austinpreneur

SXSW Panel Picker is up - cast your vote!

Every year, SXSW puts up all of the great panel submissions and lets the community vote on which ones are best. They combine this data with their own advisory panel and staff to select the final panels.

At the very minimum, please show your support for me and OtherInbox by clicking here and
PLEASE VOTE 5 STARS FOR THESE 4 PANELS.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/3/company:otherinbox

Here is a list of all the panels I'm involved in, of course I'd recommend them all!

Don't Declare Email Bankruptcy! Take Control of Your Inbox.
Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Your inbox is overflowing with spam, bacn, ham, email lists, Bcc's, and even a few emails that you actually want to respond to. Learn about new tools to help protect you from spam, prioritize your inbox, and save you time. Don't be a slave to your inbox!

Should I Build my Startup on Ruby on Rails? Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

You've heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You've also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Hackproofing Ruby-on-Rails Web Applications Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Ruby-on-Rails makes building web applications deceptively simple, and for most Rails startups, security is usually an afterthought. Through a live coding demonstration, I will demonstrate how thinking from the attacker's perspective can help you protect sensitive data and avoid the pain of a hacking incident.

Scaling Ruby-on-Rails Using Cloud Computing Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails "can't scale". In this talk, I prove them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Will include a case study and live scaling demonstration.

Email Deliverability Secrets from Deliverability.com Dennis Dayman, Eloqua & Joshua Baer, Datran Media

Okay so you have read all the white papers about email deliverability and you've got the basics covered - but some of your email still goes to the spam folder. Learn about advanced techniques for segmenting by IP address, building your email reputation, removing spamtraps, and more. Find out how to get your problems priority access from ISPs like Hotmail or Yahoo. Plus we'll take 3 volunteers from the audience and help to diagnose your deliverability challenges on the spot!

Spend More & Pay Less: How to Create a Great Company Culture Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Learn from successful entrepreneurs the do's and don'ts of building a company culture. Take home a list of specific ideas you can implement to make your employees perform better and increase their loyalty. What's the rationale behind providing free drinks, catered meals or free cab rides? How much strategy and financial information is appropriate to share with the entire company? Can employees work from home? How do you celebrate your successes? Find out what really works and what is just a waste of time and money.

Hire an Employee, Hire a Local Contractor, or Outsource it Overseas? Steve Bell, ShangBy.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Should you hire employees in-house, work with local contractors, or outsource overseas? Learn the overall pros and cons as well as the specific exceptions. Hear personal success stories and horror stories from entrepreneurs who have extensive experience building products in-house and overseas. At the end, we'll take specific examples from the crowd and give recommendations on how to proceed and who to work with.

So You Want to be an Angel Investor? Hall T. Martin, Central Texas Angel Network & Joshua Baer, Austinpreneur

Wishing you were an early investor in Facebook? Have some extra cash? Or maybe you just love talking to startups? Whatever your reason is, Angel Investing can be fun and financially rewarding. As software and hardware costs go down, many startups don't need as much money and Angel investors become more attractive than venture capitalists. Hear from a panel of experienced Angels to learn basic strategy, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms and find other investors to partner with.

The New Inbox Mark Schmulen, NutshellMail & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Everyone knows that email is the killer app. But we get so much email that we're in danger of information overload - and its only going to get worse. New paradigms for email are evolving to help prioritize the email you want and ignore the email you don't want. Hear from the innovators in Inbox management about what to expect in the years to come.

Bootstrap Your Startup Bijoy Goswami, bijoygoswami.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Virgin were bootstrap companies that were able to get started without raising traditional venture capital. Bootstrapping is not just capital efficient, it has many other positive influences on your business and your potential to profit from its success. Learn why you should consider the bootstrap method and ask questions of a successful bootstrap entrepreneur.

And here are some other friends doing panels that are also worth voting for:

Widgets and Mashups - Enablers or Risky Business?
David Altounian, iTaggit Inc.

