Cool Air

Jul 31, 2008 in Computing

3

My MacBook Air was experiencing a core shutdown.  This was my fix.

Atlanta Consumer Startups

Jul 31, 2008 in Startups

1

Quite some time ago someone anonymously suggested via Skribit that I write about the reasons for the lack of consumer oriented startups in Atlanta.  The suggester used the word "dearth" which seemed a little harsh to me.

The reality is that there is a pretty vibrant group of consumer startups in Atlanta.  I saw founders of these companies at BarCamp and StartupWeekend.  I got to know quite a few of them better via the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition, Startup Riot, and CapVenture.  Just amassing the list of these startups in one place to demonstrate the point was going to be a massive undertaking.

That task has all been made quite easy by ATLlogos put together by Paul Freet.  ATLlogos is a nice place to visit that lists all the startups in Atlanta that have come to Paul's attention.  There is an RSS feed to stay up to date on startup company news. They are tagged by industry.  If you click on the consumer tag you will find 28 consumer oriented startups.  That about 25% of the total.  These companies range from more well established startups such as Kaneva, to up and comers such as JungleDisk, to just cool ideas such as Tag6, to Esgut which just sold for a nice quick exit.  So there is a group of companies out there playing in the consumer space.

But to many this does not seem to be the case.  Perhaps because not many of them make it big.  Why is this?

I'll try to answer that question next week.

Obamanomics

Jul 30, 2008 in Business

6

Interesting article by Michael Boskin the op ed section of The Wall Street Journal yesterday (paywall).  Most interesting part is the table showing the changes in marginal tax rates for those earning above $250k (which, as a current public servant for the state of Georgia I do not, and seriously question defining a duel income household with kids and such earnings as "rich"). 

Think the prospect of Mr. Obama winning the general election and increasing the tax on dividends from 15% to 39.6% combined with his capital gains plan has anything to do with the current behavior of the stock market?

Money quote.  "Despite his obvious general intelligence, and uplifting and motivational eloquence, Sen. Obama reveals his startling economic illiteracy in his policy proposals and economic pronoucements....if the proposals espoused by candidate Obama ever became law, the American economy would suffer a serious setback."

One can only hope for a move to economic center between now and November.

Building A Great Company

Jul 28, 2008 in Entrepreneurship

0

Jason Caplain recently pointed me to a post by Ho Nam on the Altos Ventures blog about the habit of venture capitalists to replace the founding CEO of the companies they fund.

It's almost a rite of passage in Silicon Valley. As a founder, you start a company, get VCs to fund you, recruit a "world class" management team...and eventually, find your replacement (or get ousted).

What people seem to miss, however, is that just about every great company ever created - in technology as well as low-tech, was built by a founder (or a CEO who happened to join the company very early in its growth phase) and a team of dedicated people who grew with their companies.

I don't believe in "world class" management in the generic sense. "World class" in what??

What I believe in is people who learn on the job and become - over time - the best at what they do. Along the way, they make plenty of mistakes. But that's part of the learning (and perhaps the luck of it - because the mistakes happen to be not fatal for the survivors).

Think about it. Some examples of great companies led by founders for decades are GE, UPS, FedEx, Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, HP, Intel, SAP, SAS, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, Dell, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Dolby, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, etc.

Ho has a point.  His most important one being that if you are going to be build a truly great company, bringing in outside management rarely gets you there.

Something to think about when folks start asking you what you see as your role in your company when you are on the money trial.

Double Quote of the Week

Jul 25, 2008 in Quotes

1

"The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc."

John F. Duffy

"The idea that Google's success is somehow predicated on its patents is pretty ludicrous."

Mike Masnick

Amazon And Availability

Jul 24, 2008 in Web/Tech

13

Today Amazon reported earnings and they were pretty outstanding (I do not own any AMZN and have not since I unloaded what I purchased as "a friend" on their IPO).  Profits doubled.  Sales up 41%. Not a bad quarter.

Except it reminded me of what happened this past Sunday. 

Amazon's S3 online storage service experienced significant downtime.  It was not available for about 6 hours (they were also down for about 3 hours back in February).  That is a ton which I will explain shortly.  But for those that do not know, S3 is a distributed storage cloud that many applications such as Twitter and SmugMug use.  They charge $.15 per GB/month and $.10 per GB of data transfer in and a sliding scale starting at $.17 per GB of data out (this is more because Amazon has less slack data out due to the site traffic www.amazon.com generates, is mostly all out).

To provide a little background here, it is a little known fact that for a period of time I ran MindSpring's product development team.  The developers all reported up to me.  The short story is we were growing so fast we started having some issues pushing products out the door, we went away for a few days to something that became known as the "technology summit", and at the end of the said summit the president of the company gave me the dev team because he wanted one person responsible.  We fixed the issues.  It is during this time that I become intimately knowledgeable about things such as reliability and availability.

