Sunnyvale Police and Santa Clara County Deputies (about 15 of them) where out in force to manage the crowd that was well north of a thousand. From what I could tell,  people that came early (i.e. before 9am) and did get shots, even if they were not in a priority group.

For more, see the H1N1 Flu Clinic Photo Gallery.

There are a number of alternatives to email for collaboration and communication, but none of them quite work yet. IM is real-time (good) but functionality is very limited (it lacks open APIs, no forwarding or other routing, no rich media). The social networks have built-in messaging, but the user interface is terrible. Wiki’s and Google Docs are great for collaboration, but have no messaging component.

Given all this, it’s great to see that a team at Google is trying a different approach. Google Wave is essentially a closed messaging system that structures messages around threads (aka conversations). Messages are updated in real time (i.e. you see people type), thus it also has many of the qualities of IM but also of the collaborative qualities of Google Docs or a Wiki. Conversations can easily be embedded in web pages, although I did not try this out. Finally it uses a number of clever ways to mark up and display messages in a more structured way. Overall it is a good user experience, although it still feels a little alpha.

The first thing to notice is the lack of integration. While it copies a lot of the functionality of other services, it doesn’t allow you to leverage existing ones. How do I migrate my existing social network and contact data into Wave, how do I integrate devices that are not web based (e.g. mobile devices) and users that want to use existing clients? While Google Wave gives you an email address <name@googlewave.com> emails sent to it don’t show up in your inbox when I tried.

The second issue I see with Wave is the UI. Seeing people type in real time is great unless you want to get work done. I usually read about 200 emails in 75 threads and write somewhere around 50. The goal of a good UI is to hide things which are not currently relevant. Showing me someone is typing before he has finished his message is usually counterproductive. Google Wave also isn’t quite as responsive as GMail or let alone a local client. And speed really matters. At 200 emails a day, needing 3 seconds longer for each means an hour less productivity a week.

For me, the main conclusion is that Wave does not replace email. In fact, I think it doesn’t even try to. With some additional polish, Wave has the potential to be a powerful tool for groups to collaborate internally on projects and documents. Essentially a Google Docs with built in Workflow. But for external communication one would need a tool that offers better integration with other platforms and a UI that is written with the goal of getting things done.

Based on the back-of-the-envelope math in my previous post this rate of fundraising would mean venture captial would shrink to a little over 200 firms or a quarter of its current size. While possible, that seems pessimistic. From what I hear from people in the VC industry, there is at least some evidence that investors are still interested in VC as an asset class and investments will increase as the liquidity of long-term investors gets better. I think there is a chance that this is the low point of the fund raising activities for this downturn.

I had the privilege today to be on a great panel this evening organized by the Churchill Club on storing your data and personal experiences in the cloud. The discussion was kicked off by Gordon Bell (photo to the right) who recently published a book on the subject called “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything“. The book is a great read and I can definitely recommend it. While I have been moving a lot of my data to the cloud, my efforts seem trivial compared to Gordon’s vision.The discussion on the panel was fun with Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, Suni Vermuri of reQall and terrific moderation from Barron’s Eric Savitz.

One of the more interesting discussions was around what companies will do well in this space. It was great to see how Evernote, reQall and Eye-Fi (all represented by the people on the panel) integrate their services. I think the fact that many data stores with relevant information have no APIs for integration is one of the main issues that this emerging sector is facing.

Going into this experiment, my thinking had been that the two biggest challenges when working with a virtual assistant would be context and security. The problem with context is that an assistant knows very little about me, my job(s), where I live, how I organize my life etc. For the assistant to be successful I need to provide a lot of detail (e.g. it takes 30 minutes from Stanford to the place I get a haircut , leave that much buffer please) which reduces the time saving. The second problem is security. Assume I want to call my dental plan about a billing issue. At a minimum the assistant needs access to my health records, social security number, credit card information,  address and online credentials. The perfect Identity Theft Starter Kit. But it turned out with AskSunday I never got far enough to even get into these issues. Details below.

To set up AskSunday you basically provide account and payment info, and you are good to go. Unless you need to reset your password. I lost mine (password manager snafu),  went through a standard reset process, but never received the confirmation email. A quick check on my incoming MTA logs showed that the AskSunday  emails from 125.16.9.10 were rejected by the mail server as spam. Why is that?

root@server [/var/log]# host 125.16.9.10
Host 10.9.16.125.in-addr.arpa not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Their mail server has no reverse DNS entry. Ouch. Today this is makes it almost certain that the mails will get rejected. I twittered about it, and shortly after got a friendly mail from Peter, their VP Ops asking for details. He eventually tracked down the issue. Not bad, the AskSunday ops team is definitely on top of things.

With that out of the way I provided my Google Calendar credentials to their portal, and sent my first request:

Dear Ask Sunday Team,

could you schedule a haircut for me with [...] in Menlo Park as soon as possible. Please make sure I have time (in my Google Calendar, you have access to it) and allow 20 minutes time for travel between Stanford and [...]. Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions via email if you have any.

