An idea came to me while I was working on VoSnap the other day. It was also partly inspired by Intense Debate who has been developing products to essentially own a part of the Internet, in their case, blog comments.

I got to thinking, why hasn’t anyone done anything with email subject lines. Through all the years email has been around, and all the innovation that has gone into email products, the subject line is still a static, plain element in your mail reader. Certainly it could be possible to embed HTML in the subject line and have it displayed with a little pizazz. If I remember correctly, Colorful subject lines were a feature of BBS systems back in the day, thanks to a helping of ANSI graphics.

Then I was thinking - Why does the subject line have to be static in the first place? Take for instance VoSnap. Why can’t the email subject line show how much time is left in a vote, and update every minute until the vote is closed. Sure providing executable / dynamic code in the email subject line would be “subject” to all the issues and nightmares that come with executable code anywhere. Spammers would probably love it, and no amount of Xanax would prevent Microsoft Vista from going off the deep end due to an active-subject line induced anxiety attack.

For applications such as VoSnap, meeting requests, and things of that nature it could prove to be very useful as the email subject line is the first and many times only thing that is consumed by the recipient.

Watching and participating in the several Startup Weekends has given me some insights into common elements of each weekend that could be streamlined with the use of additional tools, preparation (no, not like Toronto), or services.

One thing that each Startup Weekend implements, as do a number of Software as a Service companies, is the pre-release splash page. This is the page that announces the imminent release of the product, and allows an interested user to signup with his or her email address to be notified when the product launches.

I envision a service that manages and hosts pre-release splash pages on behalf of SaaS companies. I know, in the case of Startup Weekend Boulder, when we were developing VoSnap, we got our page up late in the game. We also had to spend time and resources designing and posting the page on the production server.

I believe the pre-release splash page is a simple yet very important of any startup company. It should be posted as soon as a domain name is available to capture and gauge customer interest, and to develop a mailing list that can be used for marketing purposes and a way to continue generating “buzz” about your product long after a potential customer’s initial visit to your site.

Pre-release splash pages are relatively simple to create and usually adhere to a common structure. I believe a pre-release splash page hosting service would be beneficial to SaaS developers because it would eliminate the need to spend time reinventing the wheel by developing and hosting their own custom splash page. It would also provide additional benefits such as list management, email campaigns, mobile SMS text notification, and analytics, that a roll-your-own solution would not be able to provide. It could be monitized through advertisements (of course), and fees for premium services such as SMS text and analytics.

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 posted this idea on the Startup Weekend  idea page, and figured I’d post it here as well:

The Idea: Vevo.com as in Vote Early, Vote Often.

Whereas twitter asks “what are you doing” in 140 chars or less, VEVO asks  “what are you deciding?”

The idea came from thinking about the Startup Weekend model. To eliminate the need for countless number of rules and to keep the Startup Weekend model self-organizing, we will need to rely on a democratic voting process to guide the course of the group’s action. I imagine we’ll be making a lot of decisions during the weekend through group votes. We will want a method to make these decisions quickly so we can focus more on developing and less on decision “overhead”

VEVO facilitates this process by allowing decisions to be made by a group through a quick, efficient, and accurate democratic voting process.

How it would work:

1. A group moderator sets up a voting group by adding group member emails and configures the parameters of the voting group (anonymous votes, voting duration, etc)
2. Group members login and setup their account (turn on notifications via email / SMS / whatever)
3. When a group member wants the group to vote on a decision, they can, in 140 chars. or less, enter a description of that decision (either online or via a SMS short code)
4. Decision request is broadcast to group members via their specified notification channel.
5. Group members have, say 5 minutes (configured by moderator in step 1) to vote with a simple Yes, No, Abstain (Y/N/A) response via email/SMS
6. After the voting period has expired, VEVO.com tallies the votes and updates the group members with the results of the vote via their desired notification channel.
7. Group members can go online to get a history of all decisions / votes processed by the system along with pie charts of vote outcome. If the moderator has configured the group such that voting results are public, members could see how each person voted on each issue.

Additional Features:
1. Multiple choice voting

Markets:

1. startupweekend
2. Classroom settings - enable feedback / quizzes in large lecture halls and eliminate the need for the “clicker” devices
3. Board Room / organizations
4. Advertising Agencies for instant focus-groups or quick-response surveys

How to make money:

1. See twitter.com
2. 37signals model of varying service levels based on # of groups that a moderator can form, # of decisions per month, security, archiving of vote outcomes, notarization of votes
3. Advertising (last resort)
4. Maybe Diebold will be interested in acquiring us

Attention, all you (Guerrilla) Marketing type out there. I had a moment of inspiration this morning and wanted to share a new idea with you!

