Indexed Forever

Sunday April 23rd
It took 45 minutes to buy the card. Most of that time was spent answering questions for the Cingular sales person and watching him manually enter the data – data they already have as I am a 15 year Cingular customer. I pass the time by watching people 3 deep buy Razrs.

Captured the card and took it home. After a 5 minute install and I can see the network but it will not connect. Switch to WiFi and get an added bonus - Outlook will not check POP email. Cingular is blocking something. Spent two hours reading through forums and doing an upgrade of the firmware in the card. Same problems.

Monday, April 24th
Took the card and the PC to Cingular. Got laughed at for using the included software -“The Cingular stuff doesn’t work, go download the Watcher utility from the Sierra web site!” Did a system restore and installed the Sierra “Watcher” software. Still can not connect, but can collect POP email. Took it to Cingular again, but the no one in the store knew anything about the card. More people buying Razrs. Another hour trolling through support boards looking for the solution.

Tuesday April 25th
Took it to Cingular again. The manager took one look at my dbase record and sheepishly admitted the clerk had not activated my card. 30 seconds later, it works … really well.

Wednesday and Thursday, April 25 & 26
Never loses connection during 8 straight hours of RSS demos in the bowels of the Moscone. And it’s fast!

Friday April 27
Moving offices on Monday so call SBC/AT&T to makes sure the order for internet service to our new office is on track. It’s not. The rep did not put in the order (nice job, “Gary” of SBC’s Torrance office). Install 3G card on old Vaio and use Windows internet connections sharing out the eithernet adaptor to a router to provide wifi to the new office space. A terrific short term solution, although the engineers complain of slow uploads for doing builds. Probably violating some terms of service, but given the amount of my time they wasted this week, we can call it even.

Saturday May 6
For inexplicable reasons, coach makes my daughter arrive an hour early for her soccer game. Rather than flipping through magazines, I get work done. Nice. No noticeable drain on battery.

Monday May 15
Off to New York for the Syndicate Conference. Works well in San Jose Airport. Arrive at lousy hotel, where the “free” WiFi costs $10 a day. The Cingular sales rep had said that 3G won’t be fully deployed in New York till the end of the year. I fire up the 3G cards and get nothing. Not even Edge. Try it at an agency meeting across town and get nothing. Try it at a partner meeting downtown and get nothing. New York, not a Cingular 3G kind of town.

Conclusion – it’s magic when it works, but Cingular has a long ways to go with thier network and their customer service.

I spent the middle of the week at Red Herring’s CMO Conference where the theme was “Understanding the Technology Customer.” The big themes I heard.

• The rise of the web – Larry Webber, “the web is not another vehicle, it is the vehicle.”
• The Googlification of marketing – success is directly tied to how effectively companies turn their customers into their sales force without advertising.
• The emergence of PR as a lead generation tool, which the Salesforce.com CMO called “the virtuous hype circle.”
• CMO Rising – CMO moving from a “staff” role to more central to the success of tech companies
• Use of internet tools (such as email) to achieve near term ROI at the expense of lifetime value of the customer.

The dapper and gracious Alex Vieux wrapped up with his top 10 takeaways from the conference. Number two - Branding is not a marketing issue it is a business issue.

This rang true as I went back to hotel. Lest the entrepreneurial live seem too glamorous, I was again too cheap to stay at the conference hotel, so I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express Encinitas.

Or so I thought, as that very day the hotel had been turned into a Howard Johnson. Neither brand has much of a connotation in my mind. And I don’t spend much time thinking about that which I can not control. Not so their cliental. Checking in at 10:30 PM and checking out at 7AM, I stood in line as guests voiced their anger in person and on the phone. What would this mean to their rooms? What about their reward points? Would their reservation still be valid? Do they still serve breakfast? The patient desk clerks answered the questions and only complained that their new uniforms had not yet arrived. To me it was the same hotel, they just changed the name, but not to their customers. Somewhere the branding team at Holiday Inn is smiling.

The corporate marketing track started off with on a high powered note with Ryan Rosenberg and Marc Landsberg speaking and Chris Kenton moderating. It was that rare panel that you wish would not end. Kenton, a BusinessWeek columnist and head of the CMO Counsel asked excellent questions. Some highlights.

Rosenberg discussed the creation of podcasts in conjunction with the launch of Filemaker 7. The idea came from the PR team, not a top level corporate mandate. Initially they created scripts but went away from the scripts to keep it more conversational. They also recorded over the phone (rather than go to a studio) to make is sound more live and conversational. In the first 90 days 12,000 people have downloaded the podcast. Given the specificity of the content that seems fantastic. Next will be a series of Podcasts tailored to their vertical markets.

