other investors willing to join them on the investment (bringing them “rocks”), but then decline to collaborate on a deal with those investors (“bring us a different rock.”)” (from Scott Kirsner)

Ok, not really funny. More sad depressing poignant familiar…

Ok, I am on a Frank Rich binge, but he does have one thought provoking article after another. In his column recently he wrote about The Other Plot to Wreck America: “If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.” (from “The Other Plot to Wreck America”)

I just just finished reading the rare business/economics book (I usually skip them) called ...

I don’t own or buy many shoes. Recently I needed to replace a shoe and visited my previously favorite shoe store, twice (they had to get the right size from the other store, or something…) but left not satisfied. This is a really good store, but they didn’t have what I needed Also, I found that, like salesmen everywhere, they made up stories to explain a price differential (“it’s more expensive because it has goretex”) or tried to convince me to take an ill-fitting shoe (“you can just cut the toe off the removable insert and it will be perfect.”)

Enter Zappos, which I wanted to try for a while. With their encouragement, when I couldn’t decide between two brands, I ...

I have believed that Amazon is a much bigger deal than people realize. Not only are they the ultimate retailer that seem to have everything, at better prices, more conveniently offered, than anyone else, but, the technology (in software and process) that they have invented and built is extremely unique and impossible to replicate. In other words, there’s a lot more to Amazon than most people think. In my opinion. Well something happened yesterday, and their stock shot up 25% in one day. Let’s see what happens next week. Is there a rumor that I didn’t see?

Check out It’s Not My Company(from Feld Thoughts🙂 ** "While I’ve got plenty of rights as an investor, I’m very aware that I’m “an investor.” If you are a CEO or an entrepreneur, I can’t imagine anything more annoying than hearing one of your investors refer to the business as “his company.” Now, if the investor owns more than 50% of the company, I guess this is a legitimate legal perspective, but it’s still an incredibly demotivating position to tak" (from: **It’s Not My Company)

I couldn’t agree more. I have many VC friends and acquaintences (there is a difference 🙂 and I always mentally smirk when I hear them talking about ‘my companies’ and words to that effect.

I attended BIF-5 (The Business Information Factory’s Annual Summit) last week, a great and stimulating experience. One of the speakers was Alan M. Weber taking some topics out of his new book, Rules of Thumb. Some of what he said actually led me to buy his book at the mini bookstore they had set up there. (More some other time on the tradeoffs of paying full price for a book on the spot versus waiting a day and a half and getting it for much cheaper from Amazon.) I was reading this article this morning: “Looking at Life as One Big Subscription”...

I wrote about the Mint/Intuit deal the other day. Being an avid user, I had mixed feelings about this development. I came across this good post about the transaction, which puts a decidedly negative spin on it: “Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?” (from [The Next Generation Bends Over]...

Just found out that the WebInno group is back in session after a summer hiatus. This is one of the best open meetings for techies and entrepreneurs to meet and talk and see each other’s stuff. Here’s the official blurb: “The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) is comprised of people engaged in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area. We aim to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction.

Our regular meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for...

I am a fairly avid fan of Mint.com. So it’s with mixed emotions that I read that Mint is being acquired by Intuit. Intuit is a bigger, better known, and so in theory, more reliable vendor for something that is quickly becoming mission critical for me. But on the other hand, Intuit’s software has become uglier and harder to use over time. I tried Quicken Online, twice, and found it to be far inferior to Mint. We shall see. By the way, why do aquired companies insist on saying something like: “What’s not going to change: Mint.com will stay the way you like it: free, easy-to-use and constantly improving.” (this was from their email to users.) It’s never really true, and it worries me because it shows the naivete or dishonesty of the writer.

Gavin Murphy (of Annkissam) and I have been talking about the implementation of an idea that has been floating around the philanthropic community for a while, which is leveraging the web to create kind of a match making service where grass roots community projects who need people, equipment, expertise or money can be matched up with individuals and organizations who have indicated their willingness to offer those. We recently were asked by Mass High Tech if we wanted to write an op-ed about the project, and it just came out today. The purpo...

I was shown a promising new site called TheRentables, for people (I know at least 3) who are looking to rent an apartment. They say: “The Rentables takes a fundamentally different approach to rental property listings to deliver the most relevant, accurate and comprehensive housing information to anyone at any time.” (from About TheRentables)

I looked in Brooklyn, New York, and there were no listings (they are in the very early stages) But in Boston there were some listings. The site looks useful. Now the trick is to get landlords to enter their information.Technorati Tags: realestate, therentables, startups

Check this post Government Efficiency from Dilbert.com Blog: A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers so no one can do comparison shopping. (from: Government Efficiency)

Nice new term: Confusopoly

If you live in the Boston area and somehow connected to technology professions you should be interested in this meeting being put on in June: What’s Next In Tech – Where will the next waves of growth will come from?

Date: Thursday, June 25th Time: 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM (ET) Where: Boston University, School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, 02215 Price: $40

(If you are a student interested in attending this event and would like financial assistance, scholarships are available through www.stayinma.com.)

Take a look at the program, Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe has lined up a...

Check out this post If you think stronger regulation is a good answer, heed Buffett: “Warren Buffett gave a three-hour interview in August. Here’s an interesting bit from the transcript:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress,...

Who cares about equities traders leaving Morgan Stanley. Not me, but check out this post Top Equities Trader Leaves Morgan Stanley: "We’re convinced that no one would actually use the "spend more time with family" line unless they are trying to convey that the real reason for leaving is something else. Very probably Gallo will pop up at another firm, or perhaps start his own hedge fund before long. His predecessor at Morgan, Sutesh Sharm, left to join Vikram Pandit’s Old Lane hedge fund in 2006." (from: from Clusterstock)

Funny and possibly true 🙂

Clay Shirkey writes an article called “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”. I thought this was an excellent discussion about a topic I’ve written, with much less insight, in the past. For me a crucial passage of his article is: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to ne...

Take a book that I was interested in, “The Lords of Finance”, by Liaquat Ahamed. This is a brand new book, very timely that I heard mentioned on TV. Prices:

Sample Chapter on “Kindle” (including Kindle on iPhone): $0. I read it and thought it was really good and was tempted to buy it. But I almost never buy hardcovers so normally I would wait for it to come out in paperback.

Hardcover, List Price: $32.95

...

This article is somewhat mathematical but I am sure it still hugely simplifies the logic that led us astray. If you are a pop-math-head like me you will find it interesting: “For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.” (from Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street)

You know I am a fan of the Newspapers. I’ve written about it several times, wondering out loud whether our collective desire to get everything for cheaper and cheaper, eventually for free, would eventually kill them. This topic has been discussed a lot in the press and blogs as well. What if we apply the principles of viral marketing to supporting newspapers?

How would that work?

What if a paid subscriber of newspaper N is offered the following: For each of your frien...

