A Better Place to Play

GMail Sign Ups By Mobile Phone

In an interesting move, Google is opening up Gmail to the public.  Previously it's been nearly impossible to get a Gmail account (yes, I am joking).

The twist is that in order to get a Gmail account, you must send a text message to Google via your mobile phone.  Evidently Google's looking to improve their mobile phone / email integration...Yahoo's certainly got the edge in this area.  I'm pretty excited about all the cool mobile services that are coming out these days.

Link: Welcome to Gmail.

IPod Phone Poised to Suck?

Yes, it probably will.

I've long been espousing my view of how overrated Apple's digital music solutions are...according to this Forbes article, the new iPod phone will have storage for about 25 songs.  And of course, the media will surely claim Apple's accomplishment as revolutionary, and Apple will proceed to spend millions of dollars on a hip marketing/brainwashing campaign.

Whatever happens, I know I will be annoyed.  MP3 phones have been around for a while, and unless Apple releases a quality phone with at least 1GB memory, I'll be thoroughly unimpressed.  If you've discussed digital music with me in the past year, I'm sure you already know my views on iTunes and the iPod.  Before this phone comes out and everybody starts raving like mad people, I just want to remind you all that digital music is about MUSIC and not the device you use to listen to it.

If you like listening to music, check out any of these fine services:

• Napster
• Yahoo Music
  
• Real Rhapsody

All three of these services let you listen to as much music as you want for $6 to $15 per month.  I've been using Napster since it was called Pressplay, but any of these three are fine options.

IRiver and Creative make some fine MP3 players that work with subscription services.  The iPod doesn't work with subscription services because Apple is being evil.

Don't worry if you've already dropped hundreds or thousands of dollars buying songs on iTunes.  You made an honest mistake, and you should cut your losses.  Probably 90% of the songs you bought for a $1 each are available on the subscription services.

Napster has already teamed with Ericcson on mobile phone support, and you can rest assured that the real battle for digital music supremacy is just beginning.  I expect that over the next several years, we will see a number of highly successful mobile phones with MP3 support.  Apple's iPod phone will surely sell well because so many people have already invested in iTunes.  But if you like listening to music, Apple is not the way to go. 

Ostriches in SF?

In case you missed this...wish I would have seen that!

Link: CNN.com - Ostrich breaks free on Golden Gate Bridge - Aug 30, 2005.

Twisted Logic

I am a lucky guy.  Several months ago I scored a few tickets in the lower reserve for the Coldplay concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View.

The concert got off to a bit of a slow start with Rilo Kiley as the opening act.  The best part of their set was the silence between songs.

Coldplay finally came on at around 9:30 and kicked off their set with "Square One," the first track from X&Y.  In Coldplay's music videos, the music speaks for itself, and last night's show was much the same.  The band wore black, and there was some cool lighting, but the concert was about the music.  "Square One" was solid, but I wasn't quite feeling into the show for the first few songs.  Rockin renditions of "Politik" and "Yellow" followed, and though both were good, I wasn't quite sucked in...at least the band did its best to invoke all things "Golden Gate", and it was obvious they were thrilled to be playing here.

Then the band broke into "God Put a Smile Upon Your Face", but Chris abruptly stopped.  He invited those of us in the lower reserve to come in a bit closer, and so I moved up to the second row.  Just 5 feet from some massive speakers, but 10 feet from the band!

From that point forward, the show flat out rocked.  Coldplay slipped into "Speed of Sound", "Everything's Not Lost", and "The Scientist".  The band then bunched together for an acoustic set, and Chris explained they had written "Til Kingdom" with the hopes that they would perform it with Johnny Cash.  The band covered Cash's "Ring of Fire" and then returned to their usual positions for "Clocks."  "Clocks" was perhaps the best performance of the evening.  I loved the ending -- the studio recording of "Clocks" slows down towards the end, but last night the band played it faster and faster until the song was absolutely frenzied.  The band next played "Talk" and then waited to come back out for the encore, which began with "Swallowed in the Sea".  The band next banged into "In My Place" and Chris somehow made his way into the middle of the crowd during the song.  The finale was "Fix You", which is certainly the band's favorite song from X&Y.  "Fix You" starts slow but erupts mid-song into a wall of guitar and four-part harmonies...Chris swung a lantern around the stage and through it high and far when the song exploded, which was quite cool.