Landsberg discussed big marketing trends – innovation is coming from consumers, not corporations – they own the brands anyway. He discussed the consumer value exchange equation = consumer give money and attention and get goods or services. New tools such as RSS, Blogs and Podcasts have the ability to effect that equation. He also nicely summarized where the tools fit in the acquisition to retention continuum.

Finally Kenton brought up measurability. Rosenberg felt results came from good content rather than from delivery. Landsberg felt that it is too early to determine ROI on RSS, Blogging and Podcasting initiatives, and that the focus should be on increased brand interaction and on measurables such as click-throughs, registrations and conversions.

Just scratching the surface with the above, I eagerly await the podcast from Chris.

Drop by the Syndicate Conference next week. We will have a table top and I will be moderating a panel on the branding benefits of RSS.

No word on the jump suit.

If you are in NYC come visit us at ad:tech tomorrow or drop by their web site and see why this guy is so excited.

I am gazing into the future this week at the steamy Web 2.0 conference. Despite Alan Greenspan rehearsing for his role as McDuff, the mood is very upbeat. A run down of the trends.

Ajax Apps – wow they have gotten good! They have moved beyond responsiveness to include other desktop attributes like support for keyboard shortcuts and file save reminders. They are also taking advantage of the ease of integration of web services making these services “fully-Web 2.0.” Yeah, dude.

A particularly outstanding example is Zimbra. Think Exchange with every conceivable web service hyperlinked/mashed into your email, as bubble help. Dates bring up your calendar, tracking number go check their delivery status, and of course addresses bring up Google maps. If it works, I want it.

Identity/Attention - The Attention Trust demoed their Attention Recorder, a plug in to Firefox that captures your click stream. The hope is that companies build applications that will provide value to end-users in exchange for the stream. SXIP might be on to something by tying identity to a real world problem with sxore, a distributed identity system to combat blog spam.

Investors. The VCs are out in force despite other pressing business in San Francisco this week. While they are aggressively turning over every rock, they are complaining about Web 2.0 companies being undefensible businesses with small market opportunities.

So are we in for Trouble? Tragically, we will have to wait for Web 2.0 Act II.

I attended Ray Kurzweil’s talk on Thursday night at SAP’s silicon valley reception center - a beautiful place with horrible acoustics and flickering brown-out lighting conditions. I was reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s quip that one can tell the architectural significance of a building by the number of buckets required when it rains.

Kurzweil laid out the thesis of his new book, The Singularity is Near. Using 88 slides, most featuring that favorite of professorial obfuscating visuals, the logarithmic chart, he outlined significant events in technology and human evolution, both straight diagonal lines. His point being that change is accelerating, not just in technology, but in human evolution. The next leaps in human evolution will be the understanding of the human body as an information system, and miniaturization technology that allows nano-implants. Extrapolating from this thesis he sees the following developments.

By 2010 Computers disappear into wearable devices, images are written directly to our retina and we interact with computers through virtual personalities.

By 2029 the human brain will be reverse engineered. Humans will have millions of nano-neural implants in their brains. The result is an “intimate merger” of human and machine intelligence and the ability to reprogram our biochemistry to enable extremely long life.

By 2045 we will have reached the singularity, where we are more machine than man.

Sounds good to me, but the timing seems just a bit fast. 2010 for computers to miniaturize and be able to write to you retina – so that’s in Service Pack 2 to Windows Vista? Yes, there are exponential progressions all around us and humans are poorly designed to notice them. However, capital sources, governments and other large organizations are not on an exponential change curve. As one person in audience asked - why did it take 7 years to get to the moon in the 60’s but NASA just announced plans to get back to the moon, in 13 years. Kurzweil’s response was that just because it can happen, does not mean it will. It is a matter of focus and resources.

With significant ideas, criticism is just a drop in the bucket.

At my second GnomeDex today and the feeling is euphoric. Microsoft announced broad support for RSS in IE 7.0 and Longhorn. Excellent coverage here.

This is not a small announcement. Note that every analyst and every major technology and business publication had been briefed. Their demo and presentation was very slick and thoroughly rehearsed. They were prepared for questions.

My guess on the announcement – Longhorn needs a value proposition beyond a faster UI for people to upgrade. And RSS is a great value proposition. Prepare to be saturated with Longhorn advertising stressing RSS benefits next summer. It started today with their positioning on the evolution of Windows – Browse, Search, Subscribe!

