austinpreneur

Top 11 Austin Startups to Meet at #SXSW

Inspired by Evan Baehr's Top 10 Austinites to Meet at SXSW, I've taken my own crack at the Top 11 Austin Startups to Meet at SXSW:

1. Forecast - Their location-based app for telling friends where you will be keeps getting better and better and so does their traction. I find myself using this app more and more. Meet Rene Pinnell @RJPinnell or Eric Katerman @geometrid. (I'm an investor through CF 2010)
2. Greenling - They are making us all healthier by delivering organic and local food straight to our doorsteps. They just expanded to Dallas and practically doubled their revenue overnight. This model is ready to scale. Meet Mason Arnold @masonarnold. (I'm on the Board of Directors)
3. Mass Relevance - They are powering most of the social media at SXSW and on most of the broadcast TV shows you see. Check out their SXSW real-time feed. Meet Sam Decker @SamDecker or Brian Dainton @bdainton. (I'm an investor)
4. Onespot - They recently re-invented themselves and the new model is HOT. They have more friendly, more effective way of using display ads to drive traffic. Meet Matt Cohen @zencohen or Ian Clarke @sanity. (I'm an investor)
5. Outbox - They have an ambitious goal - to kill the postal service and digitize everything. Team comes from Facebook and HBS and they have attracted the best investors in the world (including me!). Meet Evan Baehr @evanbaehr.
6. OwnLocal - They are actually making money off newspapers. I swear! Meet Lloyd Armbrust @lloydarmbrust. (I'm an investor, also Y Combinator)
7. RecycleMatch - They pivoted from a marketplace to an enteprise software play and have a big pipeline with the biggest companies in the world. Meet Brooke Farrell @brookebf. (I'm an investor through CF 2010)
8. Socialware - They make social media work for financial services. Nuff said. Meet Chad Bockius @bockius.
9. Sparefoot - They guys killed it when they went through Capital Factory and they have killed it every day since then. I can see how this might be a billion dollar opportunity. Sparefoot makes self-storage sexy. Meet Chuck Gordon and Mario Feghali @MarioFeghali. (I'm an investor through CF 2009)
10. StormPulse - Hurricane season is coming in a few months and StormPulse is batting down the hatches and getting the servers ready for the cyclical surge of traffic. Weather is not a fad, it's a long term trend that affects almost every business on the planet more and more. Meet Matt Wensing @mattwensing and Brad Wiemerslage @wiemersl. (I'm an investor)
11. Volunteerspot - This mega-viral site is growing like a weed with no marketing spend and extremely high user engagement. Meanwhile, they are amassing an audience of affluent, active Moms with kids that has the attention of big brands. Meet Karen Bantuveris @VSpotMom. (I'm an investor)

Then there is Indeed.com - So under the radar. So awesome. Not sure if you could still call them a startup. Meet Rony Kahan.

Oh yeah, and of course don't miss out on these CloudSMTP, OtherInbox and the ballers at WP Engine!

And not quite startups, you should also check out our latest IPO success stories - HomeAway (AWAY) and Bazaarvoice (BV).

I'm sorry to anyone I left out... there are so many other great Austin startups and I'm writing this at 1am after my first day of SXSW. I love all Austin startups!

What are your favorite Austin startups? Tell me on Twitter @JoshuaBaer

How I use iPhoto to publish to Facebook

I have a pretty good routine down now for uploading and sharing my photos and videos on my Mac and in the cloud. Good because I'm able to do it frequently (a few times a week) and don't spend too much time on it (usually about 15 minutes). This system is actually based on a similar method for managing music songs and playlists that I use for iTunes.

I manage them in iPhoto, edit them in iMovie, and share them online via Facebook, Flickr and YouTube and also through devices such as my iPhone, screensavers and digital picture frames. I'm able to upload a lot of content with minimal time.

Here is what I do after returning from a trip or event where I took pictures and video.

First, I organize the photos:

1. Connect USB cable to camera, videocamera, and iPhone. iPhoto automatically launches and goes directly to the Import screen.
2. Click Import in iPhoto to copy photos from camera to computer
3. Hygiene - delete bad photos and duplicate photos in iPhoto
4. Tagging - Add tags to photos in iPhoto
5. Ratings - Rate all photos 3 stars in iPhoto
6. Ratings - Upgrade individual photos to 4 or 5 stars in iPhoto
7. Events - Break into Events if needed and name events in iPhoto
8. Smart Albums - Update MobileMe galleries by dragging and dropping new photos from Smart Albums in iPhoto

Next, I publish them to various physical devices and online:

1. Screensaver on my computer
2. iPhone Photo Albums
3. Digital Picture Frames
4. Facebook Photos - Publish new photos to Facebook from iPhoto, then update permissions from Facebook website
5. Flickr Photos - Publish new photos to Flickr if appropriate
6. iMovie Editing - Edit videos in iMovie if necessary (usually not)
7. Facebook Video - Drag videos to the desktop and then upload individually to Facebook and YouTube

Usually this entire process takes about 15 minutes. If its after a big trip with 1000 photos and a bunch of video then maybe an hour or two.

Do I have to use a Mac?

This is one of those places where the Mac really shines. No one has made it so simple to manage your photos, videos and music and the software is all completely free with every Mac. Everything is integrated and mostly automatic. You plug in the camera and it launches iPhoto and goes right to the Import screen. My screensaver automatically gets the latest pictures and so does my iPhone when it syncs. Everything is automatic. Everything is easy.

Tagging

I'm pretty religious about tagging my photos and videos. I have about 20 tags that I use to keep things straight. Most photos get 2 or 3 tags.

A few tags may eventually be replaced by iPhoto facial recognition - I've played with it a bunch but I haven't integrated it into my process yet. I also need to work geolocation tagging into this process.

