Marcelo Calbucci's Blog

Windows Azure vs. Google App Engine vs. AWS

2010-07-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading about Windows Azure recently because I’m always starting new projects and I was wondering if I should try some of those on the cloud. I got to be honest about it; I’m pretty disappointed with Windows Azure as a cloud computing platform. The technology behind it is pretty sophisticated, the tools are great, and the cloud element is there for sure, but it’s not what I wish the future would be.

Windows Azure was Microsoft’s reaction to Amazon Web Services. Because of that, it basically borrows a lot of the elements and concepts from AWS. Amazon was a leader in cloud computing, first launching S3, then EC2, than a dozen different cloud services. They are killing with their pricing model, but they left a lot of work for the developer themselves, like dynamically detecting load and scaling the computing needs.

Windows Azure tries to build on the same concepts as Amazon, adding nice features and integrating beautifully with Visual Studio, SQL and the whole Microsoft stack.

So why am I so disappointed?

I think that’s not the future. It doesn’t feel like the future. It feels like I need to know too much about the underlying environment. I need to know about virtualization. Not much, but some. Of all the cloud computing initiatives, I think Google App Engine is the most interesting. Conversely, they are the least evolved and stable. But that’s how innovation happens.

Google flipped the model on its head and said, we won’t tell you how anything works behind the scene. You won’t know what machine, file system, system architecture, data center, or anything. All you do is write code on this language, use these APIs and you have a live Web application, by the way, you *really* pay-as-you-go (as opposed to allocated resources that are never used).

For a technologist like me who’s a lot more interested in the value to the end-user than in the technology itself, Google App Engine is more exciting. They are very far from a point I’d consider them worth of my time right now, because of how limited the capabilities are, but they are going on the right direction.

AWS and Azure only feels right if I was about to build a product who could go boom! Even on that case, it had to go really boom. Right now, I run a dozen websites out of my small Dell server which cost me about $500 in hardware and $0 in Microsoft software (thanks to BizSpark). I can easily serve tens of thousands of visitors per day and there is no bottleneck on my system.

Once I looked at Azure, it would cost me about $80/month to run a tiny website. Of course it’s a deal breaker for me. I can’t have a dozen websites each running at $80/month.

For now, I’ll continue with my own Server collocated at a data center. It’s cost effective, full featured and there is no learning curve for me (a curve that would take me nowhere at the moment).

But before I go, I have to say there are many situations where cloud computing is great, so don’t try to tell me I’m wrong, because I’m just speaking for myself (as always) and that’s my case that I’m sharing. Your story might be completely different and you might have your own arguments. Just be pragmatic about it.

It’s Time For Twitter to Expand

2010-07-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

There is a beauty about the 140 character limitation. It makes people work harder on their tweet to convey what they want to say. It saves the people reading the tweet time and sometimes you are just in awe of how witty your friends can be. I don’t think Twitter should ever increase the 140 characters limit, however, there is a lot of other limitations on the service that need to be re-thought so it can find new uses.

I have 3 scenarios which are not possible on Twitter today, but they could easily enable it by making some small changes.

Local Targetted Tweets

This is something I wanted from the beginning. I want to mark some of my tweets as “for local tweeps only”. In other words, I want to put out a tweet that doesn’t go to all my 3,300 followers, but only to those who said they are in the Seattle-metro area. Why? Because of the informal nature of Twitter, I like to write about the weather, a restaurant, ask for tips of where to take the kids on the weekend, etc. Two thirds of my followers don’t care about it. Can’t do anything with it, and it just adds to the noise they receive. Yes, Twitter could go one step further and enable Groups, and allow you to Tweet to a group, but I think that would add too much to the user experience. Local tweets is the one scenario where it makes a lot of sense.

Private Followers

Recently I was thinking about a product that would be much more interesting if I could create a Twitter account, make the account public, yet, hide the follower list. Why would anyone want to hide the follower list? Simple: Because following that account might not be something people would want others to know. Imagine accounts about tips for teenagers gay to come out, or any other content where you feel self-conscious about others knowing you care about it. This could be done by having accounts with private followers, or giving each individual control as to which other twitter accounts they are following can be seen by the public. Think about how Twitter is slowly replacing RSS and how RSS is a completely anonymous “follow” scheme.

Authorized Followers

This is more of a fringe situation a friend told me he wanted, but imagine you are ok with your Twitter stream being public but you want to pre-approve who can follow you. Why? Maybe you care about who appears on your Twitter page followers list. Maybe you want to show a level of exclusivity.

Overall Twitter has not done much in terms of account controls and some of those can only be achieved if the core infrastructure supports them, so the whole annotation is not going to work by itself. That’s my request of the day.

Camping with Kids: Our first experience

2010-07-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

I rarely write about family adventures on my blog, but I thought I’d share how it was to go camping with Victor (4 year-old) and Daniel (almost 2 year-old) mostly because every one that I know who has kids keeps asking the same questions: how did it go? So a blog post seems appropriate.

We went to Lake Easton State Park, just about 1h from Seattle on Friday afternoon. I picked that spot after checking two dozen other private and public camping sites in a 2h radius from Seattle. My criteria were simple: Not too far (if something goes wrong it’s easy to get back), had something for the kids to do (playground, beach, etc.), the campsites had to be under trees (to protect from sun and rain) and it couldn’t be too close to a lake/river (less worries w/ the kids falling and less wind/cold during the night).

Lake Easton had everything for us. They had a pretty decent beach on the lake with sand, a little playground, grass area for the kids to play, an amphitheater, and more. I knew I had picked the right park as soon as we got there. There were dozens of kids of very young age (2-8) running around, on bikes, scooters, playing ball, walking on the street, etc. If I picked the wrong place for my kids, so did dozens of other families.

The campsites were just exactly what we expected. Notice I never went camping on my life, so I had no clue exactly how things work, except by what I read on the web. We were lucky to have a campsite just about 30 yards from the restrooms. We had a large table and fire pit.

Before we got there

I did a checklist by doing some research and lots of visits to Target, Fred Meyer, REI, Costco and even Wal-Mart. By far, the best place to buy camping gear is Costco. Whatever they have it just buy it. But buy it early in the year (March/April) because they do sell out. They had an amazing tent which it took me too long to buy and they sold out by May. You can’t find everything at Costco, but the price and quality of the products available there beats every other store. The second best place was Fred Meyer. Good variety and good price. Target was so-so, and REI had amazing variety but very expensive.

Since we were going to stay just two nights, I wrote down a simple menu the week before and bought the food. We also checked the weather and it said it would be in the mid-70s to the mid-80s during the day, but that it would go down to mid-50s in the night. So, we packed some extra blankets. We didn’t have sleeping bags. We had one queen-size air-bed for us and two toddler air-bad + sleeping bag combo.

Day 1

As soon as we got there we started to assemble the tent. It was very easy. Inflated the air-beds, set up our “kitchen” and we started exploring the vicinities. Some friends of ours got there a few hours later and we went to their campsite. In the period of 1 hour after that Victor fell playing soccer on gravel and scratched his knees and elbows pretty badly. Shortly after Daniel went after a soccer ball and smashed his face against the cable holding the tent and got a bruise near his cheekbone. Oh well, we are used to that.

I bought a small stove/grill combo and we had hotdogs for dinner. The kids loved eating on the camp and we had marshmallows on the fire pit for dessert. Not need to say we had marshmallows on the fire pit every time it was on. Around 9:30 PM we went to bed. That’s when things got ugly...

It was much colder than we expected, and there was a draft of air coming into our tent through the mesh. Victor had slept on his air-bed before at home, so he did ok. Although he woke up in the middle of the night a couple of times and turned quite a bit. Daniel cried, coughed (I forgot to mention he was sick the week before camping), turned, wanted to get up, didn’t want a blanket and that’s how it went until about 2AM. I couldn’t sleep until 3AM worried if the kids were feeling too cold, if they were comfortable, etc. Then it was 5:40 AM and Daniel decided to wake up. Victor woke up 5 minutes later and instead of good-morning he said “I smell chicken”!

