I’m annoyed at the sate of the user interface for computing these days. It’s too hard to sync or share data across applications (the ‘suite’ concept for office seems to be missing completely – little app buttons in various programs or not) and it’s both annoying and difficult to get my computer to present information to me in the way I want it. I think the root of the problem is that there is no concept of relationship in (or god forbid, between) applications. I’m constantly typing information and then retyping or cutting and pasting it somewhere else. I can’t easily clip something from one work area and put it into another. Other than folders (which are painfully annoying and take forever to sync), there’s little concept of work-group or workspace in computing today. Here’s a great example, which both shows what a bone head I am as well as how far away from ideal we are. I missed a call this week. It was a short update call with one of the companies I work with, but still I missed it and it annoyed the heck out of me (which for me means that I’m its going to be on my mind for the next week). Here’s what happened: When I travel, I put information in my calendar in the time zone of the place where I will be that day, rather than in my ‘home’ time zone. To me, this just made sense – no need to adjust for where I was when looking at my calendar. Since there’s no way in Outlook to easily change between time zones this seemed like the best plan (although I really like their feature that allows you to place a second set of times on the left side of the screen – very very helpful and even better, only six short clicks away! [sarcasm intended]). The problem, which is what messed me up today, is that when someone sends me an invite it shows up in my home time zone, so I need to remember to change the meeting in Outlook to the time zone where I’ll actually be. I forgot to do this today, looked at the meeting time, assumed that it was in the calendar in pacific time and missed the meeting.Apparently somewhere between Office v1 and Office v11, no one ever figured out that time shifting is important. There’s no ability in Outlook Calendar to set different time zones for different days (let alone w/in a single day). There’s literally dozens of time zone options to choose from, but you can only display one at a time (other than the kluge I describe above) – there’s just no concept of shifting time temporarily.  I would have thought software was more well thought out than that by now . . .

I’ve had Feedburner on the mind recently (my last post was on the company as well).  I’m on my way back from our first post investment board meeting in Chicago as I type this and I had a chance to spend yesterday afternoon playing around with their system (read: see how many hits and how many subscribers are being served to various sites that have burned their feed).  Lots of interesting data there.  Feedburner is preparing a post on this, so I won’t steal their thunder, but I will share three data points that struck me:  First, the number of subscribers to the largest feeds is pretty amazing – the top sites have literally hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Second, the growth of podcasts is pretty amazing – there were no podcasts in the top 15 a few months ago; now there are several.  Finally, there are now few porn blogs that are starting to climb the list (I guess that was to be expected, although I was hoping the feed world would stay a little more pure than that).  Interestingly based on their hits vs. subscriber ratios, it appears that these sites are having their  contentscraped a lot vs. actually having subscribers to their feeds.

I’ll post a link to the Feedburner post when it goes up – it will be full of interesting data on the growth and popularity of feeds.

David Jackson, who is the author of The Internet Stock Blog (as well as a series of other blogs on investing and technology), was kind enough to add me to his recommended VC blog list. As part of our exchange about this I noticed that he hadn’t ‘burned’ his feeds through Feedburner (which is a Mobius backed company). I asked him why he hadn’t done this and he replied with some really good questions about their service.  I thought I would reprint them here, along with my responses with the idea that if David, as a sophisticated blogger, had these questions other people probably do as well.

David writes:
I’ve resisted using Feedburner, because:
1. It’s not clear to me how to migrate my current RSS feeds to them (without asking everyone to re-subscribe)
2. The company’s web site gives very little information about the service
3. I’m nervous entrusting my RSS feed to a company that might try to monetize it in future in ways I don’t want
4. I expect that Google’s RSS ads will end up providing fairly rich stats about the RSS feeds anyway

Here’s my response (actually in two e-mails, which I’ve combined here): 1. If you have control over the http directives on your site you can burn your feed without any change to your subscribers. See this post from the Feedburner forum http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3.

2. I totally agree – their site pretty much sucks. I expect this will take some time to change, but they’re starting to hire up (they were 5 guys when we made our investment – we’re up to 10 and growing).

3. I get the concern, but can tell you that they absolutely won’t do anything to your feed that you don’t request. Here’s Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo’s post on the financing that talks about their business model – http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=68. They are going to make money by managing feeds, by offering premium statistics and by taking a cut of ads in feeds (but ads will only be inserted in feeds that sign up for them).

4. Google stats I think will only provide you stats on the ads themselves, not the feeds. FB’s total stats pro package provides pretty in depth info on what people are reading and where they are coming from (you can trial this package on their site). Also with Google ads you have to have edit the source template, which is a pain (and something not everyone is able to do) and also means that you have to insert feeds into all of your posts (given the way most readers work, FB generally only inserts feeds in a portion of feeds to keep the content to ad ratio reasonable).

