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Wecome to the team, Rick

A hearty welcome to Rick Klau, who has joined the team at FeedBurner as VP of Business Development. Rick tells the story much better than I as to how this came to pass, but let me just say that it was great to find this type of talent in the syndication space in the Chicago area!

I've already been amazed at what Rick has brought to the team in the short time he has been with us - and I am sure that we'll be announcing some of the fruits of his labor in the very near future.

I'm sure it's in all the b-school rhetoric that when building a startup you have to "know what you don't know." Well, Rick knows a lot of things I don't know - so I look forward to learning from him.

OpenOffice...you should try it

if you haven't tried OpenOffice.org 1.9+ as an MSOffice replacement, you should. it's come through in a pinch for quite a few sticky situations for me lately, notably:

• it was able to open a PowerPoint document that was authored on a mac but when opened on the PC in MS PowerPoint gave me "QuickTime plugin required" for all the embedded graphics. OpenOffice had no problem opening the document
• Adobe Acrobat would only render an Excel file to PDF as a solid black square. Exporting the document to PDF from OpenOffice calc created a perfect PDF

how can this be? how can a stand-in perform better than the applications that define the file formats? I don't know but it does, and for all intents and purposes, it's free right now.

I also think the OpenOffice Word clone is much than MS Word at editing tables. If you have to edit a document that uses tables, you should definitely try it.

FeedBurner is hiring

FeedBurner will soon be expanding - if you think you might be interested, send me an email with your resume. You will have to get throught the mailblocks reply challenge, which you should receive immediately.
I am looking for a mobile developer whos loves to get software working on a multitud of phones, is a real code optimizer, is open to the best tool for the job, etc - but we are also hiring for other positions. Anyone who loves working with blog software and feed technologies is a good candidate.

here's the ground rules:

a) all positions are in chicago; there are no remote positions
b) all positions are for full-time employees; no contractors
c) we will relocate the right candidates if necessary
d) whether you think you fit into bizdev or engineering, samples of your previous work are encouraged, if not required
e) i will not reply to every submission; it's not physically possible

i look forward to talking to some of you out there!

desktop search - and the winner is...

Google Desktop

i wasn't really sure why i needed desktop search, and i gotta admit, i couldn't quite get why i would want to use a localhost browser based application...but after curiously trying Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta, MSN Desktop and Blinx - Google Desktop is just less intrusive than all the others, and seemed to provide faster and better results.

emails i have been looking for forever have suddenly been found - i don't even think about using Outlook search anymore - it's click on the tray and search. and i love the feature that adds the local results to your web searches. i recently moved to mostly the y! search engine, but now i've switched back because of this feature.

I never know when it's indexing - it doesn't cause problems when watching a DVD like some of the others, and doesn't waste my resources with 3D visualizations i won't ever use.

Clearly the furthest behind in my mind was the MSN product. It just seems like a repackaging of the ironically titled "FindFast" - which is pretty much a virus - just try getting rid of that service once you install it. when MSN desktop was indexing, everything else on my system came to a crawl, and if i had to suspend in the middle of indexing, my machine would surely crash.

it's great to see competition spawn some great products. good thing yahoo! desktop is still in beta - they can play catch up.

feed about to get regenerated...

sorry - playing around with some new FeedBurner features none of you can see just yet ;) i needed to regenerate my feed from scratch...debugging. move along.

book recommendation: masters of doom

if you are running a startup, or planning on running a startup, skip b-school and read david kushner's masters of doom. yes, this book is about gaming. but there's more in here on organizational behavior that applies broadly to building a startup into an empire than you will get anywhere else. i've been a part of a few fucked companies in the past - but some of the stuff here takes the cake. when things when right, they went very right, but...

masters of doom at mobipocket

a new little feedburnerette

congrats to the Lunts (family of our CTO) on the birth of their second girl, Maya, who was born early last week. leave a comment for Eric and wish them well!

finger johnc@idsoftware.com

wow, i can't believe this is still here AND it's been updated this year! if you don't know what this is, as pearl jam once said, "this is not for you."


figo:~ steve$ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
[idsoftware.com]
Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.5!

