The following is the writeup of an interview I conducted with David Cohen, entrepreneur and principal of Colorado Startups, LLC and founder of TechStars.

The Foundations

David Cohen, serial entrepreneur, founder, and principal of Colorado Startups grew up in a family of five in central Florida. His father, initially a partner of a CPA firm, went on to start and grow his own firm from three to around 50 employees. Cohen attributes a lot of his early business experience to his dad, who taught him basic life and business principles, supplied him with books on money management and financial topics, and instilled a “work for reward” ethic early in his life. Interested in computers and technology at an early age, Cohen was programming computers by the time he was 13 and took advanced placement Computer Science courses in high school.

Cohen continued his interest in technology by pursuing a Computer Science undergraduate degree at a Florida university. He supported himself during this time stringing tennis racquets in a golf and tennis shop. One summer during his undergraduate career, Cohen landed an internship writing code for a Department of Defense agency. Eventually, the undergraduate experience came to an end and Cohen’s search for any suitable programming job landed him a single job interview that would change the course of his career forever.

Doing Time in the Corporate World

Cohen’s interview out of college landed him a job with a regional planning council. There he was tasked with the development and administration of a Borland Paradox database that was used to dispatch vans for transporting elderly residents around town. Cohen became the sole technologist working at the council. In addition to his database work, he quickly assumed the role and responsibilities of information technology guru, keeping the electronic equipment working and changing the occasional forgotten password. His work on the dispatch database involved an increasing amount of custom coding such that Cohen eventually sourced and recommended the expertise of a company called Automated Dispatch Services to assist with the council’s dispatch needs.

Automated Dispatch Services (ADS) brought Cohen into contact with his future business partner, David Brown, then director of engineering at ADS who was responsible for installing the ADS dispatch system for the regional planning council. The ADS solution was a DOS-based application as, at that time (circa 1992) Microsoft Windows was still in its infancy and unproven for enterprise applications. Over the course of the next couple months, Cohen became acquainted with Brown during the install phase and in a support capacity afterward as they traded off pager nights, responding to round-the-clock IT support needs.

It was at this time that Cohen and Brown started postulating their what-ifs. They questioned the current state of the ADS application, and wondered if it could be implemented faster, better, and cheaper, using the Windows platform. Targeting the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) industry and focusing specifically on dispatching ambulances, Cohen and Brown quickly worked up a proof-of-concept version that accessed the same database as the existing ADS system. They even went so far as to give a demonstration to Brown’s boss, who rejected the prototype on the grounds that Windows was too new a platform, and that ADS was not interested in pursuing the software business.

Cohen had been with the regional planning council for over a year by this time. During this time, Cohen felt that he was working extremely hard, yet being compensated at the level of a “kid out of college.” He and Brown were the single points of contact when things when wrong, and felt as though they were adding most of the value to the company. They questioned the need to build someone else’s empire, when they could be building and owning their own. The Windows prototype soon became their corporate exit strategy and the beginning of Cohen’s entrepreneurial journey.

Beginning the Entrepreneurial Journey

Unhindered by obligations imposed by material possessions or family, and lacking much business knowledge including any understanding of angel investors and venture capitalists, Cohen moved to Arizona, hired a programmer named Eran, and started work turning the prototype into a real product. This team of two worked in 12-hour shifts, Cohen in the morning, and Eran at night. Having had all financing requests turned down by various banking institutions, Eran was compensated with the promise of 1.5% in royalties per unit sold for the life of the product, and Pinpoint Technologies was born.

Starting Up

Cohen and Brown contacted a former ADS customer and arranged a demonstration of their work-in-progress. At the customer’s site, they connected their Windows version of the software to the customer’s existing database and proceeded to present the customer with their existing data alongside maps in the graphical Windows-based environment. The customer was ecstatic and agreed to loan them $100,000 in return for 2.5% in royalties per unit sold, for the life of the product.

