I read a great article by Liz Ryan today in the Daily Camera titled “Who’s wasting time?” about companies that like to monitor their knowledge workers’ surfing habits:

Liz Ryan asks (of a PR guy that works for a monitoring software company):

“Why do we care what they’re doing online? If a person can build a DNA sequence by working for 10 minutes and then spending 10 minutes on the Camera blogs, what do we care?”

“‘We care because people should be working,’ said the PR guy.”

…

“‘Also,’ I asked, ‘if the person isn’t online at some non-work-related Web site, does that mean he or she is working?’”

…

“We say we want to move past the Henry Ford assembly-line era, but we don’t”

— — — —

But in the end, it’s good to know that these monitoring systems are easily bypassed with a regimen of Remote Desktop tunneled through SSH. Problem solved.

Update: Remote Desktop over SSH references: here, here

I think I’ve finally recovered from the intense weekend which was Startup Weekend. What an amazing event, and one that I will continue to participate in down the road. While we didn’t meet our goal of having something live at the end of the weekend, I’d say we’re about 80% done (damn that last 20%).

What We Made:

• VoSnap, a tool that allows a quick vote amongst a group through email or SMS.

What Worked:

• The people. Only in the last seven months or so have I discovered the tight Boulder tech scene. It was great to work side by side with everyone on a common goal.
• Andrew Hyde - Great leadership, organization, and moderation of 7 minute status meetings and overall Startup Weekend flow.
• It was amazing to have all the various departments working in parallel. It was so cool to be working on a server or some code, and then realize at the next hourly meeting that PR had developed some new press releases, Biz Dev had come up with some new monetization models, Creative with some new logos banner ads, or funny videos, and Legal, hard at work researching trademarks, SMS rules, incorporating the company ten different ways, and coming up with founder equity agreements.
• The idea (if I do say so myself ). One of the coolest parts of startup weekend was seeing everyone in the room begin to understand the concept and the bigger picture. It was like a snowball effect - as momentum increased, understanding grew and and deliverables that were being produced by each of the different teams followed a common vision. I believe the original concept was well suited for the number of people in attendance, did not require specific knowledge about any field in general, was of a scope that could be completed in a weekend, and would, in the end provide benefits to Startup Weekend itself.
• Feedback and support from the world, including posts on the Startup Weekend blog, press, TechCrunchings, our live-stream viewers and all the other positive feedback we received during our startup weekend
• Startup Weekend is about execution. I’m tired of panel discussions, and passive entrepreneurship. There is a time and place for these things, but they tend to dominate the scene.
• Seventy-two people for a weekend smells of chaos and disaster, especially when you consider the mythical man-month and conventional wisdom of that sort, which ended up being a non-issue for Startup Weekend.

What Needs Work:

• Dev platform selection: Justin Shacklette nailed it right on the head in his comment on Brutal Honesty, a Failure and a Success. “…any random sample of web 2.0 programmers will include more Java than Ruby. But, and this is important, all Ruby web devs know the Rails framework. Java, and Java framework knowledge, is just too broad. You can have someone with 5 years experience on Struts, than doesn’t know anything about Spring Web Flow. And there is another tricky Java speed bump around tooling. A veteran Java dev may never have used Maven 2…for example.” I feel too many would be developers (myself included) were unable to contribute due to insufficient knowledge of Java framework(s)”
• VoSnap. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done, and we’ll get it done soon. And it will be awesome.

I’ll continue to update this blog as more VoSnap developments occur, until then…

VooooooooooooooSNAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

I Just got back from the first evening of Startup Weekend. WOW! Nothing quite like having the honor of 72 crazy-smart-and-capable individuals choosing your idea and going at it full bore. So far everyone has been really dedicated and focused on the task - it’s a really exciting environment to be part of. We started at 6PM, and in that time we’ve:

• Discussed and chosen an idea
• Discussed overall vision and brainstormed product capabilities
• Decided on and registered domain name
• Creative team has most of the logo concept completed.
• Legal has incorporated, trademarked, and done all sorts of crazy research on the concept space and SMS regulations
• User Experience team has a good idea of how things are going to progress
• Development team has decided on dev. platform and is working up models installing tools and all that jazz.
• Marketing has a multitude of monetization strategies they’re considering.
• David Cohen has blogged 14 posts on the progress along with various video segments

