Monday, April 14, 2008
Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland
Just a quick note - Web Analytics Wednesday, a get-together for web analytics professionals, will be held this THURSDAY at WebTrends in Portland. WAW on a Thursday - isn't that just like Portland?
Friday, April 11, 2008
Lunch 2.0 at eROI
I went to Lunch 2.0 held at eROI on Wednesday.
I didn't see all of eROI's new office space, but what I did see reminded me of HotWired - old building, warehouse-type space, wood floors, bright-colored couches. And the area they are in reminded me of the South of Market area in San Francisco, where HotWired was located. Though there are some parts of my HotWired experience I don't wish to re-live (e.g., the dismantling of the web site, the 3 failed IPO attempts...), I do miss the environment.
About 70 people met for lunch. Of the people I met (and the ones I already knew), it hit me that a surprisingly large number of them are working on ways to improve (or replace) our educational system. And that ties in with Rick Turoczy's recent call to action to make a difference in education. So I wonder if what I'm seeing is an indication of something big going on - and, if so, is it just in Portland, or is it more wide-spread?
I didn't see all of eROI's new office space, but what I did see reminded me of HotWired - old building, warehouse-type space, wood floors, bright-colored couches. And the area they are in reminded me of the South of Market area in San Francisco, where HotWired was located. Though there are some parts of my HotWired experience I don't wish to re-live (e.g., the dismantling of the web site, the 3 failed IPO attempts...), I do miss the environment.
About 70 people met for lunch. Of the people I met (and the ones I already knew), it hit me that a surprisingly large number of them are working on ways to improve (or replace) our educational system. And that ties in with Rick Turoczy's recent call to action to make a difference in education. So I wonder if what I'm seeing is an indication of something big going on - and, if so, is it just in Portland, or is it more wide-spread?
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Startupalooza Continued
Sorry for taking so long to continue my write-up on Startupalooza. Anyway...
Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, the co-founders of Jive Software spoke next. Their goal is to enable organizations to store their knowledge in Jive's collaboration environment, Clearspace, rather than in emails.
Jive was founded in 2001. They now have 2000 customers. They built the open source Jive Forums in college in Iowa, and subsequently moved to San Francisco. In late 2000 Sun Microsystems approached them (how nice!) and asked them to enhance the software; and pushed them to incorporate. They moved to New York with their business, but found it was too expensive to do business there. In 2004 they moved to Portland, and started over at staffing. Clearspace came out in 2004, at which time they had 35 employees. They now have 140.
They were funded by Sequoia Capital; and, surprisingly, they say Sequoia has never pushed them to outsource their development or move their development staff to a low-cost country (e.g., India or China). Hard to believe, given what I have heard in the past few years about VC's and boards of directors.
When asked, they said they don't see any competition coming from open source - their customers are looking at Microsoft and IBM as their competitors. They showed a surprising lack of concern for open source. With their short track record of quick success and growth, their attitude is understandable. But I think unrealistic. There are plenty of good, viable open source wiki and collaboration projects; and if they continue to maintain developer interest, they can only become more formidable.
I'm also surprised they didn't mention Atlassian's Confluence as a competitor. It's a good product, and it is actively maintained and enhanced. I know less about MindTouch, but I wonder if it will gain traction.
Following this presentation was a panel discussion about working independently. Sarah Gilbert, Justin Kistner, and Rick Turoczy were the panelists, and Adam Duvander moderated.
Following this, there were presentations of OpenId, ExpressionEngine (very pretty CMS - I'd like to research it further to see how deep the functionality is), Unthirsty (funny guys, and I'm impressed with the number of bars they've been able to compile), Earth Class Mail (they handle your mail for you - could be valuable to large organizations), Lunarr (web app that let's you add notes to the "back side" of web pages - interesting concept, slick interface, but I don't know how valuable it is), Sidecar (a gadget you add to your site to enable IM with visitors, provide them with information, and allow them to provide you with feedback - definitely valuable), MyStrands, Fyreball (allows you to post content on their site and share with your friends - I'd love to hear what new value this provides), Toonlet (enables you to become a creator and publisher of online comic strips - what a great way to waste time - seriously!), and I Want Sandy (an innovative devleopment of an automated assistant, though I'm nagged enough by my mobile phone, email, desktop gadgets, RSS feeds...).