Time-to-market demands on web developers are leading to the creation of widgets, mashups, and embed code to add functionality to sites. This panel will explore the options, benefits, and risks of using third party sites and modules.

Dancing With Zombies: Monetizing the 'Old Media' Graveyard Matt Cohen, OneSpot

With online content exploding, the “old media” deathwatch has become a popular spectator sport. But with large financial war chests, millions of readers, and a burning need to re-invent their business models, big media brands aren’t joining the departed anytime soon. They’re just turning into something new. This panel will contemplate the old media metamorphosis and discuss why these brands will offer substantial syndication and revenue opportunities to third party online publishers in the years ahead.

Blog Revenue Strategies for the Web Discovery Era Matt Cohen, OneSpot

What will it mean to be a professional blogger three years from now? As the Web becomes more intelligent, bloggers must be prepared to evolve their publishing, syndication and monetization strategies. A better collective understanding of individual consumers, “smarter” content aggregation tools and new models for content distribution will transform the current landscape, creating new opportunities for market leadership and revenue generation. This panel will examine the major trends at work, and dig deeply into these new opportunities for the online publisher.

PR for Pirates Jeremy Bencken, BuzzStream

Doing your own PR? How to use the latest tools and techniques for finding the right bloggers & reporters, researching their contact info, writing a great pitch, and conducting highly personalized outreach, without making it your full-time job.

The Whole Business Web - Making the Shift Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

The accelerating emergence of Web 2.0 and the new converged digital social media enables business to move all its processes, not just sales/marketing/PR, out of the deep-hierarchy low-velocity world of conventional mass-based operations, up into the high-knowledge high-velocity network structures of the Web, creating a whole new platform in which the old tradeoffs of quality vs. speed vs. cost no longer apply. This panel explores how the Whole Business Web is emerging, and how you can make the shift now.

Making Green Visible Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

Sustainability requires informed buyers. The accelerating convergence of real and virtual is opening vast new potentials for us to make the “green” visible in every purchase by increasing the interaction between the product and the buyer, making the product’s true history and composition transparent. This panel explores these trends and the globally emerging new technologies and businesses working to make this happen.

Showtime -- Bringing the Co-Web to a Screen Near You! Andrew Donoho, IBM

The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged web, is upon us. Showtime uses Web 2.0 technologies (OpenAJAX, XMPP and RTP/RTSP) to build a Co-Web page where we all interact on the same data at the same time, see the same context and make better decisions as a result.

Measuring the Health of Your Online Community: Metrics That Don't Suck Miles Sims, Small World Labs

There is a lot of buzz today around measuring & defining community health. This panel will focus on the right way to work WITH your community to measure success and make sure value is being provided for both sides.

In the Cloud: Massively Parallel Computing for Everyone Mason Hale, OneSpot

"Machine learning" once implied PhD's and racks of servers. No more. With projects like EC2, Hadoop and Mahout, and accessible texts lining bookstore shelves, advanced distributed computing techniques are going mainstream. After introducing the basics of map/reduce and collaborative filtering we will ponder the possibilities of web-scale computing for everyone.

Martha Stewart-izing Your Site with Rich Complementary Content Steve Waters, OneSpot

Recipe for Vertical Media Destination Site: Place high volumes of exceptional content in bowl. Add 2 cups of affinity focus. Stir in 1 cup of SEO flavoring for richness. Bake at 500 degrees all day. Serve hot. Repeat indefinitely. Until now, only fabulously wealthy master chefs could make this dish, because only they could afford the staff and tools necessary for its successful creation. This panel will explore the emerging content syndication trends and technologies that are allowing the rest of us to turn our humble sites into vertical media destinations. Felony conviction not included.

Lessons Learned from the Open Source Software Neelan Choksi, SpringSource

Open Source Software, once considered revolutionary, has increasingly been accepted as mainstream. In this panel of some of the most experienced open source leaders and analysts, we will explore what has made open source successful and what lessons all businesses can learn from this paradigm shifting technology.