Day 2

Despite feeling a bit tired, the day went great for everyone. More of our friends got there on Saturday. We went to the beach and spent several hours there. The water was too damn cold and not even the kids (who usually don’t care for water temperature) had the courage to get into the water. We played with water balloons, sand, balls, playground, volleyball, did a barbeque (Brazilian style), drunk beer and wine. There were 11 adults and 9 kids. It was fun.

Day 2 was the shower day. We bought the tokens on the change machine (about $0.50 for 3 minutes of hot water). It was a pretty clean and good shower. No complaints there. Just make sure to have several tokens. Nothing worse than running out of hot water while you are still showering.

I went to bed around 9:30 PM, put both kids to sleep and when Daniel tried to negotiate I was direct to the point “lie down and sleep!” He complied. Everyone was sleeping in 5 minutes and contrary to the previous night, and probably because the kids were extra tired; it was mostly an uneventful night.

Day 3

We woke up again around 5:45 AM. Coffee on cold mornings does taste better. We had a slow moving morning eating our breakfast (grilled cheese sandwiches, coffee, cereal bars) and went for a walk to visit our friends. Around 8:30 AM we started packing the car and were done in about 1 hour. By 10:00 AM we headed back home and that was a wrap.

A few thoughts if you are going camping with kids:

Camping with multiple friends is better for several reasons:

If you forget something (on my case olive oil), one of your friends might have brought.
Kids keeps kids busy, and leave parents free to do stuff

Wood is great for the fire pit if you are using to keep warm or to do marshmallow, but not so great to grill meat because it’s too hard to control the flames and heat, so charcoal is better on that case.
You’ll use a lot more wood then you expect. We used about 5 bundles, so it’s better to buy nearby the camping than to carry it with you.
Kids 3+ might sleep fine on sleeping bags, but very young (1-2) is hard because they move too much. I have good solution for this.
Lots of band-aids and Neosporin/antiseptic.
Next time I’ll bring a cooking oil spray for the grill.
Bring a kettle to warm water for instant coffee or tea, and to warm kids’ milk. The strategy to warm kid’s milk is to boil half the milk and mix it with the other half cold, so the milk gets to the right temperature. The first night I boiled the milk and it took a good hour before it was at a temperature my kids could drink it.
This is the first time I used Facebook to post pictures as we went. Instead of coming home, download pics, selecting the top 20-30 and uploading, I did it all with my iPhone 4. I wish I could upload videos as well. Someday.

A thing or two about becoming a tech entrepreneur

2010-07-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

Last year I organized the StartupDay conference, focusing on what someone like me would liked to have learned before I left Microsoft to do my own startup (and ultimately failing). You can’t learn everything in a single day, but what are the top dozen things you should be aware of? That was the premises of StartupDay 2009 and it was an absolute success.

This year we are doing it again at the same venue, same weekend, same premise, but different speakers. Although the topics will be similar, the content will be significantly different, which will make this conference valuable to last year’s attendees as well as new attendees.

If you were there last year, we know you loved it (actually, just 98.6% of you loved it, the other 1.4% thought we were giving money to all attendees and were pretty disappointed). So, don’t waste any time and register as soon as possible. If you were not there, you should try to attend to learn a thing or two (or ten) about startups and entrepreneurship.

Great food, great venue, awesome speakers, and most of the attendees are pretty cool people who just made the jump, are about to make the jump or are planning in someday becoming an entrepreneur. If you are comfortable at your corporate work and absolutely focused on climbing that corporate ladder, this is certainly not the conference for you.

A quick reminder that we did sold out last year, and it’ll probably happen again this year. So make you sure you register today or drop your email address on the “Remind Me” box (middle of the sidebar), and don’t forget to tell your friends who you think could be some awesome entrepreneurs someday. Actually, grab them and come together.

How do you screw up your email? I just did it!

2010-07-01T10:02:00.001-07:00

[This is mostly a geek post, so if you are not one, you can just skip it]

I have an error logging system on every project I do that sends me an email every time it logs a system error or an exception on the code. Email is perfect because it’s easy to query – at least on Gmail – and you can feel the pulse of the quality of the code. If I wake up and my “Errors” folder has dozens of errors, it was a good day. If it has hundreds, not so good. If it has thousands, it means I really need to fix something urgently.

For the most part, this system works really well, except when… Twitter has a problem. For example, on Seattle 2.0, we update the Twitter Directory every day grabbing the latest profile information and the social graph of each user. That means thousands of calls per day to Twitter. If Twitter is down for 24 hours, I would wake up to thousands of error messages on my email. Not a big deal, actually.

Yet, on Tuesday I “fixed” a few problems with the code to update the Twitter directory. One of the fixes revolved around a change on the API Twitter did many months ago, but I never got to the point of implementing the new version. That’s the social graph API. Before, you’d just do one call and Twitter would return all the friends or followers of a user, even if she had 100,000 followers. They changed it to use paging, so that you’d get 5,000 at a time.

Long story short, the code worked so I deployed it on Tuesday night, except there was a tiny case that would surface if Twitter was down. And that night Twitter was down for several hours. And that tiny case meant that we would keep calling Twitter on an infinite loop until it responded without an error. In a period of just a couple of hours, our server called Twitter about 200,000 times, failing every call. Logging every call. Sending me 200,000+ emails to tell me it failed.

Yep. I clogged the GMail pipes. When I woke up in the morning, there were still about 80,000 emails on the SMTP queue on the server which I was able to clean up, but more than 120,000 were already out of my server and being delivered to my GMail account. After 48 hours I’m still getting about 2,000 emails per hour. That would not be a problem, except that I’m not getting regular emails.

If you sent me an email on the last 48 hours, I probably didn’t get it yet. I just hope I get it at some point today.

How most businesses in the US miss the World Cup boat?

2010-06-10T12:24:00.001-07:00

I was at a Fred Meyer this morning buying some pool toys for my kids and I saw something that absolutely shocked me. Actually, it was something I didn’t see. I didn’t see a single reference to the World Cup. Jut to be clear, the World Cup is the biggest event in the world. Bigger than anything you can ever imagine. Bigger than the Summer Olympics, bigger than the Superbowl, bigger then Christimas. It’s that big! Yet, Fred Meyer (and QFC, Safeway, Target, Wal-mart, etc.) are refusing to acknowledge it.

Well, to be honest I don’t think they are refusing anything, I just think they are ignorant about World Cup parties, gatherings, etc. See, I’m a consumer. If I enter one of these stores and I saw a cap, a t-shirt, a commemorative soccer ball, or fruit-juice for kids celebrating the World Cup, I would buy it.

My only guess as to why these organizations completely miss these opportunities is probably the fact their heads (executives) and the people in charge of marketing don’t get it. They don’t watch the games, they don’t like soccer, or they believe the US population is mostly not interested in the World Cup.

That’s the mistake. If there are really 30 million immigrants in the US, you can bet every single one of them loves the World Cup. In addition to that, there are tens of millions of first generation Americans, born of parents not born in the US. Add to that the tens of millions of American-born citizens who also love soccer, and you are probably talking about 20-30% of the US population. That’s a lot of people to ignore.

Anyway, enjoy the World Cup and expect a huge drop in productivity from anyone who’ll be watching the games!

Facebook has a big problem: I can quit it!

2010-05-22T12:37:00.001-07:00

Not sure if you heard about this, but there is an official Quit Facebook Day happening on May 31.

Obviously, there is a website behind it and, surprisingly, this is getting quite a bit of media attention. I'm not quitting Facebook, although I've been vocal about them using slime privacy strategies.

However, this movement made me ask this question: Can I quit Facebook? In other words, how much would I lose in my personal and professional life if I just quit Facebook? Turns out, I don't lose much. I have very few pictures uploaded to Facebook. None of the data I have there matters much for me. My entire social graph can be easily re-created and already exist on Twitter, LinkedIn and my email contacts.

So, Facebook does have a retention problem in my view. Yes, they are soooo big, and growing sooo much, that any retention problem will be just a small leak in a very large bucket. Yet, it's there. Every business has a churn rate. Facebook is no different. But as they approach market saturation point, the churn starts to matter.