Going into Startup Weekend I was a little concerned with managing the dynamics and communications among such a large group, especially with so little time to execute. Turns out my concerns were for naught as Andrew Hyde has been doing a wonderful job of managing Startup Weekend,  constantly soliciting feedback from the individual groups and moderating hourly status meetings to keep everyone up to date of the latest efforts in each team as well as the overall direction of the concept.

We start again at 8:30 am tomorrow morning with our staff meeting and mini-yoga session. Everyone is determined to get a lot accomplished tomorrow - mockups and skeletons in the morning and the developers have even signed on to some sort of demo by evening.

Just now installed the Me.dium update to their firefox plugin. What a great makeover - seems a lot more intuitive and the “talk” area has been cleaned up quite a bit. Seems it’s more obvious who is saying what, from where, and also has some nice hover effects. It also seems that the web cloud/map is much more responsive to navigation across different links/pages.

Now I wonder if it would be possible to have a plugin mode that takes up less browser real-estate. My browser side-bar is becoming a coveted spot, and apparently can only handle one site/plugin at a time. I’ve been using the SlimTimer sidebar to track some work I’ve been doing, and this conflicts with the Me.dium plugin.

Perhaps a simple option to show the number of sites in the cloud, along with number of people at those sites in the Firefox status bar. That way you could probably get a good indication if you’re in a high traffic area worth investigating by invoking the me.dium plugin. Additionally, the ability to send messages to others browsing in your area is nice, but not always necessary and I believe the important information is contained in the sites around you as well as the number of people visiting those sites.

Just my two cents, FWIW, but kudos to the me.dium folks for the shiny new plugin.

I was reading Liz Ryan’s column in Business Plus this morning, “Who’s lucky anyway?” and she hit the nail on the head regarding resume gaps and returning-to-the-workforce moms. I quote:

“It’s absurd, Employers behave as though moms managing busy kids and households are utterly without marketable skills. That gap on the resume is as off-putting to them as garlic to a vampire. That’s a shame.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I believe this applies not only to returning-to-the-workforce moms but to everyone as a whole. Especially in this day and age when employees may not be as married to their employment as employers would like. I know many folks that have taken time off to go climb a mountain, explore a foreign country, sail the oceans, be with their family, or generally enjoy life for a period of time. Maybe this is just my experience living in Boulder, anyhow.

The common practice by HR and Recruiters that involves filtering out resumes with temporal gaps in their employment history is ridiculous. Should I take some time of for whatever reason, that doesn’t mean I’ve all of a sudden forgotten everything I’ve learned. In fact I’d argue that in many instances (Ahem, Aerospace for example) many employees sometimes go months or years at a time working on tasks that do not involve their core competencies. I know many colleagues that have spent six, maybe twelve months writing countless amounts of useless technical documentation, not touching a single line of code during that time. Perhaps you HR folk, and especially you employment Recruiters should start doing your job and find a better way to deal with this overwhelming resume burden that you are faced with each day. Filtering on simple typos and resume gaps well, give me a goddamn break.

I just recently ran across the following services and they seem to have some potential:

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

OK, so maybe I’m a little late on this one, but I was talking to a local venture capitalist last week and he clued me into this service by Amazon. Apparently this is an attempt by Amazon to make inroads into other business arenas. S3 provides unlimited storage priced at $0.15 per gigabyte-month and $0.20 per gigabyte transferred with no minimum fees or startup costs.

Data is accessible via SOAP or REST interfaces and the intended usages are only limited by imagination. Think of S3 as a good solution for media sharing sites (photo, music, and video), online backup. Check out JungleDisk for a cool application that lets you use Amazon S3 as a drive share (via WebDAV) and has a nice pricing matrix comparing the storage costs between competitors at different levels of storage requirement.

OpenDNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is probably one of the most unsung protocols on the Internet these days, but has a hand in practically all your Internet activities. OpenDNS labels themselves as a safer, faster, smarter DNS and is a free service targeted at end users and server operators. As an end-user you can use OpenDNS as your primary DNS in place of your ISP’s DNS. OpenDNS offers a speedier service due to its It offers increased speed to a high-performance distributed network and a large, smart DNS cache. Secondly it intercepts phishing sites and automatically corrects typos in urls.

For server operators, OpenDNS allows you to use their service as your primary DNS server, allowing configuration of all the DNS entries for your domain. They mention they make their money off of unresolvable domains - instead of display the typical 404 page not found, they display an error message along with some advertising. Good to know how a free tech service plans to survive.
UPDATE (3-4-07): I think I spoke too soon on the above. Doesn’t seem that OpenDNS does DNS hosting after all. Unfortunate being a server operator and always looking for a better way to do DNS, Oh well.

oDesk

Have a development project? Looking to staff it, but can’t afford the high costs of local talent? Before you head off to Bangalore, take a look at oDesk. oDesk helps mediate the process of bringing Buyers (with projects) and Providers (with skills) together. Similar to sites like Rent a Coder, oDesk offers a number of ways to ensure your Providers are working on your projects through webcam, keyboard and mouse monitoring and screen captures. You pay only for what you’ve been billed by Providers and it looks like you have a great deal of control over what is developed as well as a paper trail of documentation that describes what the Provider has been spending his or her time on.

Some interesting articles and links I’ve encountered recently:

• Slashdot article: ‘Dumb Terminals’ Can Be a Smart Move for Companies
• Central Valley Business Times article: “Lights out in California?” California may be the first state to ban incandescent light bulbs
• Great utility: MWSnap - ” MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen. ” Yes I know its just a screen capture program but it is really nice, sits in the system tray, and automatically magnifies the selection region so you can capture exactly what you need from the screen. No more Shift-Print-Screen and cropping in Word.

Yeah, that’s right, all you HostRockets, HostMonsters, HostGators, MonsterHosts, and the whole lot of you, listen up! Google Apps for your Domain is here! You may now commence ceasing operations, because, well, your market has been saturated for a long time now, and we’re Google - providing this service for free (UPDATE: Looks like Google Apps is going Paid). And honestly, you guys make GoDaddy look like an easy-to-use respectable operation with your numerous hosting plans, upsells, addons, additional features, and such!

Introducing Google Apps for your Domain
Google Apps for your Domain is a free (at least at the time of this writing) service from Google that lets you “brand” Google’s applications under your own domain name. Google Apps features include:

• Google Mail for your domain
• Google Calendar for your domain
• Google Talk for your domain
• Google Page Creator to host web pages for your domain
• A customizable start page to preview your email, calendar, news, and other domain content.
• A nifty customizable control panel to manage domain accounts and users.

So What’s the Big Deal?
Well, if it isn’t obvious, this is an amazing service for a number of reasons. First, it eliminates any excuse for a business to operate without a legitimate business domain and the web and email hosting to support it (See my prior article on this problem). Second, it’s Google Mail (GMail) for your domain! GMail is by far the best web-based email client I’ve ever used. That, and there are no annoying ads inserted at the bottom of your emails (at least for now). GMail is very easy to use in a web browser, and Google Desktop makes it easy to stay informed of new messages arriving in your inbox.

Third, it’s Google Calendar (GCal) for your domain! Once again GCal is by far the best calendaring solution I’ve see in ages. I’ve been using GCal for maybe a year now and rely on it heavily. In fact, it has recently become my browser homepage. GCal has great support for multiple calendars, sharing calendars, setting up meetings, and sending meeting notices. It has a very clean presentation, is very easy to use, and is accessible from iCal, phones, Google Desktop, and pretty much anywhere else thanks to the API. Packaged with Google Apps for Your Domain, it can be used for office scheduling and has hooks into Gmail for creating meetings and such. GMail and GCal are eating Microsoft Office’s lunch, too.

