false precision

Day 3, Upgrade to Windows 7

2009-11-10T21:34:47-07:00

Yes, Microsoft does seem to have gotten it right this time…

WTF?

Just another day in the Airforce

2009-11-08T16:49:56-07:00

I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit on this Airforce commercial.

I've never been in the Airforce but I was a contractor to NASA for about 10 years and worked with a lot of Airforce people, in a lot of Airforce places.

I can't recall seeing or hearing of a commission with the Airforce Space command where anyone got to maneuvered a giant transformer style space craft at a moment's notice, in a room with a giant holographic projection of the earth, eerily hovering above a projected battlefield while controlling the entire thing with hand gestures on a giant tablet.

If you see all this after you enlist for the Airforce Major Tom, you may want to take a look in your frosted flakes.

Thoughts on Real-time Search

2009-10-22T15:36:11-06:00

Several companies have entered the arena of what has become to be known as Real-time Search. I've had a bit of problem really getting my head around what real-time search is and how it would weave its way into my behavior patterns. For me, Search is just one part of how I find out about stuff:

DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don't know it's happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, dig, CNN, etc. I don't have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that's highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.

For the record, I think Google does a pretty good job of real-time "search". You have to know how to apply date bias to the search but they index very quickly and have larger reach than anyone else. Of course, I have to know that I wanted to know which means the actual SEARCHING has to be paired with ALERTING or DISCOVERING.

It appears that most of the specific Real-time search services seem to combine SEARCHING with DISCOVERY. For me this moves the combined activity into an entertainment arena, rather than a fact finding arena. It's like buying a magazine about Coffee, now Milk Dudes, now Bottled Water – interesting but not entertaining.

It seems a lot of real-time search services are paired with Twitter. For me this makes a little more sense, first because twitter is largely entertainment (at least to me). I'm really not there to learn anything except what the people I'm following are doing. Twitter is however heavy in ALERTING as was witnessed in my last post.

Twitter (ALERTING) and SEARCHING seems like a more natural combination than DISCOVERY and SEARCHING. For instance, when I get a Tweet about something, it would be cool tap the tweet in my iphone and return the most recent 5 items from the web that match that Tweet. For instance, "Michael Jackson dead", would return the top results with date bias from Google or another search engine.

Another use case that makes sense to me, "Michael Jackson dead" returns the latest news from the online sources that just people I follow read, sorted by date. In other words, I got the alert from my network – I want the most recent news from my networks sources. This is the Lijit spin on how to find information.

My takeaway is that there are combinations of the three activities DISCOVERY, ALERTING and SEARCHING that I can make sense of in certain situations. I just can't get my head around the combinations being a "task" that I perform on a destination web site.

It only makes sense when they are combined organically in another place where DISCOVERING or ALERTING is happening.

Is Twitter Real-time Search?

2009-09-28T21:45:45-06:00

I've made my piece with Twitter. I kind of like it, especially when I travel.

But, I don't think it's really my news source. How many people in this thread know who GNIP is, what the company is trying to accomplish, or why they are even tweeting this?

How much real information is really contained in this thread? I hear the hype of real-time search, but is this the output?

Startups continually adapt what they are and how they go to market. If you aren't doing this in the beginning you are either a genius or a dolt.

I can't find a tweet in this entire thread that likely even knows who the hell GNIP is.

Thanks for relevant real-time results @SVstartupjobs, @smashingfeed, @swwtel_links, @technologynew, @Geekeez, @leahsoleil, @NeilAshworth, @helpfulCCA, @TechnoTweets, @tpviews, @tesed, @dnewstep, @techfeedsEN, @jakepolo, @ianborwnCC, @windwest, @ronincycle,@tosumitgupta,

Slow “Know”

2009-09-28T20:32:45-06:00

Anyone who is an entrepreneur knows about the "slow no". Generally this term is associated with Venture Capital Firms that never seem to make up their mind if they are in your deal, or not. Brad Feld has talked about the slow no before in his blog. With Venture Capitalist I can almost understand the slow no. If you never answer, then you don't have to decide. If the deal heats up later you can jump in and look like a rock star. If the deal doesn't heat up you just say, "ahh, yeah we could never quite get our head around it". It's weak, but all too common in the industry.