Once you are "it", not only you have to battle your competitors who will be pointing their guns at you, you'll have to battle yourself. It's the problem with Microsoft Office of yesteryear being the biggest competitor of Microsoft Office of today. Once you reach market domination, you actually have to speed up the rate of innovation. It's easy to do that early on, because it's easier to go from 500 to 1,000 freakin' smart engineers creating cool new stuff. But then it becomes harder to go from 1,000 to 2,000 engineers who can be creative and innovative to maintain the same pace of innovation. And it becomes near impossible to keep up the recruiting rate necessary to keep yourself on top. Your internal process changes, engineers become less productive, the company starts to fear change and the culture becomes like… Microsoft – and we used to say that about IBM in the 90s.

Quit Facebook Day is pretty important to Facebook, not because of the number of folks who'll quit, which should not be enough to see a dip on the growth chart, but because you'll give lots of folks a perspective that Facebook doesn't have that much sticky value, and they can tell their friends (using Twitter). It's not like dumping your email address, or your phone number, or burning all your pictures. Leaving Facebook and coming back, it's almost like you never left.

Boycotting Yelp Is the Right Thing to do

2010-05-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

I love Yelp. I’ve known of them since they got started and for the last 2 years I almost never go to a new restaurant without checking Yelp first. I go to their website or use the iPhone app. I also never call for people to boycott anything, but this time I feel pretty strongly Yelp and Facebook are doing something pretty evil. You might not know this, but as of last week, every time you visit Yelp they know exactly who you are. Your name, phone number, age, birthday, workplace, your friends name, and pretty much everything you put on Facebook without ever telling you this is happening!

How would you feel if you visit Yelp to search for a French restaurant, and the next day you get a phone call from that restaurant asking if you want to make a reservation? Wait… That was a surprise dinner for you and your wife. Oops!

The whole thing is called “Instant Personalization” by Facebook and only a few partners are using it right now, and Yelp is one of them. Facebook is giving them a free pass on all your data without your consent.

I’m pretty sure this is illegal. There have been laws in place on how companies should deal with your PII (Personally Identifiable Information). But even if there wasn’t law in places, it breaks the expectation of how we always assumed the web works. If you are not register on Yelp, you expect them to know nothing about you, except your IP address, which at best gives them your city.

This is pretty bullshit to me. Facebook is way over their head to think I gave them a free pass to give my information to other websites I visit on the web. I don’t want that. Where do I opt-out? Oh, I can’t. That sucks. The only thing you can right now is to either remove your account from Facebook, which lots of people are doing right as you read this, or to sign off from Facebook before you visit other websites on the web, like Yelp or CNN.

The one way we can clearly stop this is by showing Yelp our dissatisfaction with this breach of trust, so they remove the feature and let Facebook know customer don’t like it. Facebook doesn’t listen to their users, but they will listen to their pockets. Join me in boycotting Yelp.

UPDATE: Megan left a comment giving the instructions on how to disable Instant Personalization: Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck "Allow" .

Good Marketing Campaigns Make You Ask “How?” not “What?”

2010-05-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

Marketing campaigns for big brands sometimes puzzles me. Companies sometimes hit it right, sometimes fail miserable. Microsoft has more than their fair share of failures, and the new Hotmail campaign is one of those failures.

I saw this campaign for the first time last week and I can’t remember exactly where, but it was a footnote on someone emails or on some banner on some website. All that it said was “Hotmail – Tools for the new busy”. To which I replied in my head “What?”

As a big brand spending millions of dollars on marketing, Microsoft marketing understands the value of using multiple means of taking the message to the end user. Email, web, TV, radio, movie theaters, buses, print, etc., they will do it all for sure. Just a day later from seeing that footnote for the first time, I heard an ad on NPR “brough you by Hotmail, tools for the new busy”. And I go “what?” again.

Telling it twice

The worse thing that can happen on any marketing campaign is for people to misunderstand the message. That’s really bad and is a situation that is as rare as a medium-sized meteor hitting the earth. It happens, but just about a few times a year. That’s not the case for this Hotmail campaign. Users cannot misunderstand the message, because no one can understand what the message is to begin with, which I call the “what” effect.

You really know you have a bad marketing message when the first thing people say is “what?”. Picture this: You’ve seen a commercial presented to you by your spouse who works at Microsoft marketing. You ask her “what?” and she explains what they’ve meant by that and you go “oh, I see”. That’s bad.

Go for the How

Advertising and commercials should be self-contained and self-explanatory. In other words, you should always say “I get it” and decide to either move on or to learn more. In other words, someone sees your commercial on TV and the first thing that comes to his mind is “How?” That’s a great thing. You caught them.

Let me give it a try. I’m not saying this is great, but what do you think of this campaign: “Hotmail – Tools for less email”. That’s a How-moment. That will get people curious because email overload is a problem for everyone. I know it’s not sexy filled with buzz words, but it gets one point across and make people move to the next stage, to learn how they can get less email.

And just to be clear, I’m not picking at Microsoft, I’m picking at the Hotmail campaign per se. I think every once in a while Microsoft does have good marketing campaigns (“Bing & Decide”), but most of them fail (“Vista – Wow”, “I’m a PC”, etc.)

Flash Downfall: Lack of Hardcore Software Engineering

2010-05-02T10:08:00.000-07:00

My first disclaimer is that I love Adobe’s product. I’ve used Adobe Premiere for the first time around 1994. I wish I were better with their product, because it allows me to unleash ideas from my brain into the screen. And that’s how Adobe has branded itself: a “creative empowerment” company. And here lies the problem with Apple and Flash. Apple doesn’t consider Flash good engineering. Adobe is offended and disagrees.

Let’s make it clear, Adobe has been directly (through Flash) or indirectly (through Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) responsible for the most amazing websites designs to date. But the technology has grown and the delta between what was possible with and without Flash is about to switch, in other words, you’ll be able to achieve more with HTML5, CSS 3, Canvas, etc. than with Flash.

The Engineering Part

Some companies, despite what the end product is, think of themselves as software engineering companies. Microsoft makes Word, Xbox and SQL, but they don’t think of themselves as word processing, gaming or database manufacturers. They think they are applying hard software engineering to make people’s life more enjoyable and productive. Amazon is the same thing. They don’t see themselves as retailers (despite what Wall Street labels them), but as software engineers solving retail problems. And Google is probably the most software engineering driving company there is (it could be their shortcoming in the future, but that’s another post).

On the other hand you have companies like Adobe and eBay. They do make amazing products, solve some hard world problems, but they are not thinking like engineers. eBay believes engineering is a commodity and enabling commerce is what they are about. Those are not mutual-exclusive, but they choose it to be this way.

Flash/Flex Shortcomings

Most of the critique of Flash/Flex has existed for a long time. I was never an expert on the topic, but other developers and entrepreneurs were always complaining to me about the limitations and performance issues of that platform. Yes, it gave you beautiful graphics and freedom to do many things, but the trade off was a slower time-to-market, performance issues, re-inventing the wheel, etc.

It’s not easy for Adobe to fix those because they don’t have the right kind of engineers behind Flash. They have engineers who are more like me, who like the end application aspect of it, instead of engineers who admire the beauty of the language, the framework and the platform. It’s a trade-off they’ve made (likely involuntarily) a decade or more ago, and it’s too hard to change it now.

Flash/Flex is not broken. It was designed to do something else. Developers don’t want that anymore.

Oyster.com Model Should Be Followed

2010-04-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

There was a time on the Internet that big brands and companies would only use carefully writing, editorially reviewed text, and photos would come from professionals’ photographers as a request from the marketing department. Then it came the age of user generated content (UGC). Reviews were written by visitors of a website on TripAdvisor; Wikipedia allowed “anyone” to edit entries on their encyclopedia; Then Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp and every other UGC-site popped up.

So, you were given two options if wanted to build a business for people to do research a topic -- like a Hotel search: 1) you could use the marketing material sent by the hotel itself (like Expedia, Orbitz, etc.) or 2) you can ask users to review and rate items (like TripAdvisor).

Pre-package marketing materials were good, because were consistent, in a format consumable by your business and was free. The downside is that you can’t differentiate between facts and marketing-speak, or purposefully omissions (“what do you mean you didn’t know the Airport was just 2 blocks away?”).

UGC is great to generate lots of unstructured data, like reviews, ratings, pictures, etc. But it has some perils like lack of uniformity, rating mismatch (Is a ‘4.5’ for you the same thing as ‘4.5’ for me?), angry reactions, web-mob attacks, “ballot-stuffing”, etc.

