Archives for 2007

2.0 in Argentina

Posted on October 28, 2007 ·

Vinnie talks about The Web 2.0 Confusion Cycle. There’s a 2.0 of everything.. we’re used to Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0… next week there’s a Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. But if you think that’s stretching it, wait … here’s the Sex 2.0 Conference.

So, in the spirit of “everything 2.0”, I claim Evita 2.0, before someone else does:

First lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner swept to victory in Argentina’s presidential vote on Sunday to become the first woman elected to lead the country, television exit polls showed. (Reuters)

Filed Under: Humor, Politics · Tagged: evita, evita 2.0, Humor, Politics

Desktopized Web-Applications are a Great Convenience

Posted on October 26, 2007 ·

Mozilla Lab’s Prism, which allows you to ‘desktopize’ your web applications – i.e. represent them by a desktop icon and run them in their own window – is generally well received, so I’m really surprised at Josh Catone’s assessment on Read/WriteWeb (one of my favorite sites):

Except for the minor convenience of running oft-used web apps in their own dedicated window and making them accessible via a desktop icon, Prism isn’t really all that exciting in its current form. It doesn’t offer much of a benefit over bookmarks and your current browser window.

Sure, offline access will be great, when it’s here… but don’t underestimate the importance of users’ convenience, Josh!

I love the fact that about the only program need to launch is FireFox – but I often find the browser too restricting. Now that large LCD’s are getting less expensive, more and more of us find ourselves working on 24″, 32″ ..etc screens – the browser does not allow smart use of all that real-estate. For example I like to use different window sizes for different (web) apps, and often want side-by-side windows, which I could not get using FireFox tabs. Launching another browser session was a rather resource-wasting workaround.

I’ve been using Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show in a desktopized form for almost a year now (literally, since the tool Zoho uses is called “desktopize”). The pic to the right shows part of my desktop, with 3 Zoho icons. They all pop up in my pre-set window size and position, and disappear to the system tray, even if I close my main browser session.

If this “convenience feature” becomes more mainstream, with Mozilla, Adobe and whoever else backing it, I believe it will lead to increased migration to Web applications, so I’m all for it.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: adobe, Adobe Air, Air, Desktopize, firefox, Mozilla, office 2.0, Prism, Web Applications, web office, webrunner, zoho, zoho desktopize

Blinded by Vista Sales Success

Posted on October 26, 2007 ·

It turns out someone does like Windows Vista, along with Office and the other stuff Microsoft sells.

– reports the New York Times, quoting Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson:

Customer demand for Windows Vista this quarter continued to build with double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and with the vast majority of consumers purchasing premium editions.

(emphasis mine)

…lot of folks spend so much time bitching about Vista and Office that they overlook one key point: Folks are buying this stuff.

– says Between the Lines. Donna Bogatin goes on in her “the-blogosphere-is-all-wrong-except-me” style:

The disconnect between tech blogosphere negative Microsoft hype and positive Microsoft reality continues to astound. Yesterday, Microsoft reported 27% revenue growth, fastest first quarter since 1999…

Typical Vista gloom and doom blogger headlines: “No one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco,” “The top five things about Windows Vista that still suck,” “Is Windows XP too good for Microsoft’s own good?”…

If Vista were truly the nightmare it is made out to be in the blogosphere, wouldn’t there be a massive consumer Microsoft revolt?

Time for a reality check. Product quality, customer satisfaction and market success have very little to do with each other when you have a monopoly.

The Vista problems are real, they are not fantasies created by bloggers. But how exactly are consumers supposed to revolt? They still need computers, and despite Apple’s respectable growth, they still represent a fraction of the consumer PC market. Try to buy a PC today, it’s hard to NOT end up with Vista (even I got one)

Customer demand for Vista? No, it’s customer demand for computers, in a market with no choice. I’m not “making this up”, Donna. It’s all in Microsoft’s 10-Q:

…Client revenue growth correlates with the growth of purchases of PCs from OEMs that pre-install versions of Windows operating systems because the OEM channel accounts for approximately 80% of total Client revenue. The differences between unit growth rates and revenue growth rates from year to year are affected by changes in the mix of OEM Windows operating systems licensed with premium edition operating systems as a percentage of total …

The increased “demand” for premium versions comes from another well-documented fact, i.e. Microsoft’s new segmentation, castrating Vista Home Basic and essentially making Home Premium the equivalent of XP Home – a hidden price increase, by any measure.

A true measure of “demand” for Vista would be corporate licenses and retail sales, and both are behind. But not for long: eventually, after the release of SP1 corporate IT will give in, too – who wants to be “left behind”, after all.

This isn’t liking Vista at all – it’s assimilation by the Borg.

Update (1/11/08): A UK Government report advises school to avoid upgrading to Vista, or deploying Office 2007.

See further update here.