The most common tags that I use now are:

• Family Members *
• Josh *
• Baer **
• Family **
• Friends **
• Business
• OtherInbox
• Capital Factory
• Ignite Austin
• Home 
• Holiday
• Travel
• Cars
• Dogs
• Documents (pictures of awards, certificates, etc.)

* could be replaced by facial recognition
** could be replaced by facial recognition if it had groups

I can use the same criteria to do one-off searches and I have found it to be very easy to find specific pictures I'm looking for. Usually I can just narrow it down to 2 or 3 tags and then scan chronologically to find it.

Ratings

iPhoto has a five star rating system. My default rating is 3 stars. After deleting bad photos that are out of focus and duplicate shots, I "select all" and set the ratings to 3 stars. Then I look through them for any that I want to upgrade to 4 stars or 5 stars.

• 5 stars - the very best pictures
• 4 stars - better than average, but not the very best
• 3 stars - default rating for pictures that are worth keeping
• 2 stars - below average, but kept for completeness (usually pictures from an event)
• 1 star - never show in albums, probably some special case, not usually normal pictures

By rating every photo, I can create Smart Albums (below) that contain my "best" pictures from the past few months. Or I can combine with Tags to search for the "best pictures of Cars".

 

 
 

Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like "saved searches." I combine Tagging and Ratings to create Smart Albums that update their content automatically. I then connect these Smart Albums to screensavers, my iPhone, and the albums that I publish to Facebook.

My most frequently used Smart Albums are:

• Kids Best - tagged Kids and rated 5 stars
• Kids Recent - taken in the past 3 months, tagged Kids and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Best - taken in the past 3 months and rated 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Recent - taken in the past 3 months and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• Family Best - tagged Family and rated 4 or 5 stars
• Travel Best - tagged Travel and rated 5 stars
• Amy & Josh - tagged Amy and Josh and rated 5 stars

How do I decide how many stars? Mostly be trial an error. I start with 4 and 5 stars and if that is too many then I just go with 5 stars. If its not enough then I go to 3, 4 and 5 stars.

 

 

iMovie Editing

iMovie is a simple video editing application that comes pre-installed on most Macs. It's really easy to make professional looking videos with it. You can easily cut and paste clips together, overlay slides from a presentation, add titles and effects, and more.

It is integrated with iPhoto - so as long as I upload my photos and movies into iPhoto (which is what happens by default when I plug a camera into my Mac) then iMovie can automatically see all of those media assets and I can drag and drop them into movies I'm editing.

Facebook

For photos, I usually let iPhoto organize them into Events and end up wanting to publish Events as Albums on Facebook. After all of the hygiene, tagging, and rating, I'm usually left with exactly the group of photos I might want to share. So I just name the Event the same name I would want the Album to be named in Facebook and then click the Facebook icon in the bottom right of the iPhoto window.

 

 

If you want to share your photos with Everyone or with Just Friends, its easy. You just click go and you're done. I think that somehow it even matches up the facial recognition and will automatically tag photos with your friends.

If you want to share the album privately on Facebook with only certain people, it gets a little tricky. iPhoto only gives you the option to share your album with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Just Friends. Most of the photos that I share are only shared with certain Facebook Friend Lists and not with Everyone. So I have to publish from iPhoto to Just Friends and then immediately go to the web page and reset the privacy controls from the web after the first photo is uploaded. Even still, I've had a few times where some friends on Facebook have seen pictures (I know because they commented on them) that they weren't supposed to see (fortunately nothing embarrassing, just cute family pictures).

 

 

This only works for uploading photos to your own personal account. Once they are in your account, you can easily post them to a Facebook event. However, if you want to post pictures to a Facebook Page for your company, you need to export the photos to a folder and then use the Facebook photo upload process from the web page.

For videos, it's similar to Facebook pages. You have to upload the video files directly using the Facebook web page. I usually end up dragging and dropping the video from iPhoto onto the desktop so that its easy to find when I'm uploading it to Facebook.

Flickr

I don't really publish many photos to Flickr but it works with iPhoto a lot like Facebook.

YouTube

Publishing movies isn't quite as simple with YouTube. The maximum time is 10 minutes, so long movies require extra editing to chop them up into 10 minute chunks and upload them each separately. This is a big pain in the ass and is making me seriously consider switching the bulk of my video to Vimeo because it has fewer limitations.

iPhone

My iPhone automatically syncs the Smart Albums to my iPhone, so it always has the best and most recent pictures on it. You configure that from within iTunes.

Screensavers

You can choose a Smart Album as a screensaver on a Mac, so I usually have the "3 Months Best" album with the Ken Burns effect on my screen. Its counter-intuitive to me at first, but I find that I prefer seeing the most recent pictures all the time, not the best old ones over and over.

Just go to the Screen Saver in the System Preferences and your iPhoto Albums and Events will appear in the list. Sometimes it takes a minute for them to appear.

 

 

Digital Picture Frames

I have a Philips digital picture frame on my desk. Unfortunately the only way to transfer pictures is by connecting it to a computer via USB or using SD memory cards. This means manually dragging and dropping images from iPhoto to the SD card and physically moving around the cards or cables every time you want to sync them. I'd really like to find a good digital picture frame that would stream the photos off of iPhoto (the problem with Facebook is that the pictures are so low quality).

What about you?

How do you manage your photos? Any tips on how to make my process smoother or more automated? Have you worked facial recognition and geo-location into your process? Please comment.

It's evolution - physical signatures need to evolve or die

 

In general I think that physical signatures are archaic and not that meaningful. It's not impossible to forge a physical signature by hand and its even easier with computers. More and more documents are made into PDF's so you end up with digital copies of your signature being sent around in insecure emails. 

This is about evolution and survival of the fittest. Physical signatures are slow, stupid and ugly and they should get eaten by the digital signatures. 