All in all, a great concert, and Coldplay has officially cemented top 3 status for my favorite bands alongside Oasis and Counting Crows.  I actually think Coldplay is kind of what you get when you combine Noel Gallagher's music with Adam Duritz's thoughtfulness.  Anyway, I can't wait to see Coldplay again.

Here's the complete set list.  I've got exceptionally poor quality MP3s of the concert, and I'd love to get a hold of a good bootleg if there is one out there.

• Square One
• Politik
• Yellow
• God Put a Smile Upon Your Face
• Speed of Sound
• Low
• A Rush of Blood to the Head
• Everything's Not Lost
• White Shadows
• The Scientist
• Til Kingdom Come
• Ring of Fire
• Don't Panic
• Clocks
• Talk
• Swallowed in the Sea
• In My Place
• Fix You

Lease Your Body

Just thought I'd point you to this News.com article about the latest innovation in Internet marketing.  This is just too funny...

Moneyball, Markets, and Musings

I finished reading Michael Lewis' Moneyball today.  Yes, I know I'm not the first person to read or write about this book, but for those of you who don't know, Moneyball is literally about how the Oakland A's have managed to thrive over the past several years.  Figuratively, it's about how David beats Goliath.  Or how a startup can sock it to big companies.

So why did I read Moneyball now?

It's August once again, and the Oakland A's are battling for first place and have a 67-51 record.  Not bad for a team that traded Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder in the offseason.  Like many baseball fans, I had left the A's for dead in May, but I should have known better.  They had lost Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, and Johnny Damon over the past several years, and yet, they've been in the playoffs almost every year.

Surely the A's have been doing something right, and I wanted to understand better.  After all, I'll soon be joining a startup with limited financial resources.  Now that I understand how the A's compete with the Yankees on a quarter of the Yankees' budget, hopefully I'll have some good ideas about how Jot can make the most use of its marketing spend.  Jot doesn't have to compete against George Steinbrenner (at least for now), but it does face some difficult problems in bringing its product to the masses.

I think there are two major difficulties with bringing a product like JotSpot to market:

1. Explaining what the heck JotSpot does
2. Proving that it's worth your time to use JotSpot

Now at this point I know that you're thinking I'm just trying to sell JotSpot on you, but bear with me, as I think there are some interesting questions to consider, and I don't have all the answers.  But I will speculate...

I think that the problems that Jot faces are actually similar to some problems that Moneyball talks about.  The Oakland A's have been successful, not through luck, but because they have utilized a system for objectively valuing baseball players.  The concept of objectively valuing baseball players sure sounds like a no-brainer, and in the 1980s Bill James and numerous rotisserie baseball fans cooked up all sorts of evidence that the traditional methods of evaluating baseball talent were seriously flawed.  Metrics like batting average and stolen bases were substantially overvalued, whereas metrics like on base and slugging percentage were seriously undervalued.

The deficiencies in baseball statistics and the typical means of evaluating baseball players became apparent in the 1980s.  However, it wasn't until the late 1990s that a major league baseball team took all the evidence to heart.  So why did it take so long?

Major league baseball insiders did not understand that they had a problem.  Therefore, most baseball teams were not searching for solutions.  Baseball insiders either did not realize that they were being inefficient, or they just didn't care.  Only a team like the A's, who seriously needed a competitive advantage, were willing to embrace a system that most baseball insiders considered heretical.

I see much of the same situation with Jot today as there was during the 1980s and the handful of baseball mavens who tried to change the game from the outside.  Somehow Jot needs to make the people of the world understand that the way they currently work is inefficient, and perhaps even harder, Jot must convince people to care.  There's nothing obviously wrong with sending a spreadsheet via email and asking people to edit it, just as there's nothing obviously wrong with liking a baseball player because he's a natural athlete.  However, JotSpot offers better ways to collaborate on spreadsheets and documents, just as certain statistics provide a better means for evaluating baseball talent.  If it took mountains of data and over ten years to convince baseball insiders to change, how long will it take to change the way businesses operate?

Sadly, I don't know, but I hope for sooner rather than later.  Change happens faster in Internet time, after all.