Filed Under: Business, Technology · Tagged: microsoft, microsoft monopoly, oem, vista, vistasucks, windows market share, windows vista

Microsoft: The Live Installer / WDS Invasion was Just the Rehearsal

Posted on October 25, 2007 ·

Here’s a quick chronology:

Under the auspices of installing Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft installs their Desktop Search product on XP systems, without asking for user permission or even bothering to notify users. (for details, see previous posts listed below)
User uproar follows
Microsoft updates their Photo Live Gallery, and it no longer requires Windows Desktop Search.

Naive me, I welcome this as proof that Microsoft Listens, after all.

No, they don’t. All the above was just the rehearsal. The Real Invasion is happening now, under the disguise of Window Server Update Services, as reported by the Register:

“The admins at my place were in a flap this morning because Windows Desktop Search 3.01 had suddenly started installing itself on desktops throughout the company,” a Reg reader by the name of Rob informs us. “The trouble is that once installed, the indexer kicks in and slows the machines down.”

“I’m slightly pissed of [sic] at M$ right now,” an admin in charge of 3,000 PCs wrote in a comment to the first aforementioned link. “All the clients have slowed to a crawl, and the file servers are having problems with the load.”

Mea Culpa for my naivety. The Borg does not change.

My previous stories on the invasion (and more):

Other Related posts: Sadjad’s space, David and David Arno’s Blog. Of course these are hard to find, TechMeme is full of reporting how the Borg kissed the Berg.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, Technology · Tagged: desktop search, microsoft, wds, windows desktop, windows desktop search, windows live, windows live installer, windows live photo gallery, windows update, winxp, wsus, xp

Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail

Posted on October 24, 2007 ·

This is now so simple, it shouldn’t even require any guidance… but first things first.

Why would you want to import all your old email to Gmail? Because it gives you an All-In-One, searchable archive. I know there is real demand for this: my blog visitor log tells me, since my old post on the subject, How to Import All Your Archive Email Into Gmail still receives a good 5-600 readers every single day. That means:

people do want to migrate to web-based software (Gmail)
they don’t want to lose their historical “baggage”
so far it has been rather complicated

Now that Gmail supports the IMAP protocol, everything’s changed. My most-popular-ever post is all of a sudden obsolete. Forget all the “Gmail-loader” tools on the Net, most of them did not work anyway, forget even my multi-step process… I’ll show you all you have to do now. I’ve tested these steps with Outlook, but they should work with Thunderbird or whatever your favorite desktop email software is.

Enable IMAP in your Gmail account
Setup the Gmail account in your client software, based on these instructions
This will create a folder structure matching your Gmail labels
Open your old archive.pst files, if any
Drag-and drop all your old email into the Inbox folder in your new IMAP account.
- You can do this across accounts, or even archive files.
- If you don’t want to “move” old email out of the archives, use “copy” instead.
- Instead of Inbox, you can drop old email into any other Folder (create new ones if you like), to match the Gmail labels
Drag-and drop all your old “Sent mail” into the “Sent Mail” folder in your new IMAP account.
Wait patiently – with thousands of emails (my archive goes back to 1996) your upload bandwidth may be the bottleneck.

Voila! Your email is now up in Gmail, all labeled, searchable, with original sender info and dates intact (this was a problem with previous methods).

Happy Gmail-ing

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: email import, gmail, gmail archive, gmail import, IMAP, Outlook, thunderbird

Gmail IMAP and Microsoft’s Desktop Push

Posted on October 23, 2007 ·

You’ll have to appreciate the irony of this TechMeme screenshot:

Microsoft’s Jeff Raiker defended desktop applications, mocking of Google for “backtrack(ing) on what we’ve been saying and to offer things like Gears in order to be able to be offline and or take advantage of global computing power”, reports Infoworld.

As if to support Raiker’s statement, just minutes earlier the hot item on TechMeme was Google’s Gmail offering IMAP. Yes, it’s there, if you don’t see it in your gmail account, log out and come back again.

Unlike POP access, which is basically a dumb download, IMAP synchronizes your mail folders (not just the Inbox) with your online account, and your read/unread status..etc are maintained both in the desktop client and online. In fact IMAP is an easy way to sync several desktop clients on multiple machines. (Note: Gmail does not have folders, but I assume labels would take their place – assume only, since I no longer use desktop email software)

Where’s the irony here? IMAP is clearly beneficial only if you use a desktop email client* with your gmail account, which is exactly Raiker’s point. And a bit of a personal irony: for over a decade I was a faithful Outlook user, mocking my friends who used web-based email (typically Yahoo) for their personal accounts. How could they live with such a dumb, slow service?

Well, times change: Outlook grew fat and slow, it needs a cornucopia of software fighting for CPU and memory: virus scanner, desktop search (Copernic), backup (Mozy), sync with other desktops (Foldershare), and who knows what else, all of which need updates that tend to fail … what a nightmare! I ditched the desktop and have never been more productive! I’m using Gmail natively, on the Web, and am quite happy with it, so IMAP means nothing to me. (Apparently I’m not alone, as evidenced by the 5-600 readers my client to Gmail migration guide written half a year ago is still getting every day). For all other productivity needs I use the Zoho Suite. Incidentally, little birdies are singing that Zoho Writer will soon have offline edit capabilities.