 Here are some things to consider:

• Have you ever sent signature pages for a contract without the rest of the pages?
• Do you regularly compare (using "Find Differences" in Microsoft Word) the "final version" of a contract against the redline version to make sure its correct?
• Do you regularly initial every page of a contract, in addition to signing the signature page?
• Do you have a scanned copy of your signature that you just cut and paste onto digital contracts? 
• Do you use a convenient service like Zosh to save time executing PDF agreements by email?
• Do you always get back the countersigned document with BOTH signatures on it?

How hard would it be for someone to take your signature off of one document and cut and paste it onto another one? How hard would it be for someone to take a 10 page contract with your signature on it and swap out one of the pages in the middle with different terms.

Even worse, many people these days just sign the signature pages and send them separately from the rest of the pages. At that point, the other party can attach whatever they want to the beginning of it.

And it doesn't have to be a malicous act. What if someone just sends you the wrong final contract to sign. Would you notice? What if they send an old version by accident?

I know what you're thinking... I'm being paranoid. No one does stuff like this right? I must admit that no one has ever done anything like this to me before. However, if you put any faith in physically signing a document to begin with, I think these are all reasonable concerns. 

So here is how I sign contracts:

1. Compare the final version to the last redline that I approved to make sure I'm signing the same document I think I am.
2. Initial the bottom of every page of the document (except the signature page). If a page has blank space, initial at the end of the text not at the bottom of the page.
3. Always send the entire document, never just the signature pages. At least this way I have record of the fax or email with all of the pages together in one place so I can prove what I signed.
4. When I send my signed contract, I create a reminder to make sure I receive my countersigned copy.

EXCEPTION: If I'm working with two lawfirms (mine and the opposing counsel) and they are handling all of the paperwork then I expect them to be responsible for most of the process I outline above. In those cases I'm comfortable signing only the signature pages and putting them with the lawyers "in escrow" until we agree on the final document.

How long will it take for physical signatures to go away? They really are an archaic legacy of the pre-digital age. A signed document doesn't "prove" much it just makes us feel good. It helps to avoid confusion by making it clear what copy of the document is the final one. There are better ways to handle this today, such as digital signatures and other forms of authentication. However, they are still "geeky" tools that haven't hit the mainstream. 

Companies like EchoSign are paving the way for a more secure and more efficient way to execute documents and its slowly taking on. Recently I signed an NDA with Microsoft using a fully digital signature process and so I'm optimistic that over the next 5 to 10 years we will see most large businesses moving away from physical signatures and towards something like Echosign's model.

How do you sign contracts? Do you take any other precautions besides the ones I list here?

We need new security questions - obscurity is no defense in the long tail of social networking

Everyone knows that financial institutions are behind the times with technology and are way too paranoid to participate in social media. But it seems like they aren't paying enough attention to social media and the trend to publish more and more information publicly that use to be private.

If you're friends with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn and troll through their Twitter and Flickr feeds, you'll find that you can answer most of the typical "security questions" for financial institutions. They picked obscure questions such as, "What was the name of your first pet?" and "What street did you live on in your first house?" thinking that they would be difficult for someone other than you to figure out. But these days most of the questions are pretty easy to figure out for a social media sleuth.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger. With hundreds of millions of people using social networking it is clear that its not just a fad. The generation of tomorrow will grow up without many of inhibitions that we have about sharing information about ourselves publicly. Today your photos, your day to day activities and your relationships with others are available to the world through Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The trend is to share more not less, so what else will be shared tomorrow?

I think this is a real concern! This is ripe for abuse and needs to be addressed proactively by financial institutions before clever social media criminals expose this common vulnerability for rampant identity theft.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Lie. Come up with alternate answers to the common security questions such as "what is your home town?" and always use the fake answer that only you know (after all, you've always wanted to be from the Bronx, haven't you?). That way even your mom can't figure out your security questions. 

I want an eye.fi card that works in reverse (thanks @egoh)

This morning I was tweeting about how much I love the digital picture frame in my office. 

 

The reason I'm loving it is because I just put new pictures on it. The problem is that it's hard to get pictures onto the digital picture frame - it has an SD card that I need to pop out, take home, copy new photos onto, and bring back.

What I really want is a picture frame that downloads new pictures wirelessly from my Facebook account - including my own pictures as well as those of my friends (similar to what Chirp does on my desktop). There is a Y Combinator company called PicWing that does this, but I'm hesitant to get tied into a proprietary platform.

Eric Goh had the great suggestion of trying to use an Eye-Fi in reverse. An Eye-Fi is an SD card with a wireless chip in it so that it can upload pictures to your computer or the Internet wirelessly (the good ones geotag the photos with GPS too). What I really want is one that works in reverse, downloading pictures automatically to whatever picture frame I put the SD card into.

Great presentation on Agile programming by Alan Cooper

Thanks to Jason Stoddard for sharing this link with me. Alan gave the closing keynote at the Agile 2008 conference and this is a link to his presentation deck and the notes that accompany them. It's worth reading and sharing with your non-Agile believers!

What if your email account got deleted?

TechCrunch reported that a blogging site called JournalSpace lost all of its customers data. It sounds like their database crashed and they didn't have any good backups. What a nightmare!

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you lost access to your email account? What if you logged into your Gmail account one day only to find that all of your email messages were gone? Or what if you just couldn't remember your password and the password reminders went to an old email address? It is also quite plausible that your account could be incorrectly suspended for abuse (the bad guys also try to make it look like someone else).

I use Google Docs, and I have a number of important documents up there that would be quite painful to lose. A few times, I've logged in only to see a warning that my documents weren't available. I almost had a heart attack! Fortunately it wasn't long before they re-appeared.

