Technology for Humans - Home

Webvanta Update

2009-10-24T16:42:00Z

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, so I thought I’d at least give a brief update.

On September 8 we officially launched Webvanta, and that’s kept me swamped. It’s going great, with about 35 sites up now, about a dozen more that we’re involved in building, and a steady stream of designers signing up. There’s hundreds of user accounts and dozens of sites being built by folks we don’t even know—it’s a great feeling to see it taking off.

The level of activity has noticeably picked up in the last few weeks, and the custom development side of our business now has about a 6-week backlog.

We’ve launched our first ecommerce site (SimplySlater), and we’ll have another one launching within a week or two. We’re near completion of a large site for a local non-profit that is converting over from Drupal. This project has driven us to polish up a lot of loose ends with our information portal features, so many customers will benefit.

We also recently announced the Webvanta Design Contest—we’re giving away a MacBook Pro for the most innovative site built with Webvanta, plus three iPod Touches for the runners up. Please help us spread the word!

Become a Fan of Webvanta on Facebook

2009-07-10T21:29:00Z

We've been building up a presence for Webvanta on Facebook. If you use Facebook, please click the Become a Fan button below to connect with us.

Webvanta on Facebook

Is Facebook Ready for Business?

2009-06-20T15:00:00Z

I’ve been working lately on creating a Facebook presence for my company, Webvanta. It’s been a somewhat painful experience. You can see the primitive results so far.

Facebook has “pages” for businesses, which are like profiles, but for non-humans. This seems like a good idea, but they’re missing some core features to support the way businesses work.

For example, it appears to be impossible to remove the person who originally created the page as an admin. So if someone creates your Facebook page and then leaves the company, well, too bad, they still have access to modify the page.

I’m not alone in this concern. There’s a discussion thread on this issue in their so-called help that has posts by 73 people, going back two and half months, all struggling with this problem. No one from Facebook has replied, and no one has proposed a fix.

There’s plenty of other ugly corners. When I try to change the profile image for the Webvanta page, for example, it takes me to the profile picture for my personal page.

Because we have less than 1,000 fans, we can’t get a vanity URL, so the URL for our page is the lovely http://www.facebook.com/pages/Webvanta/70984967800?v=wall&viewas=0. (For my personal page, I was able to get www.facebook.com/mzslater.)

Facebook clearly has lots of work left to do before they’re really ready for businesses. But with more than 200 million users, they have their hands full, and they’re riding a tidal wave, so I doubt they’re worrying about it too much. And, of course, there’s no way to actually contact anyone and get a question answered.

The platform is full of awkward bits like this, and I’d like to say that someone will step in and do a better job and displace them, but the reality is that they have reached critical mass in terms of user adoption, and the vast number of people on Facebook is going to make it very hard to displace. As a business, if you want to participate in social marketing, you need to go where the people are, so you really have no choice about whether to go elsewhere.

My request for Facebook: please charge me $100/year for having a business page, and use that money to provide appropriate features and a support line. Or take some of that $200 million you just got from the Russian investors and use it to provide better support.

The pains of creating an online store

2009-06-18T21:48:00Z

I’ve recently been helping my sister put together an online store, using Volusion. It has been eye-opening how complex they make it and how clunky this system is. This is a product that is ripe for being replaced with something a lot cleaner.

We looked at Shopify as well, but their business model of taking a cut of the transaction was a turn-off. And there’s always Yahoo Stores, but they tend to be, well, ugly.

On the surface, an online store is pretty simple. We can build simple ones with Webvanta, using PayPal or another third-party shopping card, but it’s not a complete ecommerce solution. The tricky bits come when you need to deal with tax by county, shipping options, returns, out-of-stock items, fulfillment workflows, etc. In time, we’ll make Webvanta a good solution for this, probably by integrating an existing third-party solution.

Do you know of any great solutions for simple online stores, either complete sites or hosted shopping carts that we can integrate? I’d like to be able to refer people to something great.

And just in case you’re looking for some inexpensive and very cool outdoor furniture, check out the Classic Butterfly Chairs at SimplySlater.com.

A Brief History of the Web, and a Glimpse of Its Future

2009-06-13T03:59:00Z

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Sebastopol, the first-ever local Ignite event. Started a couple years ago by O’Reilly Media, Ignite talks use an unusual, fast-paced format: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds so there’s no such thing as running over. It’s a challenging format but it sure keeps things moving. The event was packed, with more than 150 people at the Hopmonk Tavern.

