Monthly Archives: November 2007

27th Nov, 2007

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53 Things

Last week my last employer celebrated their one year launch anniversary. That means this week is my 53 week anniversary since going solo. My goals were to start a company that I wanted to work for and to spend more time doing interesting things. So, here’s 53 things that happened over the last 53 weeks:

Self-funded a company through contracting

1. Recorded my first screencast (using Camtasia Studio).
2. Three Salesforce articles.
3. Learned agile from the product management side and led a series of agile adoptions in the corporate world.
4. Second edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference.
5. Performed a technical due diligence for an acquiring company.
6. Led technology transfer of Odeo to their new owners.

Built a company

7. Built CrowdVine.com (682 code commits).
8. Formed an LLC.
9. Found a business model (networking services for conferences).
10. Got my first paying customer.
11. Got shat on by a bird while closing my first big deal.
12. Convinced someone to work with me.
13. Wrote the company values (Bias for action. Solve valuable problems. Love self-improvement).
14. Got my first adsense check.
15. Got my first repeat business.

Learned something about silicon valley

16. Presented to (but didn’t pitch) my friends at CRV.
17. Talked to someone at Sequoia (wicked smart).
18. Met with a big company about acquisition.
19. Read True North and realized it was ok to say no to both investment and exit strategies.

Read some good books

20. Snowcrash.
21. Cryptonomicon (should have read both 10 years ago)
22. Read The China Study and went mostly vegan.
23. Read The Game and learned there’s a big difference between first base and a real relationship.
24. The very dated Designing Web Usability (did you know Netflix used to be blue?).

Got involved in some conferences

25. Sat on my second Web 2.0 panel (but first time that I really participated)
26. Attended my 5th Foo Camp (also the first time I really participated).
27. Ran CrowdVines for SoCon, Maker Faire, FooCamp, BIF3, MX East, FOWA London, and Web 2.0 Expo.
28. Made some great friends in Atlanta.

Spent some time with my hobbies

29. Started Urban Hiking.
30. Found a Vegas poker game that I could hang with (the Flamingo).
31. Learned positive (anti-Cesar Millan) dog training techniques.
32. Shaped a dog trick (shaping is how dolphins get trained).
33. Officiated a wedding.
34. Smoked a turkey.

Switched

35. From MT to WordPress (thrilled).
36. From OS X laptop to pre-installed Ubuntu laptop (thanks System76)
37. From crappy server providers to a great one (thanks ServerBeach)
38. From phone to smart phone (so-so 8525)
39. From crappy car to the best car ever (thanks Scion).

Got involved with PR and Marketing

40. Wrote 73 posts here and 8 more on the CrowdVine blog.
41. Quoted in the NYT and the LA Times (about Twitter).
42. First video interview.
43. Wrote my first press release (which led to a TechCrunch story).
44. Got a story on the front page of Netscape (now Propeller). Took one week.
45. Got a story on the front page of Digg. Took two weeks. Key was the title.

Became a better developer

46. CSS skills went from a 1 to a 5 (out of 10).
47. Made my first logo in Photoshop.
48. Contributed to open source (XSS plugin, OpenSocial, and soon to release icalico).

Business partners

49. Integrated with Pathable for FOO and FOWA
50. Integrated with icalico for FOO and FOWA
51. Learned how to quickly end a call or delete an email from an inappropriate biz dev inquiry (“May I speak to the marketing department?” “No.”).
52. Responded to three requests for me to co-found someone else’s company. Flattered once. Disgusted twice.

Also

53. Accepted enormous amounts of help from my partner, Sarah. She was a sounding board, cheerleader, author of some of our marketing copy, and even convinced her group to do market research on CrowdVine for a Berkeley MBA group project.

14th Nov, 2007

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Launched: CrowdVine for Conferences

We just launched our new product, CrowdVine for Conferences. Here’s the official announcement where I try to explain the product in layman terms.

We’ve done six conferences now through our professional services (that’s where we do everything from setup to community management): Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, MX East, Future of Web Apps / London, Foo Camp, Maker Faire Bay Area, SoCon.

And we’ve had people setup regular CrowdVine networks for BarCampBlock, IDEA 2007, Ignite Boston, and PodCamp Atlanta.

Our new CrowdVine for Conferences service is just making official something that we’ve known for awhile now: CrowdVine networks are a great replacement for the traditional printed attendee list. They let you put names to faces, find out real information about people, and then get in touch with the people you want to meet.

From a conference organizer perspective, more networking means a more valuable conference that attendees are more likely to return to. Plus we’re able to pull out information to help make the next conference even better, information like which topics were attendees most interested in, which speakers were most popular, and which attendees acted as connectors who made the conference better for everyone.

If you know conference organizers or you are conference organizer, please make an introduction.

3rd Nov, 2007

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Introducing Jay and the New CrowdVine Blog

Jay put together an official CrowdVine blog. It’s already got a nice post where I explain who Jay is.

Here are some of the cool things I think we’ll be posting there in the next few weeks:

* Announcing CrowdVine for Conferences. We’re already running a healthy business running social networks for conferences. We’re expanding on that with a version of CrowdVine customized for conferences. It’ll include some cool options for unconferences too.

* Following OpenSocial. That’s Google’s open widget standard. They’ve done a really poor job of supporting the open source community, so we’re going to be following and documenting hows, whats and whys. Hopefully, we’ll have some open source code too.

* Open Social Standards. There’s a lot more than just OpenSocial.

* Releasing some Rails plugins. We have one ready to go that fights XSS attacks.

2nd Nov, 2007

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OAuth for Mac Apps

OAuth is one of the standards behind the emerging open social web. It allows you to grant access for one site to access data on another, say allowing LinkedIn to keep track of your GMail address book. My friend Jon Crosby just released an OAuth consumer library for Mac Apps.

Some people seem to think the open social web will be created with press releases. It’s actually people like Jon, who are building and releasing the tools, that are going to make this happen.

2nd Nov, 2007

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OpenSocial Not Open for Service Providers

Yet.

Google released their OpenSocial API. It allows social-network aware widgets to run on any site that implements the standard. Unfortunately, it’s got one major problem.

They didn’t release the Service Provider documentation. Not so Open. If you happened to sign a partnership with Google you may already be releasing your implementation. Everyone else is left out in the cold. In particular, check out the postings on the OpenSocial Container group (Container is another word for Service Provider). Practically every post is some Service Provider asking to be let in. And there isn’t a single response to any of them.

Here’s what CrowdVine is going to do about it. By hook or by crook, we’re going to get our hands on that spec. Then we’re going to implement it. Then we’re going to document our effort. Then we’re going to open source our implementation. Google’s launch partners seem to have the goal of replacing Facebook. Our goal is to replace Google’s launch partners.

Here’s the vision. Give every ma and pa website the tools to support this standard so they’ll have access to the same widget set as every other provider. That removes the one barrier small websites have when they try to compete with bigger sites: features.

When big and small players compete for a niche, the competition looks like this. The small player is armed with focus and passion, but constrained resources. The big player has unlimited resources but likely doesn’t even recognize that the niche exists. Take away the resource constraints and the small player wins.