Here comes Oyster.com. A site who asked the question: why can’t we generate a radically large amount of information about a hotel ourselves? In my view, they’ve grabbed what’s best from both words -- editorial and UGC. They generate an enormous amount of reviews, photos and data for each hotel, just like UGC, but they keep full control of the content, making it friendlier to the visitors.

Just for comparison sake, I look at the “Encore at Wynn Las Vegas” and compared Oyster with TripAdvior and Orbitz:

	Orbitz	TripAdvisor	Oyster
Editorial Pictures	28	19 (from Expedia)	200
User Pictures	0	640	0
Editorial review:	591 wors	84 words	2,095 words
UGC Reviews & Ratings	631	768	1

Oyster has about 324 times less traffic and it’s almost a decade younger than TripAdvisor. So that would explain a lot of difference in UGC. But they are just getting started and they have time to build their brand and traffic.

Why there should be more business following Oyster model?

So far I’ve only stated the facts. We need Oyster-like business to give us what we can’t get today. I’m not talking about more businesses creating in-depth hotel reviews. I’m talking about businesses which can provide lots of information, carefully controlled, about a topic or industry. Think about Real Estate, Cars, Electronics, Appliances, Computers, Etc. You find either site that aggregate content from others (which are usually using marketing materials provided by the manufacturer/owner/agent/publisher), or you have the free for all reviews and ratings which don’t mean much, as in “what a 3.73 rating really means for *my* experience?”

Maybe I’m an outsider. Maybe I’m one of the few people who love to see maps of the vicinity and point-of-interests when booking a hotel. Maybe I’m the only one who cares about the Wi-Fi quality and speed on my room and I’d like to filter all hotels who have a kids pool in Orlando and I’d like to actually see a picture of the pool to make sure it’s not an inflatable pool the Hotel put there just to score a checkbox on Orbitz. Probably I’m not the only one.

And just like picking the perfect hotel for the perfect vacation, I want to pick the perfect TV, the perfect LCD monitor, camcorder, house, car dealer, car, restaurant to celebrate my anniversary, camping ground, and all other things on my life. I like to see pictures of every corner; I like to see floor plans, diagrams, and maps. I like a virtual video tour (3D in the future). I like every single data point about the menu, the A/V inputs, and I’d like reviewed by a person who “gets it”.

More Oyster please.

[Disclosure: I’m not a shareholder on Oyster, but Eytan Seidman – one of the co-founders – and I worked together at Microsoft. Go Eytan!]

It’s 1995 Again: The Web Is Exploding

2010-04-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

If you are old enough, you might remember 1995 as a remarkable year for the tech industry and the “crossing the chasm” of the Internet. Yes, techies and innovators were already using the Internet, Web and Email for while, but 1995 was the start of the mainstream folks joining the parade. Between 1995 and 1999 the web changed dramatically. New HTML standards, the adoption of JavaScript, the promise of Java, the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft trying to out-innovate each other and Venture Capitalists putting piles of money on ideas, most failed, but some that changed everything, like eBay, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and more.

Fifteen years from now, we’ll look back at 2010 just like 1995. The pace of changes in technology is something I haven’t seen since the mid-90s. From the programming languages and frameworks, to the adoption of Cloud Computing, from the birth of new platforms like Facebook and services like Twitter (Twitter is not a platform yet). It’s a moment worth savoring.

Facebook and Trust

The announcements Facebook made yesterday were nothing short of extraordinary. If you look at the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was defining the trends, and lots of companies trying to play catch up. It was destroying and disrupting established business, like databases, browsers, email servers, development tools and much more and enabling partners in an amazingly valuable ecosystem. Facebook is the new Microsoft. Facebook is defining the trends and putting itself right in the middle between people and applications. It’s doing that by enabling things that weren’t possible before, were too costly for the average developer, or had tremendous distribution hurdles for it to work. Now it’s all a line of code away.

The problem that we (consumers and developers) face right now is the fact the ground is shifting. Things will fall, and they might hit you in the head. Facebook is changing protocols, APIs, terms of service, policies, UI and lots of things. Facebook didn’t get to the point that it’s stable and moving slowly to some clear direction. It’s moving fast and making 90 degrees turns. If you devise a super successful idea on top of Facebook, it might be completely destroyed by next year’s F8.

The Real Web Is Here

This Web that I see becoming a concrete thing over the next 5 years is a lot more exciting than I ever experienced in my life. It’s a web that jumped from PCs & Macs to everything – a real web! It’s exciting not only because what will become possible, but because it’s not vaporware anymore. I’ve been misled in the late 90s. Lots of promises of what was going to happen just a few years from “now”, things like Personal Assistants Devices that made your life easier, to Network Computer, and cross-platform development. It all failed on me (and you). Not anymore.

I can see my car navigation system connecting to my calendar and grabbing the next destination address automatically, and sending a note to the other party I’m on my way and running 7 minutes late. I can see news websites who will show me exactly what I want to read because it understands me from all the data available everywhere. I see my music, pictures and movies of my kids being available anywhere I want, the way I want it and make it easy to find that video scene where my kids are running on the beach in the middle of 1,000s of hours of recorded video.

My friends, the future is awesome.

How To Find Unique Ideas Or Validate Your Idea Is Unique

2010-04-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

About three years ago I had an idea for a web service. It was a very oddball idea, so the first thing I did was to see if someone else had done it already. Using my search engine superpowers I was able to find out there was an “attempt” a doing it, but nothing else on the web. I thought this would be a winner idea because no one was doing it and I’m big believer in “not-me-too” (a.k.a. blue ocean opportunities) so I’m always looking for new and unique ideas.

The next obvious question was: will people use it? Sure, it’s easy to find out something new that hasn’t been done before, but most likely someone tried and failed, or people don’t care for it. But my thought was that I would use it, so I assumed other people might be interested as well.

First, I wasn’t going to execute on the idea and make into reality, but I thought it was good enough for me to keep thinking about it. My next step was to start writing a document describing this idea. Since it’s on an “industry” I didn’t have much experience and I already knew there wasn’t many websites on the topic, I went to Barnes & Nobles, Amazon.com and Half-Price Books to buy some books.

I found about 10 or so books on the topic, all of them published on the last 10 years. Then I realized something…

How to Validate Your Unique Idea

How come there are 10 different books on this topic, yet there are zero websites dedicated to it? Come on, books are hard. They require someone to write (well) 100-300 pages on a topic, they require an editor, a cover design, a printer, a publisher, distribution, shipping, yada, yada. Websites in comparison are very easy and cheap. You can have a blog on any topic in no time.

If there is a demand for a book, there is a demand for a website or web service!

There are hundreds of millions of websites on the web and tens of millions are created every year. From full-featured web services, to blogs and social networks, to Q&A sites, to companies who put up link-bait websites for their services and products. On the other hand, there are just about 200,000 new books published every year.

When you have an idea and you can find several books on the topic, but no websites, it’s a pretty good indication there is a market waiting for that website, unless the books are old and they talk about some outdated practice or topic.

The biggest repository of undiscovered new ideas: Barnes & Nobles

If you can use the number of books on a topic and the lack of websites to measure the opportunity value of an idea, why can’t you reverse this process to actually find new ideas? Or, put it differently, how many books published on the last 10 years don’t have the equivalent on the web?
I devised this mental exercise to find it out…

Imagine you go to a Barnes & Nobles. Books at B&N occupy shelf-space, and people are required to physically go there, so purchase patterns of buyers will be different from Amazon.com.

Now, think that you can put these books into a taxonomy (categorization) that makes sense from the perspective of the question “Is there a web service that does this?” In other words, the taxonomy used by librarians is not the same because they try to organize the information and not the service related to that information. In more specific terms, imagine a book about Camping. It might have information on parks, tents, cooking, outdoor safety, etc., and you can create a website with that information, but then you are just converting from a book-format to a web-format. But, if you think about a Search Engine for camping gear and parks, you are actually creating a service that uses the best the web can offer.

Now imagine you think about 1, 2 or 3 services for each book and categorize all the hundreds of thousands of books at the Barnes & Nobles. You look at all the hypothetical services you came up with and go to the web to see if they exist. As you go down the list from the most popular services (more books that correlate to that service) to the least popular you’ll start to find the jewels.

