Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

My VP of Marketing has repeated this quote to me many times:

“You know you are wasting half of your advertisement budget; you just don’t know which time”

and now thanks to John Battelle I found out who is behind it, John Wanamaker, “a department store owner” according to Battelle and “the father of modern advertising” and “an innovator, creative in his work, and a merchandising and advertising genius” according to the Wikipedia article about him. Not exactly the same way of describing the same person…

The good news is that this is not entirely true these days, specially with online advertisement and data mining tools (or sometimes simple reporting) being more predominant and available. It is still largely true though in printed advertisement that is why many companies are moving away from it except for brand building purposes.

The quote is cited in Battelle’s recent book The Search that I am reading now, so far, so good. He argues at the begining of the book that he did not want to do a book about Google (in spite of talking a lot abot it) and that was the right decision as the book is much more interesting that way. However, I do not see how he could have written a book about just Google without getting into the early pioneers of search like DEC’s Altavista or the inventor of today’s business model for Google, Gross’ Overture. Once I am done with the book I will post something about it if I have something interesting to say.

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I have been following this thread about whether you need VC money or not that started with Rick Segal VC Handbook posting, triggered a Robert Scoble’s post here and a further response by Rick Segal here (Note: I would love to get a RSS Reader that is intelligent enough to recognize that all those posts are related and group then together in my reader, I am subscribed to both blogs so doing this is not a particular difficult problem, it just has not been done).

These posts remind me to a lecture by Robert I. Sutton that I attended in Stanford this last summer (btw, my team won the People’s choice award of the New Venture Lab that they organized, it was a lot of fun). He basically was telling us that VCs are the closest things in today’s society to a Ponzi Scheme, he basically shared most of the premises about the value that VCs bring and how they exploit entrepreneurs that Robert describes in his article. He made exactly the same remark as Robert, VCs will always make a lot more money than entrepreneurs in spite of the entrepreneur putting all the work and the original idea.

The lecture was being attended by Tom Byers who was sitting in front of me and I could see how his face was turning red as Robert spoke about VCs (Tom is big on entrepenership and VCs and his brother is a VC in Kleiner Perkins I think).

Sutton is a great presenter and a very passionate and polemic speaker, I read his book The Knowing-Doing Gap which is highly recommended and he spoke during his lecture about his new book Hard Facts, Half-truths, And Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management that has not yet been release but that promises to be as interesting and polemic about his early ones.

I think that VC money is needed depending on the context of the company you are starting, who is putting the money and whether they bring more than just money to the table as Rick describes. I do think that Rick is right when he says that VCs care about the people and the product since ultimately, this is what will make them money and this is precisely the point, the only care about the people and the product as far as making money is concerned which might not necessarily be aligned with the entrepreneur goals in the company (they might want to build something to last, they might want to move at a different speed, they might want to add features to make the product cooler even though the impact in revenue is irrelevant, they might want to hire someone very bright even if you are already fully staffed, etc..).

So overall, I agree with comments from both posts but I shared Robert opinion, if you can start a company without VC money, do so and never raise money unless you really needed (same as going public, do not go public unless you really needed it for a very good reason since managing a public company is a nightmare compared to managing a private company).

CD

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Windows based laptops have had a sleep feature ages but the Apple press continues touting some of Apple additions as "innovation". Recently, there were also a lot of posts about an Apple mouse with two buttons (again, nothing new to Windows users).
I remember when MacOS X was released, everyone was excited about what the OS could do compared to MacOS 9 in spite of most of the basic stuff already being available in Windows and Linux (at the end of the day, MacOS X is based on Linux).
In my opinion, their bigger innovation has been on the OS desktop interface (oh, well, an iPods), not having a good desktop is the main reason for the failure of Linux in the desktop (this is why I think that they should license the OS)

CD

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I am experimenting posting from a desktop client rather from the web interface that Typepad provides, their Web interface is so Web 1.0, very low usability (a little bit of AJAX wouldn’t harm…). So my question is, how can I configure the Omea Reader extensions to work with w.bloggar? I rather post from there since it is the weblog reader that I am currently using, I do not like to use multiple applications and interfaces to accomplish related tasks…
Any help is appreciated.

CD

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Just a day after my post about my theory of MacOS X running on any sort of x86 hardware, the guys from ZDNET in the UK have posted  an article about how to do it. There have been some other obscure posts about how to do this but this time the article with a very detail explanation about how to do it comes from a large publication so this is going to catch Apple’s attention (will they sue them?). Apple is not going to like this but it will eventually happen so in my opinion it will be better if they do it themselves and control the process (and the revenue flow from OS licenses that will offset potential losses on the hardware side).