Here’s the video, courtesy of Empire Report. The slides are available at slideshare, but they’re sort of dull without the talk track.

Adventures in Social Media

2009-05-17T16:52:00Z

I was not an early adopter of social media, being of twice the optimum age. But in the past few months, I’ve become much more involved with it, and I now believe it is going to be central to the growth of my business.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for many years, and found it moderately useful as a sort of distributed address book and business contact list. But its role in my life was very small, and entirely limited to business contacts.

Three years ago, I started getting invitations from friends on Facebook, which I accepted but rarely did anything with it.

About a year ago, the pace of invitations I was getting climbed, and I put some work into my profile. I connected with a bunch of high-school friends I haven’t seen in 35 years. It has been fun, but odd, to get little glimpses into the life of these folks—some of them were a big part of my growing up. The odd part is that, for the most part, these are people I never would have had any contact with if it were not for an online social network, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever see them in person.

A few months ago, I started paying more attention to Facebook, motivated more by business than personal desires. I went through my address book and invited people to connect; and I scanned the contacts of my contact to find other people I knew. In the past 20 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of people, and Facebook has proven to be an easy way to reconnect, however tenuously, to many people who I would like to stay connected with but realistically I wasn’t likely to, out in the “real world”.

With a few days of effort, I increased my Facebook friends from 25 to 250. (If only I had started 10 years ago, I would have thousands of “friends”.)

And then, of course, there’s Twitter. I’ve had an account for a couple of years, but only used it occasionally, usually at conferences. Recently I’ve gotten more involved, though I’m still not a prolific twitterer. (More on Twitter in an upcoming past.)

I’m of the wrong generation for all of this to come naturally, despite being something of an early adopter. I’m just starting to get real value, both personal and business, out of social networks, and I still have more questions than answers. Among them:

Do I maintain separate networks of personal friends and business friends?
Can I get myself to post frequent thoughts and updates?
Do I use Twitter, Facebook status, and LinkedIn updates in concert, or do different things with each?
How do I filter out the stuff I really care about?

Separating Business and Personal Networks

One thing I’m still coming to grips with is the blending of my personal and business contacts. LinkedIn is almost all business, but Facebook and Twitter are a mix (especially Facebook).

The easiest thing to do was to give up on separating my personal and business networks. That’s what I’ve done so far, though I doubt that it’s the best strategy.

The question is, do both groups of people have the same interests? For the most part, I think not. There’s also an interesting twist added by mixing the two groups up, but ultimately I think I’ll separate out my family and close friends network, in one way or another.

Dealing with the Flood

One I had hundreds of contacts, and the social network news feeds became prominent, the next challenge has been dealing with the flood of status updates, tweets, and so forth. To read all of it, even without responding to anything, seems like it would take hours every day.

My solution, so far, has been to simply dip in an out when the mood strikes me. I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of interesting stuff, but I haven’t wanted to devote the time to sorting through all the cruft to get to the nuggets. Some kind of filtering seems like the only real solution.

The Instinct to Communicate

It takes a lot of time and energy to make effective (or even ineffective!) use of all these social networks, and in the early days of using them the energy in is a lot higher than the value coming out. I have no doubt about the long-term value, but it’s still hard to spend the time it takes to keep up with even one of my online social networks.

I’ve been blogging for three years and have never sustained anything like the frequency of posting that I aspire to. I have all sorts of articles running around in my head—the legacy, perhaps of a dozen years writing newsletters and magazine columns. But they take time to commit to bits. What you’re reading now is one that’s been rolling around inside for a couple of months and finally made it out, sitting in a cafe in Santa Rosa while I wait to pick up my daughter from ice skating.

I’d like to get up to at least one blog post a week. And to several tweets a day. It takes a big shift in mindset, though, to communicate this frequently and proactively—it’s an opportunity that didn’t exit prior to online social networks. We’ll see if I get there.

My Success Story

The biggest chunk of business value that I’ve ever gotten from these networks occurred a few weeks ago, when I was looking for a couple dozen web designers who I could interview and get feedback on our new product. I’d exhausted my direct network, and the step to cold calling is a big one.

So I used a LinkedIn question, in addition to a Facebook status update and a Tweet, and with a few days I had introductions to a few dozen people. Because these were introductions, and not cold calls, even though I had no prior direct contact with these people more than half of them have spent an hour with me in a web-based demo and phone discussion.

