Oct 22

Friday night it was merely an idea. By Sunday night it was a prototype. And by Tuesday afternoon it was on the homepage of TechCrunch. How did we do it with Reserve Chute?

This was a perfect storm where an old idea whose time had come collided with a group of capable, motivated people with the right skills in the right environment punctuated with just the right amount of Zoolander.

People using SaaS applications love the convenience but face the possibility of losing access to their data -whether it be caused by the company going out of business overnight, hard drives and backups failing or simply by their internet connection being interrupted. Users want the peace of mind knowing that they have a local copy of their data and they want a brain-dead-simple way to achieve this for all their online applications. The tool we created this weekend offers this capability and makes it possible for any contributor to add extend the system and add hooks to make it work with new services.

While the demo we showed on Sunday night is not publicly available yet, our small but stalwart group is already plotting a series of Wednesday night hack sessions at Gangplank to advance the project to a shippable first version targeted for release sometime around the Holidays. For now, if you use any web-based services and want to be able to automatically store a unified, local copy of your data across all your applications, sign up for the beta and be among the first to try out Reserve Chute!

Other noteworthy projects that sprang to life this weekend:

  • Twitteratr
  • MyShelterHelper
  • And on another note, if you’re in Phoenix this evening come out to my talk on startup lessons at the Club eFactory in north Phoenix.

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    P.S. And yes that is a Karate Kid Cobra Kai t-shirt I’m wearing. Sweep the LEG!

    Oct 03

    Startup Weekend will be in Phoenix two weeks from tonight. This is a 2.5 day affair where strangers of different disciplines come together to build and launch a real product in a weekend. I attended the one in San Francisco back in November and wrote up some thoughts on that event. If you’ve considered starting your own business or just want a chance to meet and work with smart local people to build something real, you will not want to miss this.

    The event starts at 6pm on Friday the 17th and will be held at the new Gangplank office at 325 E Elliot Road Suite 34 (SE Corner Elliot/Arizona Avenue). Tickets are $40 and cover food and overhead for the event. You can get them online here and see product ideas that have been proposed so far here.

    Oct 01

    Security Theater” is a term coined by Bruce Schneier and refers to “security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.” I got a taste of it today when one of the packages I sent last week was returned. We’re now sending out t-shirts to people that make us happy at JumpBox. Apparently stuffing two shirts in one of the pre-paid envelopes puts it over the 13oz limit for what’s safe to mail anonymously in the USA. May I point out:

    1. Wasn’t anthrax the scare awhile back? That’s a powdered substance that’s virtually weightless and therefore immune to this countermeasure.
    2. If letter bombs are the real threat, it takes a lot less than 13oz of c-4 to hurt someone. Again rendering this policy ineffective at blocking that threat.
    3. If a terrorist wants to mail an anonymous package over the weight threshold he/she can just make the return address the intended destination and it will get there (as I found out today when they returned my package to me). Oops I guess I just spilled the beans on how to defeat this silly security practice…

    All this practice does is inconvenience people. Perhaps there is some value to the feeling of security it gives the public, but it’s false security just like the shenanigans we go through when we take our shoes off at the metal detector in the airport. And now that TSA employees are allowed to bypass screening themselves at the metal detector, that whole process has more holes in it than a block of baby swiss. Oh well, </end security rant>.

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