The services that have a lot of books about it, but no one have done it on the web yet, as far as this model is concerned, is a brilliant idea because it’s “guaranteed” a certain level of demand for it. I don’t think you can find the next billion-dollar idea this way, but you probably can find ideas for multi-million dollar businesses.

Conclusion

The point I really want to make is that us, entrepreneurs and technologists, live in a world of startups and new technology, and if that’s what you use to find inspiration for your ideas, you’ll end up with a “me-too” idea and have an uphill battle in distribution and marketing. However, if you look for low hanging fruits from the physical world (like books, brick-and-mortar, events) as an inspiration to new ideas, you can come up with brilliant and (somewhat) easy to win businesses.

My Switch from Comcast to Verizon: First Thoughts

2010-04-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Last week we’ve made the switch from Comcast TV & Internet to Verizon FIOS. The primary trigger for the switch was price. Comcast raised our prices beyond what we thought was reasonable, so we decided to give Verizon FIOS a try and get the bundled Internet, TV & Phone. Turns out the price is about the same, for a slightly better Internet speed. But not everything is the same. Here are a few differences.

Internet Speed: Comcast offers 8 Mbps at my house (with their PowerBoost of up to 12Mbps), and FIOS starts at 15Mbps. I could actually go with 25Mbps on FIOS if I needed. Upload is also a win for Verizon, since right now I’m getting 5 Mbps and Comcast offers 3Mbps, but I could upgrade my Verizon to 25Mbps of upload speed!!!!

Dynamic IP: For the geeks out there, Verizon is much more aggressive with changing your IP address to make it harder for you to use a Dynamic DNS service and host a server at your house. I’ve noticed Verizon changes my IP about every day. Comcast wasn’t as aggressive. This is somewhat of a problem for me because I use IP-blocking on my servers to make sure only my house has access to certain ports & services on my servers on a data-center.

Port 25: This one is very annoying, but Verizon actually blocks traffic on Port 25. If you don’t know what this is, you probably shouldn’t care.

Internet Outage: Surprise! Less than 48 hours after we first got Verizon FIOS there was an Internet outage. It lasted about 10 hours and it took us hours of investigations and phone calls to talk to a representative for him to tell us it was a city-wide issue. As far as I can remember we had one Comcast outage in 2 years of using their service and it lasted just a couple of hours. This could be just bad timing and Verizion won’t have another outage for another 2 years, or it could be their infrastructure is not good and we are set for a bumpy ride.

Customer Service: Comcast rocks, Verizon sucks. Period. Verizon is a very dysfunctional company. If you have an issue or a question expect to wait a long time on the line and be bounced back-and-forth between customers rep. Comcast is the opposite. From phone to the Comcast store to social media, Comcast gets it and does it right.

Price: Well, turns out that price-wise we’ll be paying about the same thing, but with slightly higher Internet speed and more channels. However, we have not received our first FIOS bill yet, and Cable/Phone companies can always surprise you with the extra stuff.

TV Channels: Verizon is much better than Comcast. Our current package has more channels and they have what seems to be a wider variety of channels.

Remote control: It takes time to get used to a new Remote, but I’m liking the Verizon Remote Control more than Comcast. It has more buttons, but somehow they make sense and are easy to use. The one thing I don’t like is that Comcast had a “Power All” button that would turn on/off the Set-top-box & TV with a single click. On Verizon it requires 3-clicks to turn off the TV & STB.

Set-Top-Box & DVR: The STB is physically identical (both made by Motorola), but Verizon is way, way, way better on many aspects. First of all, it’s way faster and more responsive. Comcast STB is as stupid as it can be. It gives you useless messages and make you go through weird choices. Verizon STB & DVR offers a lot more, including the ability to share DVR recordings across rooms (it’s not working for us yet, but I’ll figure out), control your DVR from the Web or Phone, etc. The design and experience of the STB/DVR is much better, elegant and well thought out than Comcast and they even have integration with Facebook, Twitter, ESPN Fantasy Football and a lot more. Amazingly cool (and geek)!

Channels Order: My TV viewing habits are about to change forever. I’ve been using Comcast for the last 12 years and got used to the channels # and order. I noticed that because some channels are in different order I don’t watch them anymore, or watch new ones. I think Verizon FIOS is really bad for FOX News, because it’s not close to CNN/CNBC/MSNBC anymore.

That’s it for now.

It’s time for the Seattle 2.0 Awards (behind the scenes tidbits)

2010-04-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

Once more I’m organizing the Seattle 2.0 Awards. I have not written much about it on this blog, since most of the posts are going to the Seattle 2.0 blog, but I thought I’d save a few behind-the-scenes tidbits here.

Today we announced the finalists. It’s an amazing group of 50+ people and companies that are competing in 11 categories (by the way, you can follow all of them on Twitter). Like last year, we are still learning how to do this right and we’re open to suggestions and feedback.

For simplicity and because I have other things going on in parallel, the model for this year’s Seattle 2.0 Awards will be pretty much identical to last year’s. The nomination, selection & voting process is the same. The event will have the same format and structure.

To be completely honest, I’m not a big fan of the current voting system. I wish it was more like the Oscars, where members of this community get to vote, than like People’s Choice Award. I considered collecting the emails of every single entrepreneur, angel investor, VC, lawyer, accountant, startup employee & consultant in Seattle, but that would have required countless weeks of (boring) work. However, the current system is not broken, it’s just not ideal, in my view.

Jennifer Cabala and I also decided that I had put so much behind the Seattle 2.0 Awards that it would not be the most effective use of her time and mine to bring her up to speed on this year’s event. So, she’s focusing on several upcoming events and other initiatives that we have, while I “wrap” this event for one last time.

This is the week I come out to breadth. The hardest part of putting together this Award is done. Actually, not done, but they are in steady motion. Putting the original website, then scrubbing the 6,900 nominations, inviting the selection committee and managing it, contacting all the finalists, putting the voting page (which requires me reading countless LinkedIn profiles & bios), picking the program, guest speaker, venue, setting up the Eventbrite (to sell tickets), soliciting sponsors, managing sponsors logo, inviting startups to participate on the showcase, yada, yada. That’s the real work. What’s left is a bunch of emails to sponsors, venue, finalists, startups and attendees and that’s easy.

One last thing I must say, is that a lot of finalists are thanking me for being a finalist and that’s wrong. You should thank the Selection Committee and the people who nominated you on the first place. I’m just the enabler or the catalyst if you will. So, you can thank me for doing the website, organizing the voting and putting together the event, but not for you being a finalist or winning the award.

It’s Time For Remote Controls To Meet 21st Century

2010-04-01T09:30:00.001-07:00

This has nothing to do with startups, software, career or my hobbies. It’s just one of those cases where you scratch your head and keep wondering why we are using a 60-year-old technology when there is so much better solution. In this case, my beef is with Remote Controls. Raise your hand if you have more than a few remote controls on your house? That’s what I thought.

I know what you’re thinking… Remote Controls have too many buttons, they are hard to use, you have too many of those. Well, that’s actually not my issue with Remote Controls. My primary issue with them is why are they using Infra-Red to transmit commands instead of using Radio-Frequency (RF)?

The Infra-red on Remote Control was probably the choice at the time because it could have been made directional, this is, only the TV you are pointing it to would receive the signal; it was safe, well understood and the electronic boards to make it work was simple. (Note: I don’t have an electrical engineering background, so I can’t elaborate much more than this).

It served us well, but we have much better technology now.

Radio-Frequency (RF) is the most powerful technology nowadays for transmitting data in short or long distances. Pretty much every house has a Wi-Fi router. That’s RF. Have a cell-phone that can make phone calls and browse the web? It’s all RF. Do you have a Bluetooth headset? It’s RF as well. And look, your ears don’t have to be pointing to your cell phone for it to work. And your Bluetooth headset knows your friend’s cell phone is not your cell phone. And, it not only sends data but also receives data.

Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, LG and every other manufacturer out there should just step up to the plate and propose a RF-based electronic Remote Control protocol. It’s not that hard. Even I can do it. The benefits for consumers would be huge. Home automation would be much more of a reality. Universal remotes would be trivial and delightful to use – you wouldn’t need to keep pointing your Remote for 7-seconds in the direction of your electronics for it to do the 5 things it need to do to turn on your system. And a door of endless possibilities would open up creating several multi-billion dollars industries.