Seamless online/offline computing, as it should be.

*Update (10/24). This post was my quick first reaction late last night, when the news first hit (in fact before it became official news). As Marc Orchant correctly points out, IMAP may very well be useful even if you don’t use a desktop email client, as it makes it really easy to use the client software on your mobile devices, and still have a sync’d Gmail on the Web.

Update #2, (10/24): Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: desktop applications, gmail, Google, IMAP, microsoft, office 2.0, Outlook, Web Applications, web office, zoho

243

Posted on October 23, 2007 ·

243: That’s my current Technorati authority, which was 313 just before lunch ( two hours ago). 3 months ago it was in the neighborhood of 600, then it went into a free-fall. I’m clearly not the only one, as indicated by forum threads like this:

The canned Technorati answer is that since authority is calculated based on links in the past 6 months, it’s quite possible that old values just naturally dropped off. Most complaints in those threads come from users who participated in some sort of scheme to artificially inflate their link counts: something sophisticated like the 2000 bloggers trick, or circle-link groups, or just mutually getting on blog-rolls ( I hear Technorati re-evaluated blogrolls).

I haven’t done any of the above. Ever. Which means I don’t have large groups of links which should drop overnight. Oh, and my inbound link list is still completely messed up, often showing my own blog posts as inbound links, under a subdomain of my own URL . Something I requested Technorati to fix months ago. If they don’t respond to forum questions, why would they bother fixing bugs? Symptoms of a dying company.

Why do I even care? Technorati Authority in itself is quite irrelevant – but I still use it as a “spam-filter”, when searching on Technorati. I have the default authority level set to ‘some’ and this eliminates the zillions of auto-generated spam blogs, which typically have 0 or 1-2 inbound links. That’s about the only benefit Technorati search still has, otherwise I would have long switched to Google Blog Search, which is faster, more reliable, and also searches comments.

If others have the same habit, within weeks I might not show up on their radar screen, when my Technorati authority reaches zero. (I kinda wonder if it can go negative).

Please, Google, implement link-count filter!

Update: 15 minutes after posting it, it shows 325. Might as well just use a random number generator.

Filed Under: Blogging, SaaS · Tagged: Blogroll, Google, link count, technorati, technorati authority, technorati bugs

Beating Social Media’s 90:9:1 Rule in the Enterprise

Posted on October 23, 2007 ·

The 80/20 rule is out (so last century), 90:9:1 is in: the rule of participation in public communities, social networks, wikis:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

90:9:1 is a pretty good fit for most public wikis, starting with Wikipedia. Ben Gardner observed very different numbers: 50:25:x (he does not specify “x”). The interesting number here is 25, or it’s relationship to 50, meaning:

When the same question was asked about our corporate wiki ~50% of those present had used it but about ~50% of those had edited it.

Active participation in a corporate environment is much higher than in the public domain – this is not really a surprise, since the corporate wiki is used by people of real identities and reputations, and most importantly, shared objectives. This is also why Prof. Andrew McAfee hasn’t seen vandalism – a plague of public wikis – in the corporate world at all.

I suspect that 25% can go a lot higher, depending on the purpose of the wiki. When after the initial “grassroots movement” management fully embraces the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, it becomes the fabric of everyday business, where people create, collaborate, and in the process capture information. When the wiki is the primary work / collaboration platform, participation is no longer optional. Not when the answer to almost any question is “it’s on the wiki.”

My earlier posts on this subject:

(hat tip: Stewart Mader)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Social Networking · Tagged: 90:90:1, Collaboration, enterprise 2.0, enterprise wiki, KM, Knowledge Management, wiki, wiki adoption, wikis

SVASE VC Breakfast with Robert Troy of Geneva Ventures

Posted on October 22, 2007 ·

I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting Thursday, October 25th in San Francisco.

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, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc.

This Thursday we’ll be joined by Robert Troy, Managing Director at Geneva Venture Partnersl. Robert a former Entrepreneur / CEO himself sold his company, Verilog in 1994, then relocated to Silicon Valley and became an investor. Managing Geneva Venture Partners he invested in early stage software companies including SalesForce.com (NYSE: CRM) and Zantaz (sold to Autonomy this summer). Geneva’s focus is on Enterprise software, Infrastructure software, Wireless, RFID, VOIP and Embedded technologies.

These breakfast meetings are a valuable opportunity for early-stage Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to 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!
Follow a structure, don’t just roam 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, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 8-10 minutes, half of which is your pitch, 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. The second half of your time-slot is for Q&A.
Bring an Executive Summary; some VC’s like it, others don’t.
Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up.

For more information check out the SVASE event page, and don’t forget to register.

See you on Thursday.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Social Networking, Startups · Tagged: entrepreneurship, startup pitch, Startups, SVASE, vc Funding, venture Capital

Archives for 2007

2.0 in Argentina

Desktopized Web-Applications are a Great Convenience

Microsoft: The Live Installer / WDS Invasion was Just the Rehearsal

Simplified Guide to Importing All Your Archive Email Into Gmail

Gmail IMAP and Microsoft’s Desktop Push

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