Making Money with Royalties and Revenue Share Agreements
Lou Ellman, RoyaltyZone

Technology companies often enter licensing or partnership agreements to target new markets and increase revenue. The panel will discuss common licensing agreement strategies, keys for success, and effective ways for companies to track and monitor agreement performance.

FundingSleuth.com sends email alerts when companies raise money

First Round Capital released a cool new tool for entrepreneurs and investors called FundingSleuth.com. It lets you enter in companies to watch and automatically sends an email alert if that company files a sale of securities with the SEC.

If you work for a funded company, you should sign up and watch your employer. If you are an entrepreneur, you should watch your own company so that you know when your fundraising becomes public information. If you're an investor, you should watch your portfolio so that you know about other fundraising. If you're just really interested in a particular startup, you might want to monitor their fundraising.

Thanks for this cool, free tool!

Venture-backed IPO recession?

This BusinessWeek video clip points out that there were only 5 venture-backed IPO's in the first quarter of 2008 and ZERO venture-backed IPO's in the second quarter. The VC's blame Sarbanes-Oxley, picky entrepreneurs and globalization as the cause and suggest that we make a concerted effort to save venture capital by raising awareness and easing some expensive accounting requirements.

Hat tip to Barry Thornton

Necessity is the mother of Invention (and winning Chinese battles)

I'm reading Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, and came across a story that reminded me of bootstrapping a company.

In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off the attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all the cooking pots crushed.

With their ships gone, the soldiers had no route of retreat. Winning was the only option. And win they did. 9 battles in a row before defeating the Qin forces.

This is similar to when a bootstrapper enters the Valley of Death and commits to their venture, but before they are making money and cash flow positive. They are forced to figure out how to make it work with what they've got. The timeline is not completely in their control.

We're always tempted to leave ourselves an escape route or path of retreat. And usually that's a good idea. But sometimes there aren't enough resources to mount the attack and cover the retreat. In order to be successful sometimes you have to commit the resources to what you believe in because the retreat option isn't acceptable. Sometimes once you head down a path there is just no turning back, so you might as well commit all of your resources to getting to the end.

When I was CEO of SKYLIST, this happened twice. We were growing and needed to shift focus based on customer demand and a rapidly changing market. Both of those times it was focused on eliminating unprofitable customers and focusing sales on specific types of opportunities. Each resulted in a temporary drop in revenue but strengthened the long term sustainability and profitability of the company.

When Datran Media bought SKYLIST, we went through the same exercise again. Each time the SKYLIST business came out stronger than before and had replaced the revenue with better customers within a year.

Each time it was the right thing to do and left us stronger than before, but each time we went into it kicking and screaming. Change is hard. When something works, we often get the urge to just do that over and over - well past the point where it stops working. It felt bad to move away from lines of business we had traditionally dominated.

But it was turning point for the company. Had we not burned the ships behind us, I'm not sure we would have survived and succeeded.

Bootstrapping is Effectual, not Causal

Last year I read about a paper by Saras Sarasvathy titled, "What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?". Bijoy Goswami and others in the Bootstrap-Austin group praised it and so I filed it in my "Stuff to Read" folder and just got around to reading it this weekend.

With only 8 pages of text, it was a quick read. While the article doesn't talk about bootstrapping specifically, it immediately resonates with any true bootstrapper and has a lot in common with Demo, Sell, Build.

Saras explains the "common sense" model of causal reasoning, where you first select a goal, come up with a strategy to achieve the plan, acquire the necessary resources, and finally execute on the plan. This sounds perfectly logical and is the way that many people go about planning a new business.

But then she defines effectual reasoning, where you start by evaluating the resources you have and figuring out what you can do with them. What are you excited about? What skills do you have? What relationships can you leverage to your advantage? Once you have a place to start, get to market quickly and learn from your customers. Then start the process over now that you have more information.