The announcement has this, blogger and RSS start-up heavy, crowd feeling very happy. And not only is Microsoft behind the conference in providing a big announcement, but they are heavy financial supporters - “Microsoft Presents GnomeDex 5.0”

Last Fall the conference was fun, but it was held at the dim and seedy Harrahs’ Lake Tahoe. Today the conference is at the pristine Bell Harbor convention center. Tonight’s party is at the brand new Seattle Public Library. The money is starting to flow in RSS.

On Saturday I was a panelist at the Stanford Engineering School’s annual e-Day conference. Having neither attended Stanford, nor graduated in Engineering, it seemed an unusual lapse of quality control.

The conference was keynoted by Jeff Raikes who runs Office for Microsoft and is by far the best communicator I have ever seen from Redmond. Granted this is not a very high hurdle, but he may have missed his calling in politics. The guy is a combination of aw-shucks Midwestern humility with an obvious keen mind and strong presence – the guy is devastating.

He talked to the standard issue Microsoft Presentation (one word per slide) and discussed the vision for the forthcoming Office 12:
“Remove corporate boundaries” – Groove operating through the firewall.
“Connect information and people” – Search
“Broad control” – Document DRM
“Business Applications” - Play nice with ERP/CRM applications
“Software services” – Live Meeting
“Unified Communications” - He gave an example of being able to take phone calls when he is on IM. Not sure if he realizes a million people were doing that while he was talking.

They are moving in this direction as Microsoft chose to “Expand the view of the Opportunity.” As such Office is no longer about productivity applications, but about “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work.”

I don’t know. For the first time I had to give serious thought about whether to buy Office with my new PC. I did, because of Outlook. But I find myself using OpenOffice more than Word as it has a great HTML editor and every document can be turned into a PDF. And it’s free. Their grip is tenuous. And the fact that he never mentioned RSS when his goal is “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work,” is stunning.

Moving on to our panel, Jeff Kleck did a stellar job of keeping it conversational and fun, complete with Nerf rockets to shoot at audience members who asked bad questions. While we were supposed to talk about “Managing Next-Generation Information Technologies and Services,” the discussion quickly veered to entrepreneurship and software business models. But not before someone asked me about the relative benefits of XML vs. relational database as a data model – a question I am uniquely unqualified to answer as a Finance major.

At the conclusion a member of the Stanford engineering department presented me with a token “as I do not have an affiliation with Stanford.” It was a School of Engineering drink coaster.

Well, it’s not an honorary doctorate, but I will get plenty of mileage out of this with the development team.

Walking up Broadway on my way back from dinner, I noticed a crowd of people cheering under bright lights in the middle of Times Square. AudioSlave was blasting. Being a fan of the Jimmy Kimmel Show, particularly the concert series, I guessed it was a live simulcast and went over to join the fun. The picture below is the camera man dancing to the music while operating the steady cam.

Part of the concert series is the ability to buy the live performances. It was a good song and a nice “only in New York” moment, so why not?

Because to get the music, you must download Sony’s soundstage software. I don’t know what that will do to my computer, and Sony is not telling as there is not even a FAQ on the site. Even better the music is DRMed to death - it only comes in Sony’s proprietary file format which only plays in SoundStage or Sony’s iPod knock-off.

I would have happily paid my $0.99. I would have paid $10. But if you want to install your spyware on my PC and give me a crippled product, no thanks.

Earlier in the Day I had listened to Scoble discuss a major value point for RSS - he is happy to have relationships with companies, but it must be on his terms. I could not agree more.

Returning to my hotel (too cheap to stay in the conference hotel), I found that the common areas had been rented out for the Radar Magazine Launch Party. Pushing through the Paris wanna-be’s on my way out to dinner, I was talking with my daughter on the mobile who was enthusiastically telling me the results of her swim lesson. As I exited the hotel, one of the staffers ran after me down 45th street and in panicked tones yelled that I forgot my goodie bag. I began to object and he screamed “Just take it!”

In the Bag
Match.com ¾ arm length “70’s burn-out” t-shirt.
“Don’t you know who I think I am” Radar Magazine T-Shirt
Jhane Barnes eye glass case (no glasses)
Radar magazine
Altoid “smalls” mints
Bottle of Mark Body Lotion, “Hollywood Pink Flamingo”
Mark Kiss Therapy lip balm, “Sheer Red”
Hotel QT Lollypop
Small Piece of “Unblessed Kabbalah” Red String
Hardcopy book “StarStruck – When A Fan Gets Close To Fame”
One bottle each Gardnier Shampoo, Conditioner and Leave in Conditioner
Pamphlet, Betty Ford Institute.

