Archives for 2007

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US-funded Reconstruction Projects Fail in Iraq – After being Completed

Posted on April 29, 2007 ·

“In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle”. – reports the New York Times.

The reconstruction programs were designed partly to rebuild what the Army destroyed in the first place, partly to promote goodwill to the United States.  Yet another Mission accomplished. smile_sad

 

 

Filed Under: Politics ·
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Garage Sale on YouTube

Posted on April 25, 2007 ·

The last thing I expected to find on youtube is a garage sale ad:

 

Creative?  Yes.  Effective?  Don’t know.  Youtube has global viewers, I don’t know how many people who want to check out garage sales, and happen to be in the  neighborhood will see this. 

Actually, it’s not simply a garage sale, it’s a complete Estate Sale, and appears to be run by an agent who may  just  have started a new trend.

 

 

Filed Under: Misc ·
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Musical Spreadsheets – Microsoft PR Blunder #… ?

Posted on April 25, 2007 ·

If you have a  lot of documents, you should use Windows Media Player to pull them up…

No, it’s not a joke.  This Vista review by the Wall Street Journal (subscription only, but here’s a summary by Michael Parekh) discovered that if you have thousands of files, Vista comes to it’s knees. Displaying a complex directory structure with thousands of entries took Vista over 6 minutes – still better than XP, which simply crashes.   (Mac: 30 seconds).

The reviewer contacted Microsoft, and here’s the hilarious answer (no, it was not on April 1st):

“Microsoft said I would have had better luck viewing my files in its Media Player software. As for why its file system simply wasn’t more robust in the first place, it said it put its development resources in areas that affect the most people.”

This not long after Microsoft Outlook’s Program Manager declared that the two major design changes that were heralded as key new features crippled Outlook’s performance.

I’ve long given up hope on Microsoft fixing their software… but they sure could fix their messaging problem.  Or perhaps just hire Stephen Colbert.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Technorati Replaces User Data With Advertising

Posted on April 25, 2007 ·

Here’s the Technorati homepage.  If you’re signed in, your blog’s basic stats would appear at the upper right corner, which is now covered occupied by advertising:

It’s frustrating enough to see ads hide actual content on Yahoo..etc, but normally there’s a way to click and close it. Not this one. This is a solid ad, you read it or leave it, it won’t go away. So where’s the account data?  Your guess is as good as mine … it’s gone!  You can randomly click around, and find it after a few clicks via Favorites, Ping ..etc – but the most important information, along with your inbound links is completely missing from the Front Page.

Perhaps Technorati are just as confused as I am… the WTF button on the left takes on a new (old) meaning…thumbs_down

Update (4/25):  Apparently it was a bug, Technorati fixed it. Kudos for responding fast!   At the same time…I know it’s “release often, release early” but I didn’t think testing became a 100% user function…

Filed Under: Blogging, SaaS, Software ·
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Two-Word Strategy for the Math-Challenged

Posted on April 23, 2007 ·

Small Business Trends interviews Gary Harpst, CEO and founder of Six Disciplines, LLC on his two-word business strategy.  The interview starts with a few examples:

Gary Harpst: Examples of a two-word strategy statement might include:

  • Hot Donuts (Krispy Kreme)
  • Computers Direct (Dell)
  • Quick Automotive Service (Jiffy Lube)

Excuse me?  Which word is Jiffy Lube supposed to drop to get down to two? Question

 

Filed Under: Business, SMB / SME ·
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Amazon >< Statsaholic: Who’s Blackmailing Whom

Posted on April 23, 2007 ·

The Amazon / Statsaholic (previously Alexaholic) fight just got a lot uglier: details of Alexaholic owner Ron Hornbaker’s past conviction surfaced, and are being played out in a lowly game. 

TechCrunch reports rumors of Hornbaker attempting to blackmail Amazon earlier, while Hornbaker claims that “Amazon is using his conviction as leverage in the case, threatening to disclose it publicly if he doesn’t settle immediately by paying $25,000 and transferring all Statsaholic assets to Amazon.”

I’m not going to provide details of the old conviction, what’s done is done, it has nothing to do with the current case, and it’s really unfortunate that it surfaced now.

But something is seriously wrong here: the assertion that Amazon “outed” Hornbaker as part of  a smear-campaign is ridiculous.  Just think for a minute… wouldn’t any half-brained PR person know digging up dirt on the “little guy” would backfire, negatively reflect on Amazon?   Amazon can railroad Hornbaker all they want, but they would be using money, lawyers, the court system … the entire war machinery much rather than doubtful methods that so obviously can hurt them.

And Amazon blackmailing “the little guy” to pay $25K?  C’mon, this is just pathetic.

(Disclaimer: I have no factual information on the case, the above is just my opinion – although I’m obviously not alone…)

 

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Filed Under: Business, Marketing / PR, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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School Kids in Handcuffs

Posted on April 22, 2007 ·

A Milwaukee school district may soon begin to use plastic handcuffs on “out-of-control” children. 

The School Board’s decision was triggered by a wake of violence in Milwaukee high schools – but the new policy applies for all ages, including kindergarten.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… those shameless  criminals need to be put in their place. smile_zipit

What almost made me fall off the chair was a statement by a former corrections officer.  ABCNews must have felt the same way, the printed an edited version:

“Temporary training is not good enough,” she said. “It’s not that you can just walk up and cuff people and they’re going to comply.”