In comparison, causal reasoning seems rigid and inflexible. Effectual reasoning is fast to start, low risk to experiment with and has faster iterations. By getting to market quickly and incorporating user feedback, effectual reasoning is more likely to produce the best product and better able to respond to a rapidly changing marketplace. Too often with causal reasoning, it takes so long to get to market that the market changes before you get there.

When I started SKYLIST at Carnegie Mellon, I didn't have some grand plan - I mostly just did things that people offered to pay me to do. I got into email hosting because I was rejected for the WebSTAR beta program but was accepted for the ListSTAR beta program. My first customers were all relationships that I developed while working with ListSTAR at StarNine. I used the PowerMac 7100 that my parents bought me for college to host them and I stuck it on the school network in my dorm room.

Starting UnsubCentral was a similar story. I wasn't planning on starting a new company. The CAN-SPAM law was passed in December 2003 and the opportunity presented itself. I didn't spend a lot of time researching the market - I just dove in and started building it and we launched the product in January. I thought all our customers would be other email service providers like SKYLIST - because that was what I knew the best. But it turns out that our primary customer base was advertisers because that's who is directly responsible under the law. Fortunately we built the right product and just had to refocus our sales efforts on the right customer.

And my current startup, OtherInbox, is no exception. I looked around at the problems with my own email that I want to solve. I leveraged more than a decade of experience working with email marketing in designing the initial solution. I taught myself Ruby On Rails and built a demo myself. Then I started using it.

After convincing myself that I was on the right track, I partnered with a friend from Carnegie Mellon to start building a version that could support multiple users. I recruited some of my close friends as beta testers. Right now we're learning more every day about how people use it and we're iterating until we have it right.

I'm not saying we won't ever take an investment. In fact its very likely that we'll need to raise money at some point in order to ramp up customer acquisition or to expand internationally. But the longer we can put it off, the more we'll understand exactly what to do with the money we raise. The more we understand our customers and our model, the less equity we'll have to give up.

Great Greenling story on FOX 7

There is a great story on Greenling Organic Delivery on FOX 7. I'm an investor in Greenling and on the board of directors. And I'm a happy customer!

Texchange dinner tonight - "The New VC Math: Does Less = More?"

Tonight I'll be leading a table discussion at the Texchange dinner with topic:
The New VC Math: Does Less = More?

With hardware costs dropping and open source software booming, the capital requirements of most Internet business are also dropping. Sounds like bootstrapping to me!

Panelists

Moderator:
Charley Dean – Principal, Silverton Partners

Panelists:
Brett Hurt – Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice
Mike Maples – Founder and Managing Partner, Maples Investments
Bill Wood – Founder, Silverton Partners

Discussion Leaders

Joshua Baer – Founder & CEO, OtherInbox
Tom Ball – Partner, Austin Ventures
William Chan – VP Products & Co-founder, Crimson Services
Matt Chasen – Founder & CEO, uShip
Morgan Flager – Silverton Partners
Scott Gardner – CFO, Metrosol
Jason Reneau – Founder & CEO, Mindbites
Michael Wilson – Founder & CEO, SmallWorldLabs
Jim Yang – Founder & CEO, Identyx

Precisely wrong

At the Rice Alliance Startup Workshop this weekend I listened to Corey Blahuta talk about financial issues for startups. When talking about a company's initial projections, he pointed out that the first draft is surely "precisely wrong."

These projections usually take the form of a big Excel spreadsheet, although I've taken to doing them in Google Docs so that everyone can work off of the same version of the spreadsheet and I can feed in live data from my website.

For a B2C Internet business, the model starts with marketing and customer acquisition and then flows through website conversion, user adoption, user activity, advertising inventory, advertising sell-through, collections, fixed and variable costs, and finally revenue and profit.

For a B2B business, the model usually starts with salespeople, who make a certain number of phone calls, to get a certain number of meetings, that results in contracts being sent out, that results in closed deals, that results in collected revenue, that results in expenses, that results in profit.

