(C)ouchSurfing’s Pathetic Shutdown
Business, Customer Service, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology June 30th, 2006
“Three year old CouchSurfing, a beloved service used by some 90,000 members, had multiple database crashes, critical parts of the software and data were irretrievably lost, and the backups weren’t performed properly. They are not rebuilding the service. They literally put themselves out of business.” – reports TechCrunch.
Mike says it’s ridiculous – I’ll go a step further: it’s BS.
Of course the negligent approach about backups in itself is a serious issue, and in that respect I encorage everyone to read Dharmesh Shah’s thoughtful piece on why he considers $2K a month for hosting of his pre-launch startup money well spent.
So why am I calling this BS? Dharmesh says:
“What was the issue? Not lack of user interest or running out of cash or strong competition or any of the usual reasons that startups die. It was because of a series of infrastructure problems.”
Yeah, right. I haven’t been a CouchSurf-er, nor do I know the business, but I am calling it a BS, because the infrastructure problems are just an excuse – they may have been the last drop for the entrepreneur already fed up running the business, but definitely not the cause. Everyone knows that the single most difficult part in building any sort of marketplace / community business that relies on network effect is exactly that – reaching critical mass. Heck, anyone can throw together the databases, programs, infrastructure if the hundreds of thousands of users are somehow guaranteed. But of course they are not. My point is: if you do have the loyal crowd and your buiness is otherwise in good shape, you can start from scratch, and rebuild everything, no matter how bad (total?) your data loss is.
That leaves us with the other single most critical part (yeah, I am cheating, there are two “single” most critical/difficult parts…): monetization. This is where I suspect CouchSurfing may have had trouble, which turned it into OuchSurfing – after all, who throws away an entirely profitable good business after a technical fiasco?
Interestingly enough, although Dharmesh devotes his article to the importance of proper infrastructure, if you read between the lines, there is a second message there: eyeballs are not enough, you need to convert them to revenue.
Google Knighted
Misc, Software June 29th, 2006
Well, almost. Getting the term “Google” included in “The definitive record of the English language” as a verb is the equivalent of getting knighted. Next time you say “I’ll google it“, it’s no longer slang, it’s proper English, meaning: “To use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet.
trans. To search for information about (a person or thing) using the Google search engine.”
(hat tip: John Battelle)
Related posts:
Update (7/6): Now, this is funny. Why is this on TechMeme a week later? How come everyone wakes up now?
The Motley Fool, Techdirt, InsideGoogle, IP Democracy, Business Filter, Digital Inspiration, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim and Google Operating System
Microsoft Office 2008
Business, Personal Productivity, Software June 29th, 2006
If it slips any further, Microsoft might as well call it Office 2008. After all, who wants a 2007 model in the middle of next year or later? 2008 car models start selling mid-year, Microsoft’s very own Money software does the same, so why not Office?
In the meantime, there is a growing camp of us setting ourselves free and enjoying Office 2.0.
Update: Sorry, if you came here looking for news on Office for the Mac. Read what happened here.
Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Office, MS Office, Office 2007, Office 2008, WebOffice, Office 2.0, Zoho
Venture Zine
Startups June 29th, 2006
Paul Kedrosky quotes OM who writes about Google checkouts, how it will fundamentally change the advertising market.
“Read between the lines – this is a dangerous and most brilliant assault on the “cost per click” (CPC) plans of Microsoft, Yahoo and everyone else who is coming to the party … late. This move is about cost-per-action advertising. It is about kicking up the online advertising business … a notch!”
[I'd say more than a notch - it's a move back to reality. In a world of click fraud, automated bots flipping through ads like crazy we seem to have forgotten that clicks mean nothing, unless there is some material, financial transaction behind them - i.e. at the end of the day advertisers pay to SELL, not to be seen.]
Jeff Nolan approaches the news from another angle, worried about trusting Google with our credit card data. That is indeed scary…
Entrepreneurs who think it’s difficult to get through the door of VC firms will enjoy James Chen’s story about how VC’s should hunt for the companies to invest in. Upside-down world, isn’t it?
Josh “Redeye” Kopelman discusses how the “real challenge in scaling a start-up is to keep the quality and passion quotient high simultaneously.” He cites a startup that’s been interviewing candidates for a senior business development role but so far has been unable to find a “a fresh person somewhere between a newbie and a veteran, who is proud of a few key demonstrable successes in previous start-up experiences.” This reminds me of a related recent posts: Top-heavy teams by Ed Sim and one of these days when I pull myself together I’ll blog the case study of a startup that learned the hard way why it’s a bad idea to bring in a “corporate type Sales VP” at a very early stage.
Don’t be a workaholic machine, rather a thinking, creative, outstanding indiviudal – is the essence (did I get it right?) of a great story by Charlie O’Donnell: Sometimes students need gentle prodding.
Senseless Murder
Politics June 29th, 2006
Eliyahu Asheri. Kidnapped. Murdered. Lived 18 years.
Tags: murder, kidnapping, kidnap, israel, gaza, middle-east, hamas
Boring Ads in Feeds
Blogging, Marketing / PR June 29th, 2006
Why is it that all the blogs I follow are pushing the very same tired Lenovo ad in their feeds? 
C’mon guys, you can do better… if you insist on advertising, at least let’s have some variety!
Tags: blogging, ads, advertising, blog advertising, blog marketing, feed ads, blog feeds
Enterprise 2.0: Social Bookmarking in the Corporate World
Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Social Networking, Startups June 28th, 2006
(Updated)
If there is a clearcut example of how consumer-oriented social platforms penetrate the Enterprise market, then ConnectBeam it is: what started it’s life as CourseCafe, the “Other FaceBook” is now reborn as a Social Bookmarking Service for corporations.
