Wow, I am topping Yahoo News again – my post about the California High School Exit Exam is listed right next to CNN.
I guess that’s my (second) five minutes of fame … I like this beta. 
Tags: yahoo, blogs, blogging, yahoo news, zoliblog
Archives for 2006
Yahoo News Stroking My Ego
Posted on May 9, 2006 ·
Nonsense
Posted on May 9, 2006 ·
“An Alameda County Superior Court judge issued a tentative ruling today prohibiting the state from carrying out its plan to deny diplomas to tens of thousands of high school seniors in the Class of 2006 who have been unable to pass the exit exam.” (via the SoCal Law Blog)
Update (5/10): I want my PhD issued by Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Wharton. I want it ALL and I want it NOW – or I will file a discrimination lawsuit. 
Update (8/11): Appeals court refuses diplomas for 20,000 who failed exit exam (SFGate, hat tip: Jeff Nolan). Justice Ruvolo: “A high school diploma is not an education, any more than a birth certificate is a baby.’’
Related posts:
- Instead of working to educate and learn, sue to lower the standards
- Exit exam in peril
- Judge inclined to halt California’s high school exit exam
Tags: education, exit exam, high school exit exam, california, california exit exam, cahsee, discrimination, zoliblog.
Vonage – OpenIPO?
Posted on May 9, 2006 ·
(Updated)
I had already called the Vonage IPO a dud prior to receiving this email:
“Because much of our success is attributable to our customers, we have asked the underwriters of the IPO to reserve shares of common stock for sale to certain Vonage customers at the IPO price in a Directed Share Program.
You may be eligible to participate in the Directed Share Program if you meet certain eligibility requirements, including having been a Vonage customer from December 15, 2005 through February 1, 2006.”
So Vonage is offering it’s IPO shares to all their customers. I can’t help but see the similarity to WR. Hambrecht’s OpenIPO in the bubble years: little guys like me would never get an allocation in any of the juicy IPO’s, but we got all the duds the brokerage was trying to dump. D
Clothe Stowe: The First Mover Disadvantage.
Posted on May 9, 2006 ·
Stowe Boyd “created this market” : his eBay bid on wearing logo’d t-shirts totaled him $3,600 – he sold his body for a year. As we know, in business being a first mover is not always an advantage – the second player comes in having learned all the mistakes an conquers the market.
In this case the second player is likely not smarter, but most definitely cuter 
: Baby Jake will wear an advertiser’s clothes for a whopping $10,000 a month, or .. are you ready for this?… $100,000 for an entire year. (via Steve Rubel)
My prediction: I doubt any company will pay $100K for the year, but someone probably will be “crazy” enough to cough up $10K for a month.
Prediction #2: we’ll soon see (baby) Jake in a movie.
Tags: Baby Jake, Clothe Stowe, Advertising, Marketing, Body Business, zoliblog, zolierdos
Why I “Cleaned House” on LinkedIn – When Less is More
Posted on May 7, 2006 ·
Social Networking is all about connecting People, not linking dumb Data Records…
I’m a fan and early user of LinkedIn, and am really happy with the recent enhancements, including a public web profile and a badge:
.
However, I’ve recently spent hours combing through my list of contacts, compiling a long list that I asked Customer Service to disconnect me from (why it’s not a self-serve option is beyond me…). Why do such an insane thing, the more connections the better, isn’t it? – No, it’s not.
What differentiates LinkedIn from some of the very early social networking services is the business focus, and the fact that it attempts to map one’s existing network in the real-world. Link-mongers drove business users away from Ryze, one of the very early players, and LinkedIn opened just in time to shelter the “Ryze-refugees”: the invitation-only feature was supposed to keep link-spammers away. It worked … for a while. Then “superconnectors” with thousands of contacts showed up who bombed everyone with link requests. I made the mistake of accepting most link requests in the early days, thinking rejection was rude. No, it’s not rude, it’s playing by the rules, and keeping LinkedIn what it’s meant to be, so from now on whenever I receive a link request from someone I do not know (these tend to come with the boilerpate text) I take the only reasonable action:
Today I received an email from one of these “superconnectors”: apparently I was not the only one who disconnected him, in fact LinkedIn canceled his account. He negotiated his account back, but is now complaining that LinkedIn limits invitations to 3000 individuals. He is trying to rebuild his “empire” of 16,000 contacts (yes, that is 16K!) by circumventing the rules and trying to convince his former contacts to invite him back.