These networks were a fantastic resource for me. They allowed me to make a casual request of hundreds of people to whom I would have hesitated to email, and I got responses from a good scattering of them—and often not from the people I would have predicted, if I had to select a smaller number to contact.

Coming up in my next post: Twitter stories.

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Amanda's Skating Triumph -- and Interesting YouTube Behavior

2009-04-09T16:31:00Z

Last Sunday, Amanda won first place in her group at the skating competition in Vacaville! Here’s the video—and below, some notes about copyright and YouTube.

It was an awesome performance, and I’m so proud of her.

Now, the YouTube bit: the song playing in the background is Witch Doctor by Alvin and the Chipmunks. When I uploaded the video to YouTube, it recognized the song (I did include Alvin in the title but didn’t identify the song), and sent me the following email:

Your video, Amanda’s Alvin and the Chipmunks ice skating routine, may have content that is owned or licensed by Razor & Tie.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

And when the video plays on YouTube, there’s an advertisement banner at the bottom, with links to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon.com. (Curiously, the ad does not appear on the embedded video above.) It’s sort of annoying, but compared with banning the video because it contains copyrighted content, it’s a great solution.

A question for the copyright experts out there: I assume the skating rink must have the right to use the music in the performance. Does this right not transfer to videos made of the performance? Of course, arguing this with Google would probably be futile, regardless of what’s true, unless one was willing to put a great deal of energy into it.

Gregory's Fire-Eating Debut

2009-04-05T05:17:00Z

Whuffie

2009-04-03T05:42:00Z

My favorite presentation from Web 2 Expo:

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View more presentations from Tara Hunt.

Read Tara’s blog at www.horsepigcow.com for more.

Her book The Whuffie Factor is due out April 21.

And if you’re curious about the origin of Whuffie, it comes from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Why are Warranty Disclaimers in ALL CAPS?

2009-02-19T06:05:00Z

This is a trivia item for those with some curiosity about common legal agreements.

Why is it nearly universal in legal agreements that there’s a couple paragraphs in ALL CAPS that state that the product or service is offered “as is,” that the provider makes no representation that it is good for anything or will work as advertised, and that they are not liable if it causes you to lose your business, your spouse, or your right arm?

I can understand what drives the disclaimers in general, but I was curious about the specific language that is always used, and especially about the bizarre use of ALL CAPS. Is that supposed to make it somehow more forceful?

The Uniform Commercial Code

As it turns out, this all has its origin in something called the Uniform Commercial Code. Among other things, it states that:

“Unless excluded or modified, a warranty that the goods shall be merchantable is implied in a contract for their sale if the seller is a merchant with respect to goods of that kind.”

And:

“Where the seller at the time of contracting has reason to know any particular purpose for which the goods are required and that the buyer is relying on the seller’s skill or judgment to select or furnish suitable goods, there is unless excluded or modified under the next section an implied warranty that the goods shall be fit for such purpose.”

So that’s the reason for these paragraphs. Unless you explicitly disclaim it, your act of selling someone something can be taken as an implication that the thing you’re selling will actually meet the user’s needs. Heaven forbid!

SO WHY ALL CAPS?

OK, so now we understand what drives the disclaimer language, but what about the typography?

It turns out that comes from the U.C.C. as well. It specifies that any disclaimers must be “conspicuous,” and the code includes a formal definition of conspicuous:

“A term of clause is conspicuous when it is so written that a reasonable person against whom it is to operate ought to have noticed it. A printed heading in capitals (as: Non-Negotiable Bill of Lading) is conspicuous. Language in the body of a form is “conspicuous” if it is in larger or other contrasting type or color. But in a telegram any stated term is “conspicuous”. Whether a term or clause is “conspicuous” or not is for decision by the court.”

So to avoid the risk that a court might rule that a notice was not conspicuous, lawyers fall back on the unambiguous statement that “A printed heading in capitals is conspicuous” and just toss all the text into caps (since larger type or a contrasting color is typically not available in a contractual document).

So here we have it: a terrible typographic decision enshrined in the conventional wisdom of legal documents because it fits within the safe harbor defined by a widely used statute.

I’m going to take a radical chance and use bold for the disclaimers in our Webvanta terms of use.