This seed money supported four individuals’ development for a year. Pinpoint Technologies released their first version of the software in August of 1995 in conjunction with the release of Windows 95. Their first release was a disaster; however an additional three months of bug-fixes resolved many of the outstanding problems. Finally, as their money was about to run out, they attended an industry trade show, courted an interested customer, and made the second sale of their product narrowly avoiding having to close up shop.

The Turning Point

When they started, Pinpoint Technologies was intended to be a lifestyle business. They imagined, best-case, that some day they each might be making $100,000 a year in salary with at most 10 employees companywide. They never intended to start this company with the sole interest of making large financial gains, but did it more for the freedom and independence of working for themselves. During their startup phase, their primary metric was the number of months they could afford to live on their current cash balance. Cohen described a feeling of personal relief when this metric increased to around 16-18 months.

The company’s turning point came during the Y2K craze as everyone scrambled to purchase new Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems to replace their legacy systems affected by the Y2K anomaly. Sales during this year hit record highs and Pinpoint Technologies was bought out by ZOLL Medical Systems at this time. The next year, they were unable to sell anything due to the mass upgrade that occurred the year earlier. This was only a temporary problem however and today, the Pinpoint Technologies system has been deployed in over 600 cities and has dispatched over 80 million ambulances. Their company, now operating under ZOLL Data Systems name, is currently operating with annual sales in the tens of millions.

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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.

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.

Guess it was too good to stay free forever…

Google Apps (covered here) will soon be a paid service according to a BusinessWeek Article. The subscription fee will be “…a few dollars per person per month.” I guess even at a few dollars per user, the value per dollar is still a lot higher than you can get elsewhere. I just hope they don’t take away my Google Calendar though.

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!

Last Sunday my wife and I attended a live eTown taping at the Boulder Theater featuring Nanci Griffith and Piers Faccini. It was a great concert, and personally not having really listened to either of these artists beforehand, I was very impressed. During of Nanci Griffith’s closing songs for her set, she’s singing about the radio, and at one point near the end says, “…Now that’s a real Clear Channel.” Obviously making a jab at our dear monopoly of the airwaves, Clear Channel Communications, Inc.

That got me thinking this morning about RadioIO and Internet radio in general. For many years now I have made an effort to avoid listening to broadcast radio. The commercials, the trendy music, the annoying DJs that laugh at their own jokes, the commercials… Being an early adopter of the Slim Devices Squeezebox music players, over the last few years, I have tapped into a whole (new) world of streaming Internet radio accessible through these players.

About RadioIO
RadioIO hosts what is probably my favorite set of streaming Internet radio channels. They feature around 22 channels of varying genre: Acoustic, Jam, Rock, Classical, World Disco, Edge, Eclectic, Beat, and many more. Heck, they even have a 24-hour a day Grateful Dead channel (RadioIODead), if you can’t get enough of that good ol’ Casey Jones, drivin’ his train, high on cocaine.

The beauty of RadioIO (and most Internet radio stations in general) includes:

• Few to no commercials - RadioIO toots its own horn for 30 seconds or so every couple of hours, but that’s about it (and the commercials aren’t obnoxious)
• They really do offer a diverse mix of music including independents, up-and-coming artists, ones you’ve never heard of, and the ones you’ve always heard of. So nice to hear new artists and new songs - diamonds in the (Clear Channel) rough, so to speak.
• No censorship of artists, types of music, or otherwise due to corporate mandate or the fact that the latest Britney Spears single is so popular with the fans that it “censors out” the entire body of music composition due to its incredibly high amount of airtime.
• No annoying DJs
• Free! Or at least very low-cost - Being a fan of RadioIO I’ve purchased one of their $50 annual SoundPass Memberships hoping to support the cause and keep it commercial free.

Streaming Internet Radio in General
RadioIO is but one of many options available in the Internet radio segment. Shoutcast provides about a bazillion different genre and music channels streaming to you from all over the world. Check out Folk Alley.Com for a little bluegrass/folk music and occasional music history lesson. Listen to public radio? Then choose pretty much any station across the nation, and stream it static-free from the Internet (We listen to KUNC.org broadcast from Fort Collins). There are so many options when it comes to Internet radio that my 81GB music collection has a pretty thick layer of dust on it now and is becoming rapidly obsolete.