All in all, it was a great day - I'm glad I went, and I look forward to the next one.
Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, the co-founders of Jive Software spoke next. Their goal is to enable organizations to store their knowledge in Jive's collaboration environment, Clearspace, rather than in emails.
Jive was founded in 2001. They now have 2000 customers. They built the open source Jive Forums in college in Iowa, and subsequently moved to San Francisco. In late 2000 Sun Microsystems approached them (how nice!) and asked them to enhance the software; and pushed them to incorporate. They moved to New York with their business, but found it was too expensive to do business there. In 2004 they moved to Portland, and started over at staffing. Clearspace came out in 2004, at which time they had 35 employees. They now have 140.
They were funded by Sequoia Capital; and, surprisingly, they say Sequoia has never pushed them to outsource their development or move their development staff to a low-cost country (e.g., India or China). Hard to believe, given what I have heard in the past few years about VC's and boards of directors.
When asked, they said they don't see any competition coming from open source - their customers are looking at Microsoft and IBM as their competitors. They showed a surprising lack of concern for open source. With their short track record of quick success and growth, their attitude is understandable. But I think unrealistic. There are plenty of good, viable open source wiki and collaboration projects; and if they continue to maintain developer interest, they can only become more formidable.
I'm also surprised they didn't mention Atlassian's Confluence as a competitor. It's a good product, and it is actively maintained and enhanced. I know less about MindTouch, but I wonder if it will gain traction.
Following this presentation was a panel discussion about working independently. Sarah Gilbert, Justin Kistner, and Rick Turoczy were the panelists, and Adam Duvander moderated.
Following this, there were presentations of OpenId, ExpressionEngine (very pretty CMS - I'd like to research it further to see how deep the functionality is), Unthirsty (funny guys, and I'm impressed with the number of bars they've been able to compile), Earth Class Mail (they handle your mail for you - could be valuable to large organizations), Lunarr (web app that let's you add notes to the "back side" of web pages - interesting concept, slick interface, but I don't know how valuable it is), Sidecar (a gadget you add to your site to enable IM with visitors, provide them with information, and allow them to provide you with feedback - definitely valuable), MyStrands, Fyreball (allows you to post content on their site and share with your friends - I'd love to hear what new value this provides), Toonlet (enables you to become a creator and publisher of online comic strips - what a great way to waste time - seriously!), and I Want Sandy (an innovative devleopment of an automated assistant, though I'm nagged enough by my mobile phone, email, desktop gadgets, RSS feeds...).
All in all, it was a great day - I'm glad I went, and I look forward to the next one.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Startupalooza last weekend
Startupalooza was last Saturday in Portland, at cubespace, from noon to 7pm. I stayed until 6:15, so sadly only saw a bit of the presentation on Fyreball, and completely missed the presentations on Toonlet and I Want Sandy. I've looked at the latter two before - toonlet looks like it would be a fun way to waste time (which I don't have), and people rave about I Want Sandy, but I just don't see the need, what with my calendars and cell phone constantly popping up meetings and tasks.
After a quick Lebanese lunch and meeting a couple people, the presentations started:
Garagegames, presented by founder Mark Frohnmayer and CTO Josh Williams. Mark talked about how, while working at Dynamics in the '90's, he noticed that projects required a growing number of members (from a couple people to 10's) and a growing amount of time (from months to several years). So the risk of failures grew (with the increased cost), and the fun grew less. He also saw the number of retailers selling games change from lots of mom & pop stores to just the mega-stores like Wal-Mart and CompUSA. He wanted to create software that could be used to develop games quickly and for low cost.
After slowly moving their company toward their goals, they were acquired by IAC, Barry Diller's company. And get this - they represented themselves in the negotiations. And they're happy with the deal. They have maintained control, and they got agreement to recompense their loyal, low-paid employees with equity.
They're now dealing with a totally different problem - how to handle their growth (they now have close to 100 employees).