The problems in our economy right now are real, I believe. Tons of people have lost jobs, and my investment accounts also prove it. I guess there’s no debate about that. But the question is, what to do about it. My observations:

Politicians on both sides are equally passionate yet totally contradict each other about what they claim to be ‘facts’.

The most glaring one is, for me, “are tax breaks stimulative or is government spending stimulative?

I mean this is a case where apparently intelligent adults are calling the sky red and the grass blue.

It’s not like they say, “well experts have trouble understanding this but I really believe that the sky is red and the grass is blue”. It’s more ...

Check this post The 7 deadly sins and 10 lessons of a failed startup from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: “Building a startup is the most difficult, and most rewarding, thing anyone can do. Sometimes you can even make some money at the end of it all. There are so many things that can go wrong it is a miracle when a startup actually makes it. It is important to celebrate our successes, learn from our failures, and value them equally. Failure is important…because success is a terrible teacher.”

Originally posted on Jul 24, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

You’ve heard me bemoan the death of magazines, newspapers, and other valuable things (radio? small software products) that we are killing by demanding and expecting them to become cheaper and cheaper, and eventually free. And after that, “gone”. Here’s an interesting idea: make newspapers into non-profits, supported by endowments and fund raising, sort of like Public Radio and Television.

“Although the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed ...

Check out this post Madoff Scammed His Sister, Too!: "A division has appeared in the Madoff family: Those who invested all their money with Bernie (such as his now wiped-out sister)…and those who didn’t (including his sons Mark and Andrew and his brother Peter). Forgive us for tentatively concluding that the Madoff family members who didn’t lose their shirts on the scam knew or suspected that something was going on." (from: from Clusterstock)

…

In an excellent article on The End of The Financial World as We Know It, an even more fascinating story about Harry Markopolos: In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Wow!

Thomas Friedman with another thought provoking column. I know not everyone likes his perspective but I find myself in violent agreement more often than not: “All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.” (from New York Times, Time To Reboot America?)

Time To Reboot? Read the whole article, please.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the need for some kind of platform to match local community projects with resources to do them. For example the project might be to build a playground, clear a lot, raise money for the school. And resources might be sources of money, people and things who’d like a way to contribute to their community.Seems to me that there’s a spot for kind of a .org to create and operate a system like that and offer it for free or very cheap, locally, then nationally and globally. One thing I’ve been working on is to see whether this need is real, and what exists out there to address it.0Check out this post ...

The irony and paradox confounds: “[…] Mr. Dreier, who grew up on Long Island, the son of a refugee from Poland who owned movie theaters, evolved into a bon vivant who belonged to the Harmonie Club and was a staple of high-wattage charity events[…].” (from NYT, “Lawyer Seen as Bold Enough to Cheat the Best”)

and

“[…]They were renowned for their charitable work and gave away millions to arts and education groups and Jewish charities. They also served on the boards of several prominent foundations, theatres and colleges.[…] (from The Telegraph, “Bernie Madoff: Profile of a Wall Street star“)

Oh well.

charity swindlers

From XConomy Seattle, this article covers ‘an inspiring talk by Nick Hanauer of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners‘. It’s a good read with lots of useful insights. Here’s his formula for judging whether your idea for a new product is any good. I am not sure whether I like these because they are cleverly worded and snarky or whether there’s a big grain of truth in them. Probably a little of both.

If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks.

If people understand it, you’re too late.

If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

A ...

I was traveling this weekend and as I am wont to do, spent too much time at bookstores and magazine stands. I came across the current issue of the New Yorker, where this article caught my eye: “A reporter at Large: Anatomy of a Meltdown”, and the current issue of Wired, where this article caught my eye: “Ray Ozzie wants to Push Microsoft Back into Startup Mode”.

I haven’t read either article yet, but a cursory scan says that they are just the kind of thing I am interested in. Just the thing I’d be willing to pay for. Here’s the thing...

Robert X. Cringely’s prescription for Detroit automakers: “So the trick to turning around the U.S. auto industry is to make car buyers adopt the values of bicycle buyers, which implies the willingness to pay $20 per pound of final product. The way to achieve that goal is by building cars that are both affordable at $20 per pound and EXCITING TO DRIVE.” (from I Cringely, Saving Detroit)

Not than anyone is buying any stocks these days (are you?) but I happened to have a very small number of Whole Foods shares, so this bit of news explains why Whole Foods have been tanking (other than the general lowering tide which lowers all boats) “… Whole Foods has had a cult like following amongst upscale urban professionals. Aspirational shoppers even mocked their own spending by nicknaming Whole Foods: “Whole Paycheck”. Given the economic instability though, customers are staying away from Whole Foods in droves….” (from Seeking Alpha, Whole Foods in a Whole Lot of Trouble)

Bummer…

Michael Lewis writes a great article in Portfolio online about the, let’s say, inevitability, of what’s happened to economy, or wall street, or the markets — take your pick. You can file this under “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich”, or, my personal favorite, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Michael Lewis is the author of two of my favorite non-fiction books, Moneyball and ...

Jim Manzi (of Lotus fame) has an interesting article in “The Nation” about our need, as a nation, to invest just a little bit more in innovation: “But with only a little bit of extra funding, foresight and determination, it may be possible to kick-start an innovation revival. Especially at the federal level, we see an opportunity for a modest investment to create a whole new generation of idea-growing, job-creating technology hubs all across the country–perhaps even an “automotive Silicon Valley” in otherwise moribund Detroit.” (from Invest in Innovation)

A good article, with several me...

Whether you agree or not, it is thoughtful and thought provoking discussion of Bubbles and Financial Engineering (IMO): “Let me get this straight. In 2008, funds trying to squeeze out another basis point or two thought they were being conservative buying insurance on heavily leveraged portfolios of sub prime loans and other debt. Once those loans started to default, it created a cascading deleveraging event which lead to major financial institutions failing and the “smartest” minds on Wall Street being forced to dump everything to raise cash, which in turn lead to a crisis of confidence and deleveraging that created the worst week in the history of the stock markets. Did I get this right ?” (from Blog Maverick)

Check out this post In Defense of Raising Money: a Manifesto for NonProfit CEOs: "How about this instead: “You are incredibly good at making money. I’m incredibly good at making change. The change I want to make in the world, unfortunately, does not itself generate much money. But man oh man does it make change. It’s a hugely important change. And what I know about making this change is as good and as important as what you know about making money. So let’s divide and conquer – you keep on making money, I’ll keep on making change. And if you can lend some of your smarts to the change I’m trying to make, ...

Check out this weird new practice called 5S: “5S is a key concept of the lean manufacturing techniques that have made makers of everything from cars to candy bars more efficient. The S’s stand for sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain. Lately, 5S has been moving from the plant floor to the cubicle at hundreds of offices around the country, adding desk cleaning to the growing list of demands on employees.” from Wall Street Journal

I am so happy that I don’t have to work in such an environment!

