Category: News

Categories
News

Random Facebook Status Messages, Delivered Daily

Late last year, I knocked out a little facebook app that pushed a random status message into your facebook account. I used it as an excuse to learn about the API. It was particularly good because it’s one thing to simply put content up into facebook. It’s another thing to update a user’s status. I got to the idea by way of suggestinon from my buddy, John Szeder. He wanted his status to update without having to log in.

For many months, my little app didn’t do that, exactly. You still had to log in, click into the app and then click a submit button. I knew exactly how to make it automatic, but I let myself be lazy. I thought that if a user never came to use my app, he would never think about my app or see a bit of advertisement. Although I have no expectations that this app will generate real revenue, it’s fun to pretend it might. It’s good practice.

I should take a second here to reveal a “secret”. It’s not really a secret, because it’s easy to find if you want. I’ll tell you now. You can learn a lot of good ideas if you pay attention to Steve Gillmor and his Gillmor Gang. I have had the fortune of having discovered him about three years ago, plus I have a 35-minute commute that gives me a ample time to listen to the podcasts. Sometimes the ideas shared on the show simply spark my imagination. This time they gave me an idea I could use.

The particular idea was that every message on Twitter is an advertisement. As is typical with a Gillmorism, the metaphorical nature of this idea encourages you to leave your dictionary on your desk. Steve went for at least a year straight saying that MS Office was dead. It’s not that it makes no money. It’s not that no one uses it. It’s just that it’s headed for anilation, but hardly anyone has noticed yet.

So, don’t try to take this too literally. A tweet is not a billboard shouting at you about cigarettes that you don’t care to smell, much less smoke. Twitter is a medium for transmitting ideas that you might be interested. It’s smart because it allows you to opt in for those ideas. You’re smart because you chose emitters that you hope will send the type of ideas you’re interested in.

If a tweet is an adverstisement, then so is a facebook status. I’m already funneling all of my tweets into my facebook status. Therefore, they are the same thing. Most people are using the status messages to advertise to their friends the trivia of what they are doing. Some people use them to share links. I’m using them to send people to a random Amazon search on the off chance it will be amusing and they will buy something.

Granted, it’s a fine line. I think my weird, random status messages are interesting. So do about 15 other people (right now). Maybe their friends like it. Maybe their friends find it annoying. Maybe those people like that their friends find it annoying. If I were pushing 20th century shout-style ads, I bet people would be angry.

Categories
News Politics

Iran Months Away from Having the Bomb

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post called It’s Time to Destroy Iran. At that time, UN representative Mohamed ElBaradei claimed that Iran was 5 to 10 years away from having nuclear weapons. The tone of the NY Times article was one of relief that we had so long to work on the problem. Of course, 5 years is brief moment in time in the realm of government action. Unfortunately, this week we are learning from the UN that the clock is down to 6 to 12 months.

In an interview with MEMRI, ElBaradei said “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least…six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”.

Given that his estimate of two years ago was 5 to 10 years, and the new estimate is 6 to 12 months, does this almost suggest that Iran virtually has nuclear weapons already? Does 12 months seem like enough time to prepare for an attack on Iran? There have been hints that our government has made some preparations, but it’s also clear that the Bush administration makes no plan to take action before its term is through. We can only hope that Israel will defend itself when there appears to be no alternative.

As with four years ago, the threat of totalitarian governments is the one greatest issue of the presidential campaign. We needed Bush, not Kerry, to execute the Iraq war. He’s fought it with one hand tied behind his back, but our military has made slow progress. I don’t feel any better about McCain than I did about Bush, but it’s very clear to me that Obama would be incapable of handling the crisis we’re headed for.

Last year, McCain joked about bombing Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys song, “Barbara Ann”. Our best hope is that this represents McCain’s true resolve, that he won’t paralize us with endless negotiation. The overwhelmingly important task of the next president will be helping the people of Iran to shed the chains of their totalitarian government, and therefore restoring security to the rest of the world.

Categories
News

Managing Money at a Startup

I’ve spent my entire career in small companies. The largest was when the original Clear Ink ballooned to 150 folks on three floors of a big building in Walnut Creek. Aside from running a sole proprietorship, I was employee #1 at Quantal International. I’ve been much more comfortable on the lower-headcount side of things, perhaps because when there’s only 40 of us, I can have a real relationship with each person. The handbook of 20th century management would argue that it doesn’t matter, but I know it does. There is no more productive team than one that considers itself a community.