They recently announced instantaction.com, an interactive, multi-player games site that runs in your browser.
AboutUs, presented by founder Ray King. Ray sounds like the ultimate entrepreneur. As a kid he took over his sister's babysitting job and turned that into a tutoring business; learned how to use a computer and built a business teaching business people how to use VisiCalc (or was it Lotus 1-2-3?) by putting a pc on a table in front of Grand Central Station and giving people a glimpse of what it could do; moved on building Semaphore, developing accounting software; built snapnames to monitor for availability of domain names and grab them based on his desire for raysworld.com and writing a little program to monitor for its availability; left in 2004 and started AboutUs based on the idea that he could create a page for every existing domain name, based on data in whois. His partner is Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. AboutUs is now getting ~5 million visitors/month. Their challenge now is to beef up the presentation and user engagement.
The gain revenues from Google adsense, ad buys, and by creating articles on the site to promote their customers' services (called PromoteUs).
There are 27 people in the company, with 15 in Lahore, Pakistan. He admits the difficulty of communicating across time zones but still believes it's worth it. Unlike most offshore and outsourced engagements, he provides his employees (remote and local) with the high-altitude view of what he wants done, and allows them to do the more detailed design and coding. He noted that they publicly describe tasks on their wiki, and also use irc and skype to remain connected.
A lot more was presented, but I will have to write about them later.
After a quick Lebanese lunch and meeting a couple people, the presentations started:
Garagegames, presented by founder Mark Frohnmayer and CTO Josh Williams. Mark talked about how, while working at Dynamics in the '90's, he noticed that projects required a growing number of members (from a couple people to 10's) and a growing amount of time (from months to several years). So the risk of failures grew (with the increased cost), and the fun grew less. He also saw the number of retailers selling games change from lots of mom & pop stores to just the mega-stores like Wal-Mart and CompUSA. He wanted to create software that could be used to develop games quickly and for low cost.
After slowly moving their company toward their goals, they were acquired by IAC, Barry Diller's company. And get this - they represented themselves in the negotiations. And they're happy with the deal. They have maintained control, and they got agreement to recompense their loyal, low-paid employees with equity.
They're now dealing with a totally different problem - how to handle their growth (they now have close to 100 employees).
They recently announced instantaction.com, an interactive, multi-player games site that runs in your browser.
AboutUs, presented by founder Ray King. Ray sounds like the ultimate entrepreneur. As a kid he took over his sister's babysitting job and turned that into a tutoring business; learned how to use a computer and built a business teaching business people how to use VisiCalc (or was it Lotus 1-2-3?) by putting a pc on a table in front of Grand Central Station and giving people a glimpse of what it could do; moved on building Semaphore, developing accounting software; built snapnames to monitor for availability of domain names and grab them based on his desire for raysworld.com and writing a little program to monitor for its availability; left in 2004 and started AboutUs based on the idea that he could create a page for every existing domain name, based on data in whois. His partner is Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. AboutUs is now getting ~5 million visitors/month. Their challenge now is to beef up the presentation and user engagement.
The gain revenues from Google adsense, ad buys, and by creating articles on the site to promote their customers' services (called PromoteUs).
There are 27 people in the company, with 15 in Lahore, Pakistan. He admits the difficulty of communicating across time zones but still believes it's worth it. Unlike most offshore and outsourced engagements, he provides his employees (remote and local) with the high-altitude view of what he wants done, and allows them to do the more detailed design and coding. He noted that they publicly describe tasks on their wiki, and also use irc and skype to remain connected.
A lot more was presented, but I will have to write about them later.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Tonight's Beer and Blog
Went to my first Beer and Blog in Portland OR today. Reminded me of my days at HotWired - young, techno-literate, single, creative, uninterested in corporate employment. Friendly group.
Scott Kveton demoed an installation of OpenID with Wordpress. Having one username and password on the Internet sounds great - how many usernames and passwords do you have? And I'm interesting in providing better service to our web site visitors. But it's not ready for us. As it is now, if you don't have an OpenID, you'd have to go to another page to select a provider, then create your id there, and then come back to our site. Scott said there are plans to make it easier with less steps. I look forward to that.