Don’t know if I convinced David to move over to Feedburner or not, but he knows I’ll keep on him . . .

Look for announcements soon from Feedburner on some very large feeds now using their service.

UPDATE: I received a trackback ping from Dadu Mimram writing on Strategic Board Blg – a great perspective from a Feedburner user and much more eloquent than my original post.  See Dadu’s post here.

Paul Kedrosky writes on his blog: Here is a puzzler: Why are there so many venture capital blogs? It is hard not to notice that there a host of such things out there, from Brad Feld’s to Fred Wilson’s, and everyone in between. Here are five possible hypotheses:

1. Professional service firms are highly branded by individual, so it makes sense to get out there and present yourself as a way of attracting deal flow.

2. There are just as many legal/financial/other blogs, but those people aren’t as good at getting media attention.

3. Venture capitalists don’t have enough to do.

4. Having a blog as a technology VC is a way of demonstrating your technical competencies.

5. Having a blog is a way to lay out your thought process about markets and technologies, thus demonstrating your added value as a putative investee board member. Let me add my 2c: 1 and 5 are generally on target – ultimately VC investing is about the people involved and the partner (or principal) you work with is more meaningful than the firm as a whole. 3 is off base – Brad is one of the busiest guys I know. My sense is that Fred is extremely busy as well and the two together are some of the most prolific VC bloggers around. I’m definitely not lacking for things to work on and as a result tend to write my blogs while traveling or in the evening. Perhaps 4 is a motivator tosome VCs, but really – how hard is it to set up a blog anyway? I can’t imagine anyone really feels that blogging adds much in the way of technical credibility. I have no clue on 2.

That said, here are some other possible reasons – at least from this VC blogger:

6. Writing things down requires more/better thought. The thought that goes into a post requires some time and attention. It’s easy to start to develop a “thesis” about something – to use a VC cliché that I’m not very fond of – but much harder to really understand something to the point of being able to organize your thoughts into a blog post.

7. Playing with the technology is interesting/helpful. This is different from 4 – I’m not talking about trying to prove to anyone that you are a technologist (I’m not one). I’m talking about getting your hands dirty and seeing what’s out there to get a better lay of the land (Mobius is an investor in Technorati, Newsgator and Feedburner, for example, so its directly relevant to my work).

8. Good VCs benefit from better educated entrepreneurs. Too much of venture capital seems like a black hole to many entrepreneurs. Perhaps this drives better deals for VCs, but ultimately an uneven playing field doesn’t really benefit anyone. Writing about how to give better VC pitches or what term sheet terms actually mean is a way of shedding light into the vortex and demystifying venture capital. Clearly, education is a theme across many of the VC blogs out there.

9. Creating a name. This is totally personal and perhaps only applicable to me, but it’s an important part of why I blog, so its worth mentioning. I imagine this is more true for the small number of non-partner VC bloggers like myself, but let’s face it – the VC world has a hierarchy and I’m trying to climb my way up it. Blogging is a way to give myself a voice that can perhaps be heard beyond my firm (The Wall St. Journal isn’t exactly beating down my door for quotes at the moment). I imagine this is a motivator for partner VC bloggers as well (although I don’t know that they would admit it as readily)

I’ve been meaning to post on this topic (might as well be transparent about what I’m trying to get out of this experience). Thanks Paul for the push to finally get this down on paper.

Also see Jeff Clavier’s response to Paul’s question here.