A bit more technical…

I couldn’t care less what frequency it would use or what physical protocol. It can be wi-fi, Bluetooth, or any other tech, as long as you can reach tens of yards. In fact, it should be optional for the physical lawyer to be USB or Ethernet as well.

Since we are talking about all these, guess what? There is a pretty well-known standard called TCP/IP for the transmission layer. I know, electronic manufacturers might not have heard about it, but it’s worth checking it out.

If each device is a networked device, then you need just a few more things. You’d need some kind of authentication and authorization mechanism (you don’t want your neighbor switching to the Playboy channel just before your wife walks into the house, would you?). Hey, I have news… Bluetooth has a pretty good solution with PINs. You can just copy that. You can even add data encryption if you want to. There are several protocols for that too!

Now, all that’s left is some kind of data protocol to transmit and receive commands and data. I’d suggest you just use something we call POX. Nope, it’s not a disease, it’s a cure. POX stands for Plain-Old-XML. Using XML would allow integrators, ISVs and device manufacturers to very easily speak the same “language”.

In other words, Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic/LG/et al. don’t have much to do, but to add a RF support to their electronic devices and come up with a data protocol. That’s it. In 10 years we will manage to save the world from an epidemic of remote-control proliferation.

12 Years In the USA, 12 Reasons I Love Here

2010-03-31T11:49:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was my 12-year anniversary of moving to the US. Microsoft brought me here. Contrary to a lot of immigrants, while in Brazil, I never felt the need to move to the US. It actually never crossed my mind to move here. But once an amazing job opportunity presented itself, I took it and here I am. There are lots of pros and cons of living in the US, and lots of pros and cons of being an immigrant, but for now I just want to enumerate twelve reasons I think the US is great (for me) in no particular order:

#1 English Language: My first language is Portuguese, but we Brazilians learn (bad) English at school since the first grade until the end of high-school. English is a great language because contrary to Romance languages (Portuguese, French, Italian, etc.) the syntax is very simple. But the most interesting thing about English is not the language itself, but the cultural tolerance Americans have to adapt the English language. Fax and Email can be used as verbs, so can Google. In Portuguese that would never happen. Scholars, professors and politicians hate new words (like the French) and they don’t want the language to change. English is flexible and adaptive to the existing culture.

#2 Diversity: My view of the US is the view from Seattle, a hot pot of culture and races. If you go to a mall and listen attentively, you’ll hear at least a dozen different languages being spoken. With that diversity, not only comes a feeling of how small this world is, but also the diversity in food, which brings me to my next point…

#3 BigMac & Foie Gras: Yes, I confess: I love BigMac. I also love Foie Gras, Salmon, Lamb, Sashimi, and every kind of food. If you go to the supermarket here you can find pretty much everything. And if there is something you want that you can’t find at your QFC or Whole Foods, there’s certainly a boutique market with it. The restaurants are also amazing.

#4 Money is clean: By that I mean “money” is not a dirty word. If you are an American you might not realize this, but a lot of other places in the word people feel somewhat ashamed of having too much money, because money is associated with corruption, cheating or unethical behaviors.

#5 Accountability & Meritocracy: I don’t think there is any society anywhere else in the world that treats meritocracy as seriously as the US. It’s not perfect, but there is a feeling that performance-based rewards are the right thing. With that comes accountability, in other words, you’re responsible for your actions, good or bad. There is a lot of injustice and criminals in the US, but check out the rest of the world. It’s a lot worse.

#6 Hollywood: You actually don’t have to live in the US to enjoy the amazing (and awful) movies produced by Hollywood. Movies can move mountains. They can change cultures. They can affect the course of history and bring awareness to causes (think “Rwanda”).

#7 Pro Sports: The US is the strongest force in professional sports in the world (except for Soccer). It starts by giving opportunities to those kids who have the potential, sprinkle the sponsorship and support structure, and year after year there is a wave of amazing athletes making it.

#8 Shiny Objects: It’s a culture of consumption and innovation that brings the coolest products to market at an accessible price. All the electronics, shiny cars, video games, boats, and whatever you crave is available for you…

#9 Access to Capital: Whether you want to buy a house, a car, a new digital camera or open a business, there is no other place in the world with this kind of access to capital. From credit cards to home loans, from car loans to business financing, the capital industry is in place and functions pretty well. It certainly could be better.

#10 Entrepreneurship: Being an entrepreneur in the US is a great thing. I actually know a lot of people who moved to the US because they wanted to establish their own business, and there was no better place in the world. There is no other country that has produced as many innovations and fantastic companies as the US has. World-wide people use Microsoft Windows, Google search, Yahoo mail, Apple iPods, use the vaccines and medicine produced by Pfizer and Merck, fly on Boeing 777, use printers by Hewlett-Packard and computers by Dell, and use the diapers, detergent and toilet papers of Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

#11 Visa, Green Card & Citizenship: You hear the news of all the illegal immigrants moving into the US, but you never hear about all the legal immigrants coming here from all over the world to work on the high-tech industry, or to study, or to do science research and a lot more. The US is actually a pretty friendly country to immigrants, IMO, if you’re bringing value here – as it should be.

#12 Opportunity: It’s true! The US is the land of opportunity. The opportunity to be the best you can be. From having a career and climbing the corporate latter to opening your own business, from working on scientific research to have a mid-life change of heart and decide to become a painter. You have the opportunity here like nowhere else. And that is exactly the most important reason for me to be living here.

So, thanks Uncle Sam for allowing me to live here.

Don’t Hire Entrepreneurs!

2010-03-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

This blog post is an unfinished thought on why you should not hire entrepreneurs to work at your startup. I’m sure it will come back to haunt me if I’m ever looking for a job at a startup. It was on my queue of posts to write, which I tend to wait for a while until I have some good points and answers, but it got “rushed” because of a friend made a comment about looking for a “developer-entrepreneur” he’s hiring.

I want to make sure for the rest of this post you understand my meaning of the word “entrepreneur” means someone who wants is creating a business of their own.

First of all, the word “entrepreneur” and “hire” contradict each other. By definition, you can’t hire an entrepreneur. You can hire an entrepreneur who’s not being an entrepreneur at the current moment, but by hiring them, they stop being entrepreneurs and become employees. Even if they own a good chunk of the company and have a critical contribution to the success of it.

But that’s just a small part of the issue. The two bigger issues are: focus and focus.

The first “focus” refers to the fact that entrepreneurs – you know the one I’m talking about – are idea people. They can’t control themselves and they just have ideas for new businesses and projects. Most likely, they already have a side project they started before they joined your startup. Startup success requires focus. You don’t want to hire someone who is not spending every working minute thinking about your startup.

The second “focus” refers to scope of work. Entrepreneurs tend to be more generalists, which in general is a good thing for startups, but can they be a specialist when you need them to? Will your jack-of-all-trades-entrepreneur-developer be comfortable becoming an exclusive front-end developer?

I’ve worked with some great developer-entrepreneurs, but they come with a baggage that’s not ideal for a startup. At your startup, you are much better off finding the best foot-soldier who works well in a startup environment, than hiring an entrepreneur.

Feel free to disagree with me on the comments below. As I said, I'm still thinking about this topic and I don't have the answers yet.

What If You Don’t Have Any Ideas?

2010-03-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

It’s pretty amazing the number of people who say they’re not good with ideas for new products or businesses. Over the last week or so I had several conversations about this many times during lunches, dinners and other meetings.

I just came back from lunch with 4 other folks and on the span of probably one hour we mentioned about two dozens cool apps and services we’d like to see to make our lives easier. And we weren’t even trying hard.

Ideas that come from personal pain are easy. You think of something you don’t like, and imagine a solution for it. Done. But there are dozens of other ways to come up with good ideas for products and businesses. I think the key to have a great idea is to have lots of them, even try to execute a few of them to have an understanding of what makes a good idea into a great product or business.

Even if you pick an idea to execute on, and later you find out it’s a terrible idea, a new great idea might come out of that. But the more you isolate yourself, the less you live, the less you try to do things… the less ideas you’ll have.

