Oct 22

Zero to TechCrunch in 4 days

Arizona, Entrepreneur, Events, Nerd 3 Comments »

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.

    reserveChuteTeam.png

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

    Oct 03

    Startup Weekend comes to Phoenix Oct 17th

    Arizona, Entrepreneur 2 Comments »

    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 from the US Post office

    Security 1 Comment »

    “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>.

    Sep 30

    7 Plugins that would rock my SugarCRM world

    Nerd 11 Comments »

    I’ve been using SugarCRM for two months now to put structure to the call efforts on the leads that are generated via our site. The more I use it, the more I appreciate all the work that must have gone into developing it. It’s an awesome tool but awesome things can always be better. Here are seven plugins I would pay for if they existed on the SugarExchange site:

  • Track Skype Calls – it has the nifty skype integration so that all phone numbers become clickable and let you call the number with a single click. I would love to see modifications that made it possible to track all calls made and give me a separate tab that allows me to see all calls sortable by date & name. That data could then be incorporated into the forecasting and reporting tools so you can see it took X dials to produce Y contacts to produce Z sales. This seems like a simple matter of writing a javascript onclick handler that intercepts the callto:// link and records the timestamp and lead.
  • Append geo info from phone – Our leads consist of a phone number, an email and a few other bits of information. It would be supremely useful to have a plugin that would flesh out the geographic info (Country, State, Postal Code, City) based on the area code our country code of the phone number. It looks like the NPA NXX area code database is publicly available and there’s probably a country code database out there as well so this would be doable I think.
  • Triage garbage records – While we’re on the subject of phone number plugins, it’d be great if there were a plugin that used some intelligent algorithms to flag the records that had suspect phone numbers. Right now this is a tedious process of sifting through leads and assigning a custom status of “Bad Phone Number.” Common patterns of junk numbers are emerging though (1234567, 555*, 1111111). A plugin that caught the obvious ones would knock out probably 80% of the work for dealing with bunk numbers.
  • What time is it there? – Appending the geographic info to the leads is the first step but the cadillac treatment here would be to have the local time at the destination you’re calling. Ideally this would be a field that’s filterable so the net result is that one can set acceptable calling hours and get only leads that fall within that current time window.
  • Auto merge all dupe emails – I’m really surprised this isn’t a feature of the import process. They have some de-duping capabilities based on firstname, lastname but none based on email (which is a little weird because it’s more likely that there will be two legitimate John Smith’s in the system than two john@smith.com’s). I’d like to be able to have SugarCRM merge all leads that have the same email address. This seems more like a feature request of Sugar than an actual plugin.
  • iCal feed – Please make it so I can get an iCal feed of the events on my calendar so that they appear in the calendar I live by (iPhone and iCal on the Mac).
  • Gmail integration – I’d love a way to have SugarCRM search my gmail account for past correspondence based on lead and contact email address and append any communications with that person as history to that record.

    • My only other suggestion: why not create a bounty system on SugarExchange so we can get this stuff created? I have to believe other people would be willing to pay for these enhancements as well if they existed. Take the guesswork out of what people want and how much it’s worth to them – accept pre-orders via a “pledgebank” style site. Developers will gravitate to solve the requests that have the highest bounty amounts. End result= paying work routed intelligently to developers and satisfied SugarCRM users.

    Sep 30

    Richard Stallman is officially confused

    JumpBox, Nerd 6 Comments »

    News sites and blogs are abuzz right now with reaction to Richard Stallman’s statement that “Cloud computing is a trap.” Unfortunately none of the commentary I’ve read so far has caught the key fallacy here: he has confused two entirely orthogonal concepts, Software as a Service and Utility (Cloud) Computing. While often seen together, the two are completely independent of one another (ie. you can have a SaaS offering delivered via servers running in your datacenter, and conversely you can deliver OSS software on a cloud-based system – we in fact make this very thing possible now with various JumpBoxes on Amazon’s EC2 service).

    The vendor lock-in he’s railing against in his interview (and wrongfully attributing to the cloud computing aspect) is actually related to the fact that most SaaS offerings are based on proprietary software. But it’s the same dependence one develops to proprietary software running on the desktop only it’s easier to take the first cocaine hit when there’s nothing to install. That offering may happen to be delivered via servers that are running in the cloud but that’s completely tangential. I doubt Stallman would take issue with a site like opensourcecms.com using a cloud computing service to host free demos of open source software in order to encourage its adoption… Making the argument he has is about as silly as going after the steel industry because you don’t like guns.

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    Sep 27

    Take 2 min to write your congressman and help save Pandora

    Activism No Comments »

    If you listen to Pandora radio, they’re on the ropes right now and need your help. Take two minutes of your time to rally and write your representative. Read this post from Pandora’s founder and then use this page to send an email to your congressman. I just sent the following one to mine in Arizona:


    Ed,
    I would urge you to support H.R. 7084. It's come to my attention that there have been recent lobbying efforts from massive media giants like Clear Channel in an attempt to sabotage the negotiations that would allow internet radio companies like Pandora to continue to peacefully coexist. Pandora and other internet radio stations have been slapped with unreasonable per song fees that exceed those charged to traditional radio stations. This is a anticompetitive "box out" maneuver from the incumbent players attempting to keep a stranglehold on how people can listen to music. It's reminiscent of the early days of Southwest airlines and how the entrenched players in the airline industry fought tooth and nail to block their charter. Imagine how poor air travel would be today if they had succeeded?

    I strongly urge you to support this bill and keep the playing field level for internet radio stations to coexist. To learn more about the issue, read this message from Pandora's founder: http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2008/09/congressional_e.html

    Sean

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