Overall it was a rousing success, especially given it was a first time conference. A sell out crowd – I moderated three panels and I did not get a conference bag – they ran out. The audience was heavy on execs from the publishing side of media companies trying to figure out the implications for their business. Mix in a few technologists and a few dozen corporate marketers and you quickly see that RSS is everywhere and changing everything. Below are a few of the most interesting thoughts/factoids from the conference.

Paul Kedrosky – Companies give their CEOs $500,000 of training on proper disclosure under Sarbanes Oxley. Then they give a product manager a blog. Both are disclosures in the eyes of the SEC. This will lead to a lock down of information in the post hobbyist phase of blogging.

Elliot Ng and Scott Wilder of Intuit. There are 20 million small businesses in America and only 3 million use account software. Our challenge is to reach these late technology adopters. We use Blogs, Wiki and RSS Feeds to help create highly engaged customers that will evangelize our product and create new customers.

Charlene Li – email is my to do; RSS is my to know.

Bill Flitter – our customers are lowering their cost of customer acquisition by 50% using RSS Advertising.

Rok Hrastnik – Three case studies with hard facts:
RSS for Search Engine Optimization resulting in a 75% increase in traffic,
Private label branded RSS Aggregator resulting in 23% click-through rates
RSS Feeds to customers with click through rates 75 times higher than commercial email.

Let’s just say it - Skype has build the operating system for the internet in two years. In the annals of the technology business, it’s probably only second to Paul Allen buying DOS for $50k. But 20 years later, Redmond fiddles (with Longhorn) while Skype burns up the internet with a scalable (peer-to-peer), secure, real-time communication network with directory and network-based identity.

The first application of course, is voice. When I talk to my fellow Americans about Skype, the universal reaction is – why not just use your cell phone? With our inexpensive communication services, huge country, and globally-challenged thinking, rich Americans don’t get the power of free global calling. But it caused 100,000,000 people to download Skype. Think about that - how many broadband lines are there in the world? Did I mention that this is the size of their directory? Their milestone last week was three million concurrent users.

Baring the Telcos introducing network latency prior to the arrival of WiMax, the telco’s will suffer, but you still need broadband. However, the disruptions caused by Skype go much further, because if they can do secure voice, everything else is a lay-up.

Skype recently added the number three communication application, Chat. They have also added file sharing and voicemail. What’s next? My guess is email and then RSS. Then they watch for interesting applications created by third parties via their API. Skype rips off the idea and makes it better since they control the platform – see, they really are the new Redmond.

Remember all those cool applications that the rich client crowd promised LongHorn would deliver – you know before they stripped out WinFX and made it XP 2.0. Longhorn was to empower information workers by intelligently prioritizing the flow of information we all receive, IM, RSS, phone calls, web and video conferences, voicemail, email, etc.

Who’s the one company who can do that now? And can do it from any device? And look at the lock-in - screen name, billing relationship, Skype-in number today. Tomorrow your contacts, your data, the relationship between and among both, and finally, network intelligence. It’s finally come true – the network is the computer.

For those of you who think the trade show business is over, visit AD:Tech today through Wed at the Marriott in San Francisco.

How big can the business of selling technology to advertisers be? The above picture, taken from my panelist-eye-view shows the standing room only crowd. And we were in the smallest of the five rooms!

For those of you who can’t get enough RSS Marketing, I will also be moderating a couple panels at the Syndicate Conference as well as on a panel at Stanford’s “E-Day.”

If you answer no, take a look at their beta RSS Aggregator. Click on “show.” Have fun. Unless you are a web-based aggregator vendor, then you can shriek in terror.

Note the following features:

Snappy “Ajax” interface
Ease of adding RSS Feeds (they don’t have to be cached)
Neat organization of My Feeds, Recent Searches
Collapse All / Expand all RSS Feeds
Directory style navigation with subscribe-able sub-directories
And most of all, the best UI of any web based aggregator – by far!

I am reminded of the early days of Outlook when Microsoft went from worst to first in email in a matter of quarters.

Bet Bloglines is happy they sold.
And if Yahoo reinventing their company around RSS why can’t they do this?
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Update to original post. Less than 24 hours later, they took it down. [Insert your own conspiracy theory here]. Richard McManus has screen shots.

A quick thanks to Jeff Nolan at SAP Ventures, who had some kind words for SimpleFeed yesterday. He is recommending us to his portfolio companies and we would be delighted to help.

I have been busy, lots of exciting stuff in the works. But I look for a long post next week, complete with the usual sarcasm and bad puns.