Slow no's also exist out in the free range world of business. This is where you make a pitch about a product or service. The guy you are pitching listens intently, maybe through a few meetings. All the while saying, "Yes, I get it", "Ah, huh that makes total sense". At the end of the second or third hour of your involvement he says, "Send me over a proposal, and I'll get back to you". So, you spend 4 hours or so on a custom pitch that really addresses the business need. You send it, the feedback is thanks, let's follow up on a call in a couple weeks. Four weeks later, after the 3^rd email and you ask for a "fish or cut bait", he responds, "No interest thanks".

Really, after about 8 hours of my personal time, after 8 hours of the CEO's time – you send me back, "No interest thanks". That's very useful. Thanks for giving me that feedback to help with the business.

I'm constantly amazed to the great extent people will go-to to avoid conflict.

Don't be a big pussy, say no – say it early – say if often.

OMMA Conference and Madison Avenue Blues

2009-09-24T16:21:37-06:00

I was out at the OMMA Conference in NY this week. It was a pretty good show that completed the connection for me about how Brand advertising buyers communicate with their Agencies, how Agencies communicate with their publishers and network ecosystems. It's a beautiful thing when you go to a conference like this and already know everything you heard. It means you finally got it – at least mostly.

Another cool thing was getting to watch my friend Terry Kawaja present "Madison Avenue Blues" during the lunchtime keynote. Terry has a wickedly smart mind and has been around Wallstreet for nearly his entire carrier. Terry ran Global M&A at Citigroup and Credit Suisse and in 2000 stepped away to be the CFO of Raindance, my last company. During that time I understood why it's a good idea to hire a Wallstreet guy to be your CFO as negotiating the public process is to say the least, ambitious.

Terry is now at Savvian Advisors in New York helping large companies understand what other companies they should be partnering with or buying. Last spring, Terry put together "Madison Avenue Blues" to help everyone understand how the online ad game was changing. Many have seen this already, but after watching again it deserved a second look.

Will Twitter become ground based?

2009-09-24T14:48:58-06:00

My last post addressed the trend of cloud computing to deliver services fast, on an infrastructure that is scalable, in a way that you can pay for what you eat. In that post I poke around the edges of what may be some pain points as you scale that model.

It was reported in TechCrunch that Twitter is closing on a $100M private placement investment round today or tomorrow. In a way, Twitter may be the litmus test of what happens when your service delivery platform goes large and you were born in a cloud computing world.

No one I know would dispute that Cloud Computing gives you all those features and probably a few more. The real question at hand is, does this model scale into a large scale business. My technical friends are saying to themselves of course it does, "Amazon runs their own infrastructure on EC2. They aren't going to do something less for their EC2 customers". Maybe, but EC2 is their platform so they are running their service on their platform. That example doesn't count.

The question is, does using outsourced Cloud Computing scale into a large "business". What happens when your demand starts to become a sizeable portion of the suppliers' infrastructure (real or virtual). Can the business-needs be met technically and financially with this arrangement? Is performance and reliability something you can outsource, or is it key to your business success?

Of course the same questions could be asked about something like the Lamp Stack. Can we really trust a whole bunch of open source code, built on top of open source code, to run my business and my platform? Obviously the answer here is a resounding yes. Is Cloud Computing just another version of this same argument?

I think the ultimate answer comes down to the maturity of the solution, be it Lamp Stack or Cloud Computing. As real hosting businesses form around Cloud Computing, with real SLA's and business tools that give more control and upside then the potential downside I think Cloud Computing will become attractive to large entities. Not, sure we are there yet – but watching twitter will be a leading indicator I think.

Life in the Cloud(s)

2009-09-16T18:24:43-06:00

A couple days ago I got to sit down with a group of startup CTO's at the Techstars bunker and talk about nerdy things. While it's true that I'm currently a CEO, I still love the CTO job and pretend I'm one every chance I get. Being a CEO is fun and certainly has its advantages, but franky its way harder than being a CTO. A good CTO is the lifeblood of a technology startup and can be the coolest job if done correctly.

Being responsible for technology choices has its own challenges however. Technology is always a moving target and requires you to decide what's baked and what's not quite baked before adopting it for mission critical service delivery. You rarely get extra credit for adopting something leading edge, but you always get credit for adopting something that doesn't work. In fact, I think somewhere in that sentence exists the difference between a CTO and CIO. But that's a post for another time.

I went in to the meeting curious to get this groups opinion on Cloud Computing. I have to go on record, today September 16, 2009, as not being "on the bus" yet. I know, I know your saying to yourself "but it works so well for twitter" (sorry couldn't resist). In fact I don't have a clue why twitter is "uptime challenged" but I suspect incredible growth has something to do with it.