I used to think LinkedIn was a better place without such link-collectors, but I guess I no longer care: let them play their game, I play by my rules. If having 16,000 contacts makes him happy, so be it. I tend to think that Social Networking is all about connecting People, not simply linking Data Records, so his 16,000 database empire is quite useless. It’s the good old rule of Quality vs. Quantity. As a result of my housecleaning my LinkedIn network has shrunk by 30%, an the extended “reach” of 3rd-level connections by a much larger margin, but it’s no longer just a database: it’s a true reflection of my social-business network. Just the way it’s supposed to be.
Update (5/8): Konstantin’s comment below is well worth reading, he hints at future LinkedIn features…
Update (5/9): A new debate on the usefulness of Online Social Networking. I think it reinforces my point: useful, but purely online (in a business context) does not make sense, should be based on real-life connections. You can’t expect to build a new network online (unless you’re happy owning 16K dummy records), but online systems help stretch your own network a little further by reaching out to contacts of your own trusted contacts.
Update (5/10): Oh, now we have guides out there on How (Not) to Get Banned from LinkedIn. Gee … how about just playing by the rules?
Update (7/25) : Vinnie LinkedOut! (?)
Update (1/22): On the other hand, Phil Wainewright may just give in … I mean Link in 🙂
Update (1/31): A major improvement in LinkedIn: breaking connections is self-serve now, you no longer have to ask Customer Service. Finally! Steve Rubel is about to clean house, too….
Update (11/29/07): Even Facebook-ers are starting to realize that Less is More
Related posts:
- Dennis Howlett
- Jeff Clavier
- Ross Mayfield
- Everton Blair
- Online Social Networking is Really Neither Social or Networking
- John Jantsch on Online Social Networking: It’s Neither
- LinkedIn as a social network builder
- What not to do on Linkedin
- Linked In on LinkedIn without my consent
- How Many “Friends” Do You Really Need?
- The 500+ Club on Linked-In
Tags: Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networks, LinkedIn, Ryze, link-hunters, link-mongers, link-spam, superconnectors, zoliblog, zolierdos
In the Technorati 10,000
Posted on May 6, 2006 ·
I’m #9851 on Technorati – I know, this is nothing compared to Guy Kawasaki being #46, but hey, he was already a celebrity before starting his blog. The funny thing is, I broke through the barrier on a week when I barely posted anything.
Tags: blogs, blogging, technorati
Vonage Playing Lingo
Posted on May 6, 2006 ·
Finally Vonage is offering a subset of Lingo’s free calls to Europe: if you’re on the unlimited ($24.99) plan, calls to France, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK are now free. Too bad Lingo whose unlimited plan is five bucks cheaper has been offering free calls to most Western European countries ever since they launched.
Before anyone thinks I am on Lingo’s payroll: no relationship whatsoever, in fact I’ve been a faithful Vonage customer since the beginning. I still am – just don’t know why… probably since I am too lazy to switch, and $5 a month savings was not a strong enough incentive (hm… let’s see… Lingo has been in business for about 2 years, that’s a $120 in “lost” savings…).
But the real threat is not Lingo: ZDNet crunches the numbers for us:
“Let’s just say that I am a U.S.-based caller who talks to other U.S. local and long distance numbers 16 hours a month, as well as spends four hours a month speaking to colleagues and friends in the nations now part of Vonage’s new plan.
If I am on Vonage’s Premium Unlimited, I can do it all for $24.99. If I am on SkypeOut, 20 hours= 1200 minutes or around $25.00.
So that’s pretty much a wash.”
But Skype is not the only threat, there are zillions of competitors – Yahoo IM is less expensive than Skype, but I don’t even want to do the math on it, let’s jump to almost-free right away: VoipStunt allows (almost) free calls to landlines in 46 countries. “Almost”, since there’s a flat fee of 10 euros (roughly $12.70) that has to be renewed every 4 months – that’s about $3.25 a month. That’s what I call a squeeze.
And that’s why the Vonage IPO is a dud.
Tags: VOIP, Vonage, Lingo, Skype SkypeOut, Yahoo, VoipStunt, IPO
AttenCrap
Posted on May 2, 2006 ·
My (so far) favorite feed reader, Attensa had an auto-update today. It turned out to be an auto-downgrade, or should I say auto-disable? All I am getting now is post titles, article body blank, can’t even click to go to the source – have to pull up the config menu to figure out what the URL’s are.