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/jc


amazon.com prime

well, i calculated what i spend on shipping in a typical month at amazon, and decided that Amazon Prime, amazon's new membership that for $79.99 gets you a year of free two-day shipping, is a good deal for me.

i am forever trying to get all my purchases into bits (iTunes (music), Mobiocket Reader (pleasure reading), and Safari (work reading/reference)) - but alas there are still a bunch of things i need to buy as atoms. It's usually things like phones or game cartridges, but then also books that aren't carried by safari (which seems to be more and more these days).

they've even been really smart about it and allow you to tie in up to four household accounts into the same membership...so for instance, my wife doesn't need to use my account to enjoy the benefits.

the result is i don't really see myself driving out to the store to save on shipping anymore. a great move for amazon.

Were you looking for sear chb log ?

i think it's funny that the MSN search engine, having it's coming out party today, when searching for "searchblog" asks me if i really wanted to search for "sear chb log."

like that makes any more sense?

click for full size image:

google suggest beta

wow, just when you think search couldn't have gotten any better, google comes up with this. how did they get this to pop up so fast? even obscure terms come up immediately.

it continues to amaze me how big of a market search is, and the applications around search. there's a whole conference here in chicago this week on "Search Engine Strategies" and it is huge.

and mobile search applications, we've only scratched the surface.

my favorite firefox trick

i'm a sloucher. by that i mean, when i work, i'm usually slouching back in my chair, driving with a mouse much like i'd be driving slouching back in the seat of my '76 eldorado on an episode of beretta.

anyway, the best feature of firefox is the CTRL-Mousewheel zoom and unzoom. try it. look at how you can make those fonts effortlessly bigger and smaller, and in any case much more readable. i use this all day.

can't wait to see "la mala educación"

i can't wait to see Pedro Almodóvar's la mala educación which opens friday here in the U.S. under the directly translated name "Bad Education." Not only do i really like all of Almodóvar's films, but it also stars Gael García Bernal, who was really great in Y tu mamá también. it's getting a lot of hype, so i hope it lives up.

official site

we just don't get any of the good tv ads here....

this one is pee-in-your-pants funny.

hosting recommendation (updated)

i just wanted to pass-on a low cost hosting provider i've been using for my home sites and email, and it's really working out great for $4/month. they have shared linux boxes, but are really responsive and make it really easy to manage your site, plugins, etc.

they are called TotalChoice Hosting - and i was up and running in about six hours after giving them my info, well before network solutions propogated DNS for my domains.

after years of messing around with my own linux box, this is way easier. well at least for 80% of what i need to do. thanks to Rick Klau for the tip.

dotPhoto gets well needed redesign

dotPhoto, which is probably best known in the mobile world for their Pictavision application, which is the highest selling BREW application that is not a game, gets a well needed website redesign...I like it, and I like the message.

share. preserve. profit. they have a bunch of unique ways to do all three.

The Lifetime Photo Locker™ is a good idea, especially with some other sharing sites now charging a monthly fee to share and save photos, this could be a good free choice for redundant storage.

I think this is the right model. Photo sharing sites need to make uploading free and encouraged, and find other business models in which to make a profit. I don't think there's a lot of money in printing, but probably a little more margin in things like mousepads and especially in their mobile applications.

disclaimer: dotPhoto is a former client of mine, but I have no current incentive to promote them.

MyYahoo! Search

Not sure how long this has been here, but i see today that Yahoo! has also launched personalized search in the form of MyYahoo! Search.

It allows you to save searches with our without a note, and block sites from future results. very cool.

netflix lowers prices

pleasant surprises are nice. one big one today - Netflix is lowering their prices! awesome. i've been a Netflix subscriber since god knows when, and i got this great piece of news this morning. Kudos to them for figuring this out...

Dear steve,

Over the last five years, we've grown the Netflix community to over 2.2 million satisfied members. We appreciate your business, and our goal has always been to provide you great service.

Since our price increase in June, some of our members have expressed concerns about the new pricing. We've listened to this feedback and are pleased to inform you that we're lowering the price of your Netflix 4-at-a-time program from $21.99 per month to 17.99 per month.

You don't need to do anything. Your membership will automatically move to the lower 17.99 price. The lower price will appear on your next bill on or after November 1, 2004. You will still get the same great service and convenience, but now you will pay less for it. So please sit back, relax and enjoy your movies!

-Your Friends at Netflix

But Dick, "It's a Small World" is already gone!