What about your photos? I have the master copy of all my photos on my local hard drive, I back them up with Time Machine on my Mac, and I also upload them to Amazon S3 with JungleDisk. So I feel pretty safe. But I have heard of lots of people who start out with their photos on their computer and on Flickr, but then their computer crashes and Flickr becomes the master copy. What if your Flickr account got deleted along with all of your photos? Or what if they just decided your pictures were obscene and took down your account?

Have you ever lost something important that you assumed was safe "in the cloud"? Have you heard of any major websites losing customer data?

Twitter is my RSS reader (and OtherInbox)

I read lots of RSS and blogs (I'll collectively refer to them as "feeds"), but I don't regularly use an RSS Reader. I've toyed around with Google Reader and with Bloglines but just never take the time to go browse them. I have some feeds bookmarked in Safari and Firefox but never take the time to look at those either.

For me, feeds can be easily grouped into three categories:

• important - I want a chance to read or ignore every post
• interesting - occasionally a post is interesting to me
• one-off - a post caught my eye, but I probably won't read that blog again

I find that I prefer to read important feeds just like they were email messages. I want to see an "Inbox" with all of the new postings in these feeds and either read or delete each one. If I don't check them for a few days a bunch pile up, I want to be able to quickly browse the list of old posts to see if I missed anything interesting. Apple's Mail.app Program has a nice feature that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds in Mail and have them show up in your Inbox just like email messages. There are also other services out there such as RSSFwd that will let you "subscribe" to an RSS feed by email. I use my OtherInbox account for this - you can set up any RSS feed to automatically get delivered to an OtherInbox Mailbox just like email messages (similar to Mail.app).

The interesting feeds and the one-off feeds come to me through Twitter. I don't actually subscribe to the feeds, rather I depend on my network of Twitter friends to post links to blogs that are of interest to me. A big part of why I follow certain people is because they post useful links. Many people log into Bloglines or Google Reader to scan for interesting posts - I just watch my Twitter feed.

iPhone vs. G1 - Forget the Internet, which is a better phone?

Lets start off simply. What's it like to make a phone call on an Android G1 phone versus an Apple iPhone? I show the screenshots of exactly what you would see and then talk a bit about my experience with the headset, microphone, and speakerphone quality. Finally, I hit on the carrier issue - because you're not just choosing a phone - you're married to either T-Mobile or AT&T as well.

Both phones have similar interfaces for the basic functions of dialing a phone number by the digits or by selecting one of your existing contacts. Making a phone call is pretty much the same. 

Android G1

 

Apple iPhone

   

(I redacted some phone numbers and email addresses)

 

Headset & Microphone

Both have loud, clear headsets that can easily be heard. Both have good microphones and everyone else can hear you. they work great as phones. The iPhone is about half as thin and lighter so I find it a bit nicer to hold, but that's a minor issue and a personal preference.

Speakerphone

Both have a speakerphone built-in, but neither would take the place of that Polycom at your office. Both are comparable, although the speaker on the G1 is a bit louder and the microphone on the iPhone seems to be a bit clearer. I remember my old Nextel had an excellent speakerphone so I would use it all the time. I don't find myself using it on these phones very much because the overall quality is just too low.

T-Mobile vs. AT&T

This is probably a bit of a religious issue. I mean, its not like any phone companies are actually GOOD are they? I have hated every phone company I've ever worked with (AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile). I have yet to try Virgin Mobile but I have high hopes that they could be different like the other Virgin brands.

It's hard to go wrong with AT&T. It is the original phone company after all. Coverage is really good and the 3G network is fast. There are stores everywhere. They work internationally. Even better, most of the time you don't have to deal with AT&T, you just deal directly with Apple. 

BONUS! Dealing with Apple is a billion times better than dealing with a phone company. For those of you who aren't familiar, Apple is "genius" at customer service. You can schedule an in-store appointment at their "Genius Bar" from the web for the same day. Instead of hiding it in the back of the store, it's right in the middle where everyone can see it. The Apple techs are super helpful and if there is a problem, they will often just hand you a new phone. If you do need to ship something off, its fast.

T-Mobile has most of the same benefits of AT&T. Good coverage, lots of stores, international coverage. I'm not sure if their network is as fast - I'll do a separate post comparing the speed of the two. 

The big thing they are missing is Apple - Google search is no replacement for Apple customer service. I'm sure that over time the community resources around the G1 will grow into something much better than today. However, I don't think it will ever match the Apple experience.

Conclusion

All other things being pretty equal, having Apple for customer service is the most significant factor in making me say that the iPhone is a better PHONE than the Android G1. I also like that its thinner and fits in my pocket better. So if you got rid of all the other functionality and all these could do is make phone calls, I'd go with an iPhone.

Google G1 versus Apple iPhone

I definitely would qualify as an early adopter. I bought the original iPhone on the day it came out, and then the iPhone G3 on the day it came out. I tried to order the Google G-1 phone on the day it came out but had problems ordering from the T-Mobile website and took me until early November to get around to picking one up.

I'm so torn. I love Apple and I love Google. How's a geek to choose?

I've decided to put them head-to-head. I'm carrying both around and I have my GrandCentral account set up to ring both of them at the same time, allowing me to easily switch from one to the other. Too bad neither of them will let me listen to my GrandCentral voicemail messages...

I was trying to write up one master review and after more than a month I've decided to release it in smaller chunks (so that it actually gets released). Each blog post will focus on a particular aspect, such as making calls, taking a photo, download speed, or typing.

In addition to the normal tags, everything in this thread will be tagged "iPhone vs G1".

Road Runner is putting ads in your DNS

As a sign of the times, my cable modem Internet service from Time Warner's Road Runner now is serving a Yahoo search page instead of generating a proper DNS error when you mistype a web page URL. If you're on Road Runner, try clicking on this link as an example. 

Network Solutions tried this a few years ago and got so much bad press that the canned the program within a short period of time.

