Sep 27

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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Sep 25

My friend Josh just interviewed me for his AZ tech news site. The interview gives some of the backstory of how/why we created JumpBox. Unfortunately it also comes off as attributing way too much credit to me. I have to reiterate here that 99% of the vision and strategy for JumpBox comes from our CEO Kimbro Staken. And 100% of the engineering execution is from our tiny “lil’ engine that could” team. I provide what I can to support these people and insulate them from BS, but the hardest work for the company is done by them.

Anyways, thanks Josh for the interview. We feel like we’ve come along way and at the same time realistically we’re still closer to the starting line than we are to the finish line with miles to go before we sleep.

P.S. Please plug the economy back in- I think somebody kicked the cord.

Sep 17

Big day for JumpBox as we announce a new service called “Powered by JumpBox” for Independent Software Vendors. The first customer of this new program is Six Apart. They’re now distributing Virtual Movable Type as a JumpBox. Their announcement today can be found here.

This is a big deal because it means all of the experience we’ve gained through distributing hundreds of thousands of JumpBoxes for Open Source products can now be put to work for any ISV that distributes a server application. Reducing the technical barriers for would-be users trying your software means less frustration, more prospectives in the pipeline and more closed deals. If you’re an ISV with a particularly complex server app and want to learn more about how to close more deals by getting a JumpBox for your product, contact us.

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Sep 15

I was lucky to be one of the people who got to speak at the first ever Ignite Phoenix a month ago. The night was a complete blast with 16 presenters each doing a 5min talk on something they’re passionate about. Topics ranged from OCD, to pinhole photography to firewalking to geese in a public library. I talked about music, education, becoming your own teacher and how to accelerate breakthroughs. Huge props to and Roger Williams for pulling off a fantastic event and Clintus McGintus for filming and producing all the videos from the night. You can watch my talk below and you can catch all the other ones here on blip.tv. And if you’re interested in presenting at the next one, they’re now recruiting speakers for that one on Oct 28th.

Aug 29

Headsup: if you haven’t voted for panel topics for South by Southwest yet they close the voting at 5pm today. I’ve put one together on the topic of how to grow successful online and offline communities (and as usual I’m merely the guy who gets the other villagers to come out and make stone soup). This panel has the co-founder of Reddit Steve Huffman, the community manager for Cambrian House Sarah Blue, the community manager for Vencorps Will Pate and the author of OKdork Noah Kagan. .

How would you like to hear from a guy who became the first Y Combinator success story after being initially rejected? He wrote the code for what became one of the most vibrant peer-rated news sites on the planet and then decided to open source his technology. Hear about the design decisions and philosophy that allowed them to create a massive online community that was popular enough to be acquired by Conde Nast.

What about hearing stories from one of the main people responsible for cultivating the community within the online community Cambrian House? With their philosophy of “intense candor” they relentlessly videotaped and exposed internal meetings with their community, shared conference calls, developed a voting system that made members feel relevant and held weekly “Idea Warz” contests to build one of the most loyal online communities (granted they are no longer in existence but that story in itself of their rise and fall should be an incredible one to hear from someone who was there from day one).

Or how about chatting with the community manager who has taken in the refugees from the defunct CH project and given them a new home in the VenCorps community? They’re trying to reshape the funding process by using “wisdom of the crowds” techniques to float the cream of the crop ideas to the top and give them seed funding.

And what about trading insights with blog author who has built a readership of thousands and consistently draws dozens of comments on each post. Learn how a humble writing style can and self-deprecating jokes can create a “Geneva” of neutrality that welcomes in readers and makes them writers.

If these sound like panelists you want to meet then…

Vote Now!


It takes all of 30 sec. And while you’re at it vote for these other Arizona SXSW candidates who have interesting talks of their own.

We had a unicorn last year. You can bet we’ve got something bigger than candy mountain this year.
But we need your help to make it happen so vote.

Aug 21

The topic of why relocate to the Bay Area if you’re doing a tech startup has been beaten to death by people like Michael Arrington and Paul Graham. In some situations it’s simply not possible. The answer we found to compensate for all the things we lack in terms of networking and visibility for our startup was simple:

Parachute into the scene in Silicon Valley and hit every possible local event to make connections that are deep enough that they will persist once you leave.

Below is a video (bigger version) from the talk I gave yesterday at the Gangplank Headquarters discussing the lessons learned from a 31 day road trip to San Francisco I did this past holiday season for our company. It discusses everything from tactical details like how to pack to strategic concepts of different ways you can network as a complete alien.

BTW, the Gangplank guys are doing some great things in Arizona to help jumpstart our tech community. Their podcast site just went live yesterday, if you like startup podcasts check it out.

Slide deck from the talk available here as PDF (1.5MB). All images other than the ones I took are Creative Commons share & share alike license.

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