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/main.swf

This has been picked up all over the place, so you might have already seen it. I thought it was good. There are many sections that are quotable, I pick just one. You should just read the whole thing, as I said, picked up all over the place. “[snip…]I have no interest in any deals in which anyone would like me to participate. I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to ge...

Check out this post Henry Blodget: Should You Really Panic And Sell Everything Like Cramer Says?: "On the Today Show Monday morning, Jim Cramer told investors to sell everything and get out of the stock market. A Wall Street friend described this as the market’s "Munchian scream moment."" (from: from Huffington Post: Front Page)

…

Esther Dyson wrote this very interesting Wall Street Journal article about how online advertising is changing. This article is very relevant to my new product, SWIFT, which I have hinted about before. She says: “The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated. New players are emerging to devalue the spaces that the ad giants are currently fighting over. Companies you’ve never heard of called NebuAd, Project Rialto, Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla are pitching tools to Internet service providers that will enable them to track user...

Like everyone else, I’ve been following the drama on Wall Street, Main Street, Washington DC and so on. Bless their hearts, they have posted a document called“firstdraft.pdf” to allow the masses to examine the bill which will authorize the bailout (a bit of irony?)

It’s way over my head, but a quick scan does reveal some rather large numbers being bandied about…

Wow!!!!

Interesting article about the sale of DVDs in Silicon Alley Insider: “Just a reality check on the video download/rental business: There really isn’t one yet. At least not compared to good old-fashioned DVD sales and rentals.” (from “Forget iTunes: Americans still love to buy DVDs“)

Interesting article. I wonder, what about music CDs?

The quote below is from this post from ReadWriteWeb While we are certainly seeing more and more examples of products being given away for free, it is not necessarily a good thing. There are different aspects and faces of free. The Flickr free, which Fred Wilson calls freemium, is the model where the basic version is free and the premium one costs money.This model is very different from the GMail model where the entire product, with full features, is completely free. The downside of freeconomics is a monopolistic market, with barriers to entry, and little incentive to inn...

I’ve written about some of the considerations that go into the choice between physical infrastructure and new SAAS services such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2. I also covered why the fact that you are comfortable relying on a hosting provider for rack mounted servers (so called ping & power) doesn’t mean necessarily that you would come to the same conclusion about SAAS services. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about that tradeoff a little while ago:

“Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 serv...

Here is a full article written by Jeremy Wagstaff… Blind to Bargains If We Won’t Pay for Software, People Won’t Write It April 20, 2007

Computers would be nothing without programs to run on them, so why do we spend so much time drooling over our hardware — physical bits and pieces — and so little over the software that makes the bits and pieces do what we want them to? And why are we so stingy about paying for software?

These thoughts were running through my mind the other day as I read the exchanges on a mailing list devoted to a piece of software I follow closely (a thought organizer called PersonalBrain, which I’ll be taking a closer look at in a forthcoming column). When its creator, C...

I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example: “[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?

Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed – even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.” (from Fear of Failure)

Technorati Tags: softwaredevelopment management

I met with a potential client the other day who was on red alert because there were a lot of nasty things being said about them on blogs, comments and forums. And I thought of the concept of asymmetrical conflict as we have learned about it in recent years. Even without knowing whether the criticism of the client was deserved: for a single act, or a pattern of action, or not at all, it struck me that they were in a very tough and unfair spot. If you look at nasty blog posts or comment streams, it is hard to deny that there’s a piling on, hit them when they are down dynamic.

When hearing the people and effort that this client had deployed to try to respond to this, and how helpless they ...

Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products contains some excellent Do’s and Don’ts for someone (like me) thinking of starting a new business. Here is just one little ‘Do’ with which I agree whole heartedly. “1. Do become a domain expert in some domain. If you are a computer science/programming oriented entrepreneur, there is a great temptation to try to solve general broad problems. This is because we tend to have no other skills. If you study programming that is a skill, but you need to marry that with some understanding of some real world issue. I strong...

Bill Ives of the Portals and KM Blog writes an interesting two-part article on the business impact of Web 2.0: “Now with Web 2.0 the open architecture, the refinement of web services, and the ability to put together applications through mashups makes the basic development costs much lower and time to market much quicker. More effort can be placed on making the tools actually serve business and consumer needs. Startups now can also benefit from looking back at the mistakes and successes of the first generation.” from Portals and KM: The Business Impact of Web 2.0: Part One.

Bill also co...

I came across this very cool and simple set of criteria or rules to apply for funding from YCombinator. Not sure how well it works for them but they are quite reasonable. Here’s a sample: “(4) Yes decisions will include the amount we’ll invest and the percent of the company we’d want for it. We usually invest $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of participating founders (i.e. 2 founders get $15,000, 3 get $20,000), in return for between 1% and 10% of the company. The median is 6%.”

Cool. Does it work?

I am advising a client who is interested in reaching out to a huge existing community of folks who they, historically and today, can count as their natural constituency.The problem is, they don’t have their names or email addresses and want to connect to them, and them to each other. The question is, how to do that. I explored three options with them: create a Facebook ‘Group’ and/or Application, create a Ning social network, or create a new and beautifully designed new web site to serve as the hub of the effort.

Here are some of my tentative conclusions.

Outreach: No matter what approach is taken, a big part of the effort will be outreach, via email or google ads or something ...

Check this post Three on getting a job from Newmark’s Door. Where Craig turns us on to these three fun links for job hunters (Dan are you listening?):

“Ten Things You Really Shouldn’t Do in a Job Interview“.

“Get That Job At Google“.

“25 Questions to Think About Before Your Next Job Interview“.

I agree with this post from Feld Thoughts:

Overall, titles don’t (and shouldn’t) matter much in an early stage company, other than for helping people on the outside of the company understand who does what to whom. In my experience, the idea of a COO almost always muddies the water. (from: I Don’t Believe in COO’s)

Brad Feld, famous Venture Capitalist writes an interesting post about how he might get to the point of telling an entrepreneur “we are passing” in this post from Feld Thoughts: “We always try to be respectful of the entrepreneurs and pass as soon as we hit the “this isn’t going to happen” point. There are different triggers for each company and it’s not predictable. I imagine this can be frustrating for an entrepreneur because it feels like you are making process with us when we suddenly say “we are passing“, but I’d like to think it’s an efficient way for you since...

In the context of the current Wall Street excitement, I received a letter of assurance from a mutual fund manager saying, among other things:

*“Dear Investors, *

*While the recent downdraft in worldwide equity markets may be unsettling, there is a great deal in our investments to engender optimism. In fact, we believe that we are witnessing an incredible investment opportunity for those who are able to exhibit some fortitude. *

*We have endured similar experiences in the past. *

If the history of human affairs can be summed up in simple terms, it would be by the phrase: “This too shall pass.” In our opinion, the current crisis will end sooner rather than later.”