While I was initially frustrated by this, I was happy and impressed to see the opt-out link at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the opt-out brought me to a page that allowed me to turn this off and go back to the standard (and proper) behavior.

If you use Road Runner, I recommend you click on this link and opt-out now.

Clicking on the opt-out link takes you to this preferences page:

After opting-out, your error page should look like this:

Man seeks Entrepreneur

(I'm reposting this message for a friend and fellow entrepreneur, Barry Thornton)

Hello co-Brainiacs, I am engaged in a search for an Entrepreneur and though you might have some leads.

 

A couple of months ago I invented a device that does a very good job of converting wind or water into electricity.  I did the patent search and reached the conclusion that it is mine (of course filing a patent helped).  Built a rough prototype to verify that it works, it does.  It is very simple and low cost in nature, efficient, has very low manufacturing tolerances (low precision, it will work in dusty and dirty environments, even underwater,  with very little maintenance or skill (the old AK47 idea)), and can be mostly built from typically indigenous materials (wood, bamboo, local cloth, etc).  Only high-tech stuff is some simple magnets, copper wire, and very common/simple electronic parts (although the performance goes up a lot with a bit more real high tech parts).

 

I came up with it while thinking about energy in third world countries.  The economic model was to license the technology for local fabrication and sale.  I later realized that employing Seth Godin's Tribe model would work well for selling finished units in First World countries such as ours, and that the generator part of it will work well on things like small water wheels etc. so there are several products to offer.

 

It is ideal for a bootstrap entrepreneur; I will provide the product development, engineering, and documentation.  I will also work this the marketing and collaterals.  I have contacts in India and Pakistan and can get relationships in China.  I know how to get relationships for licensing and fabrication set up there.  I am working on a pilot program in Pakistan to verify the veracity of the indigenous part of the claims I have made.

 

What I don't have the time to build and run the company to do it.

 

I contacted Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap fame (I really like his group) but after some interviews realized that they are on a discover journey and I need someone with moxie and experience to take advantage of this.  

 

The relationship I am looking for puts me in a minority position, that is I want someone else to assume helm, the run the show, and thus earn the big rewards but behind the scenes I can help make it all work and will certainly do much of the evangelism needed.

 

Thus I put my need to you.  Any ideas?

You can reach Barry at barrythornton1 [at] gmail.com

How do I use LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a popular professional social networking site that is centered around an online resume. Users "connect" to other users that they know and can recommend other people they have worked with, worked for, or hired. 

Most profiles are public, so I can search for all of the people who work at a company I'm trying to get an introduction to, find out that my good friend Bob knows the VP of Marketing, and get him to introduce me.

I keep my profile up to date with every employer and organization.

LinkedIn encourages you to connect with other people you might know at companies and organizations you've worked at in the past. By filling in your complete profile, you increase the chance that people will find you and can be sure that you are the person they are looking for. My LinkedIn profile includes my first job as a grocery bagger in high school. I usually update it promptly when something changes.

I let my connections browse through the list of my other connections.

One of the easiest ways to find more people to connect with on LinkedIn is to browse the connections of your connections (in Facebook terms, "friends of friends"). LinkedIn gives you a choice about whether or not to let your connections see the list of your other connections. By default this is turned on, but many people turn it off. I guess they are afraid that people will "steal" their contacts. But LinkedIn does a good job of policing the users against trying to connect to people you don't really know so I'm not so worried about it being abused. 

I want to be a hub that my connections use to find each other

I'm more excited about the idea that people come to me to find other interesting people. I like the idea of being a conduit and think that the benefits of that far outweigh any risks of other people stealing my contacts (this idea of the pros of sharing something publicly outweighing the cons will be a common theme in the next few posts).

I search LinkedIn to find people at companies that I want to do business with

This can be really handy for business development. It's always better to get introduced by a mutual acquaintance than to cold call someone. I rarely will request an introduction unless the person I want to reach is directly connected to one of my connections.

The goal with connections is quality, not quantity

Some people think the point of LinkedIn is to get as many connections as possible. I don't. I think the value of my LinkedIn network is dependent on the quality of the connections, not the quantity. If I have too many connections, then the various newsfeeds and other functions of LinkedIn become less useful because there is too much noise. 

My general rule of thumb on LinkedIn is to only accept connections from people that I actually know. For me, that means that we have corresponded over email, phone or in person and I would probably recognize you if I saw you. If I'm having lunch with someone for the first time, I will usually look them up on LinkedIn first but I won't request to connect until after we have had lunch and gotten to know each other a bit. This is just a rule of thumb, there are always exceptions. But please don't be offended if I don't accept your request to connect - it's just a sign that I don't know you well, not that I don't want to!

I don't accept connection requests "to grow my network." If you'd like to add me to your network, invite me out to lunch or come and meet me at Bootstrap Austin, Austin on Rails, Social Media Club, High Tech Happy Hour, or another Austin event that I attend regularly.

Also keep in mind that you don't need to be connected on LinkedIn to send messages to each other. If you want to ask me about something specific, feel free to send me a message even if we're not connected.

How do you use LinkedIn? What should I be doing differently?

What is Twitter?

I would guess that most people reading this blog have heard of Twitter, but I know many don't really understand what it is. Others are concerned about sharing so much information publicly.

I would describe Twitter as a very public, social version of online chat. Instead of just sending messages between small groups of people in a private way, the messages are all shared publicly by default. This means that anyone can go and search over the things people have been chatting about - either by searching keywords or "following" certain people they know.

Like many others, I first started using Twitter in March 2007 at the South by SouthWest Interactive festival in Austin, TX (SXSW). Between blogging, Twitter and Facebook, I have pretty much stopped sending out blast emails when I find interesting things I want to share. Instead, just post them to whatever is the most appropriate place. 

