Archives for 2006

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Bright Minds in Dark Suits

Posted on October 4, 2006 ·

I’m sitting in the lobby of the Charles Hotel, waiting for my flight back to CA after a really interesting conference by Longworth Venture Partners, where I had the chance of participating on a panel moderated by Harvard Professor  Andrew McAfee, along with fellow Enterprise Irregulars Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalimi and Roth Boothby.

 It’s interview time, the place is swarming with law firms and dark suits: Harvard Law School students. They all look alike in their “uniform” … I haven’t seen this many (dark) suits ever since I moved to California:-)  Guys arrive in full gear, girls’ ritual includes sitting down at the lobby and switching their sneakers to the mandatory torture devices (i.e. high heels).  

Wait!  what’s going on?  A guy in a dark suit, open-collared shirt and no ties arrives… he walks kind of funny, smiles and has his iPod headsets in his ears… greets his friends and heads for the elevator up. 

Will he get eliminated right away?  Or is being “different” the winning strategy?  Whoever you are, if you read this, let me know how it went.  And all you other interviewers, I feel for you… good luck.  And remember: there is life outside the mega-firms.

Update (10/4): What a coincidence that Robert Scoble just posted The suits vs. geeks.   

Filed Under: Business, Misc ·
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Indecent Proposal

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

Should the embedded player not work on your feed, watch the video here.  It is … “priceless”. smile_wink

 

Filed Under: Humor, Misc ·
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Windows Vista Value Analysis

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

You gotta love this bottom-up value analysis of Windows Vista. It is based on a “feature-by-feature analysis of how much the upgrades are worth to the user.“

The final tally: $133.

“Unfortunately, to get all of these features, you’ll need to fork over $400 for Vista Ultimate Edition, a full three times what the OS is really worth. Better news: The upgrade is $260 (not $360 as previously reported), which puts us a little more in the ballpark, but still twice what it’s really worth.”

Oh, well, I know I won’t get Vista until it’s time to buy a new laptop….

 

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Google’s Costly Garage

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

HP GarageGoogle purchased the 1,900 sq.ft. home in Menlo Park where founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago to start the business.   The rent back then was $1,700 a month.  Yes, you read it right, $1,700, and it’s not the entire home, just the garage! 

In comparison, HP co-founder William Hewlett rented the garage where HP was started for $45 per month.

Only in California ….

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business ·
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Sleeper Blog Awakening: Burnham’s Beat

Posted on October 1, 2006 ·

A long-forgotten, dormant blog came back to life today: Burnham’s Beat.   Bill Burnham explains his long silence: it was due to his lawyers’ advice while setting up his new hedge fund, Inductive Capital.  He’s back online and plans to blog on.

Burnham’s Beat was one of my early picks as a favorite blog: Bill did not post every day, but quite regularly on software, startup, VC subjects, and whenever he did, it was worth reading. Here are a few of his “golden oldies”, in no particular order:

For the Love of God People, Enterprise Software Is Not Dead

Software’s Top 10 2005 Trends: #3 Software As A Service

Is Open Source Becoming Over-Sourced?

Honey I Bought The Wrong Company!

Conflicts and Cash: Industry Analysts and Start-ups

Cash Rich vs. Cash Poor VCs

When to Catch A Falling Knife 

Deal Flow Is Dead, Long Live Thesis Driven Investing

 

Back when Burnham’s Beat was still alive there was a good conversation on Dead  Blogs  Walking, the essence of which was:

“So I say this to these bloggers, treat your blog like a startup – don’t let your labor of love become labor of lame. Update more frequently or shut it down completely.”

The return of Burnham’s Beat proves the above wrong.  I could easily list several other blogs, that for some reason or other are dormant: 

  • Mayfield VC  Allen Morgan’s Ten Commandments, in fact his entire blog should be mandatory reading for startup Founders, but it’s been in radio silence since January 2006.
  • Joe Kraus’s It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur has become a classic with 167 comments and 107 trackbacks, and is being quoted at numerous panel discussions – yet his last post was more than a year ago.

The list could go on … are these dead blogs?  Who knows…  I’m not about to “delete” them. The key is to use a feed reader that has the capability of displaying only the blogs with new posts. You can have hundreds of dormant blogs in your opml, they don’t waste space, don’t consume resources, won’t clobber yor screen.  The are sleepers.  Some of them will wake up, and when they do, they are worth reading again.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Windows Live Writer Tracing Bloggers?

