Bill Gates last days

From CES. The bit with Bono is particularly amusing! Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr5w3X4R8b4

January 11, 2008· 1 min read

On endless calls today

January 10, 2008· 0 min read

Marketers Unite!

Ryan Hunter, VP of Marketing for Mobius portfolio company Newmerix, has started the Front Range CMO’s – a networking and professional organization for marketing executives in the front range. You can check out the group’s blog at www.frontrangecmos.com. The group’s first event is going to be on February 4th down in Denver. You can email Ryan directly if you’d like to learn more. He’s got a great group of local marketing execs already signed up – should be a great event and long term a great resource for the Denver/Boulder marketing community.

January 10, 2008· 1 min read

Sonos – how have I lived without you?!?

I wrote in my last post that soon after installing Memeo I couldn’t figure out how I had lived so long without it. I had a similar – in this case instantaneous – experience last night after installing my new Sonos. I’m not entirely clear why I waited to long to buy one (actually I am clear – I’m cheap and Sonos isn’t exactly inexpensive) but now on the long side of my buying decision, whatever benefit my frugality brought me was completely dwarfed by the sheer joy and excitement I had about 15 seconds after setting up my system. …

January 8, 2008· 2 min read

Memeo

Yesterday Memeo announced an $8.1m Series B funding led by Foundry. Memeo offers simple, elegant, but extremely powerful backup and synchronization capabilities for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. I couldn’t be more excited about the Memeo opportunity, about the Memeo team or about our co-investor, G-51 (with whom we’ve teamed up with in past investments). And while I rarely judge the merits of an investment based on my personal experience with a product, I can say that having installed the product as part of our due diligence process I’ve been amazed with how powerful and simple to use the Memeo’s Life Agent. It’s one of those things you add to your technology stack and quickly realize that you can’t live without it. The fact that it blows its competitors away with its ease of use just adds to the experience (yes – managing the back-up and synchronization of your digital assets SHOULD be this easy). …

January 8, 2008· 1 min read

“Seth can’t take your call right now . . .”

I have a few pet peeves about personal business habits that I’ve joked about in the past (see How do you sign your emails and Where was that you went to school, for example). Here’s another one that’s been bugging me lately: outgoing voicemail messages With apologies to my many, many friends who do this, it really bugs me when people have their assistant leave their outgoing voicemail message. I get it – you’re busy; you’re very important; you have an assistant; you don’t really have time in your schedule to deal with things like setting up your voicemail. But really? Do you honestly not have the 30 seconds it takes to set up your own personalized outgoing message? Or is it that you just can’t figure out how to do it . . . ? …

January 2, 2008· 2 min read

Back in the saddle

At Mobius/Foundry we take the week between Christmas and New Year off from work. Combined with a few days before, Christmas this makes for a pretty nice break from the office. Historically I average about 50% for being able to actually take meaningful time away from work over this time period (there have been a handful of years where an end of the year deal has made this impossible). This was one of the good years. …

January 2, 2008· 1 min read

Happy holidays from Gary the Snowman

Blueprint scores again with the next installment of its Gary the Snowman series. See the fully video card here.

December 28, 2007· 1 min read

Revenge of the database

I had a note from a break-out session I led at defrag a few months ago that read “database is back”. It was by far the biggest take away from the two-day conference for me. While a significant infrastructure has developed around simplifying and virtualizing pretty much every aspect of the technology stack, the common denominator to all NextGenWeb, Web 2.0, social networking, aspiring platform companies is the database. And while the other elements of the technology stack are getting all of the fanfare the very unsexy database that back-ends all of this great new stuff is the real hero. After all, many of the companies in the categories I mention above are really just fancy front-ends to a large. This presents problems for companies that are developing new services since there are very few options for lightweight databases and essentially no options for virtualizing these databases (at least nothing very robust and scalable). For the most part they’re stuck handling the set-up, implementation and maintenance of this technology themselves. The result is greater cost, more headaches and an inability to quickly scale if their business is successful. …

December 14, 2007· 2 min read

Sales is a science, not an art

Andy Blackstone had a great comment to my post yesterday on Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about explicit behavior (in the case of the article, doctors using checklists). I’ve edited the comment slightly for clarity. An important concept in the article is that the checklists are not aimed at a specific condition but at an overall process in the ICU. One of the objections I often encounter in my consulting practice is “my business is different” – I’d contend that at the process level that’s most often not true. The resistance to adopting these checklists often comes from doctors that think the “art of medicine” is being threatened by the regimen of the checklist. In my practice, I see sales managers and salespeople with the same objection. In fact, as the article states, it is the reduction of the routine aspects of the process to the rigors of the checklists that enables the art to emerge. Finally, I was struck by the feeling of the doctors in the ICU that there was just no time available in the midst of their chaotic day to deal with checklists – a reaction I’ve seen in lots of business managers as well. This is a major barrier to implementing any new business process. The success of checklists in the ICU in not only reducing accidents, deaths, and costs, but in making the doctors time efficient, can be seen as new business processes are implemented as well. …

December 12, 2007· 5 min read