This is the second in a series of posts on the art of mergers and acquisitions. See the first post in the series here. I think the most important part of being an effective negotiator is not being a persuasive talker (although that is a skill that is helpful) – but rather being a very good listener. Its tempting to spend your time in a negotiation thinking about all the great points you can make and concocting elaborate strategies for getting your views across to the other party, but one can’t really do that and effectively hear what someone else is saying at the same time. The best negotiators spend the time when someone else is talking to listen intently to what is being said, knowing that there’s always plenty of time to think about your response after the other side has made its point. Personally I like to take detailed notes ofthe points that are being made – it keeps me focused on the conversation (helpful in long negotiating sessions) and provides me with a record to later use in working on my responses. I also generally don’t like to take a combative approach in negotiating and listening to what people are actually saying lets me better understand what points are truly most important to them and, perhaps more importantly, the rationale behind their thinking. There’s a corollary to this idea that’s equally important. Silence can be your best friend in a negotiation. It’s a natural by-product of listening well (since you won’t necessarily be ready to respond the second someone else stops talking) and something that should be embraced. Interestingly, most people seem to be afraid of long pauses – particularly in rooms full of people. Their natural reaction to this is to try to fill the silence with words, which leads many people to just keep running on if you aren’t talking. This can be a huge advantage – I’ve sat across the table from people I was working on a deal with numerous times and watched them start to back off the positions they had just firmly stated without my ever having to say a word. I like silence in a negotiation – it gives me time to think, to size up what the other side is really saying and to look at their body language (I almost always look directly at the person I’m negotiating with in a pause – it tends to provoke them to keep talking, which generally works in my favor).
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Yesterday Factiva and Newsgator announced a deal that will allow Factiva customers to access their Factiva content via RSS (specifically through Newsgator’s Outlook reader and on-line system). This is a great milestone in the development and adoption of RSS – here’s my take on the deal: First, for those of you who are not familiar with Factiva, it’s a joint venture between Reuters and Dow Jones that provides their users with customizable content (from news articles to D&B reports to other types of company profiles). The idea is to allow their customers to stay up to date on news that is relevant to their business (customers, competitors, etc.). The deal with Newsgator marries specialized and proprietary content (Factiva) with a distribution platform (Newsgator) and is an example of where I think corporations are moving in how they consume information. Interestingly, the partnership came about in part because Factiva CEO Clare Hart was a user of Newsgator (and had been for quite some time) and she quickly recognized its power as a way to distribute information.

The idea is really simple. Factiva recognized two important things: 1) many information workers want the collection of important data integrated into their existing workflow (i.e., not in a separate application) and 2) these workers also want a single point of access for multiple data sources. By integrating Factiva “feeds” into the Newsgator platform they are addressing both of these concerns – driving adoption and usage in their existing customers and expanding their potential pool of users.

However, this is only the first step in the new model of information workflow. Imagine this idea applied to internal data. I’m using RSS, for example, to track changes on an internal Wiki for one of my companies – obviating the need for me to check in to the Wiki site to see if anything new has been posted and saving me quite a bit of time in the process. You could also imagine RSS feeds coming from a CRM system to alert account managers to problems that one of their major accounts is experiencing. You could also see this tied to a SFA system to automatically generate search feeds for a sales person’s key contacts and allowing them to easily keep up with news on their prospect. In every case delivering this information directly to the workspace (Outlook, most likely, but also to a desktop client or web based client if desired) of the worker that needs to know about these changes. This is jus the tip of the iceberg . . . watch for more from Newsgator as they lead the charge to make information easily available.

Credit to Brad for this one – I had completely forgotten about it when he sent it to me (I waited for him to blog it, but he’s been out of town so I thought I’d put it up).

Remember the wayback machine?

www.waybackmachine.org.

It lets you search for old versions of web sites.

Want to know what Yahoo’s site looked like in October of 1996 – here you go .

How about Netscape that same month (makes you wax nostalgic, doesn’t it?) .

Google beta anyone?

Miss the Nasdaq at 4,800? Here it is.

Enjoy!

Sandy Hamilton (one of the key execs at Newsgator) did a nice follow-up post to the note I wrote about taking 100% responsibility.  In it he talks about what that actually means  – how we present ourselves and the importance of taking responsibility not just for what you are saying, but also for what other people are hearing.

What a powerful concept.  Thanks Sandy for taking this to the next level. In case the link above isn’t working, here’s the  full URL of his post: http://sandyhamilton.blogs.com/sandy_hamilton/2005/04/did_i_say_that.html

I forgot to mention this in my post on Freakonomics a couple of day ago. Hold on while I climb onto my soap box [clump] [clump]

As if I needed another reason to really like this book, I was happy to note that the authors – Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner – correctly use the word data (as a plural, rather than singular noun). It’s used all over the book and their correct use of the word truly enhanced my reading enjoyment.

Now I just need to figure out how to get down off this damn box without falling . . .

I picked up a copy of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the  Hidden Side of Everything last night before jumping on a plane.  I pretty much devoured it on my flight. While I don’t often write here about books (in fact this may be my first entry on the subject), if you liked Blink or The Tipping Point or are just curious about how the world works, I’d strongly suggest you check this one out. The basic idea of Freakonomics is to use statistical analysis to explore relationships and answer some pretty interestin  questions about our world (are swimming pools more dangerous than guns; why do drug dealers live with their mothers; how can we tell if sumo wrestlers cheat; etc).  I eat this stuff up (for me its in part the mix of my two college majors – economics and psychology).  And, while you may not find every topic explored in the book riveting, I think the broader premise is an important one – by thinking about problems a little differently one can come up with interesting ways of testing theories that would otherwise seem untestable.  Perhaps by turning problems slightly askew you can gain a perspective into something that you didn’t think was possible.