Google Talk and the other applications are just icing on the cake. With Google Talk, your business can finally embrace instant messaging within your company. The page creator while a little weak, does provide a decent solution for publishing static web pages. The start page is what you’re used to if you’ve ever personalized your Google search experience. The control panel is a well thought out, easy to use user management console. It provides a dashboard to get an overview of your domain and the capability to create email lists and mail aliases. It also offers an number of customizable features for your domain including your own logo, domain aliases, time zones, and other similar settings.

Drawbacks
For most businesses or individuals, the drawbacks are minor. GMail for your domain offers 2GB of email storage per user. I imagine you are still subject to giving up a little mail privacy as Google is known to index all their GMail content. Google Page Creator is somewhat limited and dynamic content or scripting does not seem possible at this time. Web content is limited to 100MB at the time of this writing. Finally, you’re on your own when it comes to setup and configuration, however there are some good forums that can help you out along the way.

Regardless of the (minor) drawbacks, Google Apps for Your Domain is perfect for most small businesses looking for Internet hosting. I host a handful of sites through my Obility, LLC company and have even been recommending it to some of these companies as a possible better, cheaper alternative.

If your business is considering options for Internet services hosting, have hosting in-place already, or you’re one of those businesses that have incomplete hosting, you’d be doing yourself a favor to take a look at the Google Apps for your Domain.

I don’t want to see another business using a third-party domain for their web or email (i.e. joeswidgets@comcast.net) ever again!

Around 1994, when the Internet was just coming on the scene, I started a venture named PerformaWeb that marketed web sites and Internet branding along with a community directory page to independent businesses in my hometown. The Internet was new then, and most folks just didn’t get it. Fast forward to the present day. The Internet has proven its potential, has reached (and exceeded) critical mass and businesses both large and small have embraced what it has to offer.

What amazes me though is the number of times I still come across businesses that do not have a legitimate branded Internet domain for their company’s web and email services (the Internet domain is the part that comes after the ‘@’ in an email address such as info@joeswidgets.com). I see this happen all over the place - in articles on businesses in the Boulder Daily Camera, on business cards, and in advertising materials. Using the fictitious company Joe’s Widgets as an example, I see Internet branding that falls into one of the following categories:

1. Omit website and email information indicating no business Internet presence.
2. Use a third-party domain usually from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as aol.com, comcast.net, or hotmail.com for their web hosting (joeswidgets.home.comcast.net) and business email (joeswidgets@comcast.net).
3. Use a legitimate domain for their website (www.joeswidgets.com) but either lack a business email address or use a third-party ISP domain as in category two above.
4. Has a legitimate website (www.joeswidgets.com) and a legitimate email: (info@joeswidgets.com).

Now for those businesses that fall into category one, OK - maybe you don’t care. Maybe your business really doesn’t need Internet marketing, maybe you have a solid client base that has never used the Internet. Fine.

But for those of you that fall in category two or three, using a third-party ISPs domain in place of your own legitimate domain is similar to using a party-line for your business telephone or an potential employee submitting a resume full of spelling and grammatical errors. It’s unprofessional and gives a poor first-impression of your company. And those of you in category three, you already have the domain and the website, why did you drop the ball on the business email address?

The problems that can arise from using a third-party domain for your email address include:

1. The email address taken out of context (i.e. a business card or advertising literature) may lack meaning or may not be recognized by a potential client.
2. Depending on the nature of your business, clients may be hesitant to email sensitive information or questions to what looks to be a personal, home, or family email account.
3. It is free advertising for your ISP, not your business.
4. Creates a question of business affiliation and ownership. Are you a subsidiary of Comcast? Do you work for Comcast?

Now I will agree, registering your domain, signing up for the right services, and setting up your website and email hosting can be a confusing and sometimes expensive process (thanks, GoDaddy), but contact your local consultant, computer-savvy business partner, or teenager and have them help you. While you’re at it, consider signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain which is a free hosting service provided by Google that provides Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Web Creator specifically for your domain. Stay tuned for an article covering Google Apps for Your Domain in more depth.

UPDATE (1-31-07):
I added an article on Google Apps for Your Domain