Now, you say you can’t get Internet radio in your car? True, true, at least not yet. But until municipal WiFi comes to your location, load up your Ipod with some great music or a nice audiobook and tune out those “Clear Channels”

If you’re like most people, backing up your important data is an afterthought at best - at least until the day comes that you lose all your pictures, email, important documents, and that doctorate thesis you’ve been working on for the past few years. Even then some of these same victims of data loss become lax in their backup practices over time putting themselves at risk for another data loss event. What is it they say about doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome?

When you run several servers and you have a computer count that is in the double digits, backing up all the data on those servers and workstations is a serious matter. Several years ago, I bit the bullet and started searching for a great solution. After evaluating many backup applications that just didn’t work out, I hit the mother lode and found one of my favorite applications, BackupPC developed by Craig Barratt. I have been successfully using BackupPC for a while now, and a year or so ago I turned the BackupPC server into its own embedded network appliance running off of compact flash (and storing the data pool to a 300GB IDE hard drive).

About BackupPC
BackupPC is an open source application written in Perl. BackupPC runs as a server, connecting to clients, and extracting and saving backup data on disk. BackupPC has a very nice web-based user interface and an extensive set of configuration options that provide flexibility to specify the exact backup policy you desire. BackupPC is compatible with Windows, Linux, Mac and pretty much any operating system that supports SMB protocol (i.e. Windows file sharing) or rsync

BackupPC Media Management
One of my favorite features of BackupPC is its media management. BackupPC makes efficient use of the backup media by implementing backup data pooling and compression. Duplicate files encountered in a given backup set, across sets, across workstations, or any combination of these are managed such that only one real copy is kept in the backup data pool and the rest are “links” to this master copy. For example suppose Alice and Bob are two Mechanical Engineers working on a large SolidWorks design. Suppose they both have the latest revision of this SolidWorks design checked out onto their local workstations (you do use version control don’t you?). Suppose BackupPC makes a backup of Alice’s computer first. When it gets around to backing up Bob’s computer, it realizes it already has a copy of the Solidworks file and creates a hard link to the file backed up from Alice’s computer, saving a network transfer and backup disk space. BackupPC also can be configured to compress the backup data pool stored on the backup disk, and it only has to run the compression algorithm once per unique file thanks to the data pooling algorithm BackupPC employs. BackupPC can also be configured to create permanent backups of the backup data pool to removable media such as DVD or tape for offsite storage.

Versioned Backups
BackupPC’s efficient use of the backup medium allows it to provide versioned backups of your servers and workstations without the worry of quickly exceeding the capacity of the backup disk. BackupPC easily manages full and incremental backup sets, automatically merging incremental sets into their corresponding full backup set. Restoring a file is simply a task of logging into the web-based user interface, selecting the full or incremental backup desired, and navigating the file tree and selecting the files you want to restore.

My BackupPC Media Stats:
To give an idea of the amount of data and number of versions you can keep around with BackupPC, I included a few screenshots from the user interface. I have a 300GB drive as my backup medium. First, the uncompressed statistics:

Now the backup data pool statistics on compression and disk usage:

So I’ve only used around 86GB (37%) of my backup disk, even though I backup seven hosts and have around 280GB of raw backup data. Pretty impressive, in my opinion.

BackupPC User Interface
BackupPC has a great web-based user interface that allows both administrator and end-user access allowing the appropriate privileges for each role. Like I mentioned above, selecting backup sets and files is a simple task. Here are some screenshots indicative of the Backup Summary and Backup Browsing available on the BackupPC website.

Other Backup Options
To be complete I thought I’d mention a few other backup options that seem worthwhile and briefly discussion pros and cons of each.