HP's Service Disaster

2009-02-18T06:50:00Z

I’ve had HP printers for a long, long time, since the earliest LaserJets. The latest is an all-in-one printer/fax/copier that we bought a few years ago. It is the last HP machine I will buy until I hear that they have completely revamped their service department.

A month or so ago, my wife’s PC’s hard drive starting acting up. I replaced the drive and decided to take this opportunity to “upgrade” the machine from Vista to Windows XP. For some reason, the XP install decided that the machine’s built-in memory card readers were drives C, D, E, F, and G, and the hard drive was H. By the time I noticed this, I had reinstalled a bunch of apps, and although it is an odd configuration, everything worked fine. I did a brief google search looking for an easy way to change the drive letters, and it appears that there’s no easy solution for changing the letter assigned to the boot drive. So I decided to leave it.

The only problem I’ve had is with the drivers for the HP all-in-one printer. HP’s installer appears to be hardwired to look for drive C, and the install fails. I tried various tricks, even putting in a memory card into “drive C” and trying to install from there, but nothing worked. After hours of frustration, I decided to call HP service. That was the beginning of the real frustration.

Turning “service” into sales

After navigating through a circuitous voice menu system and waiting on hold, I finally got to a live person. After providing my serial number, they told me that they would be glad to help me, but that it would cost $35 since the printer was out of warranty. I asked if I would have to pay the fee even if they couldn’t resolve my problem, and the “support” (really sales) rep assured me that they would connect me with an expert who would work with me until the problem was resolved. With some trepidation, I agreed to the charge.

They then transferred me to a woman who seemed to be starting over. She had no idea what my problem was, or that I had paid for the service call. After another 20 minutes, we got this worked out, and started in on the actual problem.

She then launched into a sales pitch for how for “just a few dollars more” than the $35 service call fee they would exchange my printer for a new model and refund the service call fee. I asked how many dollars. She ignored my question and kept on with a pitch for the new printer. After asking literally five times for the exact price, she finally gave it to me: $250. That’s more than a few dollars above $35 in my book, and the printer works just fine with the other computers on which the driver software will install.

I told her I didn’t want to do the exchange, but wanted to solve the problem. After a very brief discussion, she concluded that my printer was just too old, and wouldn’t work with the “new” drivers, and that was my problem. This is total BS—the issue had nothing to do with compatibility between the drivers and the printer, and the driver software on their site was dated 2007, just a year newer than the printer. The problem is their software’s brain-dead installer can’t deal with the hard drive being something other than C. Not only could she not propose a workaround, she couldn’t seem to even understand the problem. Some expert.

She launched back into the sales pitch for selling me a new printer. At this point I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She tried again to get me to buy a new printer. I said I wanted to talk to a supervisor. She said none was available then, but one would call me back tomorrow.

“We’ll call you back”—never

I waited three days, and no one called. Finally I called back, went through another 10 minutes of voice menu hell, and explained the situation once again to a live person, who once again was no help. I asked for a refund on the service call fee, since they weren’t able to help me, and she said she had no way to do that. I asked again to talk to a supervisor, and she said one would call back.

No one ever did. After a few more days, I contested the charge with the credit card company and bought an Epson printer to use with that computer. It just wasn’t worth any more time or grief trying to get that printer working with that computer.

HP’s service operation is broken. They don’t understand what they’re talking about. They don’t seem to care about solving your problem. They push expensive upgrades on you even after you’ve paid for a service call. And the policy for responding to requests to speak to a supervisor seems to be to say one will call you back, but no one ever does.

My first job out of college was working at HP. I used to have a great respect for the company. I’ve been loyal to their printers for 20 years. And because of their ineffective and irresponsible service operation, I am unlikely ever to buy another one.

Update—HP Follow-Up

After a couple weeks, I started getting phone calls from HP folks in the U.S. who were apologetic and eager to help. I believe these calls originated from a complaint email I sent in, but maybe this blog post had something to do with it too.

By this point, I had replaced the printer, and all I wanted was a refund of the service call fee, which they gladly provided. In fact, they called back repeatedly when I was slow to gather the information I needed to give them. These people were typical of the HP of old (albeit engaged in damage control). If I could have reached them when I asked to speak to a supervisor the first two times, all of these problems would have been avoided.

One of the HP people I spoke with acknowledged that my problem with “someone will call you back” and then no one ever does has been an issue with this call center.

