Archives for 2006

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Guess the eBay Bid and You May Win the Very Last TechCrunch Party Ticket

Posted on August 16, 2006 ·

The TechCrunch party at August Capital will likely be the most lavish one – just look at the impressive list of party sponsors (see logos at the bottom).  There are 760 names on the attendance list, and yours truly holds the last position on the wiki – hey, I am a rock-solid Z-lister forever:-)

Mike Arrington put up the last two tickets for bidding on eBay, and he will donate all proceeds to the Entrepreneurs Foundation, a Bay Area non-profit organization.

And now the big news: there may potentially be one more ticket to win – right here. How high do you think bidding will go? Fill out the form below, and you can be the winner. (I’ve just realized that the script may not come through in a feed, so please click back to my post to access the form). The guess closest to winning bid amount will be awarded by:

  • A drink and photo with Mike Arrington if you are already on the attendee list (hey, there may be a kiss, too, but I can’t commit Mike to that )
  • The very last ticket, if you are not yet on the list.

Note: I will be closing the poll at 10am on the day of the party, The eBay bid will close at 4:15pm. Winner will be published and notified by email as soon as payment is verified. (i.e. the bid has to be real).   Update: The poll is now closed. The winner of the free

ticket is David Gobaud from Stanford, who guessed $537, and the winning

eBay bid was $501. Congrat’s and see you there!

Proof that this is for real:

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Misc, Technology · Tagged:
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Lessons from the TechCrunch Wiki War

Posted on August 15, 2006 ·

Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch Parties have become “THE EVENTS TO ATTEND” in the Valley – in fact not just in the Valley: last time around I remember participants driving up all the way from San Diego, and this time people will fly in just to be there. The last party as well as the next one this Friday both sold out within hours after the announcement, and a lot of readers felt frustrated:

  • Some felt that first-come-first-served is not fair enough with such a short notice (an hour or so)
  • Some publicly asked for special consideration to get in
  • Some proposed to pay for “tickets”
  • Just about everyone complained for the lockups in the registration wiki.

I don’t envy Mike in this situation. It’s his party, his house (well, at least for the previous events), it would be perfectly OK for him to have an invitation-only party. Yet he obviously wants to see new faces, so he opens it up to anyone, but then of course he can’t please all… This time around, for the seventh TechCrunch Party hosted by August Capital there was more than the usual rush: the registration wiki has become constantly locked up and Mike was forced to move RSVPs to comments on his blog, closing the wiki.

Mike received ample feedback on why the wiki was not the right platform to handle hundreds of almost simultaneous registrations, and several entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to announce new offerings. Central Desktop announced a free public event wiki, and since it’s a hybrid not-just-a-wiki solution, Founder and CEO Isaac Garcia claims they do not have lockup issues (they use a form with a database in the background). Zoho Creator would have been another elegant solution.

However, what almost no-one talks about is that this was not simply a technical glitch. Having been lucky enough (?) to wake up 4am the day the wiki opened I managed to register myself at exactly position #100 in the wiki, then observe the wiki-war that soon ensued. The major “sins” I witnessed were:

  • Individual users registering entire blocks (dozen or more) names
  • The same users sitting on the wiki (blocking), probably while coordinating with their buddies who else to sign up
  • Previously registered names getting deleted

One can perhaps justify registering others, although I don’t know where the reasonable limit is ( I only signed up myself), but deleting others is the absolute cardinal sin. Apparently fair play is a strange concept to some.

This raises another issue though: are these people not aware that wikis provide a perfect audit trail and what they did can easily become public? Or do they simply not care? Is getting in on the TechCrunch party worth being displayed on a virtual “hall of shame”?

This particular incident aside, I think the major learning here is the overall lack of awareness of a typical wiki’s capabilities and how to “behave” while using it. I know many who’d like the collaborative capabilities but are afraid of “chaos” and the potential lack of civility… in short a major ‘wiki war’ if they open up editing to anyone. Most wiki platforms offer technical controls to limit chaos: even consumer /community focused WetPaint introduced several security schemes in their latest updates, and enterprise wikis like Socialtext and Atlassian’s Confluence have for long had elaborate security schemes – heck, that’s why they are “enterprise”.