The goal is to show how you put in money on one end (by hiring salespeople or spending it on marketing) and then more money comes out the other end (after expenses).

The initial projections are based on many assumptions that have not been validated, so of course they won't be exactly right. Often, the initial projections are orders of magnitude off of the actual performance.

That doesn't mean its not worth making projections. One of the audience members asked why you would even make the projections if you know they are not right, suggesting that it was a waste of time.

The point of your initial projections is not to try and estimate exactly how the company will perform over the next 3 years and what the costs will be. The point of the projections is to develop a mental model for thinking about the business and tools for discussing different scenarios and tradeoffs. By creating a model for the business you have something to poke at and talk about with your team and advisors.

Any good model is based on a list of assumptions, and at the start of your business most of those assumptions will feel like throwing darts with a blindfold on - not very accurate. But by listing them out, you can see the relative impact of one versus another. And as you learn more, you can update the assumptions to be more accurate.

Another use of the model is to compare your business to others that are similar. Say you are trying to figure out your customer acquisition cost. You should estimate what you think it will cost based on advertising rates and conversion rates. But then you should compare your customer acquisition cost to what you can find out about the customer acquisition cost of companies that are similar to yours. Chances are you will have a similar cost structure to them. If your number is way less than theirs, you might want to check if there is anything you have overlooked.

Investors and advisors who have seen other business know what its supposed to look like. They can help you identify hidden costs that you have missed or other revenue opportunities you are not considering.

Creating a model isn't just something that should be done when your planning a company or fundraising. You should be constantly updating your assumptions as you go. Within your model, you should identify a few key metrics that you can focus on to optimize your business.

Great legal blog for startups

Brian Spross has started a legal blog focused on technology startups... already some good stuff posted there! It's worth subscribing to!

Total Leadership

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Stewart Friedman, professor at Wharton and author of the new book Total Leadership. Much thanks to Brett Hurt for introducing me!

Stew has an interesting perspective on how to maximize your success and happiness by integrating work, community, family and self in a holistic way. He provides specific exercises to help you discover what works best for you and to empower your employees to do the same. After a few hours with Stew, I'm re-evaluating some of my choices and priorities. I'm looking forward to reading the book!

Tonight he'll be speaking at a Leadership Austin and Bootstrap Austin event hosted by BazaarVoice and I highly encourage you to attend if you can make time!

Austin Rice Alliance Start-up Mentoring Workshop

On Saturday I'll be participating for the second time in the Austin Rice Alliance Start-up Mentoring Workshop.

Last year this was a lot of fun and I got to meet Jeremy Bencken and learn about ApartmentRatings.com and TenantMarket.com. It wasn't long before he sold them to InternetBrands!

In addition to mentoring, Bijoy asked me to give the Bootstrap presentation to the group. I've probably seen Bijoy give it 20 times, so I feel like I could already repeat it by heart - but I'm looking forward to adding my own twist to it!

You can view or download the slides from my presentation here.

Bootstrap Rice Alliance 20080517 - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: Bootstrap Rice Alliance 20080517