Another reason people think they don’t have good ideas is because they either have too many ideas and lack the necessary focus to add more depth to the ideas, or because they over-think each individual idea to the point they surface all the flaws and hide all the virtues of that idea.

The bottom-line is simple:

Have lots of ideas, preferably with other folks
Filter them by potential & execution (can you do it?)
Don’t over-think and just do it
Morph your idea into a better idea, even if it means losing 90% of work done.

How to do customer support: Quick responses yields more questions

2010-03-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

When I launched my previous startup in 2006, I was the only one doing customer support. On the beginning it didn’t matter since I’d get a couple of questions a week, until it grew to dozens of emails a day. There are many things you can do to slow down customer support, but one of the most important is how fast you answer the support questions.

If a customer sends a support question and you answer in 30 seconds, she’s going to go “wow!” You feel good, she feels good, but it’s not good for the business. This customer will realize how quick you are to answer her questions and rely on your support to find out even basic information.

There is the other side of the coin, when you are on the “initial ask” end. Let’s suppose you are discussing with your lawyer a contract. The quicker you are to send him questions or information, the more likely it’s he’ll feel the urgency from your part. Now if you take a couple of days to answer even basic questions, he’ll believe you are not too worried about it, even if you write on the email you are in a hurry.

Back to customer support, I think there are a few issues that you must reply promptly. Those include any customer complaining about availability of the service and customer complaining of some type of security issue. On cases like this, the customer – even if they don’t say it – is honestly having an urgent problem that requires immediate attention. The minimum you can do is to tell them “we are looking at it right now.”

I also think the very basic support questions that are very obvious and very easy should be ignored and not answered. If you get a support email of someone asking how to sign up for your service and there is a huge orange sign up button on the homepage, don’t answer it! Unless you get three people asking the same question in a short span of time, which is likely an indication of a problem on your service.

I think the ideal time-to-answer a support question should be between 1 and 12 hours, never in less than 10 minutes, never more than 24 hours.

It’s time for Meeting-free Mondays, aka, #MeetinglessMonday

2010-03-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

You know when you have a day you feel very productive, your Inbox message count goes down quite a bit, you made progress on several areas and it just feels good? Yeah, yesterday was just like that for me. I ended the day with 4 messages on my inbox. I had 5 high-priority items to take care of before the end of the day, and I did all of them.

Turned out the solution for great productivity were no meetings. But that’s not news. You know that. I know that. We all know when we have a whole day without meetings, phone calls or other distractions we will be more productive. However, I realized something even more interesting. Mondays are particular well suited for no-meeting day. You have a backlog of emails and issues that might have accumulated over the previous week or even during the weekend, and if you can knock them off your list on Monday you’ll have a much better week.

But I can’t do this alone. A meeting or a conference-call involves multiple people, so the more people who are onboard on this idea of no meetings on Monday, the better the productivity of all of us will be. Now shout on your Twitter and Facebook: “No meetings on Monday! #MeetinglessMonday”

Your Ignorance Is Costing You A Lot of Opportunities (Remedy Below)

2010-03-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of friends who are addicted to “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. But I have a lot more friends telling me they don’t get it. Why would I spend time on Twitter? Or Facebook? Or LinkedIn? They say.

I’ll not try to make you join Twitter, or start putting status update on Facebook, but I must warn you, you are missing a lot of great opportunities on your life, personal and professional, if you are not doing a few very simple things.

I want to compare not being part of the “social Web” as not being alphabetized. If you can’t read you don’t see the sign that says “50% off”, or “Help Wanted”, or “We are closed on Mondays”. You just miss a lot of things you don’t even know you were missing. Not being part of the social Web is like that. You don’t know what you are missing. And I can guarantee you, you are missing it.

On career: I don’t care if you already have a job, are happy and making an awesome salary. There might be someone desperately seeking your skills out there. The moment you least need to seek for a job is the moment you are better positioned to take the best job opportunities.
On friends: You might not be aware of it, but your friends are chatting and writing on each other’s walls (a reference to Facebook). If you are not being part of that, you’ll be missing on the inside jokes. Saying that you have a very active social life is no excuse either because your friends not only have that, but they are also using a unique communication channel.
On hobbies: You’d be surprised to find out that you are not the only one on your social circle who likes playing badminton, or singing opera, or swing dancing. Once you are part of the social web, and someone learns you just “checked in” (a reference to Foursquare) on “Impulse Ballroom on Bellevue”, they might connect you with another friend who also likes dancing.

I could create a very long list of situations where the social Web can change your life, but I’ll stop at those above. Use your imagination to think of more ways you might be missing. Now, let’s get practical and give you a few real world tips.

For the Beginner

#1 Join LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most powerful business network out there. Barack Obama is on LinkedIn. Bill Gates is on LinkedIn, so is your accountant, your mortgage broker, your boss, and everyone who has a professional life. People use LinkedIn to find connections. Your friend might be looking for an iPhone developer and he sees through LinkedIn you know “Joe The Developer” and he ask you for an intro. Recruiters and headhunters are avid users of LinkedIn looking for that one person in Seattle with Boat Marketing experience. To make the best of LinkedIn you have to do two simple things: Fill out your profile as complete as you can, including a little bit of description for each job you had/have, and, make sure you add connections of people you know well, including friends, family, university buddies, co-workers (present and past), and people you’ve done business with (consultants, vendors, service providers, etc.)

#2 Update your Facebook Profile
You are probably already on Facebook, but you might not be using it or your information might be incomplete. Facebook is absolutely great to keep up with what your friends are doing, where they are travelling, the pictures they took, and reconnect with long lost friends (if you want to). There are three things you must do on Facebook: First, you need to make sure your profile is up-to-date. A lot of people forget to update their Facebook profile and it still has the old city, job or girlfriend. Update your profile and remind yourself to update it every 6 months or so. The second thing is to make sure you have the friendships there. The third thing is the Mobile Apps for Facebook (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone, etc.) The cool thing about these apps is they provide phone directory functionality. This means if you updated your Facebook profile with your phone number (no worries, since only your friends can see it), your friends can use their Mobile Facebook App to find your phone number. Actually, on the iPhone it can automatically synchronize with your address book, so when your friend gets a new phone number, you don’t have to do anything!

For the Advanced

#3 Blogging
You don’t have to be an amazing writer, write perfect English (cough, cough) or be a story teller to have a blog. All that you need is an interest or a passion. Once you start writing about something you care amazing things start to happen. Suddenly on your “Car Enthusiast” blog you get invited by the local Tesla dealer for an exclusive sneak peek at their next model, or on your “Baby Blog” Pampers send you a sample package of their new redesigned diaper. Companies are listening, but that’s not the coolest part. The coolest part is when you have a blog for several months writing about something you like, and you go to a social or professional event, and someone you never met before has read a blog post you wrote. That opens a whole new dimension of relationship and reputation.

#4 Twitter
Facebook is for everyone. LinkedIn is for workers. Blogging is for businesses or hobbies. Twitter is… not for everyone. By now you are sick and tired of hearing about Twitter on TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, and everywhere else. There is a lot of value on Twitter, both for personal and professional reasons, but it does take you to do things that don’t come natural to a lot of people. Making random updates about your life or witty comments on a public setting can be awkward for some folks. Give it a try, but make sure you use a client app (Seesmic or TweetDeck) and a Mobile App, otherwise the experience is not great.

#5 Foursquare
Contrary to Twitter, I think Foursquare is for everyone. Foursquare is a mobile application. Once you enter a restaurant, shopping mall, gas station or any other venue, you pick up your phone and “check-in” into that venue. As soon as you check-in all your friends on Foursquare are notified where you are (your phone beeps or vibrates telling “Marcelo @ Safeco Field”). In other words, you might have a friend who is at the same bar you are and once you check-in he can look for you. There is a lot more little things on Foursquare that makes it more interesting, like tips (a lot of people put Wi-Fi passwords on Foursquare tips), and a few places (bars, restaurants, stores) are starting to offer discount through it, depending on the number of times you visited the place or if you are nearby their store. The secret to Foursquare is to keep your list of Friends small and only the people you really care to know where they are, and vice-versa.

I know this is somewhat of a longer blog post, but I hope that you leave here with a few lessons; the most important of them all is to update your Facebook and LinkedIn profile and connections. What are you waiting for? Opportunities are being missed as we speak!