Today I was thinking about how at any given moment, the companies I’ve worked for have treated our working capital in two different ways: a precious resource to be saved or fuel for a list of entitlements. The latter attitude only works when there’s an embarrassment of wealth coming in. Sign up a client who wants to give you more business than you can handle and it’s all too easy to try to spend it as fast as you can.

Startups cannot afford this attitude. You can’t have employees walking around talking about how some piece of software is the industry standard and having anything else is a personal insult. Likewise, a startup cannot afford to have employees sticking to a strict 40-hour work week. A lumbering giant of a company can sustain itself with one-size-fits all policies. It’s probably a requirement if you accept a command and control style of management. The agile startup works best when no one leaves anything on the table.

Therefore, when it comes to managing money at a startup, my attitude is “don’t”. Try to keep your wallet in your pocket for as long as you can. In addition to managing developers, I’ve been running the IT effort at Clear Ink. Yes, people would love to have a new laptop every year. Our policy is that PCs are usable for three years. Servers last for four years. And we’ll make them go longer if we can. A three-year-old desktop machine is a good temporary server.

I don’t want to drop context, because sometimes you must buy your new hire a top of the line Mac in order to have them accept your offer. But when you’re considering spending money at a startup, your first question should be, “how can we not spend this money?”

Categories
News

Gas still isn’t expensive enough to use public transportation

With gas getting close to $5/gallon, it’s even making me think about alternatives to driving into the office. I say even me because I’ve prided myself in keeping gas prices in perspective with inflation. When I was a teenager, comic books were still 75 cents, and gas about a dollar. I don’t buy comic books any more, but I remember them going up over two bucks. Intuitively, it seems like inflation. And since long before I had a driver’s license, gas has been cheap if adjusted for inflation. According to inflationdata.com, we’re just now seeing gas about as expensive as it was in 1981 during the oil crisis.

It makes sense now to compare driving into work with my alternatives. We’ll throw out the idea of getting a new car. I just bought a Mustang last October and I love it. It gets 18mpg on the highway. (That’s what the computer in it tells me). Door to door, it’s 23 miles from home to work–46 miles round trip. Gas is $4.31/gallon at the Shell on the corner, but we’ll assume $4.50/gallon. One day of driving into work with the total freedom to go different places comes to $11.50/day. And that takes me about 35 minutes each way.

One really easy option for me is the Capitol Corridor train. It starts right here in Martinez, only 2 miles from my house. If it’s on time, it leaves Martinez at 8:40AM and arrives in Berkeley, only four blocks from my office, around 9:15AM. A one way ticket is $11! It’s almost twice as expensive as gas, or $22/day. If I buy 10 tickets at a time, the cost per day goes down to $13.60/day.  If I buy a monthly pass for $184 and get 20 days out of it, the daily cost is $9.20.  Only a tiny bit cheaper than driving.

Then there’s BART. Neither my office nor my home are very near BART. The nearest station to home is “North Concord/Martinez”, which is probably 5 minutes of driving away. From there, I need to ride to the MacArthur station in Oakland and transfer to the Richmond line and go back up to the “North Berkeley” station. This is a $3.70 fare one way, and it takes an hour if the trains are on time. Then there’s a 1.4 mile hike to the office. So, it’s cheaper except if you factor in that it takes twice as long.

Of course, riding on a train would allow me to read for some portion of the time. I already have more podcast content to listen to than I have time for, and I only listen to the Gillmor Gang, Coverville, TWiT and Egg City Radio. I really wouldn’t want to give up the Gillmor Gang.

I checked out riding the bus, and it’s $3.50 one way but takes two and a half hours! No thanks.

If I had a week where I knew I didn’t need to drive anywhere extra, I might buy a 10-ride pass on the Capitol Corridor. Otherwise, gas needs to get a little more expensive before I give up driving. And I suspect that we’ll see train fares go up before then. After all, the trains use Diesel, which seems like it’s even more expensive than gasoline.

Categories
News

Amazon is Down!

A few minutes ago I saw a tweet from Dan Farber announcing that amazon.com was down. And I see that it still is. “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”. But almost immediately Twitter itself went down! Was it a coincidence or is everyone chattering on Twitter about how Amazon is down?