Listened to Matt Monroe talk about the surprisingly huge response he's been getting to his photography blog, the Global Photographer. And if you see him, ask him to show you his Visa card - think early Kenny Loggins.
Adam talked about his work at bestplaces.net. Sounds like a great - virtual - environment.
We talked about the history of Tektronix. Once had over 24,000 employees in Oregon (now it's about 4,000). Once they made just about everything in their products, down to the screws! I love this poster showing the Oregon spinoffs from Tek.
On the way home, I was appreciating the fact that Portland is a warm-bed of creativity and innovation; and I wonder if this society of technogeeks is similar to small creative groups of the past, such as the impressionists Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, et al; or the Algonquin Round Table.
Scott Kveton demoed an installation of OpenID with Wordpress. Having one username and password on the Internet sounds great - how many usernames and passwords do you have? And I'm interesting in providing better service to our web site visitors. But it's not ready for us. As it is now, if you don't have an OpenID, you'd have to go to another page to select a provider, then create your id there, and then come back to our site. Scott said there are plans to make it easier with less steps. I look forward to that.
Listened to Matt Monroe talk about the surprisingly huge response he's been getting to his photography blog, the Global Photographer. And if you see him, ask him to show you his Visa card - think early Kenny Loggins.
Adam talked about his work at bestplaces.net. Sounds like a great - virtual - environment.
We talked about the history of Tektronix. Once had over 24,000 employees in Oregon (now it's about 4,000). Once they made just about everything in their products, down to the screws! I love this poster showing the Oregon spinoffs from Tek.
On the way home, I was appreciating the fact that Portland is a warm-bed of creativity and innovation; and I wonder if this society of technogeeks is similar to small creative groups of the past, such as the impressionists Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, et al; or the Algonquin Round Table.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Making Windows Update work in Vista
Windows Update stopped working. "Jay in camborne cornwall" stated on Microsoft technet that the problem is that the Administrator account is disabled, but it must be enabled for Windows Update to work.
However, when you go to the User Accounts control panel and click on "Manage another account", you don't see the Administrator account! An article on howtogeek.com shows how to enable the account via the command line.
After following these instructions, Windows Update started working!
However, when you go to the User Accounts control panel and click on "Manage another account", you don't see the Administrator account! An article on howtogeek.com shows how to enable the account via the command line.
After following these instructions, Windows Update started working!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Google teleportation
Learned about this at the cnet site. When you do a search, the results might present a search box under the results. When I search for "Tektronix", for example, I see this:
Note the new search box under the listing. If you do a search in that box, it only searches on the tek.com site. I'll let you decide whether you think this is a good thing or bad thing for your site. But… if you see this as a bad thing, I believe you can contact Google and ask them to turn off this feature for tek.com.
Note the new search box under the listing. If you do a search in that box, it only searches on the tek.com site. I'll let you decide whether you think this is a good thing or bad thing for your site. But… if you see this as a bad thing, I believe you can contact Google and ask them to turn off this feature for tek.com.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
file dropper
Upload 5GB files, get a unique url, and use it to download the file; or give the url to others so they can download the file
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
We7 - free, advertiser-supported music downloads
If you don't mind listening to ads, you can download music for free from this site.
YouSendIt - enables transfer of large files
The free service allows you to upload files of up to 100MB and download up to 1GB per month. If your email provider limits the size of attachments - or you just don't want to tie up your email client - this would be helpful.
Roxxer - build a web site on the page
Edit your page on the page. Looks like a good way to allow non-techies to publish. Will be interesting to see if it gains any traction.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Web-based Desktops
I've been watching the web-based desktop applications as news has come out about them. At some point I expect they will get to a level of maturity that companies will start making a big leap, replacing MS Office on their employees desktops with access to one of these. It makes great sense - the employees no longer need powerful pc's, their pc's no longer have to be backed up (as the documents will reside on the server), employees can access and update their documents using any pc anywhere where there's Internet access, and there's a much reduced need to do desktop updates.
In addition, the combination of these apps and SAAS (having these hosted externally and paid for as a subscription, rather than licensed and installed internally) will become more enticing. However, the developers of these apps will have to assure organizations that their service is virtually 100% reliable and the data is secure.