I don’t know, in my opinion a significant part of human affairs can be summed up in these simple terms:

“It seemed like a good idea at the time”

Chris Herot writes about a new product called RulesBase: Check out this post from Christopher Herot’s Weblog: “I had a visit yesterday from Steven Ginzberg and Jack Schatz of Gray Box Software. They showed me a new financial analysis and modeling tool – RulesBase.

A mutual friend had noticed a resemblance to a product from my first start-up, Javelin Software, and suggested they seek my advice. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently advising startups on other technologi...

Yesterday the New York Times had an interesting article about our expectation that software (and web sites and web applications) all should be free. I’ve written about this before so I won’t belabor it again. From the article: A growing number of consumers are paying just that — nothing. This is the Internet’s latest phase: people using freely distributed applications, from e-mail and word processing programs to spreadsheets, games and financial management tools. They run on distant, massive and shared data centers, and users of the services pay with their attention to...

You can read all about the potential acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft, here for example, where Marc Andreessen writes: “I think that a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would have practically no impact on any high-quality Silicon Valley startup.” (from Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger)

You should read his whole paper to get his 5 point argument. And I definitely agree with this conclusion:

“Build something of value — something that people want, and something that will be profitable at the appropriate point — and the world is yours. [snip…]

Or, reduced to a phrase: the best way to get bought is to not be for sale.” (from ...

In the Portals and KM blog, a pair of great articles about “Enterprise 2.0”. Bill Ives has been following and covering Enterprise 2.0, which I’ve seen defined as “the Application of Web 2.0 technologies to workers using network software within an organization or business.” Check out these two articles each of which are quite useful surveys of what’s going on in the space:

Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories, The Best from 2007: “People are often looking for examples of Enterprise 2.0 successes. I am seeing a growing number of examples and wanted to collect them in one post. ...

This is what a discontinuity in a graph looks like 🙂 That’s the stock market from yesterday to today.

The discontinuity is this morning before we heard of the Fed’s “Shock and Awe” move, lowering the prime rate by 3/4 percent.

Yes there’s been lots of rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, or Logitech. They come and go constantly. I am starting one (a rumor that is) that has not been mentioned Microsoft will buy Amazon. I will state my case, very briefly:

Amazon has been building an amazing platform of services for their online store which they make available to the world at large. I am sure you’ve heard of many of them available via Amazon Web Services, such as S3 and EC2. Newer ones like DevPay and SimpleDB.

Microsoft is feeling pressure from Google, that c...

Here’s an interesting new product, just into beta: Inquisix. This is a service for sales people who need a more effective alternative to cold calling to generate leads. They say: “Now there’s no need to waste time on cold calling when contacts are just an Inquisix Trusted Referral Away.”

Here is something about their process:

“… [snip] Inquisix reviews those requests and alerts only the members who could make those introductions. Those members review your online profile and reputation to determine if their customers would be interested in an introduction. [snip…]”

I’ve looked at the product (even though I am not a ‘prospect’ myself) and it makes a lot of sense. You may want to check it out – they are taking beta applications.

Chris Herot tells the story of Convoq (which then became Zingdom) from the very beginning to the very end. An interesting chronology, worth reading if you’re thinking of (or are currently) playing the startup game. “The company formerly known as Convoq, and later as Zingdom Communications, closed its doors Friday, November 30th. It was the end of a five-year run that saw three rounds of capital and a comparable number of CEOs and product strategies.

While the company was an innovator in on-line meetings, and had a core group of enthusiastic customers, it never achieved the traction that would have provided the necessary return ...

Just check out this well argued, detailed piece, “Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis”, by Lawrence Summers: “Three months ago it was reasonable to expect that the subprime credit crisis would be a financially significant event but not one that would threaten the overall pattern of economic growth. This is still a possible outcome but no longer the preponderant probability.

Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have bee...

My purely biased view of the most memorable presenters, quotes and associated links:

Kiva.org uses their web site to allow you and me to make micro loans to entrepreneurs around the world. Jessica Flannery gave a terrific and enthusiastic talk and got me to go right to the site and sign up.Here’s Ethan Zuckerman’s exhaustive live blog of the Kiva presentation.

...

In the past, clever [tag]entrepreneurs[/tag] (yours truly not included, alas) have built companies and products with a very specific plan or desire or hope or scheme to be acquired by some deep pocketed parent-to-be. Perhaps create a bit of MS Windows Software that looked just like an Office App, interoperated beautifully with Microsoft apps, was written in C#, didn’t run on anything but Windows, hoping to catch the eye of Microsoft (remember Visio?). Well I am sure this is still going on with Microsoft, especially since Balmer announced that MSFT will be acquiring 100 companies per year (quantity over quality?)

But lately the cool kids dec...

In recent weeks there have been two exciting announcements of acquisitions of companies started by friends of mine, and not coincidentally, ex-Lotus Development Corporation folks. Congratulations to Mussie Shore, who started Zingku on his announcement that he’s entered into an agreement to have Google acquire their Zingku service.

And congratulations to: Rick Treitman, Mike Kraley, Paul Kleppner, and many others on their announcement that Adobe Systens has signed a definitive agreemenet to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, makers of Buzzword.

Way to go!!!

Enterprise 2.0 is one of those terms that is being bandied about by various people. In the Portals and KM Blog, Bill Ives has written a couple interesting run downs of what’s going on in that world. In “Description and Reviews of Enterprise 2.0 Tools”, there’s a good summary of some of the new open source and commercial tools and services that support Enterprise 2.0. Awareness is especially impressive, and one that I know well, as I’ve been working with them for the last 6 months or s...

Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)

Check out this post from Joel on Software: ** IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli. (from: Strategy Letter VI)

Actually this is a great article about strategy in the [tag]software business.[/tag] But us Lotus alums remember Symphony and had quite a chuckle to see that IBM brought back the [tag]Lotus Symphony[/tag] brand.I am waiting for the second coming of other great product names owned by Lotus: Lotus Manuscript; Lotus Jazz; Where are they now?

Check out this post where Seth Godin gives some really good ideas about how Apple might have better handled the price change of the iPhone. See it in Seth’s Blog: ** — Free exclusive ringtones, commissioned from Bob Dylan and U2, only available to the people who already had a phone. (This is my favorite because it announces to your friends–every time the phone rings–that you got in early). — Free pass to get to the head of the line next time a new hot product comes out. — Ability to buy a specially colored iPod, or an iPod with limited edition music that no one else can buy.The key **is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less. (from: How to spend $20 million)

Many consumer products, like cell phones, computers, and so on seem to come with some kind of a [tag]rebate[/tag]. Buy now and get $50 back, and so on. I don’t quite understand the business or marketing intent of this scheme. I just switched my whole kit and kaboodle cell phone business from Sprint to [tag]Cingular/AT&T[/tag]. And as encouragement I get $50 off on each of the phones, at least so they say.