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What do telecommuters, business owners and teenagers all have in common? All usually have special needs when it comes to communicating by telephone. If you find yourself managing multiple incoming telephone lines, struggling with answering machines or voicemail services, and daisy-chaining your internal telephones in a pre-World War II style party-line effect, maybe you should consider the Asterisk Open-Source PBX.

What is Asterisk?
Asterisk is an open source Public Branch Exchange (PBX) Written by Mark Spencer. Asterisk provides termination of everything from Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), T1/E1 service, and various types of Voice over IP (VoIP) protocols including SIP and IAX2. Asterisk inspired the founding of Digium, the original creator and primary developer of Asterisk. Digium sells enterprise and business hardened versions of Asterisk along with digital and analog line cards for terminating incoming voice service (FXO) as well as internal voice stations (FXS)

I have been using Asterisk to manage my voice services for several years now, believe it is a very Disruptive Technology and highly recommend it to everyone. When I started using Asterisk, there were occasional hiccups, and for a while I struggled with line echo issues on the POTS line. Since that time, Asterisk has undergone constant development, and Asterisk 1.2 has introduced a great deal of stability and capability fixing the echo and instability problems I had early on. And at the time of this writing, the release of Asterisk 1.4 is eminent and should provide additional capabilities and improvements in the Asterisk core.

How I use Asterisk
I run Asterisk on its own dedicated Mini-ITX system, a network appliance of sorts. I have a Digium TDM400P (2FXS, 1FXO) analog card terminating my home voice services and VoIP for my business phone service provided by Broadvoice. Additionally, I have phone numbers on the Free World Dialup and SipPhone. All of these services are easily handled by Asterisk. Internally, I have phone extensions connected to the FXS modules on the TDM400P, and I have one station connected via VoIP using a Sipura phone adapter which basically converts a standard phone into an IP / VoIP phone talking the SIP protocol. Sipura adapters are an inexpensive way to convert your existing analog phones into VoIP phones. I use CounterPath’s X-Lite softphone on my PC and Mac to originate and receive calls on my phone system in-house or on the road. Voicemail is forwarded to my email where the callers name and phone number are identified in the subject line and includes a .wav file of the caller’s message.

Advanced Features
Asterisk uses the Inter-Asterisk Exchange (IAX) protocol which enables a company extend the reach of their dialplan to include remote offices and telecommuters. While I was working my last gig in aerospace, I configured an Asterisk server in the office to connect to my server at home and used it to seamlessly route calls to/from my home on occasions when I found myself working from home. With this setup I was able to access my home dialplan from work, and my work dialplan from home. It was a simple setup and the communications were secure via an encrypted IP tunnel.

Asterisk supports calling external scripts from the dialplan via the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI). The AGI interface makes it possible to execute external events based on call logic defined in the dialplan configuration. I have written a simple Perl script that uses the Asterisk AGI interface to talk to my SlimServer and display caller-ID information for all incoming calls on all the Squeezebox music players in my house. I can always tell who is calling without having to run and search for the telephone.

Finally, Asterisk supports call queues and conference bridging. I have successfully used the latter to support a conference between four parties (I am limited by the number of incoming lines available). Inbound telephone numbers are available from many sources for very low rates. This is a good low-cost way to increase the number of incoming lines to your PBX for conferencing purposes.

Asterisk Distributions
Currently there are two main “prepackaged” Asterisk distributions. Asterisk@Home has been around for a while, and just recently changed its name to Trixbox. It features the FreePBX web-based administration application , an operators panel, extensive reporting functions and comes with a dialplan that already supports features such as transferring, music on hold, automatic least-cost routing of outbound calls, digital receptionists, managing call queues and conference bridging.

The second Asterisk distribution, AsteriskNOW was recently announced and claims to be an “…open source Software Appliance; a customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk®, the Asterisk GUI, and all other software needed for an Asterisk® system.” Digium seems to be directly affiliated with the AsteriskNOW project. I have not yet used or evaluated AsteriskNOW but I will be installing it soon and will write a review on it when I do. So far from the screen captures, the GUI looks very nice and seems to provide a generous feature set.

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.