Posted on September 29, 2006 ·

Like I’ve said before, I’m (almost) eating my previous words, and recognize that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool.   There are two more things I forgot to mention in the previous post:

Writer still leaves turd in your blog… and in your feed. So this morning I could clearly see how of my favorite bloggers downloaded the new release.  This Technorati search currently finds 4682 instances of “turd”.  Google Blog Search finds over 14K occurences.  How come Microsoft still did not find a way to detect stylesheets without this mess?  (incidentally the detection still fails on my blog system)

There’s another kind of turd … or is it more?   Every time you use the new “Insert Tags” feature, it inserts a cryptic line like this, along with your tags:

0757417C-982D-2b12-91E1-4F057A8CCCA8:c712360d-e4e6-4711-831a-05fdf7d8a894

The part before the “:” is constant (for your installation I suppose), the second part varies post by post.  What is this?  Is Big Brother watching us again?   Call me paranoid, but in the wake of the HP Scandal I wouldn’t be so surprised….

Update (9/29):   OK, I’ve cooled off.  I don’t think this is Big Brother in action… after all it’s so easily detectable, and Microsoft has enough trouble in this are to know better. But then, WTF is this?  Why do I need a unique ID in my blog posts?

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Gotta Love Comcast

Posted on September 28, 2006 ·

9/28/2006 5:43 PM GMT
download:  745 kb/s  upload: 64 kb/s  ping: 670 ms

What’s wrong with these numbers?  Zero.  That is, a zero missing from the right of the download/upload speeds, and an extraneous zero at the end of the ping speed. smile_sad

Filed Under: Technology ·
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Windows Live Writer: (Almost) Eating My Words

Posted on September 27, 2006 ·

My initial reaction to the first release of Windows Live Writer (geez, what a name….) was a big yawn.  Yes, a nice offline blog-editor, but we already have Ecto, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, w.Bloggar … etc. so unless the new one is significantly better than the existing solutions, why change? 

A few smaller glitches aside the showstopper for me was the lack of any support for Technorati tagging. “Bloggers do tags. An editor without tagging is not a Blog Editor. It’s that simple.”   Users came to the rescue and he Tag4Writer and Flickr4Writer plug-ins by Tim made Writer a lot more useable; so I gave in and tried it.

Today there is a new release and for the second time in a row I’m seeing that Microsoft actually listens: they’ve added tagging support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and even made startup faster – oh, and now I can insert emoticons thumbs_up.   I’m starting to like it, and using it now – that is when I’m not posting entirely online, using Zoho Writer. 

It’s still not perfect though: Writer failed to download the standard template associated with my blog, so right away there goes the “WYSIWYG in your blog’s style” – about the only differentiator this thingie would have, if only it worked.

Most importantly, although this is now a pretty good editor,  the key question from my previous post still stands:

“Why a separate product again? Has it occurred to anyone that blogging is NOT a separate activity from anything else: it’s all about writing content, that ends up published in a particular form. A large part of blogging is reading, note-taking… see where I am heading? Microsoft already has a pretty good (albeit expensive) overall notetaker, OneNote. Why not just blog-enable OneNote and release it free? That would have been a pretty good move.

Of course that still leaves us with a few other Microsoft editors: Word and Wordpad. Here’s where this should be heading: 90% of Word users don’t need the sophisticated features, so let them have a decent, relatively simple editor/notetaker (Writer/Wordpad/OneNote combined) for free, while anyone else who needs fancy editing can buy Word.

Watch my word: the market is heading that direction, whether Microsoft recognizes it or not. And if they don’t, the folks behind Zoho Writer and Writely certainly do.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, Software ·
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Jumpcut Jumps to Yahoo

Posted on September 27, 2006 ·

Wow, this was a fast JUMP to $.  

Three months ago at the second Techdirt Greenhouse event  I had a lot of fun co-moderating the Media discussion with Keith Teare.  Prior to the discussion we saw a 5-minute presentation by JumpCut’s  Byron Dumbrill, and I definitely wasn’t the only one who felt blown away.   As much as I am a fan of “moving to the Cloud“, I thought the last applications to stay on the PC are photo and especially video processing, due to the resource requirements.   Most of us there were amazed to see how much video-editing 3-month-old Jumpcut could do all online…

Fast forward (pun intended) 3 months, and see Jumpcut being  acquired buy Yahoo.

Congratulations to the Jumpcut Team!

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Filed Under: Business, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Bill Clinton Leads 2008 Presidential Poll

Posted on September 27, 2006 ·

Bill Clinton leads the pack – well, at least at the Zoho Poll set up to rate potential 2008 Presidential Candidates, even those who can’t be elected, like Bill Clinton or the Pope.  Incidentally, the Pope has better rating then George W. Bush.   Vote now!

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Filed Under: Humor, Politics ·
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