What I actually get back

A form that looks like a 1040 that has to be filled out in gory detail A requirement to cut out the [tag]UPC[/tag] bar code from the box Which I then have to place into an envelope, address and stamp and mail Weeks late, I receive a little orange debit card pre-lo...

Scott Kirsner writes about VC’s this post in his new blog Innovation Economy "[…] Though they like to portray themselves as omniscient and omnipotent, they’re actually quite anxious about missing the next big deal.[…]"

(from: Dirty Little Secrets About VCs)

Check out this post from Freakonomics Blog: ** In order to buy a home, one typically needs to save 10 to 20% of the purchase price for a down payment. The remainder of the purchase price is typically financed by a mortgage. The need to save for a down payment is one of the biggest barriers for someone wanting to be a home owner. It involves living below one’s means; saving for several years; and discipline. To the bank, however, this all means that the new home owner has a vested interest in making their mortgage payments since their life savings is invested in the home from Day 1.

(from**: Another Look at “Sellers’ Concessions” in Real Estate)

Read the article, it poses an interesting connundrum.

This is an explanation (part 1 of 2) of why and who should seek VC for their new business. From what I know of the way the world is and works, I generally agree with his article. Heres a bit from the this post in blog.pmarca.com: ** "[snip…] Startups that have a credible potential to be sold or go public for a 10x gain on invested capital within 4 to 6 years of the date of funding should consider raising Venture Capital.Most other** startups should not raise venture capital. This includes: startups where the founders want to stay private and independent for a long time; startups where there’s no inherent le...

PC Magazine’s newest issue has a retrospective of their past 25 years and LotusImprov gets mentioned for one of the big deals of 1993. And yes, you can see a bad picture of yours truly back in those days. “Innovators: Pito Salas

// Set slideShowSpeed (milliseconds) var slideShowSpeed = 3000 // Duration of crossfade (seconds) var crossFadeDuration = 3 // Specify the image files var Pic = new Array() // don\’t touch this // to add more images, just continue // the pattern, adding to the array below Pic[0] = \’http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/17/0,1425,i=175286,00.gif\’ Pic[1] = \’http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/...

I just stumbled (get it?) across this: “Hewlett-Packard announced Thursday that it plans to acquire start-up Tabblo, citing an interest in the photo-sharing site’s technology that facilitates printing from the Web.” (from C|Net News)

Nice going guys!

Check out this post from Consumerist: uy has confirmed the existence of a second "secret" website that looks identical to BestBuy.com, but has different prices and is only available inside Best Buy stores. This misleading website has been shown to customers who come into Best Buy stores looking to price match a product seen on the website. Best Buy is currently under investigation in Connecticut, but it seems as if at least one store is still showing customers the "secret" website instead of the real one

(from: UPDATE: Best Buy Still Using Its Secret Website)

I guess that many of you who read this blog are eRoom, Documentum and EMC alums so you’d be interested in reading what John Newton, co-founder of Documentum has to say about the departure of Dave DeWalt from EMC: “[snip…] Being a co-founder of Documentum prior to starting Alfresco, it is only natural that people are asking me what I think of Dave DeWalt’s departure from EMC to become CEO at Security Software firm McAfee [snip…]” from Content Log.

As a humerous aside, I’ve heard from more than ...

Check out this post from GigaOM: If you are an investor in one of the many U.S.-listed technology outsourcing giants such as Infosys, then I have some bad news for you: they are no longer the cherished destination for the brightest and the smartest in India.

(from: Troubling Signs for Indian Tech Outsourcers)

A little while back I mentioned wis.dm, a site that I’ve been helping with for about the last year. Rafe Needleman refers to it as a “Social Network of Ideas”

“This is a new web 2.0 business aiming to change the perceptions of social networking – how? – by encouraging original thinking, creative collaboration and innovative self promotion.” in ...

This new site looks quite cool. It’s a friendlier alternative to eVite, less ad heavy and more fun. They just launched today! Check out this post from MyPunchblog:

TechCrunch has the story: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/14/mypunchbowl-joins-the-evite-gunners/

It’s been a blast developing this new product — we hope you’ll sign up and give it a try.

– The MyPunchbowl Team

Throw your best party yet! http://www.mypunchbowl.com

(from: MyPunchbowl.com Now Live)

Take a look at wis.dm, which is a new site that I’ve been involved with, and recently started doing some pretty cool posting on their own team blog. Check out this post from the wis.dm team blog:

[…]I can´t imagine how many great ideas get pushed aside by capable innovators every year, every month, every week because there really was no way for them to realize it. No connections, no collaborators, no visibility, no next step in site. Pocketed across the world´s college campuses, intern pits and urban neighborhoods are these lone gunmen of the cutting edge, those guys and gals with the know-what but not necessarily the know-who or know-how. We like to think that community like wis.dm might be the tool that will help transform the situation.[…]

(from: New Dawn)

Sound interesting? Send me an email and I’ll see if I can get you an invite!

Check out this post from Between the Lines: [snip…] “Yesterday Amazon’s S3 service suffered an outage that lasted more than long enough to miss the company’s self-imposed goal of 99.99% availability, at least for the next couple of months. Last November, Google Calendar was unavailable for the better part of a day. And famously, Salesforce.com suffered a string of outages this time last year. Unfortunately, my business relies on all three of these services.” [snip…]

(from: A cautionary utility computing tale)

Recently I talked to someone who was tr...

Check out this post from Freakonomics Blog:

...

A million years ago I used Lotus Notes … I think it was version 3 and 4. I believe that it ran on Mac even then so I am not sure what the big news is. But look at this screen shot. It looks more similar than different to the old Lotus Notes. And among the Mac congesenti there’s always a lot of tut-tut-tuting when an application claims to support Mac OS X but doesn’t have the true Mac OS X mojo. I guess they give IBM a pass.

Check out this post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools...

I am at the 2006 Fall Leadership Forum in Sonoma, CA. Wine is everywhere, even a free bottle in the hotel room. And all that wine and wine information is kind of squandered on me. So I won’t talk about wine, but here are some tidbits from the conference…

Check out PicLens, a Safari-only (so far) plug-in. It adds a very cool photo browsing experience to sites like Flickr. Check out Mashery, a service that front ends other services that offer web APIs. It adds functionality for registering users, issueing API keys, etc. It is a service that would be offered to other companies that want t...

Someone forwarded this to me the other day. You might have seen it, but I still thought it was worth mentioning, because I had not come across it before. In fact I didn’t even know about the site where the article was published, SiteReference.

Here are a couple of brief excerpts:

“That’s right – ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me.” (from ...