Joshua Baer speaking2008@joshuabaer.com http://www.austinpreneur.com/ Definiton: boot·strap Definiton: boot·strap noun 1. a loop of leather or cloth sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to facilitate pulling it on. Dictionary.com
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2006. Definiton: boot·strap noun 2. a means of advancing oneself or accomplishing something: He used his business experience as a bootstrap to win voters. Dictionary.com
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2006. Definiton: boot·strap adjective 3. relying entirely on one's efforts and resources: The business was a bootstrap operation for the first ten years. Dictionary.com
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2006. Definiton: boot·strap adjective 4. self-generating or self-sustaining: a bootstrap process. Dictionary.com
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2006. Definiton: boot·strap verb 5. to help (oneself) without the aid of others: She spent years bootstrapping herself through college. Dictionary.com
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2006. Definiton: boot·strap verb 6. to create a company by use of one's own initiative and work without reliance on outside investment Dictionary.com
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2006. It’s worked before It worked for me D L O S D L O S How about you? Right Action, Right Time Use what you don’t have Demo, Sell, Build (demo - maven) Ideation • Don’t quit your day job • The Human Fabric • The Power of Two • Build the best demo you can • Prepare for the Valley of Death Valley of Death (sell - evangelist) • Take the plunge • Find customers • Fail quickly • Figure out your model • Necessity is the mother of invention! (build - relater) Growth • Time to fix everything that’s broken • Focus on the organization • Focus on recruiting • Most founders get bored • Time to raise capital? Repeat the Cycle Capital Agile Resources • Bootstrap Austin Community http://www.bootstrap.org/playbook • Bootstrap Austin Meetings http://www.bootstrap.org/meetings • Bootstrap Austin Blog http://www.bootstrapaustin.org/ • My blog http://www.austinpreneur.com/ Joshua Baer speaking2008@joshuabaer.com http://www.austinpreneur.com/

I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at Datran Media on Thursday, May 15

On Thursday May 15 I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday third Thursday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown).

We'll have free pizza (thanks Datran!) at 6pm and things will officially start at 6:30pm and wrap up at 8pm.

Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistead from Social Web Strategies will be talking about The Headless Organization:

Throughout the history of the Internet, we’ve seen an explosion of new, relatively frictionless communication channels, broad access to the means of media production, and a blurring of the distinctions between professional and personal media. We’ve seen an ascendance of many-to-many communications resulting in “out of control” communications, flatter hierarchies, and the emergence of new, agile forms of social and political organization. The rise of networked communications and the appearance of robust platforms for social networking has been accompanied by an increasing tendency for groups to self-organize — and the proliferation of entities referred to as leaderless or “headless” organizations. In May’s SMC presentation, we’ll consider how these headless organizations have evolved, discuss some examples, and talk about challenges, limits, and potential future developments.

I'm looking to hire a product manager in the social media space for Datran Media as well as Facebook app developers for Datran Media and OtherInbox. If you know of anyone who might be a good fit, please encourage them to register for the meeting and introduce themselves to me.

Hiring Developers - ROR / Java / .NET / Facebook / OpenSocial

My new startup, OtherInbox is looking for experienced Ruby On Rails developers. We're a small team working in an Agile environment on an innovative consumer service. Our development team is led by Steven Smith, founder of FiveRuns. If you know of someone to recommend, please email jobs@otherinbox.com - we'll pay you $1,000 if we hire your referral!

We also need help with web browser toolbar extensions for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. We'd love to find one person who can do all three but it seems more likely that we'll find a specialist for each browser. There will be a big project up front and then ongoing maintenance.

Datran Media is looking for developers who are excited about building social networking apps of all types. We need Java and .NET developers to work on our StormPost Social Connector platform as well as standalone Facebook applications. Email joshua.baer@datranmedia.com if you know someone!

Get Brian Spross while you can

Well, I've been waiting for 10 years for this to happen. Brian Spross finally went out on his own full time! Startups around Austin are rejoicing!

I have been working with Brian for many years on hundreds of deals and haven't met a more responsive, reliable, and knowledgable contract attorney. Beyond his legal expertise, Brian brings a mix of real-world business acumin and experience that allow his to easily balance and contrast the tradeoffs between business and legal risk.

I first started working with Brian in 1999 at Trilogy Software. Since then, he's helped me to start, grow and sell multiple businesses.

I can't imagine that he will be accepting new clients for long. He's already working with some great companies and when they find out he's available they will want to get more of his time. Hire him now while you can!

To contact Brian, I'd connect to him on LinkedIn

"Get out of my way you stupid programmers!" says the CFO

I'm playing around with Google Spreadsheets as a platform for backend application reporting and its quite promising so far. They key to it are special functions that you can use in a spreadsheet cell to import data from XML, CSV, RSS or even a well formatted web page with HTML tables or lists.