At Lijit, we adopted virtualizing our hardware as "the big step I could live with". I think it has proven to be a good choice. In the first year of operation I would characterize it as less reliable than running on the hardware, but now we clearly see benefit with no apparent downside. I think we get a little "instance crazy" in some of our architecture decisions but those are not my decisions to make and everything works great so, pick your battles.

Part of my suspicion about Cloud Computing comes from the answers I get from its excited adopters. Users of cloud services often exclaim that it "just works". It's kind of a derivative of the Mac argument, "I just think it and it happens". That certainly does sound good.

The thing I can't quite get my mind around is the responsibility of maintaining operations. Most of these services, at least the biggest, Amazon doesn't really promise anything will ever work. Of course in practice it seems to so it really hasn't been an issue, yet.

I challenged the group with the assertion that when one of my servers doesn't work, I blame the vendor and they fix it. When my storage array doesn't work, I blame the vendor and they fix it. When I lose cooling in my data center I blame the vendor and they fix it. When my cloud service fails, well my friends would say they don't fail… hmmm

I posed the question to the group. If you run your business in the cloud and suffer a failure where you lose $5K of revenue for the day - I get it. The savings on humans and hardware and stuff makes complete sense. But, consider the case where your company generates $5K of revenue a second.

When does the lack of accountability no longer make sense?

I love the idea of Cloud Services, I just question if the extended business case is there, yet.

Track testing the HeroCam at HPR

2009-09-14T17:24:41-06:00

With the opening of High Plains Raceway within 90 minutes of home, I have renewed interest in spending too much money on the Cayman. I recently outfitted it with some R compound tires and some track wheels to up the performance a little. I also recently bought a HeroCam to take some video of the fun.

The HeroCam is a small lightweight digital video camera about the size of a pack of gum that come with all kinds of crazy mounts for about $200. The best mount is the suction cup mount that allows the camera to be attached to about any part of the outside of the car. I experimented with several placements and found that the top of car gave the best perspective of what was going and the most accurate interpretation of actual speed. I shot this video of 4 laps at HPR attached to the roof right behind the windshield.

Down the long straight you're generally hitting about 125mph before you need to start to get on the brake, and the video "looks" like you're doing about 125mph to me in this video.

I shot the last session of the day from inside the car with the camera attached to the windshield. I got a little aggressive in turn 10, entering the turn faster than I thought.

Realizing that I was going to overrun the exit I committed the ultimate sin of lifting off the gas. As you can see it creates a rather graceful, ballet like four wheel slide about 30 yards down the track and into the dirt. I'm still trying to clean all the dirt out of the car, thankfully no harm done.

One bummer about the HeroCam is that there really isn't any good way to capture the audio. The camera has a low and a high audio setting that both don't really work. What the thing needs is a jack that allows you to use an external mic mounted somewhere other than in the wind.

All in all the camera works pretty well, especially for the money. I may try to capture audio on another device (or my iphone) and then syncing it up later.

Colorado, we have to care more about Pine Beetle

2009-09-07T09:08:11-06:00

It's my last morning at Beaver Creek. The last couple years we have come up for a long weekend of hiking and great-outdoor-enjoying and each year it's been awesome.

I took several long hikes up the maintained trails at the ski area that pass through the amazing forest area. The bulk of the forests are lodge pole pines, aspen and other stuff I don't know the name of.

I took this photo alone the Overlook trail that goes from the base to the top of the Centennial Express lift. It's about 2,000ft gain over 4 miles or so. A fun hike with lots of pretty stuff to see and if your knees don't like going down-hill like mine – you can ride the lift down. (I didn't but I should have)

I know I have ranted about this before but the state of Colorado has to do something about the pine beetle kill. Whenever I start ranting about this I get rebuttals that it's not feasible, you can't get in the forest and thin out the dead trees, etc.

Ok, well for the last two years I have watched Beaver Creek and the other ski areas aggressively log out the lodge pole pines. They know that the livelihood of their resort depends on the aesthetics of the environment, not to mention the pure safety of the mountain. In short, I'm watching these guys do it and they have all the same challenges as other parts of Grand County.

As I mentioned in a previous post, 100 years ago there were zero trees. The miners cut then all down for fuel and housing. It grows back, its trees.

Colorado needs to take this situation into its own hands and start cutting this dead wood out. This is becoming a serious safety issue for areas like Grand Lake. There is going to be a HUGE fire up there, it's just a matter of time. If for no other reason we need to do it to maintain the tourist industry.

What do you think?