How to get people talking about your product

Interesting article about how to build buzz

(tags: buzz PR publicrelations geeknewscentral)

Scoble has a good commentary and links to more commentary about Kiko. Kiko is a web 2.0 / ajax / cool calendar application that appears to be throwing in the towel. Here’s what Scoble had to say: Does Kiko predict more Web 2.0 failures?” href=”http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/08/17/does-kiko-predict-more-web-20-failures/”>Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger > Does Kiko predict more Web 2.0 failures?

This quote:

“Getting the cool kids to try your technology isn’t the same thing as having a long-term business proposition.”

rings true to me. I have a constant internal battle (which I’ve written about more than once) around the theme of why everyone expects everything to be free.

And by the way why anything that takes more than 2 months to build is too long. Maybe for the cool kids, but for a real company with a real business, it’s gonna take you longer than 2 months.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=blogbridge-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1591840562&IS1=1&nou=1&fc1=000000&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000ff&bc1=ffffff&bg1=ffffff&f=ifrGuy is one of my heroes and his blog is one of my favorites.

A post today on the ‘Art of Firing’ is a good summary:

“I’ve fired people a few times in my career, and I hated everything about the process. I’m not sure I did it well when I did it, but I’ve thought a lot about how it should be done. Here is my be...

simplybill – manage invoices simply online

Looks like a nice light weight invoicing system.

(tags: interesting look Invoicing billing)

I don’t know why I thought this was so cool. Maybe it’s my long standing background with Spreadsheets, from when I worked at Lotus. You remember Improv, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t…

Anyway, “Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application” !

“Google Inc. plans Tuesday to release a Web-based spreadsheet application, in a further foray into Microsoft Corp.’s traditional turf…

… Google Spreadsheets follows Google’s March purchase of a company offering Web- based word processor Writely. The two free Web-based Google ...

There’s a new meme floating around, “Freemium“, a cute/clever word for a kind of business model. Giving it away free.

Say what?

You may know that I am associated with a software product which is given away free. BlogBridge is a substantial, useful, real product, which for some crazy reason, we give away free. Everyone wants to know, “What’s your business model”? So now I have a cool/web2.0 response: “Freemium.”

Many people have written about this new term, even though as far as I can tell it was coined...

From the Wall Street Journal: (subscription required)

“Research In Motion Ltd. agreed to pay $612.5 million to settle its long-running legal dispute with patent firm NTP Inc., according to NTP lawyer Jim Wallace.”

Technorati Tags: feedburner, adwords

Guy Kawasaki writes a nice little bit about VCs (some of my best friends are VCs) and about entrepreneurs. It rings very true to me. Here’s some of what he says:

“Venture capitalists are simple people: we’ve either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, “due diligence”) or there’s not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we’re not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it’s hard to get a “yes” out of venture capitalist, you should try to get a conclusive “no.””

“Alas, entrepreneurs are also simple people: If they don’t hear a conclusive “no,” they assume the answer is yes.” (From “Let the good times roll by Guy Kawasaki“

Read the whole thing. It’s well written, humorous and contains some really good advice!

Technorati Tags: vc

Have you noticed how man how many new apps that have appeared of late are available free of charge?

Web 2.0 services like gada.be or flickr or del.icio.us. And more conventional client apps like Firefox? The list is approximately infinite. They come and go at an amazing rate. And they are all free.

Not only are they free, users seem to expect them to be free. I am not sure how this came to be…

Is it a unintended consequence of the open source philosophy? Is it a incorrect reframing of the fact that major and well known services like google and yahoo are (...

I’ve read several accounts relating to Microsoft’s recently ‘leaked’ documents about the new strategy, for example, Cringely says:

“While ostensibly written solely for internal discussion, the documents from Bill Gates and new Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie were clearly supposed to be leaked.”

… and …

“These are external marketing documents — the equivalent of those ubiquitous white papers …” (via Scripting News)

I have a couple of thoughts on this:

“On Purpose” is relative: Any email that is sent to tens of thousands of people is essentially certain to be leaked.

Any expe...

Inquisitor is a really cool program that augments the search box in Safari (which for you heathens out there is the default Mac OS X web browser.) It’s kind of hard to explain just what it does – it’s kind of a magical word completion thingie that guesses, based on other searches and who knows what else, what you are going to search for.

But I am not writing about Inquisitor, although I recommend it highly. Here’s a post by it’s author, Dave, who is trying to figure out how or whether he can make some money with his creation.

“Why am I considering pay-per-download? Well, one advantage is that it’s far easier to do than a full-blown regi...

Here’s a survey being conducted by BlogOn, where I am on the advisory board, about the state of enterprise blogging. If you have a couple of minutes, you can participate and be in the running for an iPod nano, and who doesn’t want one of those?

Click here to participate in the survey.

Technorati Tags: blog, enterprise

I often cite Microsoft as an example of corporate blogging that seems to really works: If you work with, for, against Microsoft (and who in the computer industry doesn’t do one of those?) Microsoft Bloggers will give you a view into Microsoft’s thinking, attitude, plans and challenges that is incredibly valuable.

You (generally) won’t learn any trade secrets. You will hear what you might have heard if you ran into this or that Microsoftie in a Starbucks or at a conference. But few people do.

Exhibit #1 is a recent post by Steven Sinofsky, a very senior Microsoft manager, about how Microsoft thinks about...

And in classic Blogosphere form, you can find a report on the report from Nicole-Ann Boyer on World Changing, where she says:

“With the FT riding high as the world’s best daily for the business intelligentsia, take heed large organization types: if you ever needed a piece to put in front your boss’s nose and add credibility to some of your open source ideas, this should help.” (from World Changing)

She goes on to comment and link to some especially interesting parts of the FT Special Report.

I guess that makes this post a report on the report on the report. Can anyone spell **e-c-h-o-c-h-a-m-b-e-r?

**

Technorati Tags: dangillmor, opensource

Robin Good points to: “The Myth of The Rock Star and of the Need To Sing-up For a Major Recording Label”:

“Music” does not equal “compact disc”. Music is data. It doesn’t matter whether you burn it to a CD or rip it to an iPod or a Memory Stick or store it on your hard drive. It’s still music.

**Take a minute to internalize this concept. **

Once you get past the notion that music has to come in the form of a shiny little Frisbee that retails for $16.99 at your local MegaSuperMusicPavilion, certain other truths tha...

Robert Cringely has a relatively little known quasi blog, for some reason on www.pbs.org. The stuff is generally very good, and little noted.

Given Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Teleo, this recent post about Skype is interesting and timely:

Expect Skype to be sold, another viral marketing success sucked up by big business. Expect it to go to either a major broadband provider or, more likely, to a big mobile carrier with no fixed telephone assets. And whoever buys Skype, expect them to throw money into making the company into even more of a multinat...