Guido

20 minutes later at 10:17, the reply from Vern (I assume not his real name, his accent sounded South Asian which is where I believe their call centers are) arrived:

Hi Guido,

Per your request, I called [...] and spoke with [...]. I was informed that she has made an haircut appointment for you today at 11:00am with [...].

I was unable to access your Google Calender, please provide us with your
login credentials.

Vern McDonald

I just did provide my login credentials, so something went wrong here. Also, scheduling without looking into my calendar is usually a bad idea as I tend to be mostly booked. Lastly, while I said as soon as possible, sending an email about a meeting in 43 minutes with 20 minutes travel time is cutting it a little close. In this case I had a conflict. I asked him to cancel the appointment and re-entered the credentials. Then it was time for attempt #2:

To: “Sunday Agent (Vern McDonald)” <request@asksunday.com>

I re-entered my Google Calendar credentials. Please have a go and see if looging into Google Calendar works now.

Shortly after that I receive a message from his supervisor:

Hi Guido,

My name is Michael and I am the supervisor for the said agent. There are
somethings which I would like to clarify about the autologin feature -

Generally what happens is, we use a script for autologin commands and
unfortunately, these scripts, at times, would be rejected by the website
(such as in this case) and so we have difficulty in accessing them.

[...]

So I would request you to please consider the stated fact and share your
information with us to help you better.

Ok, so their login script doesn’t work and they ask me to send them my Google Account credentials directly. This is a slight problem because a bunch of other services (Google Checkout, Google Voice etc., Analytics, Mail) are on the same account and I don’t want to give them access to it. But it is also the wrong model. Google Calendar has great sharing and delegation functionality, you don’t need to share credentials. While we are sorting this out, I get this:

I have again called [...]I spoke with Joanne and canceled the appointment which was scheduled at 11:00am today. I was also informed that they do have availability at 4:00pm and 4:30pm. Please advise.

He is still trying to schedule without being able to access my calendar. I politely ask him to hold off for now. In the mean time we found a solution to the credential issue. I create a new Google Calendar account, give them the credentials and give that account access to my calendar:

Michael,

given how many different services I access through my email account, I don’t feel comfortable sharing its credentials.

However I found a different way of accomplishing the same:
- I created a new account on Google that has access to my Google Calendar
- I am happy to share the credentials for this account

The account is [...]

IMPORTANT REQUEST: When adding an appointment, do *NOT* add it to the default calendar for “[...]“. Instead add it to the calendar “[...]“.

After one more iteration (which was my bad, I sent them a wrong password) and two more mails confirming that they should go ahead and try scheduling again, I get this update:

Per your request, I called 1[..] and spoke with representative. I was informed that your haircut appointment is confirmed for [...]

I logged into your Google calender account and added the appointment into
your Guido-Private calender

Looks good. Except that the time he picked conflicts with an appointment, and that the meeting was not added to Guido-Private but to the main calendar of the new account.  Still not making much progress, it is time to be a little more direct:

1. On October 8 my calendar Guido-Private there is a meeting called “Churchill Club Event” which collides with the time you picked for the haircut appointment. Please always look at my calendar to make sure the time slot you schedule for is available. [...].  If anything is unclear about this, please let me know.

2. The appointment was added to the default calendar of guido.assistant [...]

I’ll spare you the details, but we tried again and while we eventually got the calendar was right, all attempts ended in scheduling the hair cut for a time slots that was already taken. At this point I gave up and calceled my account. After 25+ emails over one week I still haven’t booked my appointment. While I am pretty confident that we would eventually get it right, it seems unlikely that in average using AskSunday would save time. Equally important, it raises doubts on how AskSunday would perform on more complex tasks. Google Calendar Sharing can be confusing, but compared to booking a multi-hop  international flight with an on-lap toddler, it is comparatively easy.

One other thing that I found strange were the assumed European names. I know this is a common practice in call centers. But an assistant (even a virtual one) is a trust relationship. Knowing he uses a fake name runs counter to the spirit of that.

Ask Sunday today is definitely not a service that is useful to me.  At this point the service feels “beta” with site functionality not working and at least in my case an agent that seemed under-prepared for their task. If anyone has a better experience with any other Virtual Assistant service please let me know. I am still hopeful for this category.

It turns out that virtual economies like WoW are still very inefficient. The arbitrage opportunities and price fluctuations in the in-game auction house are large, and creating crafted items from raw materials often yields margins of 30% and higher. My initial assumption had been that working capital would be the main limitation for how quickly I could grow, but that turned out to be wrong. Instead market size and “shelf space” day set the limits for growth. The server I play on has an “active” market of about 2k players during peak hours (source). Assuming the average player spends 100g per day, this means the total addressible market is only 200k gold. About half of this market consists of items that are found in-game and not produced. Of the other 100k I was able to capture about 10%-20% a day for revenue of 10k-20k and profits of about 2k-3k. The main reason for only capturing a small part of it is that I listed items on the market only once a day, and would often get undercut quickly. Thus often I was only the cheapest provider for a small part of the day.