If Dick ran Disney

Dick, since we no longer allow comments because of the 264 comments spams we get per day, a trackback will have to do until trackback spam gets out of hand - "It's a Small World" is currently "Closed for Remodeling" which in restaurant parlance, i think means it is gone for good. just FYI. and last time i was at Google and saw the searches scrolling by on the projector, there seemed to be a lot of people looking for information on the "Paris Hilton" - do they even own hotels in France?

dick's triumphant return to blogging

always worth the read. convince him to continue.

Picking Your VC Carefully, from an entreprenuer's point of view

an off-topic post on raising Venture Capital -

Jeff Nolan at SAP Ventures has put together a good post on picking your VC carefully which makes some good points on how entreprenuers should be careful in selecting who they get their money from, and who from the particular VC fund they allow to be on their board.

When we were funding FeedBurner with a VC round (after really funding the first round ourselves) we had a couple different term sheets at different times in front of us - when something curious happened - both VC firms pulled a "bait and switch" as to who they wanted to be on our board. That is, we had gotten to know one partner well, and in the middle of discussing terms, both VC firms decided they needed to put in other partners for what are still unknown reasons (explanations were given, I'm not confident in the genuineness of those explanations).

That was okay, but at that point, I absolutely called up CEOs of the companies in which these candidates particpated on their boards and asked what they thought. In one case, the candidate got nothing but bad recommendations from multiple sources. In the other case, I called up a ex-CEO that had been unwillingly pushed out by his board (including this VC) but got glowing reviews of the VC partner.

Weighing all the terms, we had to back to one of the VCs and say "no thanks" - it was only one of the factors for turning down the deal, but we didn't need any dead weight on our board.

Needless to say, entreprenuers, you don't really want any investors on your board if you can help it. Investors will give you tons of reasons why it will benefit you, but please remember they are selling something here, and their number one obligation is to their LPs, not you. Try to get away with giving your investors "Board Observation Rights" - which allows them full access to the goings on, without a vote. You probably won't get that from VCs but it can definitely be done with "angel investors." There's no reason to give an angel investor a board seat, but everything is negotiable.

When we sold spyonit.com we were lucky enough to have no investors on our board, and it really made doing deals and selling the company a lot easier.

In this build-and-flip economy, you have to keep that in mind. Some large companies will try to push you around and demand warrants to do deals with you (and it can't always be avoided, and you have to weigh each situation individually) but again - every outside party who has their hooks in your company will just slow things down when it comes time to exit. It will slow down the due diligence process of the company that wants to acquire your team and/or technology, not to mention dilute your equity! For every legal document you have on file, you can tick off a day of some first or second year attorney's time to look for that one term in every standard NDA you signed that could cause a problem with the deal.

In general, take the cheapest money on the best terms.

This may seem obvious, but it's easy to get wowed by the big names and all the promises people will make you who are selling something to you. It's easy to forget VCs are salespeople too.

Like who you work with. It will make things a lot easier when things go south if you have good personal relationships with everyone involved, including your investors and board members - so do take the time to investigate references, perform your own due-diligence, and get to know them.

It will become important later, whether things go extremely right, or extremely wrong.

no, i do not race motorcycles

every once in a while, someone googles me and comes up with this link. no, i've never raced motorcycles - i've never even ridden a motorcycle. i'm also not an enemy of scientology.

i have no idea if i am related or not to Polish presidential candidate Andrej Olechowski.

i am related to Scott Olechowski at PostX formerly of nCognito, but i have never met him.

the power of a search engine is amazing, i would have never heard of any of these people, or tried to be connected with any of these people with people looking me up...even with a pretty unique name.

i can't imagine being John Roberts.

MyJeeves...pretty cool.

I've been trying out MyJeeves the latest take on persistent search by AskJeeves. I can see some potential here, but they'll need to make a firefox plug-in for the search bar for me to use it....unless....

the word on the street is that they are also trying to bring Bloglines in house, which seems to make a lot of sense when you look at where they are going with MyJeeves.

yes, the two of these things together would be nice.

holy new media day

the star wars trilogy on DVD, a new chevelle album, a new green day album, and maybe even star wars battleground (the commercials got me). this is gonna cost me.

theyrule.net

this was pointed to me by a colleage who has no blog (isn't it funny how weblogs are how you refer to people now? ) - but it's absolutely great: a flash app that maps out relationships between boards of directors of some of the bigger companies in the US. even with all the SEC regulations, you would be surprised how many director positions are the result of phone calls from fat white guys recommending other fat white guys. in fact the graphical depictions of the directors might be the best thing about this. check it out:

theyrule.net