If people like the kinds of things I send out, they can easily find them or subscribe to my feeds. Short links and thoughts get posted on Twitter. More private photos and personal communications go on Facebook, and longer explanations (such as this one) go to one of my various blogs. 

This is much easier for me, and reduces the email overload on everyone else. Plus I get the "social effects" of using public tools and inviting unexpected responses and synergies (more on this later).

One of the best descriptions I've seen of Twitter is from Common Craft:

Austin Cloud Computing meetup

Stephen Oskoui and I have been talking about the need for regular meetups for people interested in Cloud Computing in Austin. In my head, I see a format very similar to Austin on Rails... a once a month meeting on a week night somewhere central, with free pizza and time to schmooze, one long presentation or two short ones, and close to a bar so that people can grab a drink afterwards.

We're currently trying to put together a date and location for at initial meetup in December or January. If you're interested in learning more, please join the Google Group and leave a comment comment below!

Rackspace cloud computing lunch at ACL studio 6A on Wednesday

Rackspace is hosting a lunch in Austin next week to talk about their vision for cloud computing. I expect this will be focused on their Mosso hosting platform, which my outsourced development company Capital Thought helped to build the first version of back in 2005. I'll be attending and hope to see you there!

Speed tip if you use Gmail over IMAP

If you use Gmail over IMAP, then you want to know about a new feature Google just released as part of Gmail Labs. It lets you make the "All Mail" folder invisible to IMAP so that your email client doesn't try to download every message twice.

Gmail is different from other IMAP implementations in that each "folder" corresponds to a Gmail "label". Because each message can have more than label in Gmail, each message can appear in more than one folder in IMAP. Gmail also has an "All Mail" view that shows all of the messages at once - the Inbox, Sent, Archived, Labels, etc. This is handy when you're in Gmail and want to search across everything, but its not really needed in an IMAP client because most IMAP clients do their own indexing of messages and make it easy to search across all of them without having them in a folder.

The problem with the All Mail folder over IMAP is that it means you're downloading every message twice. And because your IMAP client thinks that a message that appears in 2 different folders is actually 2 different messages, any local searches that you do will return 2 results for every message - once in the folder you expect and once in the All Mail folder.

I have a lot of email - its measured in gigabytes - and so keeping around 2 copies of every messages is a pretty big deal. It takes up a lot of disk space, slows down my Internet because its downloading 2x as much, slows down my computer because my email program needs more memory to run. I highly recommend you turn off your All Mail folder!

To do this, go to Settings -> Labs and then turn on the Advanced IMAP feature. Next go to Settings -> Labels and uncheck All Mail. It's that simple!

p.s. hat tip to Ian Ragsdale for pointing this out to me after I complained about it screwing up my IMAP client!

Come hear about OtherInbox at Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour next Thursday

Next Thursday, September 11 I'll be presenting OtherInbox at the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour at the Austin Music Hall. Register for the event and be one of the first to hear about OtherInbox!

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.

Downtime at Amazon, Gmail and Facebook - is the world coming to an end?

Wow, last week Amazon was down and now today I get error messages when trying to log into Gmail and Facebook. What is the world coming to?

Interestingly enough, it appears to just be GMail webmail that is down. I also access Gmail via IMAP and that is working fine.

Great explanation of Web 3.0

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, gives a great 2 minute explanation of Web 3.0. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com also has a decent article in TechCrunchIT. I'm a believer!

Keep your head in the clouds

I'm a big fan of cloud computing, in particular Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com. Anywhere that I can outsource the actual hosting and management of computer systems I usually do.

With OtherInbox, we've been pretty religious about it. The only computers we own are the laptops and desktops that people work on.

• We host our email and shared calendars on Google Apps
  
• We use Google Docs as our wiki and for shared word processing and spreadsheets
  
• We host our website and blog at TypePad
  
• We host our version control software at CVSDude
  
• We send our outbound email through DNSExit
  
• We host our DNS with DynDNS
  
• We send out customer surveys with SurveyMonkey
  
• We test our software on many different platforms using CrossBrowserTesting.com
  

But probably most critical to our cloud strategy is hosting our production web servers and database servers on Amazon EC2 platform and using their S3 platform for backups and serving up static web files. We also use the SQS service to coordinate all our servers.

So what is all this talk about cloud computing? How can you take advantage of it in your current web application? What's the same and what's different?

From what I've seen, there are three major steps in moving from a traditional dedicated server architecture to one that takes full advantage of the unique benefits of the cloud.

1. Replace dedicated servers with cloud-based virtual servers
   
2. Move bottleneck code into modular work queues
   
3. Move database or persistent storage to an incremental solution

In upcoming posts I'll discuss each of those three steps in more detail.

Once you get to step three, you have a highly redundant architecture that scales incrementally. You only pay for what you use, so if you are busy in the afternoons but slow at night you can turn on twice as many servers at peak time without having to pay for keeping them standing by idle the rest of the day. If you suddenly get a lot of publicity and see rapid growth, extra capacity is sitting there waiting for you to use it and the architecture is ready to scale automatically. An the whole thing is probably CHEAPER than having dedicated servers!

Channel Intelligence patents the Wish List

On Dec 28, 2001, Channel Intelligence filed a patent covering the "invention provides a method for configuring a database system to store information regarding a plurality of items." Translation? They patented the idea of storing a list of items in a database on the Internet. Huh?

Apparently, they have now decided to sue some ecommerce sites for having "wish lists" on their site. So they invented the wish list?

Forgetting for a second that Amazon was doing it long before everyone, those of us at Trilogy during the dotcom bubble will remember that IveBeenGood.com was offering wish list functionality in October 1999, more than 2 years before the Channel Intelligence patent was filed.

You can see the actual patent here. It's pretty ridiculous.