The ominous missing part, after pointing out her long corrections career sounded like this: 

“Putting on cuffs properly is not something you can learn in six weeks of training. Its’ a … career goal”

Caged 

Filed Under: Misc ·
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The Most Absurd Case of Patent Trolling

Posted on April 18, 2007 ·

This is way beyond reality:

Disc Link, a California company claims to have a patent for hyperlinking from a CD to the Web, reports InformationWeek.

“U.S. Patent No. 6,314,574, is assigned to Disc Link and governs “an information distribution system [that] encodes a first set of digital data on a plurality of portable read-only storage devices. Additional information is stored in a database that is accessible by using a bi-directional channel.”

In the patent owner’s interpretation this covers URLs.  The entire World can be sued, so they started with companies like Borland, Business Objects, Compuware, Corel, Eastman Kodak, Novell, Oracle and SAP.   Disc Link vs. The World.

As usual, Techdirt delivers some background.

I’m scared.  Not sure whether I am in violation of a patent for typing on my keybord… using the mouse… watching the creen.  Tomorrow I’ll file a broad patent on watching TV, eating breakfast, driving a car… on LIFE. 

 

Filed Under: Humor, Misc ·
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Google Charts, Presentations (Pre-Announcing a’la Microsoft)

Posted on April 18, 2007 ·

Almost a year ago I wrote about a visual comparison of Google and Zoho spreadsheets. At the time, Zoho simply KO’d Google, which had no charting support whatsoever. Of course this was more then just a “beauty-contest”: charting is simply the most effective way of visually conveying a message, and as such a “must have”.

It’s time to update that comparison (I’m using the same spreadsheet, updated to today’s numbers), since Google has announced charting capabilities today, adding 18 types of charts to select from (Zoho has 27, and ThinkFree 32).

Clearly, Google is catching up on the appearance front, the new charts are appealing. (Click on the pics to view the public version of the original spreadsheets).

On the publication side, Zoho still leads: instead of using images, like I did here for the sake of comparison, I could have simply embedded the system-generated script which would keep my Zoho Sheet inside this blog post up-to-date. In fact sometimes it makes sense to publish only the chart, without the underlying spreadsheet, like this:

Feedburner Subscribers in % - http://sheet.zoho.comThe chart to the right is not an image, any changes in the originating spreadsheet will be immediately reflected in the published article.

The addition of charts was announced today in Google’s usual, understated style; in fact the first blog post on the subject was titled How to make a pie. For all I know it could have been Grandma’s Apple Pie recipe. smile_tongue

Contrary to this the other Google announcement came with a lot of hoopla, CEO Eric Schmidt dropping the news of Google’s Presentation software in front of ten thousand Web 2.0 Expo attendees. The only problem is, unlike Zoho and ThinkFree, Google does not have the Presentation creator/manager yet, it won’t be coming for months, and as Google Blogoscoped observes, this preannouncement “Microsoft-style”, instead of just releasing products and let users discover them is “uncool” – and a break away from Google’s good traditions.

Talk about announcement, Zoho, which has made it a tradition to launch a new product at just about any event – and in between – surprised: there was no announcement. Are the sleeping? I think not, in fact as Advisor to Zoho I am quite happy with them announcing no announcements: they plan “not to release any new application until we open up our existing private-beta applications (Notebook, Meeting & Mail)”.

Those who attended the SMB Application Marketplace session at Web 2.0 Expo may have picked up on something more to come though: responding to a moderator question, Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna stated they want to “become the IT department of small businesses“… and there is clearly more to SMB IT than just an Office Suite.

Like I’ve stated before, 2007 will be the year when it’s all coming together.

Update (4/18): Note to Google: it’s *not* a very good idea to display my email address on spreadsheets I choose to make public. Sorry, Google, my mistake, I used the wrong URL (not the public one).

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Filed Under: Collaboration, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME ·
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High Profile Startup Launch Opportunities Abound

Posted on April 16, 2007 ·

There’s certainly no shortage of high-profile opportunities for startups nowadays. 

The creme de la creme is no doubt Demo where 70 startup can pitch, get courted by VC’s and enjoy unprecedented publicity. High profile, professional, and (almost) prohibitively expensive.  You essentially have to be already funded or bring in significant revenue to be able to afford it.  Fortunately there is a growing number of affordable alternatives.

Under the Radar is a well-established conference series presented by Dealmaker Media (formerly known as IBDNetwork). After the recent, successful Office 2.0 event, the next UtR is focusing on Entertainment and Media on June 28th.  If this is your field, hurry up there are 4 days left for registration. Clarification: the April 20th deadline is for submitting your company as a presenter, attendee registration is open right till the event itself.

SVASE, the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, expanded it’s scope of events last year with the joint Launch: Silicon Valley / Art of the Start mega-event jointly put up with Garage Technology Ventures. Guy Kawasaki calls Launch: Silicon Valley 2007 “the poor man’s Demo” and recommends you get in early. Submission deadline here is May 3rd – see more information in my earlier post. 

Finally, a “newborn”:  Mike Arrington just announced TechCrunch20, a conference he is co-producing with Jason Calacanis in September, where “twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this.”  Submission deadline to this event is May 30th.

Summing up, in the order of occurrence:

  • Launch: Silicon Valley, June 5th, 30 startups, deadline May 3rd.
  • Under the Radar,  June28th, 32 startups, deadline April 20th.
  • TechCrunch20, September 17-18th, 20 startups, deadline May 30th.

Sounds like a “busy” summer to me smile_regular

 

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Marketing / PR, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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