Just as important as the permissioning is the role of social- behavioral norms, which clearly are more common and more forceful in a corporate environment, where all wiki “contributors” work for the same company. “Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism.” He also maintains a Best Practices wiki (hey, it’s the new skin!). Now, remember, it’s a wiki – you can contribute, not just read.

As for the TechCrunch Party, the guest list is currently at 738(!) and here’s a preview of who’s coming, courtesy of CustomCD.us. (who may have intended to keep this a surprise, but I found it anyway….)

Update (7/28/2007): Here’s another case of wiki “who done it”.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Collaboration, Social Networking, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Potus Visits CTU; Barely Escapes from Agent Bauer

Posted on August 15, 2006 ·

Potus paid an impromptu visit at CTU headquarters today where Agent Jack Bauer had a plan ready to kidnap him and ship him off to a secret location in Africa. Unfortunately the King of the receiving country changed his mind in the last minute, therefore the plan was canceled and Potus proceeded to head a CTU Briefing.

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Filed Under: Humor ·
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YouTube is CuteTube Today :-(

Posted on August 15, 2006 ·

Several of my posts with embedded videos look quite ugly today. Apologies, I hope they will be back to normal when all the gremlins are zapped.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, SaaS ·
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Atlassian Taking On the World

Posted on August 15, 2006 ·

(Update: apologies for the dead video links, Youtube is apparently down, here’s their message: ”

We’re currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins.“)

I’ve recently had a chance to meet Mike and Jonathan in Atlassian’s San Francisco offices, and frankly was blown away by their enthusiasm, the company’s growth, but most importantly by a demo of Confluence, the market-leading enterprise wiki.

Market-leading? Never heard of them, you may say …. Certainly they enjoy a lot less brand recognition than let’s say JotSpot or Socialtext, both of which enjoyed abundant PR from the moment they launched, largely thanks to Joe and Ross‘s star-power. (Hey Joe, you were my early inspiration to get started with blogging, time for YOU to post again!). Lacking the “instant brand”, Atlassian spent their money on product development instead of PR, and it has obviously paid off. Watch this video for background:

Less PR or not, they are not exactly unknown to customers, as Confluence’s corporate market share is more than the others put together. From what I understand Confluence’s sweet spot is larger organizations, where administration, sophisticated permissioning schemes (groups, pages, activities…etc.) scalability, performance are increasingly important. (Yes, permissioning kinda goes against the social, “we’re-all-contributors” nature of wikis, but it’s a fundamental corporate requirement). The largest implementations currently run up to 30k users, but Atlassian is working on a clustered release that will be scalable to hundreds of thousands of users. Pricing also reflects the focus on large corporations: while at the entry-level Confluence is typically more expensive, at the high end (large user-base) it costs less then either Socialtext or Jot.

Despite it’s impressive feature-set and favorable price Confluence is not an available choice for some customers; namely those who are determined to use SaaS solutions. Confluence is strictly on-premise, download and install-behind-the-firewall software. Being a big believer in SaaS of course I would like to see them offer a hosted version, but today’s market reality is that only 10% of all software sold is SaaS. Atlassian’s own customer experience is that a lot of larger organizations do want their wiki behind the firewall, and competitors must have been receiving similar feedback, as both Socialtext and JotSpot are adding an installable product to their offering. However, Confluence may be missing out on the bottom-up, grassroots adoption by business users that both Jot and Socialtext are enjoying – at least until it becomes available on-demand.

And while the Founders did not have the star-power of their competitors 4 years ago, they are getting closer, having just received the 2006 Ernst & Young Eastern Region Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.. Watch the video of the Awards Ceremony here:

Congrat’s, Mike and Scott!

 

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Exciting Office 2.0 Events

Posted on August 14, 2006 ·

IBDNetwork will organize another Under the Radar event, this time with an Office 2.0 theme on August 15th in Palo Alto. The event will showcase 4 companies:

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch will be moderating, and the presentations will be judged by a Panel of experts:

  • Etay Gafni, Director, Technology Innovation Center – SAP
  • Ismael Ghalimi, IT|Redux & CEO – Intalio
  • Peter Rip, Managing Director – Leapfrog Ventures
  • Sam Schillace, Software Engineer – Google/Writely

There’s more information on the Zvents site Zbutton and you can register here. You can also participate in advance even if you can’t attend, by visiting the event wiki and posting questions, stories on this page.