Noise canceling cell phone

Did you ever notice that people on cell phones talk really loud but people on landlines often whisper into the phone? I've heard that the reason is because you can actually hear your own voice in the speaker on a landline but you can't on a cell phone, and without that feedback we make our voices louder. Another theory I've heard is that when people can't hear the other party well, they instinctively talk louder.

Regardless of why it happens, it definitely happens. And if you're not the one on the phone, its really annoying. I was riding a train in Boston a few months ago and even though I was sitting at one end of the train car I could hear a woman gabbing away on her cell phone at the other end of the train car and it was so annoying that I moved to a different train car. And these are big train cars! Can you imagine how bad its going to be when you can use a cell phone on a plane?

One approach is to try and get people to talk without making any sound but I think that's unlikely to catch on (I saw this demo of a band you where on your neck that senses the impulses of speech without you actually having to make noise - can't find the link to it right now).

What we need is some sort of noise canceling cell phone that would pick up your voice for transmission but would cancel it out from spreading to those around you. That cell phone would sell faster than iPhones... 3G is great but imagine the privacy of being able to talk without everyone around you listening? This would be viral in that you have an incentive to get everyone else to use it (so they don't bother you!).

Will somebody please invent this? Bose maybe?

Come learn Ruby on Rails on August 2nd

If you've been hearing about Ruby on Rails and wondering what all the fuss is about, come spend a Saturday learning Ruby on Rails with a group of experienced Rails developers as your guide. The program will outline the major pieces of Rails and dellve into the practial aspects of building web applications with the framework. Hands-on work on your own laptop will be encouraged during the work session.

Major topics will include:

• Some Ruby Basics
  
• Broad Rails Overview
  
• Building a Rails Application From the Ground Up
  
• Active Record Models and Database Migrations
  
• Views, Controllers, and Helpers: A Guided Tour
  
• Application Deployment with Capistrano 2
  
• App Lab

We'll be hosting the event on August 2nd from 10am to 5pm at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. Space is limited so reserve your spot today!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday July 22nd

On Tuesday, July 22nd we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Lightning Talks!
For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework
Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Posting from TypePad iPhone app

I'm testing out the new TypePad iPhone application. This is a picture of the cookies I baked last night, taken and uploaded with my iPhone.

I'll be at the Barton Creek Apple store tomorrow at 7am if anyone wants to join me!

(I had to come back after posting this and reformat it from my computer to make the image smaller and remove some whitespace)

Austin On Rails meeting Tuesday June 24th

On Tuesday, June 24th we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization
by Eric Falcao
Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1?
by Steven Smith
Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

We need Twitter and IRC integration for PowerPoint

A recent story on CNN talks about the real-time backchatter that is often happening at conferences and presentations. While the panelists are up on stage talking, the audience is having their own conversation on Twitter, Meebo and in chat rooms. I was in the crowd at Mark Zuckerberg's notorious SXSW interview this year which was probably one of the highest profile examples so far.

I was impressed to read how Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester was able to use this to his advantage and change the course of his presentation mid-stream based on feedback over Twitter. Smart presenters are going to pay attention and smart entrepreneurs will find ways to turn this into an advantage.

At some of the geekiest conferences that I attend, they have put up an IRC chat window on a projector so that participants inside the room and outside the room could interact.

We're now starting to see a new generation of web 2.0 presentation software from companies like SlideRocket and Google - where the slides can incorporate real-time data from the web, video, flash and other interactive components. But this is all focused outward on what the viewers see.

PowerPoint or Keynote show a presenter view if you have 2 monitors in use that includes the current slide, next slide, time elapsed, time remaining, current time and your slide notes. A great opportunity for this new generation is to provide a real-time presenter view that brings in this other real-time information. So in addition to the slide notes and timers, there would a twitter feed, Meebo client and IRC client so that each presenter can monitor the online audience in addition to the one sitting in front of them.

The Windows Disadvantage

It used to be that having Windows expertise was an advantage and being a Mac user put you in a severe minority. It was hard to find a job where you were allowed to use a Mac never mind where you got to be surrounded by other Mac users.

But oh how the times have changed. Macs are more popular than PCs at universities, at many technical conferences, with celebrities, even with newscasters on CNN. If you are giving a presentation at an O'Reilly conference, you can expect to see an army of Apple logos staring back at you.

Have we crossed the cusp? Is it a disadvantage for a technical person who doesn't know Mac? Are your job options significantly wider if you are comfortable on both Mac and Windows?

Some RSS belongs in my Inbox, some in my news reader

It seems like there are really 2 different kinds of RSS feeds for me. With many feeds I want to see every post as soon as it comes out and consciously decide to read it or delete it. It's not surprising that so many people choose to read their RSS in email by using a service like Feedburner or RSSFwd to get each individual blog posting delivered as an email message.

For example, I like enjoy reading the blogs of Marc Andreessen and David Byrne. I try to read every post. So it makes sense to have the arrive in my email where they will sit in my Inbox (actually I automatically file them into a folder with OtherInbox) until I read them or delete them.

Yet there are other types of feeds that are more like reading the newspaper. They are full of many different topics and I only want to read the ones that catch my eye or are the most popular. This is the kind of thing that people read in an RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines. This is how I read the blogs of all of my competitors products - I just want to scan the recent headlines I don't have time to look at every single one and if they pile up then I just want to see the most recent ones.

I wonder which is more popular? Do most people read RSS feeds and blogs from their web browser, from a specialized news reader, or by subscribing to a Feedburner email? In the past I've always used the email option if it was available. Which do you prefer?

cross-posted from the OtherInbox blog

Looks like I'll be getting the 1.5 powertrain with the single-speed transmission

Tesla's CTO recently blogged about their progress on the new and improved powertrain. This has been the source of many Tesla woes over the past year so its good to hear that its still on track for production this year. They say the new powertrain should be in production by vehicle #41 - I'm scheduled to get #83 so it should be fairly well tested by then and I won't need to hassle with sending the Tesla back to them for a powertrain upgrade.