I haven't seen an app that's ready to replace MS Office, but I remain hopeful.
These apps look like good integrations of open source apps in virtual desktop interfaces, and I'll watch to hear more about them.
AjaxWindows
G.ho.st
gOS
In addition, the combination of these apps and SAAS (having these hosted externally and paid for as a subscription, rather than licensed and installed internally) will become more enticing. However, the developers of these apps will have to assure organizations that their service is virtually 100% reliable and the data is secure.
I haven't seen an app that's ready to replace MS Office, but I remain hopeful.
These apps look like good integrations of open source apps in virtual desktop interfaces, and I'll watch to hear more about them.
AjaxWindows
G.ho.st
gOS
Friday, February 08, 2008
Find a wifi hotspot
If you travel, and you worry about being able to find a wifi hotspot, hotspotr may help.
Friday, February 01, 2008
iVideoSongs - music lessons by the masters
There is just too much great stuff on the 'net! It would be easy to spend my life watching, reading, learning, and participating with these sites.
With that said, you'll love this if you're learning how to play a musical instrument. Video lessons, some by the musicians who originally recorded the songs.
With that said, you'll love this if you're learning how to play a musical instrument. Video lessons, some by the musicians who originally recorded the songs.
iterasi - snapshotting web pages
I'm curious to see if I find this useful. The product's not ready yet, but I've signed up to get it when it is. It's an IE and FireFix plugin that allows you to snapshot the web page you're on (they call it "notarizing") so that you can get back to it later.
Sounds like bookmarking, right? But it can save the state of the page you're on, whereas bookmarking can't always do that. An example they demo uses Google Maps. As you browse different geographic areas in Google Maps, watch the url in your browser. It doesn't change. So if you were to bookmark the page, the bookmark wouldn't take you back to the page as it was when you bookmarked it (yes, I know that Google provides you a way to do that - this is just an example). But the iterasi plugin will save the page, just as it was when you were looking at it, on their server, allowing you to look at it again at a later time.
Their service will also allow you to schedule automatic, periodic snapshots of pages you choose. So you could monitor how a page changes over time.
Again, I look forward to seeing if this ends up being useful to me.
Sounds like bookmarking, right? But it can save the state of the page you're on, whereas bookmarking can't always do that. An example they demo uses Google Maps. As you browse different geographic areas in Google Maps, watch the url in your browser. It doesn't change. So if you were to bookmark the page, the bookmark wouldn't take you back to the page as it was when you bookmarked it (yes, I know that Google provides you a way to do that - this is just an example). But the iterasi plugin will save the page, just as it was when you were looking at it, on their server, allowing you to look at it again at a later time.
Their service will also allow you to schedule automatic, periodic snapshots of pages you choose. So you could monitor how a page changes over time.
Again, I look forward to seeing if this ends up being useful to me.
Hubdub - predictions of the crowd
If you’re a news junkie, you may find Hubdub interesting. If the site thrives, it will be interesting to see how well the crowd does in its predictions.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
HP notebook critical vulnerability - Quick Launch
HP is emailing customers about a critical vulnerability in its laptops. This vulnerability enables attackers to run programs on laptops remotely, and allows them to change registry settings remotely.
Other than the fact of the vulnerability itself, the other concerning part is in the details of the notification:
Link to HP article
Other than the fact of the vulnerability itself, the other concerning part is in the details of the notification:
- “Discontinuing use of the Quick Launch Buttons or the respective software does not eliminate this vulnerability.
- Deleting the Quick Launch Buttons shortcut(s) and/or program files or folders does not eliminate this vulnerability.
- Removing (un-installing) the Quick Launch Buttons software does not eliminate this vulnerability.”
Link to HP article
Friday, February 02, 2007
MS Office Professional 2007 and McAfee Security Center
I installed Microsoft Office Professional 2007 - and then I couldn't access the Web, and Opera and IE locked up! I found that the installation causes McAfee Security Center to stop working. The only way I could get my access back was to uninstall McAfee and use a different firewall. Caveat Emptor.
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