I am not happy.
Update (5/2): As it turns out, newly dowloaded post come through with the full content – albeit with less attractive formatting than in the previous release, and I have to enable image dowloads to Outlook domain by domain – this was working properly in the previous release. The crappy (unreadable) posts were all downloaded between 10pm yesterday until just prior to the upgrade. What happened there is a mystery. 
Tags: attencrap, attensa, feedreader, rss, zoliblog
Gold Medal for Listening to Customers
Posted on May 1, 2006 ·
(Updated)
And the Gold goes to: Vyew. 
Dennis and I both posted about this free “browser-based conferencing and always-on collaboration platform that provides instant visual communication without the need for client downloads or installations.” I also had a follow-on post, this time about product names and branding. Perhaps that’s the reason that the lively comment-conversation these posts triggered focused more on Marketing on my blog, and product features chez Dennis.
Commenters on Dennis’s blog quickly noted that Vyew does not allow full desktop sharing, so while it’s a handy collaboration tool, it cannot be used for software demos. Oops, it was a bit premature of me calling Vyew a “Free Webex-killer” – well, it’s not quite that … just yet.
But not for long!
While I was exchanging emails with a very responsive Fred on the Marketing team, Tim, a member of Vyew’s development team came to Dennis’s blog and announced: “As a direct result of various conversations with some of you and on other blogs, I met with our team and we decided to push out a LIVE DESKTOP SHARING feature this week. This may not be as snappy as webex, we’ll be looking at about 3 seconds between each screen refresh. But keep in mind this is a quick fix until our real release in 2 months.” Wow! Talk about responsiveness!
I don’t know how well the new feature will work, but these guys are definitely market-driven, if anyone, they definitely know how to “turn customers into evangelists“. Customer goodwill can go a long way – some companies are good in earning it, others manage to lose it fast… it’s good to be in the first camp. 
Update (5/2): Vyew just got Naked: “Talk about listening to your customers. This has to set a new record
for responsiveness for user-requested refinements. My congratulations
to vyew. My advice for next steps: start your own blog, vyew, so that
you can have more direct exchanges with customers.” – says Shel Israel.
Update (5/2): Dennis sums up the story under A Naked Conversation with a vyew. His conclusions in the second half of the blog are really interesting, go way beyond the Vyew story. (Btw., I don’t get this naked thing… just got back from swimming and everyone was in swimwear )
Update (5/2): Vyew got TechCrunched – well, almost, on the French edition. Here’s the Google-translated English version of the originally French article.
Update (5/4): The Vyew team really listens: following Shel’s advice, they’ve just started their own blog. Congrat’s .
Update (5/7): The story reverberates: Shel Israel talked about Vyew at MeshForum 2006 – not the product features, but their customer responsiveness. (souce: Christopher Carfi and Howard Greenstein). Being customer-focused has already paid off for Vyew: they’ve become a “showcase”, enjoying increased brand-awareness.
Update (5/13): Guy Kawasaki just profiled Vyew.
Tags: vyew, simulat, collaboration, webex, gotomeeting, 37signals, bloginfluence, goodwill, customerfocus, customerevangelist
SVASE VC Breakfast Club with Trinity Ventures
Posted on May 1, 2006 ·
The next SVASE VC Breakfast Club session I’m moderating is this Thursday, May 4th in Menlo Park – the VC Mecca, Sand Hill Road. As usual, it’s an informal round-table where up to 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Hummer Winblad, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc.
Thursday’s featured VC is Tome Cole, General Partner at Trinity Ventures. The Zvents post has all the info and a map, but please remember to click through to register either from zvents or directly here.
These sessions are an incredible opportunity for Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to a VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:
- It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation, but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
- Bring an Executive Summary, some VC’s like it, others don’t.
- Follow a structure, don’t just talk freely about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
- Don’t forget "small things" like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
- It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
- Write down and practice your pitch, be ready to deliver a compelling story in 5 minutes. You will have more time, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story.
- Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I have to even bring this up.
See you on Thursday! 
Tags: Venture Capital, VC Breakfast, Funding, VC Funding, Startups, Entrepreneurship, SVASE
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