So my conclusion: HP has a big problem, not at the core, but with the way they have offshored their support. The offshore support organization does not reflect the values or quality of service for which HP has been known for decades. Maybe a better-managed offshore operation could solve these issues. Or maybe the savings from sending support offshore are offset by less tangible, but very real, costs. One cost: I remain disinclined to buy an HP product in the future, because I don’t want to have to deal with this support organization.

Foxes

2009-02-16T06:48:00Z

One of the joys of living in the country is all the wildlife around us. Deer, raccons, possums, skunks, rabbits, and birds. Even the snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas are fascinating, if a little scary. (The rats, mice, voles, and moles that the cats bring in as living toys are less endearing.)

My favorite is the foxes. We have had, on and off, a family of grey foxes living on our lane. Last spring, three cubs were born here, and they were quite at home on the lane and spent lots of time sunning themselves out in the open. We often saw them from the car, but I never managed to have a camera with me at the right times.

One day late last summer, though, I took a slow, quiet walk up the lane with my camera to look for them, and one of them rewarded my patience. Truly a beautiful creature.

Time for Blogging?

2009-02-14T06:06:00Z

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve posted here. I have lots of things running around in my head that I want to blog about, but it’s been hard to find the time for it. But I like to write, and I appreciate any readers I may have out there, so I’m resolved to get back to it.

What has made it most challenging is that I’m up to my eyeballs in running Webvanta, the startup I cofounded with Christopher Haupt. Startups are always all-consuming, and the current economic climate has made it even more so because of the difficulty of raising capital.

We have managed to raise a modest amount of capital, but it’s been very time consuming, and it’s not enough for us to get out of bootstrapping mode. So my time is split between ongoing fundraising, growing the business, and doing contract work as part of our bootstrapping process. It’s fun, but exhausting.

More soon.

The Girl Effect

2008-12-14T17:00:00Z

So much animation on the web is gratuitous, underwhelming, and just plain unconvincing in terms of telling a story. Here’s a piece of very simply animation that brilliantly tells a very important story. It’s a great illustration of how simplicity beats visual polish and high production values when you have a great story and a fantastic sense of storytelling.

(For a higher-resolution version, see girleffect.org.)

This was produced by The Nike Foundation to spread the word about its efforts. It’s nice to see all those sneaker-selling skills and profits being put to a higher use.

Webvanta Financing Closed

2008-12-13T07:02:00Z

Today we reached an important milestone in the short history of Webvanta—we closed the next phase of our financing. We now have the capital we need to take our platform to the next level.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last three months that it’s been an incredibly challenging time to raise capital. We began our active fundraising with a presentation at the North Bay Angels on September 18, a day when a Wall Street Journal headline read, Worst financial crisis since ‘30s, with no end in sight. And things got worse, much worse, from there.

The freezing of credit markets, followed by the stock market collapse and the widespread economic malaise, made investors of all stripes extremely risk-averse. This week’s treasure-bill interest rate of 0% is the latest indication of the conservatism that pervades today’s investment climate. Many people are focused not on getting a return on their investments, but on simply preserving their capital.

Despite all this, we kept moving forward, refocusing on a smaller convertible debt financing instead of a Series A offering. We worked closely with several members of the North Bay Angels to craft terms that addressed their concerns about investing in these challenging times.

Today we closed the financing. I’m honored by the trust that our investors have placed in us. It is so easy these days to simply say “no” to any investment proposition. I am grateful to the intrepid souls who chose to support our efforts and say “yes.”

I’m thrilled to be able to put a renewed focus on moving the business forward; raising capital is always a big distraction, and in this climate, it was a huge distraction. Although we hope to raise additional capital in the future, we’ve structured the business in a way that it is not dependent on future capital infusions to survive.

The opportunity in front of us is tremendous: no matter what happens to the economy, the web will continue to be a crucial tool for businesses and organizations of all kinds, and we offer them a lower-cost way to gain more benefit from it. We believe that the way most web sites are built is overdue for a massive shift to software as a service, and we have a powerful platform to enable this shift.

If you haven’t yet seen the Webvanta service, watch our three-minute intro video and sign up for a free trial account. We’ll be adding lots of new features in the coming months, so if there’s things you’re particularly interested in seeing included, please let me know.

(For more thoughts on raising angel financing, see the article I wrote for Spartina.com, one of the first sites built on the Webvanta platform.)