The in-game time keeping suggests it took about 170 hours of play time to to the peak, or around 1000g/hour. The WoW gold exchange rate fluctuates, but a quick survey suggests an exchange rate of around 150g = $1. Thus my account is now worth in the order of $1500 (although it is non-trivial to liquidate that much gold) and I made $8.30 per hour. While that is more than the the California Minimum Wage of $8, for now I’ll stick to my day job.

My Home Workout Setup

One of the challenges of working a lot with computers is that you end up sitting in a chair for a large part of the day. Recently a number of people have started experimenting with setups where you don’t sit down such as using a computer while on a stationary bike, treadmill or standing. I tried the bike approach and having had the setup for a few months now, I really like the experience. I usually spend 2-4 hours online after coming home from work in the evening. Of that I spend about 10-12 hours per week on the bike wich adds up to somewhere around 3000-4000 calories per week. Not a huge amount, but I definitely feel a difference.

It’s not a replacement for running though. My heart rate while on the bike is usually just above 100, far below what it is even on a slow run. The bike setup is also not suitable for all tasks. For editing photos, making slides or complex writing it is back to the Aeron.

The parts for the setup are actually fairly cheap, although you need a 2nd monitor.  Exact setup after the break.

The recumbent bike itself is a Schwinn 226 (similar to the 230). It’s actually made by Nautilus, Schwinn just licenses their brand. It is a pretty good choice as it has a well positioned keyboard tray, and similar bikes (e.g. the 213 here) have been used by similar projects.

The display is a cheap 28” HP Monitor. I initially was using a 24” screen, but it doesn’t work well as the distance to the screen is larger than for a desk setup. I use a IOGear KVM to alternatively have my Mac (for work) or my PC (mostly for gaming) on the display and to switch keyboards between the two computers.

The hardest part was finding a decent shelf to place the screen on. I ended up using two Ikea shelves with a combination of short legs on one side (similar to these, the exact model doesn’t seem to be available online), and adjustable long Vika Byske legs on the other side. As it turns out I am not the first to have this idea, Ikeahacker has a post of a similar setup.

Due to low light condition, the shutter time is longer, and even small shaking from the tapping of the camera button will make the photo un-usable.

So, we created Night Camera, the app to prevent the blur at the first place. Using the built-in iPhone accelerometer, it automatically shoots the photo when it detects the iPhone being stable, so you have a real chance to get some good photos at night.

Sounds very compelling. Basically image stabilization (or rather image selection based on stability data) on inexpensive hardware.

There is one problem with this, which is that the iPhone according to this post uses a camera module that has a fixed 200ms rolling shutter. This seems very plausible, as most camera modules of cell phone use this technique. There also is plenty of photo evidence that this is the case. With a rolling shutter, the exposure time of the CMOS sensor is fixed. In other words, the claim that the shutter time is longer at night is wrong. Unless I am missing something, the makers of the above application at least don’t understand how the iPhone camera works.

Now it may be that in general the accelerometer could be useful for enhancing image quality by reducing movement. However anecdotal evidence shows no visible improvement, and the above app has only 2.5 start on iTunes.

Typically the initial tally by the NVCA increases by 15% or so as additional closes are announced (see Estimate in the graph for where I think we will end up), but even then this number is very low the worst we have seen in the last decade. Total capital raised was $1.7 billion.

Given that a typical venture fund runs 4-5 years, and assuming 1.5 parallel funds per firm (e.g. health care and IT), the average firm has to raise funds every 3 years or go out of business. With 25 funds per quarter, this means the fundraising can sustain 300-350 firms total. Given that we have 800-900 active firms now, expect a major shakeout. It will be interesting to see where it stabilizes. The NYTimes suggests between a third and half of VC firms will disappear. This would require fund raising to go back to a level of 40 new funds per quarter, which seems possible.

And again, for the firms that survive as well as for the LPs this will be a good thing. VC returns have been too low for the past 9 years, and this development is the start of correcting this.

While low, these number are actually better than I would have expected. The total amount raised is slightly higher than last quarter. Usually the NVCA numbers in the first press release are about 5-10% below the final numbers, thus one would expect this to look even better. However about 25% of the total funding amount is just from two funds (August and Bain), this might skew the numbers. And I would expect the downturn to continue.

All that being said, it is still pretty clear there will be a shakeout in Venture Capital, and the sport in silicon valley seems to be compiling lists of the walking dead, i.e. firms that have not been able to raise funds, or are no longer making investments. Pick your favorite list from The Funded, VentureBeat (a bit broad), or PEHub (subscription required). To quote John Holman interviewed on PEHub when asked if there was an exodus from the VC industry: ” ‘exodus’ implies that they are leaving by choice, and that’s not generally the case.”

In the end I still think this is a good thing. We have too many active VC firms right now, a number of them of  questionable quality. In the end this doesn’t help anyone, not even the entrepreneur. The reduced cost of capital is outweighed by having more competitors that are being funded, and having to spend more on sales and marketing to eventually prevail over them.