Help me out - I can't decide what colors to get?

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

Austin blogs the mostest

We all know Austin is cool, but it turns out that Austin is the bloggiest, most tech-savvy, early-adopting city in the country. More likely to own a PDA, a DVR and yes, to blog!

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

For all of my childhood, I was the only Joshua Baer.

Sometime in high school, my cousin sent me a picture of the sign in front of Joshua Baer & Co, an art dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I realized that I was not the only Joshua Baer in the world. My innocence was shattered.

10 years later I set up a Google alert for "Joshua Baer". Except for the occasional message about the art dealer, I only received alerts about myself.

Then last year I joined Facebook and was surprised to see 26 other Joshua Baers! From their pictures and school info, they all seem to be much younger than me - most graduated after 2000. LinkedIn shows 5 other Joshua Baers. I can't figure out how to find Joshua Baers on MySpace.

Are my Google alerts doomed to be polluted with news about other Joshua Baers?

I have joshuabaer.com and joshbaer.com and @baer.name. I have joshuabaer on twitter and on MySpace and on Linkedin. But how long can I keep it up?

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

Tesla Roadster #83 delivered in 2008?

Well, this is the closest I've ever seen to a delivery date from Tesla for my Signature 100 Roadster. I'm scheduled to get number 83 but only seven have been produced so far. I had to pay for it almost 2 years ago but from everything I've seen it will be worth the wait!

The chart says that they will have the first 100 produced by October and then to expect another 2 months for delivery and finishing. I think gives me a pretty good shot of having mine by the end of the year!

Jay Leno got production car number one and has a great video review.

Robots are cool

Cloud solution for cross-browser testing - crossbrowsertesting.com

Jeff Hotz just sent me a link to CrossBrowserTesting.com that allows you to easily test your web application on any combination of operating system and web browser. We are developing OtherInbox on Macs, and although I have a PC laptop sitting around for testing I don't have every different combination of XP, Vista, IE, Firefox, etc.

This lets me log in for 5 minutes and try something out to reproduce a bug or just do proactive testing. It's actually free to try out for 5 minutes at a time and you can pay for priority access.

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.

Keyboard envy

It looks like there may finally be a keyboard to replace my Microsoft Natural Keyboard that I love so dearly (when I found out they stopped producing them, I bought as many as I could find on eBay).

They finally released the keyboard with organic LEDs on each key - allowing you to have full color icons on each key that change depending on what application you're in. For me, this is great because I type in Dvorak and so the keys would actually have the right letters on them. But it's also great for creating custom keys that launch applications or perform common tasks. Depending on what application you are using, the picture on the keys can change and the function associated with the key changes appropriately.

I need one of these!
(actually I need 2)

Available at ThinkGeek

10 years after the bubble

It seems like a good time to reflect back on the past. It is almost 10 years after the dot com bubble was at its peak and everyone seems to agree that we're in a recession.

What's the same and what's different? I was watching this 2 minute clip about IveBeenGood.com, a startup I worked on at Trilogy University in 1999.

What's the same? What's different?

The predictions were right. Most of those companies spending all that money went out of business.

Dan Rather is no longer on CBS.

In 1999, 48% of consumers in the US could not name an online company. Today, Google is officially the most valuable brand in the world, beating out General Electric, Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

In 1999, less than half of Internet users had made even one online purchase. Today, 85% of Internet users shop online and this number is still growing.

In 2000, the Internet was seen as the cause of the recession - overvalued and unprofitable. Today, the Internet promises efficiency and profit. With dark clouds hanging around the credit, housing, food and energy markets, the Internet could be our ray of sunlight over the next year as traditional, less efficient business models are replaced with more efficient ones and more and more spending moves online.

What lessons do you think we can learn from the last recession? What will be different this time around?

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!

Facebook adds Instant Messaging

Stan Schroeder at Mashable questions the value of Facebook adding instant messaging capabilities. He questions if this is adding any value or just trying to steal users from other chat services such as Twitter or AIM.

What's powerful about instant messaging is not the ability to send messages - we could already do that with email. It's the buddy list and the "presence" information. It's your list of the people that are important to you and knowing when they are online or not to enable real-time interaction like actual IM messages - or audio chat - or video chat - or playing a game - or so you can walk over to their desk to talk to them.

The reason why Facebook IM is powerful/interesting is not that it gives you a new way to do IM. It's that now you don't need to maintain a separate list of your "buddies" in AIM, your buddy list is the same list you are already maintaining in Facebook.

"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.

Getting Things Done (GTD) with Apple iCal

I don't claim to be an expert at GTD, but I am trying to integrate it more into my routine. I was already using MacOS Mail and iCal for managing my todos, and am trying to map a simple GTD like system on top of it.

First I use the iCal To Dos to keep track of my next action items. High Priority items are things that I expect to get done today. Every morning, I review the Medium Priority items and promote a few to High Priority that I want to get done today. If I want to remember something for later but its not a top priority, I make it Low Priority. When I'm waiting on someone else to complete one of my todos, I move it to No Priority.

In Mail, I created a folder called To Dos. Anytime I create a To Do for an email, I move the email to that folder so its out of my way (I don't need the email reminder because I now have a To Do reminder). When I start working on that item, I know where to find the email if I need it. Periodically, I review the To Do email folder to clear out old items.

Each morning, I read through my new emails and either delete it, delegate it to someone else, deal with it immediately, or create a To Do in iCal. Then I review my schedule for the day and my To Dos and mark the ones as High that I plan on accomplishing today.

High Priority - Deal with it today
Medium Priority - Next on the plate
Low Priority - Backburner
No Priority - Waiting on someone else

If you're currently using iCal to do GTD, I'd love 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.