Archives for 2006

Venture Zine

Posted on June 29, 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.

Technorati : entrepreneurship, startups, vc blogs, vc daily, vc zine, venture capital

Filed Under: Startups ·

Senseless Murder

Posted on June 29, 2006 ·

Eliyahu Asheri. Kidnapped. Murdered. Lived 18 years.
Tags: murder, kidnapping, kidnap, israel, gaza, middle-east, hamas

Filed Under: Politics ·

Boring Ads in Feeds

Posted on June 29, 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

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing / PR ·

HieroZlango? Zlanglyphs? :-)

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

TechCrunch

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

Filed Under: Humor, Personal Productivity, Software, Startups, Technology ·

Plaxo + Jajah = Nay, Nay!

Posted on June 28, 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.

Technorati : Free Calls, Jajah, Office 2.0, Outlook, Plaxo, Skype, VOIP, WebOffice

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·

NASA’s Foamy Business

Posted on June 27, 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.

Technorati : NASA, Shuttle, Space Shuttle, space travel, technology

Filed Under: Misc, Politics, Technology ·

The (Microsoft) Empire Strikes Back

Posted on June 27, 2006 ·

ZDNet reports that Microsoft’s already aggressive Windows Genuine Advantage “might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” – and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.” Quote from a MS Customer Service rep:

“He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

The problem is that WGA is sneaky, installs without warning and breaks havoc on certain computers. It is also known to report perfectly legal installations as illegal. And now (actually from September) they can kill your Windows? What a mass. Too bad Robert Scoble is busy packing his house– he should shed some light on this.