Hey, I just came across this:

“The Invention of the Pivot Table: The concept that led to today’s pivot table came from the halls of the Lotus Development Corporation with a revolutionary spreadsheet program called Lotus Improv. Improv was envisioned in 1986 by Pito Salas of the Advanced Technology Group at Lotus.

Realizing that spreadsheets often have patterns of data, Pito concluded that if one could build a tool that could recognize these patterns, then one could build enhanced data models. Lotus ran with the concept and started developing the next-generation spreadsheet.” (from ...

Being a veteran of the groupware movement (worked at Lotus for years, and co-founded eRoom Technology) this item caught my eye:

“Liquid Systems, a venture-funded software company that is focused on enterprise messaging and collaboration, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.” (from InfoWorld)

I guess only the InfoWorld headline refers to “groupware” but it’s a very 80’s term, that even in the 90’s we at eRoom avoided like the plague.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, groupware, vc

Check this out: Microsoft Announces Plans to Acquire FrontBridge… Is BlogBridge next?

(ok, you know I am only joking, right ;->)

Technorati Tags: funny, microsoft

All software has bugs, no doubt. So pulling out one story to make a point isn’t really fair. (Especially recalling the story about stones and glass houses.)

But if I looked I know I could find story after story, including some that I could write from first hand experience, about the terrible rough edges on all the software on which our much beloved blogosphere runs. And from that observation and those stories comes the premise of this post. Here’s one of the stories:

“It all started two weeks ago when I undertook the “drop-in” upgrade from Movable Type 3.14 to 3.17. Well, “drop-in” is not really the word. I had made some changes to my server configuration that I thought...

Not computer service providers, but folks like carpenters and plumbers….

I came across ServiceMagic, which is a pretty cool site for locating and hiring people to work on projects around the house. I needed three doors repaired and on a lark I posted the project on this site. I had a phone call in 5 minutes, and 2 more within the hour. I chose one of them to come by and give me a free estimate in 2 days.

So that’s pretty impressive, considering usually you don’t even get a call back. Now lets see the quality of the service!

Technorati Tags: home, useful, recommended

If you work with software developers you’ll appreciate these two pieces by Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, a book that I also recommend heartily.

He always has interesting things to say:

“I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.” (From “Hiring is obsolete“)

I also came across this ...

This can’t be good: Google closed at $288 today.

John Batelle’s search blog is quoting someone as saying it will hit $300

I say, short the puppy, big time!

Technorati Tags: google

Not that I’m an expert or anything…

In the last few days there have been several articles about the problems in High Tech Venture Capital. One particularly interesting one was in the New York Times on Sunday talked about the exodus of recently minted venture capitalists from the business:

“We can’t really have people learning on the job anymore,” Mr. Kramlich said. Two-thirds of the partners who were at N.E.A. in 1997 are no longer at the firm, he said, and then cited an internal study that went a long way in explaining why: the surviving third accounted for 85 percent of the firm’s profit.” (...

I came across this bit:

“Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will.” (Techdirt)

It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named “BackBay”, and as an R&D project “Modeler”.)

In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind-unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like “With Improv we threw out the rule ...

In the continuing series of “this blog things is really getting big”, the most recent issue of BusinessWeek has a whole section all about blogging. Not only that, but they’ve started their own meta-blog.

Doc comments with grudging admirationthat IBM has decided to give away some parts of their much vaunted patent portfolio. One interesting tidbit is that in addition to being responsible for the most patents granted annually, IBM is also the leader in the most patents allowed to expire annually.

Why? Because keeping all those patents current is very costly, and if there is no economic benefit to having those patents, that’s a lot of money down the shute.

So maybe some clever strategist/marketer (difference?) probably realized that the PR value of open sourcing these worthless patents might actually be the most valuable of all!

If you are interested in some thoughtful perspectives about the world of Venture Capital, from a reformed (or is it a corrupted?) entrepreneur, you should check out Jeff Bussgang’s (of IDG Ventures) new blog, “Seeing both sides.” He’s off to a great start!

From News.com, about Kaboodle BrightAds RSS **On Monday, the company introduced a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format known as Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle’s keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.

Echo’s of the Google Toolbar debate? It sounds like Kanoodle BrightAds RSS will create and host RSS feeds for their customers, and intersperse Ads in the feeds. I am not sure this is a good idea, but I suppose it was inevitable**.

The question is, will the inserted ads be distinguishable so that an aggregator could strip them out?

An interesting article in News.Com: As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

Very relevant to BlogBridge, of course.

Dave Winer makes a point which I totally agree with: it is important to learn from what has come before – or more more provocatively – to steal good ideas wherever you can find them. And secondly that the only way to do that is to make it a point of being very familiar with other products, other approaches. As a designer of software I certainly believe in that. In fact,I have lived that over and over again: Improv learned from 1-2-3, eRoom learned from Lotus Notes, etc. And similarly, BlogBridge has...

I got many comments from people about my postingsrecently about Lotus Improv. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a pretty accurate description of Improv and its history in the WikiPedia. By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with writing it. Actually I am quite curious who did write it, because he or she was pretty well informed so I suspect it’s someone who was on the team from the early days, or knew someone who was. (Of course there are a few inaccuracies, but what the heck!) Cool

“Pure Entrepeneurs”, according to this article in the Boston Globe, ***… are loopy and obsessed. They have a vision of the future, and while others are casting their lines into the water to see what will bite, pure entrepreneurs are jumping over the gunwales and swimming after the white whale.

Pure entrepreneurship, by my definition, is often driven by a belief that a major shift is coming — and thus it’s hard to find customers who already understand that they need the product a pure entrepreneur is developing.*

You know the funny thing that my wife pointed out? For me, being called “loopy and obsessed” high praise**!

So what might GMail’s strategy be? I listened to a wonderful Podcast with Georges Harik all about GMail and some of the thinking about it. If you are interested in GMail, it’s a worthwhile listen. I noticed that Georges kept referring to GMail as providing great email and communications capabilities. An interesting and fine distinction to be stressing, although the interviewer never referred to it.

Another interesting strategic point that was covered was the question of providing free POP and SMTP, which is certainly counterintuitive if you believe that GMail is being made to make money, and the only w...

First the punchline: go to this link, fill out a short questionaire, and receive a $15 Starbucks gift card in the mail, no questions asked. But hurry, because I wouldn’t be surprised if that offer evaporates quickly. Here is one of those cool “internet effects.” There’s a site called DealNewswhere you can immediate reports of interesting offers, coupons, deals, etc. They are posted there by I don’t know who – people without a life. They also have an RSS Feedfor you BlogBridgeusers. That’s how I found out about the offer.

Anyway, ...