The idea involves adding a company’s advertisement, brand, or message to company email addresses through the use of subdomains.

For example suppose you had a company with a new product… you could change everyones email addresses to something like: jdoe@check.out.the.cool.new.widget.at.obility.net or Jane.Doe@voted.number.one.in.customer.satisfaction.is.obility.net. Or you could even advertise/reward your top performing employees by doing something along the lines of John.Smith@employee.of.the.month.for.July.2007@obility.net. Just think of the reach your brand/message could get using this form of advertising.

Ok, maybe its a little silly and complicates writing emails, but that has yet to be sufficient reason to prevent advertising/marketing folk from implementing a marketing idea.

If you have any questions about this post, you can reach me at Joe.Scharf@is.the.coolest.blog.poster.in.the.world.at.dt.obility.net

For around a year now, I’ve been using a external USB hard drive to store backups of my two year old’s DVDs. Streaming the video from a hard drive is the only way to ensure the integrity of the movie as my two year old has a tendency to quickly render the physical DVD unreadable. Anyhow one of my biggest concerns with using external drives is the fact that there is no redundancy to the data. Sure I could manually backup my entire video collection to another external hard drive, but that seems way to inefficient to be the best possible solution.

That got me thinking that it would be great to have a device, similar to your standard USB Hub, that had RAID capability built in. Connect one end to your computer, and connect two (or more) drives to the available ports on the other side, configure the device to your desired flavor of RAID (1, 5, whatever), and start filling it up with your data, knowing the whole time that should one of the drives fail, your data will be safe.

Sure, a USB-RAID mechanism might not be the speediest thing out there (due to the USB bottleneck), but if you’re using it to store media (video, music, photos) that don’t change very often, speed might not be such an issue as most of the time you’ll be reading the data rather than writing it.

So I’m on the second season of 24 and I was contemplating the show the other day. This lead me to think about things of a counterintelligence nature such as the common practice of “wearing a wire.” And then I got to thinking, why can’t normal people wear a wire every day around the clock? In fact, why can’t you have the equivalent of Tivo for your own personal day-to-day interactions? And not so much to secretly gather intelligence or hold people to their word (although it could be very useful for that) but to be able to rewind, replay, or store pieces of your daily life for replay, analysis, or sharing with others.

I imagine this device would be a discreet wearable piece of consumer electronics about the size of the new iPod Shuffle. It would have an embedded microphone, some flash and a minimalistic user interface similar to the iPod Shuffle. The MeVo as I am calling it for purposes of discussion would record the conversations and events of the user’s day on a continuous loop. If the user wanted to save a piece of conversation, the user could repeatedly press a button on the interface indicating the amount of conversation he/she wished to save, say in increments of 10 minutes or so. A confirmation beep would indicate that this piece of the conversation has been stored to a special area of flash. The remaining flash would then be used to resume continuous looped recording of the user’s day. Perhaps a deluxe model would allow immediate review of the conversation with an attachable headphone and rewind/fast-forward buttons. Now if I could only figure out a way to get the MeVo pause button to bring life to a stand-still while I go to the fridge to grab a beer…

Cool term for something that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and working on for several years now. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but I just came across the term for this market of products a month or two ago when listening to the CTEK Angels Live podcast of the MoodSeer product. I must say I am slightly amazed that we aren’t further along in this category yet (oh yeah, we were also supposed to have interplanetary space travel at the turn of the millennium), but according to the MoodSeer presentation at the LivePitch event, this market is expected to grow by 70B between now and 2011. I also believe this market will be experiencing a large deal of growth as I think the technology is available to create products at costs that are reasonable.

My personal interest in this area has rendered itself in the form of a a PBX serving the voice (telephone) needs of my home and home office, digital music available throughout the home via a centralized music collection and the Squeezeboxes, a whole house audio distribution system via the Zon whole house audio system. Various servers for sharing my photos and video collection with family and friends, along with serving several domains, web, and email.
One idea I was thinking about around a year ago and started tinkering with was the simple idea of having something like all the clocks in your house connected to your home network (wired or wireless). The idea involves throwing a small Linux buildroot onto some cheap embedded hardware and have it display accurate time (synchronized to the atomic clock of your choice courtesy of ntp). The software would be simple, and the hardware not too complex. I even attempted to implement this using the Gumstix platform hooked up to an LCD.

The idea is that Linux+ntp would keep your clock synchronized at all times, especially when the power comes back on from a power failure, or daylight savings time goes into effect. I figured you could hook this up to the Ethernet network in your home, or probably would be a good candidate for wireless, perhaps Zigbee would be the physical layer of choice here, as 802.11 might be overkill and also expensive to implement.