Last night I attended the Churchill Club’s “Venture Capital: What’s Hot? What’s Not?” On the panel were Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital,
Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and moderating the panel was yet another venture capitalist, Geoffrey Yang of Redpoint Ventures.

After a superb comedic introduction by Yang, the panel settled into mostly violent agreement on the topics.

Hot – Digital Home, particularly component plays. Software with Open Source components or delivered as a managed service. Later stage deals in China.

Not – Packaged Enterprise Software. Storage. Semiconductors. Nanotech (for decade).

Breyer restated his belief in “content deals” and peer-to-peer networks as he said at last year’s event. Oddly he suggested that distribution through retailers and PC OEMs was promising – it’s 1994 all over.

Gurley pushed his belief in the future of multiplayer gaming, mobile devices and security.

Lacob was the most candid. On too much money in the venture business, “the venture capital business has ups and downs but over the long term venture capital averages 30% returns and that is a very sustainable business.” On the flow of good ideas, “good ideas are always out there, but the venture business tends to follow trends not lead them so our attitude is not always receptive.” On outsourcing, “we had a company with 800 people in Pakistan and after 9/11 we had to move that operation to Costa Rica.”

Yang closed with a few thoughts. We are entering a bubble in internet media companies that have “search” or “local” in their business plans. We are entering a bubble in investing in China. Finally, the recent run up in stock prices will create a “carbonated environment for startups,” and valuations will go up - I’m always happy to spread this type of news.

Last night I attended the VLAB presentation, “Bringing Great Open Source Ideas to Market.” The format was a presentation by Marc Fleury, founder and CEO of JBoss, followed by a panel discussion moderated by an industry analyst with Fleury, three other open source advocates and Sequoia Partner Doug Leone, appropriately dressed in black.

Fleury’s presentation extolled the virtues of his “third generation” model, “professional open source.” Basically they hire the developers so they can tightly control the code base. This allows better support as they can put fixes into the project (vs. “second generation” companies like Red Hat who have to lobby to get fixes into the next distribution). He tirelessly pitched other attractive attributes of open source businesses that have “critical mass,” such as the predictability of maintenance revenue and the ease of customer acquisition with a large user base.

As the presentation turned to business models, Fleury noted that there are perhaps six (out of 94,000!) open source projects that have the critical mass to support a business. How do you get critical mass? Fleury says “get lucky” - an answer that comes off as modest and dodges the question. Later in the discussion, panelists cited solving a real problem, having a strong leader and getting community involvement.

The moderator asked each panelist if Open Source is good for the software industry. Not surprisingly, they all said it is good. Leone, in carefully chosen words, said “What is good for customers is ultimately good for the industry.” Later he noted that “Open Source is of interest at the lower levels of the IT organization. The closer you get to someone with a budget, the more they care about solving their problem, and the less they care about the source code.”

When the moderator asked about the role of patents in open source, the temperature of the room dropped 10 degrees. All panelists agreed – software patents are bad. IBM’s recent contribution is nothing more than a ploy to slow down Microsoft’s forthcoming litigation. Leone quipped that the way to make money off open source is to sue open source companies. (Note to event organizers, you can never go wrong having a Sequoia Partner on the panel.) Fleury, who is surely the world’s most charismatic French software developer, quoted a line he attributed to Scott McNeally on open source and patents, “Open Source is like using a dirty needle – you never know what you might inject.”

As the event turned to audience questions, another VC in the audience asked (1) whether customers wanted integrated LAMP stacks and thus (2) whether the value-add of open source would move away from code and towards assembly, certification etc. – basically the SourceLabs/Spikesource business plan. Fleury answered “Yes and No.” The rest of the panel remained oddly silent.

As the evening wore on, a fatigued and hungry Leone grew tired of being agreeable and could no longer forebear. Paraphrasing he said that open source will become pervasive over the next several years, but open source companies will be small and marginal businesses that will ultimately consolidate.

Next month the topic is “The Future of MicroContent and Mobile Device Applications.” The topic will include RSS, and yes, PodCasting.

While I try to keep this a non-commercial commentary blog, it’s been a big week for us. After over a year of work, we launched our company, SimpleFeed. While bloggers have taken notice of our technology, today we got our first big article. It is by Rafe Needleman writing on Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 site.

My favorite sentence in the article:

“Naturally, my BS detector rang loud when Carlson told me this, but…”

But … you will have to read the rest on the Edventure web site.

Many thanks to all who have helped get this company off the ground. Please check us out at SimpleFeed.com.