Tomorrow’s gathering will be the prelude to the larger scale Office 2.0 Conference to be held in San Francisco, October 12-13, 2006, organized by IT Redux. I will post further details as they become known.

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Filed Under: Bay Area, Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Windows Live Writer – Yawn…

Posted on August 14, 2006 ·

This is number 1001 in the list of Windows Live Writer posts….so I won’t do a detailed review, you get that in the other 1000. Just a few thoughts:

Windows Live is all about the Web, isn’t it? So when I first saw the headline yesterday, I though Microsoft released an online editor, a’la Zoho Writer or Google’s Writely. That would have been news. But yet another offline blogging client? Unless it’s significantly better than the existing solutions … a big yawn. A few specific comments:

  • “Windows Live changes the way you write your blog” says one of the reviews. Oh, really? Bloggers already have Ecto, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, w.Bloggar … etc. Adding a me-too product does not change anything.

  • It looks nice though. Setup was easy. Almost. It 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.

  • It doesn’t do tags. I repeat: no Technorati (or other) tagging. Oh, perhaps that’s what they mean by “changing the way you blog”? Sorry, having tried Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry ..etc I grew picky, and no longer accept half-solutions. Bloggers do tags. An editor without tagging is not a Blog Editor. It’s that simple.

Finally, 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, notetakeing… 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.

Other critical reviews in the sea of praise: Paul Kedrosky, Rick Segal(ex-MSFT), Jeff Nolan.

Update (8/14):  The and plug-ins by Tim make Writer a lot more useable

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet also missed tagging; more importantly his conclusion is the same as mine: Writer may evolve into being the overall notetaker/editor. The second part of that conclusion is that the world as a whole does not need Word; it becomes the specialty editor for 10-15% of users at a premium price.

Update (8/16):  With the Tag4Writer pluging Writer is now a decent solution and I am testing it.  Rick Segal points out Writer leaves turd in your blog… and in your feed. This Technorati search currently finds 1654 instances of “turd”.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Iranian President’s Own Blog Turns Against Him

Posted on August 13, 2006 ·

Update: President (?) caught red-handed, see below.

The last person I’d expect to start a blog is Iran’s ultra-radical President, Mahmood Ahmadinejad. But he did. (click on the small US/UK flag to get to th English version).

The man who threatened to give the US an apocalyptic final answer to the nuclear issue on Aug 22 posted this poll.

As with most polls, after voting you can see the current vote-count – unfortunately in this case separated from the original questions. The vote count still speaks for itself: 80% responded NO to the loaded question.

I wonder how long it will stay up…

(Disclaimer: I have no way to verify if this is indeed the Iranian President’s blog or just a spoof).

Update (8/13): Jim just pointed out in a comment that YES votes are increasing steadily. I guess the entire Revolutionary Guard is ordered to vote … but wait a minute! The absolute numbers are more interesting than the percentages. Look at the snapshot taken at 1:55PM PST:

Not only YES votes are the majority, but the total number of votes is 3473, vs 4501 some 90 minutes ago. The absolute number of NO votes dropped from 3595 to 1607! Votes are disappearing!!!!

Alright, we know where this ends: by tomorrow there will be a handful of token NO votes left and a nicely controlled absolute majority will demonstrated to the whole world that the US and Israel are the evils trying to start WWIII… just as he wanted. What a joke.

Related posts:

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Filed Under: Blogging, Politics ·
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Respect Must be Earned Even in the Blogosphere

Posted on August 12, 2006 ·

(Update: this post is starting to have its own life; read the comments below the post.)
My Mozy is a Lifesaver post received a strange comment:

“I’m not arguing the author’s points. He’s nailed it, as far as he goes. However, the Online Backup Advisor has a different take on Mozy. It’s funny and very informative.”

I don’t particularly like anonymous comments and I believe in the common courtesy if signing one’s comment (even with a pseudo-name), but it’s really not the comment itself that’s strange, but the post it points to: a long, elaborate, and yes, sometimes humorous attack-post on Mozy.