If you read this blog at all, you know that I’ve been working on a piece of software (BlogBridge) which at this point I am pretty excited about, even though I don’t know where it will go or end up. I was recently interviewed about my work by Scott Kirsner (of the Boston Globe) who writes the @Large Column. I don’t know whether or when he will write an article, but the questions he asked made me think a bit about what I was doing, and particularlyy the way I have chosen to go about it.

I have purposely decided not to try and raise capital to fund this proje...

Seems like a dredged up some “old” (you know who you are) Improv fans with my earlier posting, so I thought an additional comment or two might be in order. First off, lest it be misunderstood, in no way do I feel anything but totally proud about Imrpov as a concept and a product. I hope it is not inconsistent to feel that way, and yet agree that for a variety of reason it was not successful, as a product.

The concept of an alternative (not replacement) for a spreadsheet for real financial modeling is, I think, quite sound. (Yes, I can do page layout in Microsoft Word, but if that’s my purpose, PageMaker is better. You could m...

It’s been a while. Which is why my heart beat just a little faster when I read a reference to Improv (not altogether flattering) in the Adam Bossworth pieceI just wrote about, where he said:

*** Consider the spreadsheet**. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet.

Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA’s and PhD’s in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, for...

Here I go again, picking a out quote from a blogger who I really likeand dissecting it. I don’t know, maybe I am cranky. Robert Scoble, of Microsoft and Scobelizer fame, reports on a conversation he had with Kim Polese. All in all a fascinating bit, and I hope Kim realized that Scoble was going to blog the whole dang thing. Buried somewhere in the middle, Scoble says: “It was not possible until there was friction free collaboration (blogs, RSS, Wikis, IRC chat), and a large number of open source components.”

Maybe it’s because I come from the world of collaboration, b...

So, some day we will consider BlogBridgecomplete enough to actually be worth a few bucks. But the question is, how much? I’ve said many times, that even if every single cool idea I have is perfectly realized that the most one could expect is maybe $20 or $30 per copy. But even that is a lot. So, here’s a thought. Let the market decide.

What we plan to do is to offer a limited number (say 10) of perpetual BlogBridge licenses on eBay with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve. And see what happens. Depending on how it goes we could offer twice that number of licenses an opening bid equal to the average price the first batch went for. And so ...

I’ve said (and believe) that there’s no other company on earth that has the capability to develop, debug, beta test, deliver software on a massive scale like Microsoft. The number of configurations (both legal and illegal) of hardware, system sofyware, application software, languages, etc that XP has to be tested against totally boggles the mind.

I truly believe that not IBM, Apple, BEA, Oracle or any of them have the capability to do this at the scale Microsoft does it.

This at some level is a key competitive advantage and provides them the monopoly lock-in that they enjoy. So when that capability ceases to be a competitve advantage is when their monopoly will start eroding.

So let your imagination run free: if all software becomes centralized on servvers, if massive scale software like XP becomes obsolete, when all hardware becomes so cheap that you just throw it out instead of upgrading it, maybe then Microsoft might loose their lock-in.

Not before.

I was recently asked by a VC friend of mine what I thought of a certain Wiki product. I thought my response to him (with specific product and people references removed) might be interesting. He asked me, “Have you kept track of what’s going on in Wiki-land, and what do you think?” Here’s my answer:

Yes, I have very much kept track of the wiki stuff. After doing eRoom, which is still among the best collab systems out there in my (humble) opinion, I very much believe that there’s a whole next generation of collaboration that is needed. I say this because eRoom and others fall really short when it comes to get mass adoption. Wiki’s might point in that direction.

That said, ...

Dave Winer comments on the sale of OddPost to Yahoo. I’ve been an avid OddPost fan for a while and I am glad to see them succeed. It’s an impressive tour the force, an existence proof that you can build quite a nice UI in a browser. One critical detail which is a bit mysterious to me: OddPost today runs only on Internet Explorer, and in particular, not on Macintosh. This, I assume, because the incredibly subtle and tricky code they had to write to pull of their magic made them not-cross-platform. Clearly Yahoo wouldn’t buy them if they weren’t convinced that this limitation could be lifted.

But can it? And how does this relate to the recent dust up around Apple’s statement that they are adding (incompatible) “enhancements” to allow Safari to be better integrated and interoperable with OSX? People are worried about the divergence of standards.

As you know we are developing BlogBridge, “a new kind of blog reader.” As you may know, BlogBridge is open source(see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.) With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable, and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

The $64,000 question is: “How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?” Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to ...

Well, not really dark: This is in reference to Shel Isreal’s recent bit about LinkedIn. Shel notes that LinkedInis actually good for recruiting. He cites some examples of folks who assembled a team using LinkedIn to locate candidates.

Think about the other side: You’re the CEO of a company. You’ve discovered LinkedIn. It’s kind of cool. You introduce some of your team to it. Before long everyone is on LinkedIn.

I remember a recuriter friend cautioning me that we shouldn’t have people supply both their first and last names in the their voice mail greetings in our brand new startup. It would make it too easy for the best people to be poached by other recruiters just dialing through the directory.

LinkedIn is an order of magnitude worse/better/more.

Dan Bricklin’s written a bit on a topic that’s been indirectly on my mind lately. It has to do with BlogBridge, the Blogging tool that I’ve been developing as a back room project for a while now (I post periodic updates, so you might have seen them.) Anyway, the connection is that starting sometime next month when I wrap up my current consulting project I will be devoting more time on BlogBridge to see if I can’t get it to a real stable and usable form, and who knows, try to sell it? Progress has been accelerating lately – there’s another developer working on it part time now (Aleksey, in the Ukraine) and things ar...

What’s the relationship between offshore outsourcing and immigration? Here’s an interesting connection. Immigration brings workers from other countries to this one. With outsourcing, we send the work to them (because with fast networks, we can…) For years Immigration was a hallmark of U.S. society, the melting pot and all that. Its fair to say that it’s been viewed positively. The people that are against offshore outsourcing today would have been against immigration in the past. (And I say that as an actual immigrant 🙂

Email is not dead (Demo 2004 Series – 7) I continue to be an avid follower of what’s going on in the email space. Why? Here are some things to think about:

From my eRoom and Collaboration days, I’ve been very aware of the challenges to achieving adoption. My view is that the challenge exists whenever the adoption of a new application or system requires some degree of coordination between a set of users. Email is by far the greatest example of an application of computers which has very successfully overcome that barrier. I want to learn from that.

Second reason: I’ve observed that the tools we use to work with email (the general striucture email appli...

Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe: “Salas has spent the past few months developing BlogBridge, software that allows users to easily keep tabs on multiple weblogs — kind of a “Reader’s Digest” for the blog world.” Thanks for the mention, Scott. The whole bit is:

** Pito Salas was the chief technology officer at eRoom, an online collaboration company acquired last year by Documentum, which in turn was bought by EMC. Salas has spent the past few months developing BlogBridge*, software that allows users to easily keep tabs on multiple weblogs — kind of a “Reader’s...