Availability is simply the amount of time a service is available (scheduled maintenance downtown excluded).  Availability is typically measured by the number of "nines" delivered.  For example the plain old telephone service that you get from AT&T has an availability of five nines or 99.999% (this is sometimes referred to as telco grade).  Now back in my ISP days we did not shoot for five nines for core services such as mail and web, it would cost too much to so do.  Our objective was four nines or 99.99%.  Now removing one little nine may not seem like much but it makes a big difference in the amount of downtime a service has as you can see in the table below.

99.99% still seems an acceptable level for a mature Internet service.  A startup can get away with two, an emerging company three.  So how is Amazon doing?  For S3 it is pretty straightforward.  S3 year to date is less then 99.9% available, which to me, for a paid service is not acceptable.  This got me to wonder how Amazon's own site faired.  So I did a little investigating.  And to do so I used information from a neat little company called Pingdon that issues reports on such things from time to time.

The only report on amazon.com was from last April, but through that point of the year the site was only down 21 minutes which on an annual basis equates to just under 99.99% .  I find the disparity very interesting.

Now granted most newer web apps are not going to deliver four nines and this pingdom report shows that.  The 17 social networking apps that they reported on had an average availability of 99.7%.

Here's the point.  Back in those days of providing Internet services we had "14 Deadly Sins".  One of them was "Rely on outside vendors who let us down".  All the cuteness of the Twitter fail whale meme aside (which i believe is making some companies/individuals behave like excessive downtime is acceptable), if you are going to build a healthy web or SaaS application business the service needs to be available.  If you rely on S3 alone to deliver that availability in a production environment you will fail.  You need an effective fall over plan for when S3 goes down.

TypePad iPhone App Review

Jul 22, 2008 in Web/Tech

4

This is a review of the TypePad app for the iPhone. I created it on the iPhone.

Or perhaps I should say started on an iPhone because I inadvertently published it after two sentences.  More on that later.

First, the setup did not go off without a hitch.  I downloaded the app last week.  The first thing you have to do is enter your account info.  Which I did. The TypePad server did not like my creds so it returned a username/pass error.  I tried this a few more times (including on my MBA to check I was using the right login) to no avail.  So I opened a ticket with TypePad on Saturday and received a reply Monday.

Laura from TypePad told me to uninstall/reinstall the app.  So I uninstalled on both iTunes and the iPhone, downloaded the app via iTunes and synced it over to the iPhone.  This resulted in an "unknown error" response when submitting the acocunt info.  So I uninstalled again.  And decided to install the app via the App Store accessed via the iPhone itself.  This seemed to work.  I logged in and quickly made a test post with a picture which I published and deleted.  Very easy to use.

Then I started this post.  And while the TypePad iPhone interface is pretty straightforward there is one area that is a bit confusing and resulted in me publishing the first two sentence of this post before I meant to do so. To the left is a screenshot that I ripped from TypePad that shows the Create a Post interface.  Once you start a post you have two high level options, to Cancel or Publish.  Publish does just that.  Tapping Cancel does not actualy cancel the post but leads to a sub menu that provides options to Save to Drafts, Don't Save, and Cancel.  Having a Draft button at the high level sure would make things more clear.

Adding pictures to posts is a snap.

I could find no functionality to create a hyperlink and given the speed at which I can type on an iPhone that sure would be nice cause doing HTML is just not going to happen.

While I think that this app is a must for anyone with a TypePad blog, like Dave whose WordPress app article inspired this post, I don't think I will be using this app on a regular basis (if TypePad added the functionality to manage existing posts and comments that would certainly change).  The overall experience of typing on the iPhone is much better suited to microblogging platforms such as Twitter.

Here is the article on the TypePad blog announcing the iPhone app.

Startup Weekend on MSNBC

Jul 21, 2008 in ATDC, Startups

0

Over the weekend NBC Nightly News aired a video about Startup Weekend that they filmed at RTP Startup Weekend.  A nice summary of what Startup Weekend is all about.

Yes with a little coffee, beer and snacks you can start a business in a weekend.

The next Atlanta Startup Weekend is taking place in November.

New Business Cards

Jul 21, 2008 in Personal

2

Justin Ruckman and I met at Atlanta Startup Weekend.  He was one of the main designers for Skibit and hopefully he will do some more work in the near future.   Justin had these great business cards that he designed himself.  Communicates the info you need to share in a simple, clean, and to the point style.

When I learned that Justin was willing to farm out his design via  Guy Kawasaki I reached out to Justin to get some as well.  I just wanted to put my name on them.  He said that would be "too hot".  Adjusted the color-way a bit to match the design of FoG.

My cards showed up last week.  I love them.

Vacation

Jul 16, 2008 in Personal

0

I have been on vacation.  Went up to West Lafayette last Friday then to Chicago on Saturday.  Nice run on the lake then dinner at Table 52 for the inlaws 50th wedding anniversary.  My responsibilities were to drive, pull out my credit card, and take pictures.  I took 368.

Sunday was a trip to Lax Max, where the family remains until the end of the month.  Not much in the way of Internet there.  I was pretty much offline for four days.  So I got out of the groove.  I am not blogging this week.

See you next week.