=importXML("URL","query")
=importData("URL")
=ImportHtml(URL, "list" | "table", index)
=ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems])


Full documentation is here.

From what I can tell, every time you open the spreadsheet it reloads all the files. It does not seem to update the spreadsheet real-time with new data as you are editing it - but I think that's probably for the best.

Lets face it, most of the important data from our website activity and logs ends up in a spreadsheet at some point. The data is needed by the CFO for reconciling expenses, recording business metrics and generating future projections. Operations needs to monitor the health of the system.

In many companies, however, these requests are fulfilled by separate database admins and programmers because the CFO is not empowered to get the data himself. There is lots of, "I'm waiting to get that data back from the Reporting department." Not only does this slow things down, but causes the CFO and other decision makers to ask fewer questions. Asking fewer questions is bad! Being able to easily ask lots of questions is very good!

When something is fast and easy, you can try 10 different combinations and see what's best. When something is slow and painful, you try your best to get it right the first time. The first method seems to produce better results in my experience. It's usually better to iterate rapidly and allow for failures in the process than to try and get it perfect.

This is very similar to how email marketing tools evolved. In the beginning, the programmers for your application or website also wrote the content for the email messages it would send. Over time, the marketers took over control of the content. But then every time they wanted to change the content, they needed to go ask the programmers. While there are many other reasons to use an Email Service Provider (ESP), I believe this was actually one of the most compelling reasons at first.

So what I'm doing to start is creating a data feed of user activity. It's a daily snapshot that shows the total number of users, number of pageviews, advertising inventory generated, etc. This automatically becomes a spreadsheet in Google with a row for each day. Now the CFO can do whatever he wants with it from within the spreadsheet. Every once in a while he may have to ask the programmers to add a new column or data point to the data feed, but he doesn't have to go through someone else to get at the data and manipulate it.

Ideally, you would just dump all the raw data and logs into the spreadsheet. I haven't tested this to see how much data they will take, but I just assumed that wouldn't work. But the more granular you can get, the more the CFO can work independently without depending on others to program new reports. Rather than using a PHP or ROR charting package, you just use the spreadsheet. It's much faster and easier. You can make 2 different spreadsheets with the same data feeding into them to compare different theories.

I'm still just getting started with this and will post more examples and real-world usage data soon. If you try this out, I'd like to hear about your experiences.

Startup on Google

I've helped a number of startups and non-profits to get up and running on Google for their email, calendar and document collaboration and have been pleased with the results. And so far, I haven't found any need to upgrade from the free Standard Edition to the Premier Edition with a yearly fee (although I'm sure that there are many situations where it is appropriate).

Because everything is "open", it's safe to try out Google without having to worry about being "locked in". You can switch to another solution at any time without losing any data.

What do you get?

POP/IMAP/Webmail email accounts with plenty of storage space

A full-featured calendar that works over the web or syncs with Windows Outlook and Mac iCal

Web-based equivalents of Word, Excel and Powerpoint

Secure instant messaging, internet phone and videoconference

Simple website tools and hosting

Everything is secure and encrypted

It's all a-la-carte so you can pick which pieces you want to use. I recommend most organizations start by moving over their email accounts first and then start using the shared calendar and documents. The rest of the services can be added as/if needed.

What does it cost?
Nothing!

That's right, it's free! It is one of the most reliable email services and also has more features than just about anyone else. All things considered, it is clearly the best value and arguably the best at any cost.

I really find it hard to imagine why anyone would pay for a slow, unreliable email service from their ISP when they could have a best-of-breed solution for free. If you really want to have someone to call for support (even though you'll probably never need it), you can pay $50 per user per year for the Premier Edition.

To start using Google, you first go to their site and create an account for your domain. You probably have an existing domain name that you want to use. Creating the account at Google doesn't do anything to change your current domain, so you can go ahead and sign up without worrying about screwing anything up.

You can also switch over your email for just a few accounts without doing everything at once - a great way to test it out and get comfortable with it.