CD

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Since Apple WWDC last June where Jobs announced that they are moving to Intel processors (I had a VIP invitation to the keynote but I could not attend so my VP of Engineering went instead, I hope that I get one for the keynote speech in Mac World in January and I finally see Jobs from the first row) I have had this theory that, eventually, we will see Mac OS X being licensed and running on Dell or other hardware. The reason I have this theory is the following:

• Apple has been improving their OS so much recently that is now worth switching (in spite of their initial failure with the "switch" campaign, apparently now they got more than one million Windows users switching to Mac OS) to it (I was about to actually buy my first Mac but I want a notebook and I decided to wait till the Intel ones ship since the speed improvement will be more noticeable there as they still run G4s).
• Apple has been adding more and more Mac OS application of their own in spite of similar applications already being available, their own browser, their own Power Point and Word knockoff, iLife, an email client, now Aperture, they are only really missing a good spread sheet of their own. Why will they invest so much on software of their own when software accomplishing similar tasks was already available unless they are planning to gain market share by licensing the OS?
• The move to Intel is more than just speed. The fact that now runs on Intel will allow an emulator using virtualization technology on a Intel box running Windows or Linux do a very good job running Mac OS as well. And actually the opposite is also true, you will be able to run Windows on top of Mac OS much more efficiently so they might actually go the opposite patch and allow Windows to run in Apple machines as speculated here
• An OS with a higher market share will also protect their iPod and iTunes franchise by increasing the number of Mac users that are less likely to switch other music platforms

So today I came across this article that claims that Apple has got a patent that will prevent people from installing Mac OS in other hardware that is not Apple. The link to the patent is broken so I cannot read it but this might not actually disproved my theory, as the article already points out, the fact that Apple says one thing it does not mean that they will do the exact opposite (think video iPod).

CD

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As I am new to the blog world as a writer (not a reader), I am now enjoying getting notified with TrackBacks to my posts. Not only I amazed about how people has even found my posts after just few days blogging, but it also letting my find some other interesting people on blogsphere. The latest one came from Noah which I met at Mind Camp as he co-organize with Ario the session on information overload that I attended. In his recap of MindCamp he linked (or should I say tracked back?) to my recap on that session and that let me find out the blogs of the two organizers. I am really bad for names so I have a hard time remember the names of most of the people I talked to and very few people were exchaging business cards, something I got really used to do after so many years in Japan.

I can see in his blog that Noah is also reading Getting Things Done which was discussed at the session and is waiting me in my mailbox in Seattle so I can start reading it this weekend when I am back there.

CD

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I just read a post by Alex Barnett and another one by Ronert Scoble about Tail Rank, a new blog search engine that has been released by Kevin Burton. What got my attention was a later post by Kevin commenting on the recent hack that Tara and Alex post about hacking tech.mememorandum that reminded me of the origins of Google.

Before Google came up most of the popular search engines at that time (Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek, etc.) were suffering a huge spam problem problem with their ranking algorithms. The main issue was that their ranking algorithms were based on keyword relevance and therefore spammers figured out that if you hide a million times the word "porn" (just as an example, no particular preference on the choice) in your web site, since search engines were pretty much counting keyword frequency in pages, the ranking of your page to the search term "porn" will go through the roof and appear on top of a search. What Google did that made that was different was to come up with an spam free ranking method (although that might not have been their original motivation). The details are described in Google’s original paper:"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (this is when Google was google.standford.edu and I was doing my PhD so I read this paper at that time). The reason Google was spam free was the nature of the PageRank algorithm that rely on how many pages link to a particular site but also on what was the PageRank of those pages (in other words, how many pages link to the pages that link to you and so on, it was a recurrent definition and the other trick they solve was how to calculate it efficiently). So basically to get your site a higher PageRank, you have to cheat not only on your web site but on the web sites that link to you and on the ones that link to them and so on, an unfeasible proposition.

So Kevin’s Tail Rank, according to him "was designed with spam prevention in mind"  which is a very good think in these days of too much information and blogs available.

Kevin also mentions that: "This isn’t a Google-style beta. This isn’t a Web 2.0-style beta. This is the old school definition of beta where we need feedback from the community to make a better product."

Well, I tried searching for "mindcamp" and I got two pages or results. Clicking on the second page of results gets me a page that in the bottom has "Search Results" with 6 pages listed but all of them take me to either of the first two. This is "constructive criticism" as I really want to finally see a useful blog search engine and TailRank has the potential to be the one.

CD

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Today I had dinner in Portland (we had great curry by the way) with Jon Maroney, an ex-Extensis marketing/biz dev guy that now is the CEO of a totally Web 2.0 company called Free Range (what a change!!). His company develops a RSS Reader for mobile devices ("Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Palm Treo, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, LG or any Java phone" according to their web site) and offers a server side service where your feeds are stored, catch and served effciently over a mobile connections (catching, compression and all that) into the free client RSS Reader. They accept OPML files as a way to upload of your feeds there and get them available in a cell phone via their service. The demo looked cool in spite of being done with a shitty Motorola phone over a slow T-Mobile connection (it was actually surprinsingly fast due to the catching and preloading info into the phone I guess). The interesting thing is that his company is also targetting corporate applications where they want to use RSS and cell phones with RSS Readers as a way to keep employees updated of particular relevant corporate information. So he is actually thinking on innovative ways where RSS and mobility can be used for corporate purposes (like keeping employees updated of changes in the HR policy) which was a refreshing thing to hear after an overwhelming usage of RSS for consumer applications.

We also discussed about Amazon Mechanical Turk and how that is a great platform for building a mobile device enable interface to access those job opportunities (Amazon has yet to release a Web Service API for that, so far the only API is for the companies posting jobs but Jeff Barr mentioned at Mind Camp that they were going to do so).

I recommend you to try so Jon can make money and eventually invite me to dinner instead of the other way around (just joking Jon

CD

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Reading the WSJ before going to sleep I came across an article in the opinion section titled "Bonfire of the Vanities" that talks about the recent riots in France and starts with the sentence "When it comes to rioting, there is no 35-hour week in France". Not that what is happening there is funny but the author though there was room to make a joke about it….

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