I originally met Puneet Gupta, Founder and CEO at an SVASE Breakfast session and was impressed by his vision – so was the VC Partner, too, but back then Puneet was just testing the water, not ready to bring in serious VC investment. A few blog posts and a review by TechCrunch attracted a lot of interest, and Puneet started to receive serious feedback that there is a need for such a service in the corporate world, too. While I seriously believed in the future of the original student-community-type model, too, I have to agree with Puneet: a startup needs to be focused, and can not possibly build too separate businesses at the same time. That’s how ConnectBeam was born.
TechCrunch usually does a much better job in reviewing products than I do, so please read it over there.
Related posts:
- ConnectBeam and PeopleAggregator
- Enterprise tagging – off to the races…
- Corporate social networking arrives, almost
- Teaching an old dog 2.0 tricks
Update (11/27): Robert Scoble interviewed Puneet. Watch the interview here (Quicktime) and a product demo here.
HieroZlango? Zlanglyphs? :-)
Humor, Personal Productivity, Software, Startups, Technology June 28th, 2006
profiled Zlango,
a cute icon-based SMS ZMS language. Nice, who knows what the outcome will be:
-
It will not take off, since to really use it, the receiving end needs to have
it on their phone, too.
-
Because of the above, it will spread virally
-
Since it’s so cute, it will spread among kids first, and the language
separation will be final: we can give up any hope of understanding the 10-year
olds ever again.
Either way, as Ethan
points out, the idea is not quite new: Zlango = ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs + modern
technology.
Tags: zlango, sms, zms, hiroglyphs, egypt, techcrunch
Plaxo + Jajah = Nay, Nay!
Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology June 28th, 2006
It’s that dreadful time again: moving all my files to another laptop. As much as I am a WebOffice advocate, I have not yet made a complete transition the way Ismael did: I still have way too much junk on my harddisk.
Every step of this painful process is yet another argument to move to WebOffice. For example, after moving my entire Outlook.pst file, why on earth do have to manually recreate all email accounts, fix the messed up in box rules..etc? What a joke!
But the real pain is Plaxo. No matter what they claim, every move is a potential data disaster. Plaxo will insist on duplicating your Contact, Calendar..etc data – the only variety is whether you get duplicates on your machine or in the online version. The only way to avoid this mess is to disconnect your Outlook data from Plaxo, then manually connect again – which is what I did, downloading the latest version of Plaxo in the process. What a surprise! I have these cute little phone icons in all my contact records. Could it be a direct link to Skype?
Ahh, no such luck, it’s a click-to-connect using Jajah. There’s a lot of buzz about Jajah today, as they announced free calls. It’s really free – sort of .. as long as both parties are Jajah users. Sorry, that does not cut it for me. Inexpensive calls to non-members? Thanks, but nothing beats free. I’ll be quite happy to use the Skype toolbar for my free calls. But I am really unhappy with the way Plaxo populated my Outlook with this Jajaj junk. Plaxo is free (well, they have a premium option, which I tried and found useless, and getting a refund took CEO intervention – but that’s another story), so it’s OK for them to try to push additional services. But there is a line, and in IMHO that line is drawn at going beyond their own product. I own my Outlook file, and Plaxo should at a minimum ask me before pushing a third-party plugin into my Outlook file. But of course I am not entirely surprised, considering Plaxo’s long history of “attitude problems“.
Update (6/28): The Jajah buttons in Plaxo can be turned off via Plaxo > Preferences > Advanced > uncheck Show Click to Call Icons. Of course this should be an option offered at the time of installation, not something I discover after digging around.
NASA’s Foamy Business
Misc, Politics, Technology June 27th, 2006
A year old post of mine, titled Debris Falling from Discovery has been my most-read page ever. Another piece, Time to Dump the Shuttle also attracted a lot of readers:
“This is sickening… with all the billion$ spent on the Space program, we’re dealing with pieces of foam, tape, glue, pieces of junk protruding, falling off… are we talking about kids’s toy models or space-age design and materials here? As so many other’s stated, instead of band-aiding it, it’s time to dump the old Shuttle , and either build a brand new one, or leave space travel to the Russians … or perhaps Private Enterprise.”
I don’t want to write another “hit” article like this. Yet I can’t help but wonder reading this:
“The seven crew members of the space shuttle Discovery will arrive at Kennedy Space Center today to take one of the biggest risks of their lives. They have a 1-in-100 chance of dying during their spaceflight that begins Saturday.
Those, at least, are the official odds that NASA has given.
Michael Stamatelatos, who as director of safety and assurance requirements at NASA is the agency’s risk guru, said that number should be taken with a grain of salt, because NASA used to say the chances were 1 in 7,000 until Challenger proved that to be overly optimistic.
Two top officials at NASA took the unusual step of dissenting from the space agency’s decision to go ahead with the launch without fixing the potentially catastrophic problem of foam falling off the external fuel tank — the very problem that doomed Columbia 3 1/2 years ago.
The agency’s safety director and chief engineer wanted to wait and fix the problem. But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin decided a July 1 launch is worth the added risk for a variety of reasons.” (original story at CBS News, emphasis is mine)
I don’t know about you, but I think a 1:100 chance is really, really big. A “Business Decision” has been made, overwriting the Safety Director. This is as bad as it gets. I really don’t want to write another “sensational” post.
Update (7/4): Yet another crack in the foam is discovered … but NASA proceeds with the launch plans for today.
Related posts:
- Officials Clash Over Shuttle Safety
- NASA: the shuttle plot thickens
- who’s running this thing?
- the discovery of politics over safety
- Shuttle death possibility – 1%
- Big Trouble at Old NASA
Zoli Erdos