(Update (8/26): The “OBA” proved my point about his blog being a one-time attack platform right: the blog no longer exists.  However, he can’t completely disappear, which I’m sure being such an expert he himself realizes, too.  Here’s a copy of his post I saved from Google Cache to a public Zoho Writer document)

The author refers the him/herself as The Online Backup Advisor, or The OBA, in a style that’s meant to establish authority. (more about this later). Now, I don’t consider myself an authority (and am in no way affiliated with Mozy), so won’t attempt the address the detailed issues raised in the article, but the author makes a few generalizations, or simply skips fact-checking, which I certainly would not expect coming from an “expert”:

The referral model: “Mozy gives bloggers goodies in exchange for littering the Web with (fake) glowing reviews. If you click on the Mozy links in these blogs, the blogger gets things like extra storage space and even cash. “

Wow. There is clearly no cash incentive, and as for “fake reviews”, well if the only incentive is extra storage, that’s quite worthless to a blogger who does not actually like the service… so perhaps those reviews are not that fake after all. Disclaimer: I used my referral code in the previous post, and so did Chris Yeh, who led me to signing up for Mozy. We both disclosed it in our post, and, by the way, those who signed up using our referral also received extra storage. Sounds like a deal to me.

The business model: “OK, here’s something you are simply not going to believe, but I swear the OBA would not lie to you few of Mozy’s free backup accounts probably convert to their “Mozy Plus” account, which stores 30GB for $4.95/month.For one thing, $4.95/month for 30GB is far too cheap…”

Perhaps it is too cheap, I really can’t judge that. Perhaps “The OBA“, being such an expert has also heard that there are two major factors on the cost side of the equation: storage and bandwith. Mozy minimizes bandwith consumption by doing incremental backups (even below file-level) and limiting the number of free restores to 4 per month – something “The OBA” vehemently opposes. Why, is beyond me though: Mozy is clearly a “disaster-avoidance” service, and frankly, if you lose your data more than 4 times a month, you may be better off staying offline. For ad-hoc online storage, file-sharing.. etc there are many other services.

Ad-supported business: “Do you like SPAM? Would 30-40 per day be OK with you? Mozy will SPAM you with ads from not just themselves, but also from, “third parties via email.” “

Perhaps “The OBA” has heard about ad-supported businesses before. He seems to be repeatedly conflicting himself: first he makes the case that Mozy does not have a valid business model, than he has a problem with ads; he thinks the price is too low, but condemns bandwith-saving restrictions. I guess our “expert” wants it all free, unlimited, yet with a sustainable business model. And, for the record, I’ve been getting exactly one (1) newsletter per week from Mozy.

Competition: “Why yet ANOTHER inexperienced startup remote backup program?”

Gee, from such a renowned expert I would have expected to hear some recommendation on what I should be using instead of Mozy… but all I find is vicious mud-throwing at Mozy. You know, I am not married to Mozy, if something significantly better comes along, I might as well move. But until than, a less-then perfect but good-enough service is all I need.

There is a lot more in the article, and I certainly hope that someone from Mozy or a more technically-savvy user will pick up the glove and respond in detail. What really bothers me here isn’t so much the actual content, but the blatant attempt to create authority out of nothing, pretending to be an entity/analyst/expert. The funny thing is, the author may really be an industry expert (or not), but how should I know? As long as he stays anonymous (you know, there is that section called “About me” in most blogs), comments anonymously, and his/her one-and-only attack-post is in a brand new blog with no other post – well, I’m sorry, you are NOBODY for me. Credibility, respect needs to be earned, even on the Blogosphere.

Oh, here’s one more gem. Our “expert” finishes by saying:

“That’s it for now. Corrections, comments and hate mail welcome.”

Yeah, right. Commenting is turned off, and there is no email link. Talk back if you can.

Update (9/21):  Although only remotely related, the story of the anonymous but recently “outed” Dead 2.0 is definitely worth reading.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Does Ether’s Service Work?

Posted on August 11, 2006 ·

ether.gifToday was supposed to be The Day: my first pre-arranged Ether call would ring at 9:30am. Exactly one hour before the set time I received a reminder email: so far so good, everything works like clockwork.

9:30 – nothing. 9:40 – nothing. It’s almost 10am, the call has not come through, I cannot call the other party (it’s set up this way by design), and strangest of all, there is no trace of the appintment anywhere on Ether: my appointment list, tracnsaction list, history is all empty, is if this had never happened.

I’m curious… has anyone had positive experience with Ether? Does this thing work?

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Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Technology ·
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