I’m not committing suicide!

2010-03-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve sold TweepML a couple of weeks ago, then I announced Jennifer Cabala is taking over Seattle 2.0. Now what?

That’s a big question and the answer is two fold. I’m helping people and startups through consulting as a temporary gig to pay the bills, and I’m working on a new startup concept.

This is a short (meta) post telling you that I’ll be doing a lot more blogging over the next few months, describing the challenges of building a startup for the second time. There is a lot of differences already and this will be a valuable journal for other entrepreneurs out there, so you might as well subscribe to my blog.

More next week.

Selling a Web Service (TweepML story – part 4 of 4)

2010-03-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

[Read part 1, part 2 and part 3]

I never sold a business or a website before so everything about selling TweepML would be a new thing for me. I was determined to sell it through an auction website, but before doing that I thought it would be smart to try to find a buyer amongst people I knew who would find value on TweepML as a complement to their service. So, I created a list with about 50 names of entrepreneurs, executives and startup investors and sent them an email.

In less than 24 hours I’ve got 12 people asking “how much?” How much? How much? The value of a product is very complicated. Just a few things to consider is traffic, brand, team, technology, leverage, lift, revenue and interest by multiple buyers. Instead of using any specific metric, I decide to use my gut feeling of how much they would be willing to pay. Initially I was asking $25,000, but then I raised to $35,000, because $25K for a PageRank 6, good brand, with hundreds of thousands of Page-view service seemed too little.

It took a long time for people to “pass” on the deal. You never know who’s really interested, who’s willing to pay cash or just equity, who’s really interested in hiring you, etc. So I went to every meeting I was invited to “talk about TweepML”. All of those were dead ends. It was time to auction off TweepML, which, by the way, I was very excited about since I was sure I would learn a ton about auctioning off technology assets and web services.

Flippa Sucks

I was in doubt between using eBay or Flippa.com to sell TweepML. At the end I chose Flippa because they are in the business of selling websites, so I thought their own traffic would help me. That was a mistake. People who go to Flippa to buy websites and domains are primarily looking for affiliate/parking-domain value, not for a web service. On top of that, Flippa had the worst bidding system in history!

You know how you go to eBay and say you want to pay up to $100 for an item, but you only pay up to $1 more than the previous bidder? Well, Flippa is not like that. You have to go to the website, make a bid and if someone outbids you, you have to go back and make another bid. Seriously! How many entrepreneurs, founders and investors have the time to keep going back and putting bids on this site? Even today, I’m not sure how good Flippa was at communicating bidders about new bids on auctions they were bidding on, or telling bidders, “hey, only 3-days left”, “only 1 day left”, “only 6 hours left”, etc.

To make matters worse – and I didn’t know that – if someone puts a bid on the last 4-hours of the auction, the auction is extended by 4 hours. I know they are trying to mitigate some problem that I’m not aware off, but the issue is that my auction ended on a Friday night, the worst time for a business person to be buying a domain.

The reason Flippa sucks is not the service is buggy or doesn’t do what’s promising, it’s that it doesn’t do a good job at marketing my auction and making it a painless process for people that want to bid on websites.

The Auction

I knew from reading some eBay auction optimization tips a decade ago that starting with a very low initial price was a good thing. So the initial reserve was $4,800, the initial price was $200 and the buy-it now was $79,000.

First of all, the $79,000 was a back of the envelope calculation of someone paying $1 per unique visitor for a month, which seems like a pretty low value depending on what you are going to do with the user afterwards. Notice that it’s not $1 per user, but $1 for the first month and “free” after that. In other words, if you run the service for a year, you’d probably get half-million unique or more over that period for a one-time investment of $79,000. If you shutdown the service after a year, it would mean you paid less than $0.15 per unique. That’s a lot less than any campaign on Google Adwords.

The auction started slow until 4-days before it ended, when we started to see bids 2-3 times a day. However, I’ve got two offers outside of Flippa, so while I negotiated those offers I also increased the reserve for $10,000.

I sold it and here is a tip for you...

I end up selling TweepML for the reserve price of $10,000 which was a bid coming just a few hours before the auction ended.

If I had to sell TweepML again – and maybe the next service – I could have made twice or three times as much on the sale, because now I have a pretty good understanding of the process and what people are looking for when they buy websites. I’ve made many interesting mistakes selling TweepML on an auction website, some of the more critical ones are:

I put on the listing we were making $200 a month in Adsense. I should have put ZERO. Once you put such a low CPM value, people who have an understanding of web advertising (i.e., the target buyer for TweepML) start to ask all kinds of questions, which derails the discussion about the real value of the service.
I didn’t mention what the future of TweepML could have been. I purposefully withdrawn any information that could indicate which features would make the service more interesting. The reason was because I thought there was value in this knowledge to the buyer, so I only wanted to share with the buyer and not with potential competitors. The problem is that it’s very hard for buyers to have the strategic thinking I had for the last 6-months, so I should have put it all out there.

I’m going through the last moments of transferring TweepML to the new owner (to be announced soon) and turned out to be more work than I was expecting because there’s so many little things to take care of, like Facebook pages, blog, the domains transfer, the code and service, documents, database, etc.

Can you make a business of selling web services?

A lot of my friends are entrepreneurs as well. Some of them have small services they might be interesting in selling. A lot of them have side-projects – yes, it’s crazy the number of entrepreneurs who work or founded a startup and still has a side project. I’ve got a lot of questions from them about the viability of selling smallish services. You know, you have an idea, you pay someone to code it, you pay a designer for the logo, you put out there and you sell the service. Can you make $10,000? $20,000? $30,000 for each service you sell?

The easy answer is yes, I think there is a lot of opportunity with respect to create valuable services and selling to someone else that either wants to make that into a business, to incorporate into a suite of sites or products they already have, or to use that as a marketing tool for other services they provide. The hard part is how to find the buyer, but I also have some good ideas on that front and maybe I blog about it some other day.

That’s the end of the TweepML service as I’m handing off the service for the new owner. Tchau.

How not to run a service (TweepML story - part 3 of 4)

2010-03-11T11:27:00.001-08:00

[Read part 1 and part 2]

You certainly need some context to understand where I’m coming from. In September of 2009 it was just a few weeks after my last day of work at Sampa. Life wasn’t great and the last thing I wanted was a long term commitment to another startup. Compare this to being married to someone for 4 years, getting a divorce and asking someone to marry you just a few weeks after the divorce is complete. No way would I call TweepML my next startup. I just wanted to fool around. Screw it if the service doesn’t work, screw it if I don’t make money, screw it if I don’t have a long term plan.

So I put all that in my head and went careless about the service. But the service kept growing, I started getting more emails about opportunities for partnerships, I started to realize I was leaving money on the table because there was no monetization at the time, etc.

At the same time I was doing TweepML I was working on Seattle 2.0’s StartupDay event, trying to grow Seattle 2.0 and bouncing ideas around with few investors and entrepreneurs of what should I do next. Soon it became clear I had too much on my plate and not enough focus. I looked at everything I was doing and Seattle 2.0 was profitable and growing, so I decided to put more wood behind that fire. Stop the search for the next startup and either sell or ignore TweepML. And, as soon as I got the first interested party in acquiring TweepML …

Twitter announced Twitter List about 4 weeks after TweepML came out and launched the feature a month after that. That was a bucket of cold water on the enthusiasm around TweepML. Although there was enough differences between Twitter List and TweepML.org that today we have a better understanding, at that time there was enough uncertainty about TweepML viability that not only people interested in acquiring us went into wait-and-see mode, but users started to question if their work creating lists would be wasted by duplication of the services functionality.

Well, I don’t want to claim credit for the Twitter List feature idea, but it seems very peculiar that Twitter would announce their list feature shortly after I launched TweepML.org. Just kidding. Most likely they had “lists” as one of the features to add for a long time, but the demand for TweepML probably made they realize they should bump it up.

Without an acquirer and without much interest from me to invest on monetization and other interesting features to keep TweepML running the service was completely ignored by me in November and December of last year. In December I’ve made the decision the best for TweepML was to auction the service as soon as I came back from vacation.

That’s when I… [to be continued on part 4 of 4]