Currently, my collection of Squeezeboxes serve as my rudimentary implementation of network-sycnhrnoized clocks throughout the home. I also use them to display the incoming caller ID (name and phone number) for any calls coming into the house, courtesy of a simple Asterisk AGI script I cobbled together.

Ambient Devices

I ran across Ambient Devices a month or two ago when I was playing around with the Google Calendar. They seem to be doing exactly what I described in the last couple paragraphs. Currently they have a few products, including the Weather Wizard that displays the current weather for five cities directly from accuweather.com. They also have a number of cool looking orbs that communicate information (from the Internet) through subtle changes in the color of an orb-looking device sitting on your desktop (or attached to the handle of the umbrella they sell) Pretty cool concept, and is true to their “Ambient” company name. They also sell their chipset and seems that their chipset is embedded in a LG “Weather Plus” refrigerator.

Ambient Clock

Anyhow, the Ambient Clock is what got my full attention. Not yet in physical product form, but currently a Google plugin, this concept clock connects to your Google Calendar, and not only shows you the current time synchronized to the network, but also has a unique way of displaying the time and duration of upcoming appointments for the day. The mechanical chassis design is really slick looking as well.

I only imagine that additional products that could fit the market that Ambient is targeting include things like:

1. A digital rolodex that sits next to your phone (heck maybe it’s embedded in the phone) and lookup addresses and phone numbers for your contacts in a LDAP or online database of sorts
2. A digital recipe manager that sits in your kitchen and is connected to your favorite online cooking site (cooking light, food network, etc…). It lets you lookup and conveniently display your favorite recipes as you prepare your meals.
3. Further the clock idea by offering a network-connected alarm clock - never worry about the time resetting to power outage. Alarm wakes you up to an Internet radio station or MP3. I guess the Squeezebox does this to an extent already.
4. A device that monitors and alerts you to a powder day for the skiers out there, Great surf conditions for the surfers, or open tee times at the local club for the golfers.

Ok, well a somewhat lame list of other uses, I had some more examples a while back but can’t seem to recall some of them at the moment. Plus I need to get back to studying for midterms this week.

Everyone is always asking me what times I have free to meet for various functions. Every time this happens I have to search through my Google Calendar looking for blocks of time that might fit the bill. I think it would be great to have a Gcal feature or web extension that would do this dirty work for you.

How it would work: you would just select a date range (or default the current week) and a time duration, and specify the email address of the person you want to inform of your available meeting times. They then get sent a Gcal version of your calendar with the available times blocked out. The recipient can then select one of these time slots (by clicking on it in the email), and both your calendar (and theirs if they’re using Gcal) are automatically updated. I guess this is somewhat like publishing your free/busy data, but more specific to individual requests of your availability and useful when the folks requesting your availability are still tied to Outlook.

This Monday’s Boulder Daily Camera featured the article in their Business Plus section titled “A non-pricey PC” about a local Boulder company, 303 computers, that is refurbishing PCs and selling them for $100, operating system included. The idea is that once these computers are refurbished, “…people can do the basics such as typing, checking e-mail, and surfing the Internet, Angell said, noting it will not be as fast as a new computer.”

If this is all these computers will be good for (which describes the bulk of what most people ever do on a new computer these days) Why not take a slightly different approach. Replace the bulky operating system and applications with a Google OS. The Google OS would essentially consist of a bootloader, a few drivers and system management code, and a single application: a web browser. With this web browser you can surf the Internet, check your email, and use the plethora and ever growing number of Google web applications such as Docs and Spreadsheets for your “typing” needs. No bulky OS or applications that need constant updates and cause users countless hours of frustration. No need to deal with installing new applications - just click on the link when Google announces theirs. You could probably eliminate the need for a hard drive (a 1-2G compact flash should suffice) and you could probably reduce the RAM requirement.

With web applications of this nature, it finally makes sense for the computer industry to come full-circle and reintroduce the dumb-terminal. Design a Google OS for the refurbished PC’s now, and while you’re at it, put some development effort into designing a new device, the GooglePC (GPC pronounced ‘Gypsy’) I imagine the GPC to be a low-cost small-footprint embedded tablet PC of sorts. Turn it on and it boots in under 5 seconds, already connected to your Google homepage for you to surf and “type” to your heart’s content. The GPC could then transform 303 computers from a company that serves the discount customers to one that is ready to profit from the next wave of personal computing. Who knows, maybe in a few years Sun or Google will be interested in acquiring your company.