I want to understand better how "efficiency tools" become successful in the marketplace.  By "efficiency tools" I mean products that in some way make businesses or people more efficient.  It's not as though people go to Google and search for "I want to make my business efficient."  There are a few people searching for "wiki", but that's hardly the universe of people looking to improve their business.  So if you've got good ideas on how best to market efficiency tools, I'm certainly interested.  I'm not clueless on the subject, but there are probably good ideas out there that I haven't thought about.

I do think that the first step towards bringing change is discussion.  Bill James spotted the problems in baseball, and he talked about them.  He didn't immediately reach the audience he intended, but his message eventually got through, thanks in large part to the Oakland A's.

Days Go By

This being my first blog post, I'll quickly catch you up on my life, tell you why today is the day that I finally started a blog, and give you some thoughts about what lies ahead.

Days 1 – 842 of Life in Silicon Valley: The Oracle / Foster City Years

I graduated from Cornell with a BS in Computer Science in May 2002, and being the 49er that I am, I went west to work for Oracle.  Sure, I was 153 years late for the first gold rush, and the dotcom bubble had just burst, but I figured that in time Silicon Valley would rebound stronger than ever.  I planned to get some work experience, and when the time was right, I would move on to bigger and better things.

Amazingly, my life went pretty much as I had hoped.  I learned a lot about software development at Oracle, and in my spare time I met some amazing people.  I also finally had the time to learn to play guitar, read books (for fun!), and enjoy life in general.

I had left the cold of Ithaca and Cleveland behind.

Days 842 – 1133: The Nextag / San Francisco Year

It didn't take me too long to realize that the career paths that Oracle provided weren't right for me.  I like the problem-solving aspects of writing software, but learning API's and keeping up with the Java IDE industry is a snooze.  I had always enjoyed economics in college and had long felt I'd be well-suited for a business role that requires a technical background.

In October 2005 I started work as a product manager at Nextag, and I also moved to San Francisco.  At Nextag I've mainly focused on search engine marketing and optimization.  It's been great to learn how SEM and SEO work.  At Oracle I was so focused on a small part of Internet technology that it was easy to lose sight of the bigger happenings on the Internet.  Despite learning some interesting things at Nextag, over the past few months I've come to the conclusion that the company isn't the right place for me in the long run.  Simply put, I’m a bit too late to the party, and the party isn’t that much fun anyway.

Since joining Nextag, I've spent a fair amount of time getting "linked in" with Silicon Valley.  I've been bouncing around ideas for startups with a number of friends and colleagues, and I know that in time I'll have a company of my own.  I was thinking about leaving Nextag to do my own thing, but about a month ago Ken Norton  contacted me about Jot.

I had read a few articles about Jot back in October, but I didn’t give the company much thought at the time since I was starting work for Nextag.  However, at Oracle I really enjoyed the communal benefits of wiki use, and I’ve done my best to encourage collaboration via wiki at Nextag.  When Jot came calling, I was immediately interested.  A few weeks of interviewing ensued...

Day 1134: The Day that I Finally Created a Blog, and the Day I Accepted JotSpot’s Offer

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for several months now, but I held off for the usual reasons...I didn’t really have spare time, I was concerned I’d accidentally say something I shouldn’t say about my employer, I don’t like revealing all the details of my private life, etc.  Still, I always enjoyed writing, and I figure maybe there’s something I can share with the world.

At the minimum, I might as well let my friends know about my latest career move in this blog post.  I’m incredibly excited and honored to be joining the Jot team.  If you haven’t read Joe Kraus’ blog, take a look.  I really think Jot is onto the next big thing in enterprise software (if you want to call it enterprise software...it’s actually more of a consumer application that every person at every company in the world should use).  I’m sure I’ll extol the virtues of Jot plenty in further posts...evangelizing the coolest web product I know will be a blast.

Days Ahead: The Jot / TBD Era

So now that you’re caught up on my life, I figure you ought to know what I plan to do with this blog.  Hopefully I’ll write reasonably often, but about what?

I’ll probably write about products that I think are cool, and I’ll point you to news stories that interest me.  On occasion I’ll probably rant about sports, music, books, movies, or TV, and sometimes I’ll just post about stuff going on in my life.

Anyway, I think that's enough for now.  I'm finally reading Moneyball, so I think that's what I'll do next.  Hopefully I'll have something interesting to say after I'm done, so make sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds :)