Socialize is well known for the robust infrastructure of its drop-in social platform, which handles over 20 requests per second — over 1.5 million requests in the past 24 hours across thousands of mobile apps and millions of end users.  But how does a team of just ten employees set up and manage such an infrastructure?  Here’s a sneak peek behind the curtain so you can see how it’s done.

Our databases, servers, Partner API and SDKs have been architected to always push meta data to our systems.  Each component is built as stand-alone infrastructure, allowing us to audit and optimize intelligence on how each piece is performing.  We then leverage tools by Splunk to turn our massive log files into actionable intelligence, and we use TeamCity for continuous integration.  Even further behind the scenes we are using Nginx, Apache, load-balanced Amazon AWS & RDS, Robotium, Selenium, gh-unit, OCMock, KIF, Google App Engine and other best-in-class technologies.

It all comes together on a 50″ flatscreen monitor and 32″ iMac that our Quality Assurance engineer monitors and all our employees can see.  We even have a flashing green light that turns red when a build breaks or we detect latencies in our system, and all our developers are notified when there’s a problem.

Here’s a video of Sean describing the systems and how we use them to ensure Socialize is always available and performing flawlessly in your app:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More pictures of our system:

The Socialize Siren

Splunk in Action

Those of you who know me well know I call myself a “lifehacker” which basically means I hack & use technology to be as efficient as possible.  For example, I strongly recommend that those who are in front of computers all day learn to play them like instruments.

I’ve had people ask me how I use technology to be efficient when I’m in sales mode (which, really, any entrepreneur is most of the time).  Here’s a screenshot of what my email client looks like, with the tools I rely on below that:

Click to enlarge. Gmail, with Rapportive, Boomerang, Highrise, LinkedIn and Twitter plugins

Rapportive:  This Gmail Plugin is an absolute necessity for anyone even remotely in a sales type of role.   It lets you learn about the person you’re emailing with, and connect with them via LinkedIn right from the email client.  It also lets you manage their Highrise CRM profile without having to go to Highrise, which is a godsend.  I can’t recommend Rapportive highly enough.

Boomerang:  Lets you schedule email to be sent later, but more importantly, will “boomerang” an email back to your inbox a specified amount of time after you’ve sent it.  It’s a great way to have a soft reminder to follow up with someone.  You can also have it only boomerang the email back to you if the person you’re emailing doesn’t respond.

I can go into more detail on how I use these services (and especially how I use Rapportive to create tags in Highrise right from the email, which I then export to  Mailchimp for monthly marketing newsletter blasts) if you’d like.  Just make a comment below asking for whatever detail you’d like me to delve into.  If I get enough interest, I’ll spend the time to do a more in-depth demo.

I’m a big fan of my iPad, and I’ve found that I can take it to meetings instead of a laptop.  But typing is still a pain and really slows me down.  Even though I’m pretty good at touch typing on the iPad, it’s still way more difficult than on a computer and forces me to take my laptop with me more often than I’d like.  So I set about finding an alternative.

My requirements may be different than yours.  I wanted something that maintains the iPad’s slim profile as much as possible, has some element of style to it, and most importantly, allows me to type well — ideally as well as I can on my 15″ Macbook Pro laptop.  Additional “nice to haves” were the ability to keep my Apple iPad magnetic screen cover and a good set of function keys on the keyboard.  One intriguing keyboard that I didn’t test is the TouchFire keyboard concept on Kickstarter, which is a flexible keyboard that interfaces directly with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard.  When it comes out, I’ll give it a shot as well.

I tested five bluetooth iPad keyboards and found one I really liked:  The Logitech Keboard Case for the iPad 2.  The keyboard is actually one made by ZAGG, with Logitech branding the device.  I time-tested all five bluetooth keyboards against the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and against the Macbook Pro, by typing this text on each device and timing how long it took.  The text doesn’t make total sense, but I wanted something that required numbers, special characters, and copy/pasting.

First, here’s a video of the setup process:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Winner: Logitech Keyboard Case for iPad2 by ZAGG

This keyboard totally rocks.  For me, it’s head & shoulders above the other keyboards for several key reasons.  Most importantly, the keyboard performed faster than the Macbook Pro keyboard, with my test text coming in at 45 seconds vs. 56 seconds.  In fact, it was the fastest keyboard of all the ones I tested.  Here’s the Amazon link for it.

But importantly (to me, at least), I can keep my Apple magnetic keyboard cover on the iPad.  The Logitech case isn’t meant to allow the Apple cover to stay on, but it works.  It’s a bit of a hack — to accommodate the cover, I have to put the iPad in upside down.  That doesn’t matter, except that the charge and headphone ports no longer accommodate the iPad.  But as you can see in the video, since it’s so simple to remove the iPad from the keyboard case, it’s no big deal — and in fact since the cover makes the iPad stick out a tiny bit more from the case, you could still use both with the iPad in the case if you were so inclined.

Being able to keep the Apple cover on the iPad gives me the flexibility to take the case with me when I want it, or leave it when I know I don’t want it.  There’s no level of commitment — not even a “snapping” of the iPad in & out of the case.  This is liberating, although there is a downside:  By keeping the Apple cover on, the iPad doesn’t fit as snugly into the case, so it’ll fall out easily if dropped.  Because of this, you don’t get the level of protection with this case as you do with others that are more secure.  For me the trade off is easy though — if I were carrying the iPad around without the keyboard case, it would be even more vulnerable, so I’m not losing any protection with this case as compared to having no case.  Although I’m not gaining any protection either, I love the flexibility of this solution.

This Logitech case is also one of the few (the ZAGGfolio is the other) that has cut, copy & paste buttons — something I find to be invaluable in an iPad keyboard.  The keys are well spaced out and have a very good tactile feel to them.  Overall, this case is a clear winner to me — so much so that I’ve already called it my own by putting the Socialize icon sticker on it, as well as the optional low-profile clear rubber feet, as you can see in the video and pictures.

Here’s a video of both the on-screen test time and the Logitech keyboard:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Second Place: The ZAGGfolio

The ZAGGfolio is the exact same keyboard as the Logitech Keyboard Case (winner, above), but with a cover that requires a bit more commitment.  The iPad has to be slid into it.  On the plus side, it does provide more protection to the iPad, although it’s also bulkier.  This keyboard gets second place because it uses the same fantastic ZAGG keyboard as the winner, with a time result of 51 seconds, also beating my 56 second time on the Macbook Pro.  (The iPad’s built-in keyboard, by comparison, took 1 minute, 58 seconds to type out the same text).  Here’s the Amazon link.

Here’s a video of the keyboard in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Third Place: Logitech Fold-Up Keyboard

This keyboard has an ingenious slide-around design that causes the keyboard to expand into a full-size keyboard.  If it weren’t so bulky, it would’ve nailed a top spot in the keyboard shootout.  However, due to the mechanics needed to support the slide-around keyboard design, when the iPad is clipped in, it feels as hefty as a laptop, negating the inherent benefits of the iPad.  It’s too bad because overall, I like the concept and the keyboard itself is great, nabbing a time of 48 seconds in my time tests (second fastest, and faster than the Macbook Pro time of 56 seconds).  Here’s the Amazon link.

Here’s a video of the Logitech Fold-Up Keyboard in Action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fourth Place: Adonit Writer for iPad 2

I really wanted to like this keyboard.  INC Magazine named it as the top iPad keyboard.  And I can see why — it’s beautifully constructed and comes in a very Apple-esque high quality packaged box.  You can tell the designers and engineers put a lot of love into its design.  And for people with smaller hands, it might be perfect.  The build quality was easily tops of the group, but the keyboard spacing made it impossible for me to use effectively.  Although the ZAGG keyboards have the same width as the Adonit, the key tactile response couldn’t be more night & day.  The Adonit keyboard returned the slowest time, at 1 minute, 46 seconds (the iPad’s on-screen keyboard wasn’t far behind at 1:58).  With that kind of poor performance, I’d rather just use the on-screen keyoboard than lug around a secondary keyboard.  So big style points for the Adonit keyboard, but very low functionality score.  Here’s the Amazon link.  Here’s a video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last Place: No-Name Brand Cheap Bluetooth Keyboard

This keyboard is so no-name that not only does it not have a brand, it doesn’t even have a proper name.  The box says “Mobile Bluetooth Keyboard” but then it has some text that’s been marked through with a permanent black marker.  It probably said something like “for the iPad” but since it’s not being sold for the iPad2, they marked it out.  No matter — it’s so much cheaper than all the other keyboards, and it looks good with its aluminum-style finish (can’t tell if it’s truly aluminum or not — some people maintain that it’s plastic) that if it worked, I’d be all about using it.

In practice though, it was terrible.  The design was poor and the tactile response was just awful.  Not recommended.  It clocked in a dismal time of 1 minute, 37 seconds.  Here’s the Amazon link (although really, save your money).  Here’s a video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a gallery of pics:

Thanks to the folks at CES and the Department of Homeland Security for inviting me to participate on a panel focused on mobile security titled Tale of the Tablet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The panel focused on hardware, software and social security on mobile devices.   If you’re curious about the challenges the enterprise is facing securing mobile devices in this “BYOD” (bring your own device) world, you’ll enjoy the panel.  I was impressed that DHS coordinated a panel like this — especially that they thought to include a company like Socialize that’s focusing on the social privacy & security issues vs. the traditional hardware/software issues facing mobile security.  As I said in my intro, “I’m not a hardware or software security guy, but I’m here because often the biggest point of vulnerability in a device is the human using it.”

Greg Schaffer, Acting DHS Deputy Undersecretary moderated.   Other panelists included:

• Prasanna Mulgaonkar: Director, Endpoint Security Software and Services, Software and Services Group, Services Division, Intel Corporation
• Dr. Phyllis Schneck: Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Global Public Sector, McAfee
• Christy Wyatt: CVP and GM, Enterprise Business, Motorola Mobility
• Scott Totzke: Senior Vice President, BlackBerry Security, Research in Motion

Here’s the panel description:

This panel of public- and private-sector representatives will discuss the complexities the technology industry faces as its consumers become increasingly mobile and the measures to keep these devices secure constantly changes. The panel will discuss how manufacturers can continue producing the most up-to-date programs without impeding security. You’ll hear from the manufacturers and app developers who are working furiously to create the latest programs to work across multiple operating systems and the government divisions and software security developers who are striving to protect consumers with new security applications. The panel will also consider what responsibility the industry should have in assisting consumers to apply the stringent cyber security measures at home, and how government collaboration or oversight can factor in to the solution. The Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Security Division will moderate the engaging discussion and debate.

To me, this is part of what being an entrepreneur is all about. Turning around in the taxi line, embarrassing yourself in front of hundreds of people, and seeing what happens. Often times, it’s something good, because nobody else is willing to try it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s no secret that Google calendars and iCal don’t play super nicely together.   And it’s even worse on the iPhone.  It got so bad that I was using the Google calendar web app instead of the native calendar app because subscribed Google calendars (called “delegate” calendars) weren’t even showing up.

But here’s a trick — a way to sync your subscribed calendars from Google’s calendaring system onto your iPhone.   This is part of my “lifehacking” series :)

You have to create a separate CALDAV account on the iPhone for each one, which is a pain, but doable.

(click links below for screenshots)

Step 1: On your iPhone, go into Settings >> Mail, Contacts, Calendars >> Add Account

Step 2: Scroll down and choose “Other”.  You should see a screen like this one.  Choose Add CalDAV account

Step 3: Now you’ll have to get the URL for the server.  On your desktop, go to your Google Calendar and choose “Calendar Settings” then grab the private URL for the subscribed calendar you want to add to your phone.

Step 4: OK now you have to do a little concatenating of strings.  Take the private calendar URL you just copied, and then add it to this bit “https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/” so it ends up looking like this.  Then, add “/user” to the end (that’s missing from the screenshot at left).  So you should end up with something like this:  https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/your_private_url_here@group.calendar.google.com/user” (switch out the part in blue with your private URL)

Step 5: Now, you’re going to want to put that into the “server” field on the iPhone in Step 3.  Although you could type in the exact URL above, since it’s long, I recommend you create a short URL out of it, like this, and then open that URL in Safari on your phone and copy it to your phone’s clipboard.  Then, paste it into the “server” field in your new CalDAV account.   Put in your user name & password and name the calendar with whatever name you want for it.

Presto, you should be good to go.  If you have any trouble, drop me a comment below.

I recently wrote about how I’ve swapped PowerPoint out for something I call PowerPinch (a term I made up).

When it came time to make a demo video for Socialize, I wondered if I could use PowerPinch to make the video, and then somehow capture what was happening on my iPad.  It turns out, you can.  Here’s the finished video, and below is how I did it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PowerPinch script in Google Docs

First, I made the demo video using my PowerPinch process.  To learn more about that part, read this blog on PowerPinch.

Then, I made a script for the video using Google Docs (pic at right).

Once I was ready to capture, I bought a BlackMagic H.264 Pro Recorder box from Amazon, an HDMI cable, the HDMI iPad 2 Connector, and a mini USB cable.  That’s all the hardware I needed to connect my iPad to my Macbook Pro and start recording the content of my iPad screen.

The BlackMagic box comes with its own capture software, called Blackmagic Media Express, which was perfectly sufficient for the job.

The BlackMagic H.264 Pro Recorder w/ iPad

I then read the script into a pair of Logitech USB Headphones and used audio editing program Audacity to splice the audio together the way I wanted it.

I imported both the video and the audio into iMovie, and exported an .mp4, which I then uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube.  Presto!

The video isn’t as smooth as I’d like, but for a $500 hardware budget, I’ll definitely take it as a v1.  It’s more polished than anything I could’ve done without having to whip out AfterEffects.  Plus it’s kinda cool to have done it on the iPad.  If you do have a $5k+ budget to spend, I’d recommend a company like DigitalFlair, which made our AppMakr demo video.

I’d love any ideas you have to improve on this v1 — at some point I’ll try making another one based on what I learned from the first go-around.  So if you have any thoughts or any questions on how I did it, please leave them in the comments below.

A set of Image Tiles in a PowerPinch presentation

Sick of endless PowerPoint slides?  If you want to take your presentation to the next level, and you know basic HTML, you can hack together a presentation on an iPad that lets you interact with your content like never before.   I call it “PowerPinch” because you can pinch, swipe and zoom seamlessly with your presentation, and focus in on the content you’re talking about, then zoom out quickly and move on to the next thing.  It’s seriously liberating.

First, some caveats:  Creating a presentation like this takes more work than throwing a PowerPoint together.  (I’d also argue that the output is obviously better than PowerPoint too).  But if you just need to throw some messaging together, or if your pitch is still in a mode where it’s iterating quickly, I’d suggest you get a flow down with PowerPoint first, and then move it to PowerPinch.   You’ll also need to be able to work within a photo editing program — I use PhotoShop — to put the pitch together.

Ready to have at it?  First, here’s a video showing what a PowerPinch presentation looks like:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click to enlarge (caution -- it's big!)

The first step is to make what I call Image Tiles that form each “slide.”  Assuming you’ll be using an iPad for this, you want to oversize the tile resolution so you can zoom in on the tile on the iPad.  The iPad’s resolution is 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall.  I made each image tile 1859 pixels wide by 1347 pixels tall.  To the right is what one of my image tiles looks like that I used in the video above.

I create the image tile in PhotoShop as a .psd and then save it as a .png.  You want to keep the .pngs at 1 megabyte or smaller, or the presentation will get unruly as you add image tiles.

I save the .png to my public dropbox folder.  That way, whenever I update the .png, the hosted file is also automatically updated.  So, for example, this is the URL of the Image Tile at right: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1096184/pitch/main/00070_hor_soc_overview.png .  And the next Image Tile URL is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1096184/pitch/main/00080_hor_soc_overview_soon.png.  (If you don’t know what Dropbox is, that’s outside the scope of this blog, but I highly encourage you to read my blog on playing a computer like an instrument, that talks about Dropbox and how it works, along with other lifehacker productivity tools.)

You’ll also notice that the Image Tiles are named with numbers at the beginning.  For example, the first one is 00070_hor_soc_overview.png and the next one is 00080_hor_soc_overview_soon.png.  More on the reason for that later.

Screenshot of the PowerPinch HTML file

Once you have a few Image Tiles created, you’ll want to string them together with a simple HTML file.  You can find and view source on the full, finished HTML file that I load onto the iPad by clicking here.  You’ll notice that I put a spacer .png file between each Image Tile to give them some spacing.  A screenshot of the code is at left.

PowerPinch: Add to Home Screen

Next, just open the web page you just coded on your iPad using Safari, and choose “Add to Home Screen.”  Doing this allows you to make the PowerPinch presentation look like an “app” and keeps the Safari URL bar from showing on the screen.

That’s all there is to it.  You’ll be rocking PowerPinch presentations in no time.

Here are a few other things you’ll need to know:

You’ll want to pick up either a VGA iPad connector or an HDMI iPad connector so you can output your iPad on a big screen.  I went all out and connected mine to a 10 foot VGA extension cable, since many board rooms have short cables, and I really like to be able to walk around with iPad in hand while I’m presenting.

Open your Image Tiles with Preview

Also, the reason I name my Image Tiles with numbers in front of the file name is so they’re easy to print when you want to compile them into a PDF to email out.  Here’s the process to turn your PowerPinch presentation into a PDF on a Mac:

1. Highlight the Image Tiles you want to print, choose “open with” and select Preview.
2. This will open all your Image Tiles in the correct order.
3. Then choose “print” and either Save as PDF, or if you have PDFpen, choose Open with PDFpen.
4. Then you can edit the PDF to taste (remove pages, rearrange, etc) and mail it off.
5. For advanced users, I recommend you make a Quartz Filter to reduce the file size (if you want to know how to do this, just leave a comment below).

Mark Jacobstein, CEO of iSkoot, sat down with me to talk about Qualcomm and its upcoming initiatives.

iSkoot was acquired by Qualcomm last year, and now Mark is VP of Product Management for Qualcomm.

The reason I’m so fascinated by Qualcomm is due to its integrated approach to hardware and software.  I always thought of Qualcomm as a hardware company, but many of its current initiatives are software-focused.  And not just that — Qualcomm is moving rapidly to expose its tight integration of hardware+software as services for developers, such as its Yagatta initiative, which as its website says, “brings text, voice and images together in a single conversation. So you can write it, say it or show it – just like in real life. Sharing your own voice and your own images helps bring your messages to life.”

Mark also talks about what it’s like being a small startup being acquired by a large company, and how he’s working to influence Qualcomm’s company culture to be as nimble as possible.

Here’s the full interview with Mark:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was one of the mobile and social engagement experts at the 2011 LavaCon conference in Austin, TX this week.  LavaCon is a very well attended niche conference for digital media and content strategists — not the “social media gurus” you so often hear about, but actual content strategists who create, curate and publish content for some of the world’s leading brands.

They have an interesting predicament on their hands:  Traditionally, they’ve wrestled with how to get content out of the enterprise and into b2b and/or b2c consumption.  However, their world is changing so quickly that they’re having to rapidly re-tool their skillsets and expertise to not only be masters of the old world, but also figure out how to maximize on the potential of new and rapidly evolving distribution channels.

This group is wrestling with issues such as:

• Should their role be creating content, or extracting existing content from organizations?
• Mobile seems huge — what’s the best way to capitalize on it?
• Social also seems huge — how do they bring social into their carefully curated content world without causing more problems than they solve?
• There are many new formats to wrestle with — a rapidly evolving ePub standard, HTML5, and many others.  What’s the best way to separate the content from the formatting so content is best positioned to be usable and relevant in the future?  (Hint — they’re on the bleeding edge of XML technologies)

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Twitter stream of event:

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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video coming!

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video coming!

In my series about using agile processes not just for software development but in everyday life,  Socialize VP of Engineering Jason Polites has offered up a guest post about what often gets overlooked in software development:

Nice post.  I think there are some very basic tenets relating to SCRUM, or agile in general, that tend to get overlooked though.  Actually.. throw out the word SCRUM for a second and just consider what the concept of agile development is saying.

Imagine a situation where Person A has to complete Task X.  It doesn’t matter what you do or say before they start, Person A will ALWAYS take the same amount of time to complete Task X.  Whether you are operating a waterfall model, an agile model or some other crazy methodology.. Person A will take the same amount of time to complete Task X.  But what does this mean?

If we have an approach that says “we need X tasks completed by Y date”, then we are effectively saying we can predict how long it will take to complete those tasks.  If there is one thing we know with certainty, is that we can guarantee that things will change, and that we can’t predict the future.  So, amazingly,  this approach fails every time (amazing not because it fails, but because it’s still being used and people still expect it to work).

The reality is that you can’t have tasks AND time.. you can only have one.  The tasks will take as long as they take.  We might “think” we can affect this, or we can fool ourselves into believing that we CAN predict the future, but restating the previous, “Person A will always take the same amount of time”.

So.. if we accept that we can only have one or the other, how to we effectively schedule anything?  Well fixed dates DO exist (they’re on the Calendar ;) ) so we can easily fix a date, but we CAN’T decide on a fixed set of tasks to be completed by this date.  Where does that leave us?  Well logically if we can only have a certain sub-set of tasks completed by a fixed date, then we want to make sure the most important ones are completed by that date.

Enter SCRUM stage left.

SCRUM advocates that you have a prioritized list of “tasks” (stories) such that completion order matters, but completion time does not.  SCRUM also advocates that at every definable stage (sprint) there is a viable product.  It may be featureless, but it “works”.  There are a few assumptions here:

1. We assume that people on the project and responsible adults, and that “Person A” (from the first example) will work diligently and efficiently
2. We assume that the MVP (minimum value product) may need to more than one sprint to get going.  This is a bit of a deviation from the rules, but is a reasonable one.

Now although it’s easier to see how this applies to software development vs. anything else, but actually in principle it applies everywhere.  It’s just a way of looking at things and accepting that we can’t predict the future.

You won’t know what will be completed by a certain date, but you’ll know that whatever is completed is the most important.

Google engineer Steve Yegge let an internal Google memo slip publicly (he later called it “the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history”) where he argued that Google was royally screwing up by not building its social technology and other internal technologies as a platform.  He compared Google to Amazon, which does.

If you’re interested in understanding the importance of a company ‘eating its own dogfood,’ especially as it pertains to APIs that even internal departments use with each other, give the piece a read.

Steve argues that what’s made Amazon so successful is institutionalizing this into its culture early on.

You can also read his follow-up piece here, which he published after the slip was made public.

I really believe Steve is right about the importance of eating your own dog food, and as a company we’re institutionalizing it into our culture.  We’re always working to ‘eat our own dog food’ internally, too.  For example, we originally built Socialize into AppMakr as a custom feature; now that we have launched Socialize as a robust platform, we’re ripping that custom code out and using our public Socialize API and SDK within AppMakr too.  It gives us an opportunity to turn us into our best and most critical customer.

Whenever you can, build technology as a platform that can be consumed internally and externally.   There’s an elegant balance between fast iteration and building out a robust platform, which I can talk about in a later post if you’d like (just leave a request in the comments).

We’ve been using the Scrum agile development framework (or just “scrum”) at Socialize since early this year.  Hats off to Jason, our VP of Engineering, for really championing it and to Sean and Isaac for implementing it with the developers.  Our workflow is to use Basecamp to discuss ideas (Basecamp is like Democracy: it’s not great, but it’s the best thing out there — you can read my rants & raves about Basecamp here), then Github for issues & code repository, and Pivotal Tracker to manage our dev process.  We do fast iteration cycles with one-week sprints, planning meetings every Monday and daily stand-ups to reconnect.

I’ll explain what all that means below, if you don’t already know, but here’s the point of this blog post:  Scrum has worked so well on the dev side — what if it was possible to implement scrum across an entire company, including its non-development components like user acquisition, sales, even accounting, HR & finance?

We decided to find out.  I’m going to write a series of blog posts with our experience implementing Scrum throughout our company, with a focus on the non-development parts of the organization, as I haven’t really seen other companies do this yet.  I figure this is a good opportunity to share our knowledge and learn from yours, so please post your experiences with Scrum, agile and general, and other workflow approaches in the comments.

In this first blog, I’ll talk about what scrum is (at least to me) and show you a video of Jeremia, our developer evangelist, and Christine, our wordsmithstress, discussing the pro’s & con’s of implementing scrum in the user acquisition department (the first non-dev team we decided to test it with).

There are individuals within our organization that know scrum way better than I do because they’re using it every day — Jason, Sean, Isaac and our incredible developers, for example, and I’ll invite their comments.   Our goal is to institutionalize this agile mentality throughout the company.

So what is scrum, really?  

To me it’s simply a way of thinking about getting things done.  There are traditional development models like waterfall development, which (like a waterfall) takes a staged, or phased approach to development.  I’m going to abstract “development” into “workflow” for the purposes of this blog, since we’re talking about using these models in a larger sense throughout the company’s divisions.

The magic of scrum is that it takes time out of the equation.  Or to put it another way, assuming you have employees that are dedicated and are working hard, things take as long as they take.  You’re not doing anyone any favors by setting arbitrary deadlines.  ”This project needs to be finished by Friday” or “This deliverable is due in 60 days” cause way more problems than they solve.  When the team inevitably misses the goals, everyone is disappointed — the goal setters blame those responsible for stepping up to an arbitrary date, and the implementers resent having a date put on them that didn’t reflect reality.

The scrum attitude is that things take as long as they take, so the best thing to do is embrace that reality and instead of setting deliverable-based goals, instead focus on prioritizing everyone’s time effectively so the most important and value-added items are being worked on first.

It’s a very simple but monumental shift in thought.  Things take as long as they take.  Focus on what matters.

Here’s a video of Jeremia & Christine talking about implementing scrum in the UA department.  In the next blog, I’ll discuss some of the difficulties we’ve had implementing scrum in a non-development environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sue and I took a tour of the Tesla Model S factory in Fremont, CA today.  This is the old NUMMI plant.  If you haven’t heard the NUMMI story between GM & Toyota, and you’re a car buff, there’s a This American Life episode about it that’s just mind blowing.  The net of it is that GM tried to learn Just In Time assembly practices from Toyota, they built a factory together for Toyota to transfer this know-how to GM, and GM completely blew it.  The factory shut down and was sitting idle after that fiasco.

When Elon Musk was looking for a place to build his new Model S sedan, he approached Toyota with a $50MM bid for it, which Toyota accepted.  Why would Toyota sell a car production plant arguably worth $1 billion or more for $50MM?  For the answer to that, you really have to understand the relationship between Musk and Toyota, which is well portrayed in this 2010 WIRED magazine article.

As a reservation holder for the Model S, I’m proud to support one of the most amazing entrepreneurs of our generation.  What makes Elon even more amazing is that he’s not only revolutionizing the automobile industry, but the space industry as well, with SpaceX… at the same time.  Elon, my hat is off to you.

Below are a number of pictures and vidoes, and then a gallery with even more photos of the factory and the event, which was very well done.

Here are some videos:

And here’s the gallery:

I often get questions about how I take my killer panos.  Here’s my secret:

1. I take the pano on my iPhone with an app named, appropriately, Pano.  Although there are other pano apps out there, this is my favorite by far.
2. Then, I import it into Camera+.  I apply the clarity exposure filter, then the diana overlay filter and use the cross-process border.

A few years ago I saw some amazing videos of ‘Where the hell is Matt,’ who danced all over the world.

Today I stumbled across another mind numbing performer and internet sensation, Marquese Scott.

They both do amazing things with dance, in two completely different ways.  So I put the question to you for the comments:  Who’s more amazing, and why?

Marquese:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matt, 2006:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matt, 2008:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today I learned about the Startup Genome Report from the Startup Genome, as well as the Startup Genome Compass.

This amazing project by Max Marmer, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Ron Berman and Ertan Dogrultan compares over 3,200 startups to find parallels between them that are predictors for success or failure.

the Startup Genome Compass is a ~30 minute form you can fill out to find how your startup compares to others.

Here are a few excerpts from the report — I highly recommend you download the report and answer the questions in the compass to see how your startup compares to others.

The 5 Core Dimensions

The startup killer: premature scaling

There were 15 key findings. Here are the first two. (Download the 52 page report to see them all; it's free!)

There’s some amazing learning for all of us in here.  Congrats on a job well done, guys, and thank you for this amazing project.

It’s hard to over hype the significance of the interest graph, once you really understand its magnitude.  On the flipside, it can be confusing to hear people talk about the interest graph without knowing what all the fuss is about.  (As background to this blog post, you can learn about the origins of the interest graph in this slideshare document and this Quora Q&A post).

I’m going to lay out an argument for the interest graph and its significance on the very fabric of our lives.  And make no mistake — I am indeed saying that the interest graph is a really, really big deal — one that sits right beside other life-changing inventions and discoveries such as fire, language, the printing press, human powered flight, antibiotics,  cellphones, and of course, microwaves.

Let’s start by really defining what I mean by ‘interests’ and how they apply here.

Some people's interests drive them to do pretty crazy things.

Interests aren’t something we really think about, they just are.  We naturally have interests in various things.  Our interests define us as individuals.  Some people are interested in making lots of money, some are interested in changing the world, some are interested in Cabernet wines, some are interested in collecting stamps.  Interests span from the very broad to the very niche.  The language you speak, the nationality you are, the age and gender you are all play a role in defining you and influencing your interests.  A woman who speaks Korean will — just by the fact that she speaks that language instead of English — be much more likely to have a certain set of interests that’s different from a woman who speaks English.  And by the same token, since both are women, they will also likely share a set of interests that are different than a woman may have as compared to a man.

As you can see, the interests we all have form a fabric through which we lead our lives.  They interconnect as individuals, and with each other.  People who love photography are more likely to spend hours researching various cameras, shooting techniques and locations than those who don’t.  We apply our most precious asset– time– on what has captured each of our interests.  Many times, we also spend money in those areas as well.

Mapping leads to understanding -- for example, mapping the human genome

So by ‘interest graph’ what I and others mean is that this web of interests between a person and the world around him or her, as well as between two or more people, forms a ‘graph,’ or a series of connections that could theoretically be mapped.  And if it can be mapped, it can be understood, and leveraged to do really, really powerful things.  Mapping and understanding the interest graph of humans and the world they live in is one of the most exciting things I can imagine.  It would allow us to better understand ourselves, where we choose to spend our time, the ways we interact with the world around us, and the ways we interact with each other.

Now, here’s the funny thing about mapping the interest graph:  We all intuitively know pieces of it, because we live it each day.  We lead our lives by interacting with the world through our interests.  We choose to spend time (and money) on things that interest us.  We know what interests us — we don’t need anyone to map it to explain it to us.  We know what connections we share with others around us — in fact, we often call people with whom we share one or more interests “friends” because we’ve chosen to invest a lot of time with them and we have a strong connection with them.  (It’s outside the scope of this blog post, but a related thought I believe to be true is that friendships are always based on at least one shared interest.  See my other blog post on friend vs. interest connections)

Because our bodies have senses that can detect the interest graph — hearing, sight, etc. — many of us have never realized that we walk through the world only perceiving portions of the interest graph.  It’s like the days before having the Internet, or before having cellphones — we didn’t exactly understand what we were missing, because we’d never experienced the “after” moment before.  That’s where we are today with the interest graph.  Since we can get along pretty well as analog human beings, seeing & hearing our way through the world around us, we don’t perceive the vastness of the interest graph that connects us.  Or to put it another way, we don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t miss it.

Oh but there’s so much more.

The reality of our world is that we’re all interconnected in really deep, meaningful ways by the interests we share.  Since we only have our analog senses, we have to work hard (and dedicate a lot of time) to uncover those shared interests.  For example, if you love sailing, you have to join a sailing club to meet others that share your interest.  The Internet has made that process much more efficient — you can now join a group online that shares some of the passions you do.  And social media has made that connection even more available — you can follow those who tweet about sailing topics, or become their friends on Facebook.

But there’s still a huge piece missing:  the connection of the digital world to the analog world.

And that’s where mobile devices come in.  The explosion of smartphones has enabled us to carry a digital “doorway” with us to this online world.  We can email, call, tweet, browse the web, and use apps, all actions which connect us to others who share interests with us.

But replicating what we can do on the desktop with a mobile device is just the beginning.  Imagine some of these scenarios:

• You walk into a room full of 50 strangers and you instantly know what interests you share with each person.  You went to high school with the son of one person.  Both you and another person love sailing, and you have both rented catamarans in the US Virgin Islands (imagine what stories you’d both have to share!).  The person over in the corner has a family member afflicted with the same illness as your family member.   Since you know what interests you share with each person in the room, you can instantly connect with people you share strong interests with, have deep, meaningful conversations with them, and form a friendship with them should you choose to.
• You’re at a baseball game.  You know you share the same interest in baseball as everyone in the stadium, but you’re rooting for the away team, and most people in the stadium are rooting for the home team.  If only you could connect with others who were fans of the same team as you are, so you could talk smack about the pitcher of the home team who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing.
• You believe that eating organic, unprocessed foods along with a calorie-restricted diet is the key to living a long, healthy life.  You’d like to connect with other people who think the same thing you do when you’re at the supermarket, so you can trade tips about what works and what doesn’t, and you’d like to maintain those interest-based relationships over time.

Here’s a real example our InterestGravity API output – click to enlarge

It’s because of my and my co-founder’s passion in the interest graph that we’ve created Socialize.  The first big task for us and our amazing group of employees is to map the interest graph — to ferret out as many of the connections that bind us together as possible.  This isn’t a new problem — people have been trying to identify connections between people and interests since the beginning of time.  The problem is that since people are analog, it’s very difficult to track interests and their connections.  It’s impossible to record every conversation, to know where someone goes all the time and what they’re doing when they get there.

Click to Watch

But we realized something:  People use smartphones, and since a person’s phone is such an intimate device, they typically have it with them all the time.  And furthermore, we’re making a bet that apps on the smartphone approximate a person’s interests.  Or to put it another way, if I love sailing, I might have the sailing app.  And if I love baseball, I might have the San Francisco Giants app.  When taken together, as an aggregate, all of these apps comprise a genome of sorts — something we call the Socialize Genome.  Each app almost acts as a DNA marker for my interests.  When you look at all the apps I have on my phone, they define me and my interests — I can guarantee you that the apps I have installed on my phone are different than the apps you have installed on your phone.

Obviously, while apps may approximate a person’s interests, they’re a poor proxy of interest because oftentimes, people will download an app but then never use the app, or only use it for a short period of time.  How many apps do you have on your phone that you never use?

Apps Represent an InterestGenome - Click to Enlarge

But actually, we think these two problems are related, and we’ve figured out a way to solve them both.  We’ve created an SDK for Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad) devices that is dropped into an app on the phone.  This bundle of code, called the Socialize SDK, creates a mini social platform within each app, unleashing the app’s community so they can socialize with each other.  App developers love having access to these drop-in social features like commenting, sharing, liking and content popularity because it means they don’t have to create all this functionality in the app themselves, and exposing the app’s install base to each other means people use the app more, because they can now socialize with each other, in addition to just interacting with the app itself.

Socialize Increases App Sessions by More Than 20 Percent

So suddenly, with Socialize running in, say, the sailing app, the app’s users can share tips with each other about sailing.  We’ve found that putting Socialize into an app will raise its engagement level by an average of 21.8%.  That also means the developer can make almost 22% more revenue from his app, if she’s monetizing it with ads or in-app purchasing.

But in the larger picture, we also believe that by increasing engagement within apps, and knowing what users are doing in those apps, we can map the interest graph across billions of downloads of hundreds of thousands of apps, installed by hundreds of millions of users.

And if we can pull this off, Socialize will be able to do some very magical things.  Imagine, for example, being able to ‘bump’ your phone with a random stranger and knowing what the top 5 interests you both shared.  Imagine knowing which ten people you should really connect with at a cocktail party based on interests you both share.  Imagine a brand you trust — say BMW — being able to offer you an exclusive test drive of a new vehicle you’re interested in.

By merging the interest graph with mobile devices and a technology like Socialize, we start to begin to unlock some of the incredible value hiding in the interest graph, while providing immediate value to app developers by increasing engagement within their apps.

I was recently invited to a Napa retreat along with others in the mobile app space by Trevor Cornwell & crew from AppBackr.  It was a great, intimate event with about 35 people total.

The panel I was on was: What challenges do developers face?  How do apps get to market effectively?  How does a developer get noticed and build sales?  What strategies work?  What do developers really need?  The core question is:  What is the future of funding and distribution for developers?

Moderator: Jolie O’ Dell – Writer, VentureBeat
Daniel Odio – CEO, Socialize
Jeffrey Dickson – Producer, Paramount
Tim Burks – Radtastical, Inc.

A video of that panel is below, along with other panels from the event.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vishal from Mobclix gave a rundown of the mobile app economy in his “By The Numbers” keynote:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jay Jamison of BlueRun Ventures and Frank Pisciuneri of Silicon Valley Bank opined on where app investment is headed in this panel moderated by Alastair Goldfisher, Thomson Reuters, editor of Venture Capital Journal and blogger of peHUB.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

And there was a great panel on “The Distribution and Marketing of Android Apps” moderated by Caroline Lewko – CEO & Founder, Wireless Industry Partnership Connector Inc., with the following panelists:

Charles Yim – Americas Mobile Application Partnerships, Google
Claudia Romanini Backus – Director, Developer Relations, Barnes & Noble
Sheffield Nolan – CEO & Cofounder, AppRedeem
Steve Manning – VP Consumer Monetization Services, Opera

Click here to view the embedded video.

My wife and I have been making an effort to eat unprocessed foods as a part of a healthier lifestyle.  Simply told, that means if there’s a label on the food (or if it’s in a box), we try not to eat it.  I’ll write a more comprehensive blog soon about the thinking behind this approach.

Part of this initiative is to buy organic fruits and vegetables (Rainbow grocery in San Francisco is just amazing) and consume them over other foods as often as possible.  We try to  juice every morning and most evenings, replacing evening meals with juice as often as scheduling permits.

We’ve gone through three juicers looking for the exact right one, and finally we’ve found it.  Here’s a review of the ones we tried, so you don’t have to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Jack Lalanne high-speed juicer: This was our first juicer.  (The link at left is for Amazon, although you can also purchase it at Costco for $89).  It actually worked quite well.  It has a large opening and consumed all types of fruits and vegetables we could throw at it.  Cleanup was simple enough, although there were a number of large parts to be cleaned.  But there were two things about this juicer that made it a non-starter for us:

Organic produce isn't cheap!

1) We’re buying organic produce, which is way more expensive than non-organic.  And this juicer didn’t extract all of the juice from the items it was juicing, leaving very wet pulp.  This meant that although the juicer itself was cheaper, we weren’t getting as efficient a juice from it.

2) The larger issue, however, is that there’s a lot of literature about the advantages of low-speed (80 RPM vs. 3600 RPM) juicers, called “masticating” juicers.

While the high speed juicers (like the Jack Lalanne) use centrifugal force to extract the juice from a spinning filter, the low speed masticating juicers “chew” the juice out of the food.  You can find plenty of claims on the web about how low speed juicers “preserve enzymes” in the food and “don’t cause oxidation” and “preserve nutrition” in the juice.   The instruction manual for one of the Omega juicers below even went so far as to say that juice from low speed juicers doesn’t lose any of its goodness for up to 72 hours, while juice from high speed juicers has to be consumed within 20 minutes.  I don’t know that I specifically buy any of those claims, but I will say that reason #1 was enough for me — I want to extract as much juice out of the fruits and vegetables as possible from this pricey organic produce.  So, although the Jack Lalanne juicer has a lot of great qualities to it, we were off in the hunt for a low-speed juicer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Vert Hd Vrt350 Masticating Juicer:  We really thought this juicer was going to be it.  The Amazon reviews on it are stellar and a lot of people seemed very happy with it.  We had done a lot of research on masticating juicers, and this model really seemed to be a step up from the older Omega masticating juicer (below), which is a different design.  But we were quickly disappointed, for two reasons:

1) Fibrous vegetables (think: leafy greens) that are stringy get completely clogged up in the juicer because of its design, so you end up having to chop these items up into chunks that aren’t more than 2 or 3 inches long to keep it from clogging.

2) An even bigger problem is that this juicer choked on carrots.  How can a juicer choke on carrots?!  Especially when there’s a carrot in the stock photo?!  It wouldn’t happen every time, but it happened often enough that it proved very annoying.  A carrot would cause the juicer to grind to a halt, then we’d have to reverse the juicer, pull the carrot out, chop it up more finely, and repeat the process.  Clean-up was also not as easy as I’d hoped — while maybe not worse than the Jack Lalanne, definitely not any better.  So, back to Amazon it went.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Omega J8006 Masticating Juicer: This is our current juicer, and the one I would recommend.  Don’t get me wrong — there are trade offs.  While it definitely produces the driest pulp by far, and while it may be the fastest & simplest in post-juicing clean-up time, it’s by far the slowest in terms of the actual juicing time itself.  Additionally, it has an amazingly small chute, meaning everything has to be chopped up.  If the Vert 350 above had a smaller chute would it also have escaped the carrot problem?  Quite possibly.  But the J8006 is a solid beast of a machine.  While the Vert felt like it was just barely able to handle the food we’d throw at it, the J8006 has no such problems, chewing up everything we’ve given it with ease.  It’s a confidence-inspiring juicer.

The solidness of the machine plus the dry pulp has meant we’ve kept it and are pretty happy with it.  If a juicer came along that could match its qualities but have a larger food chute, I’d definitely appreciate not having to cut everything up (example: the Jack Lalanne could handle an entire small apple through its chute, or if a big apple, cut in half.  With the Omega, we have to cut the apple into 8ths).   However, the fast and much simpler cleanup time and process helps offset the longer and more tedious juicing experience.  And for what it’s worth, the juicer makes a really satisfying ”crunch” as it chews through food.  I know, kinda meaningless but fun just the same.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Good luck in your juicing quest, and I’d love to know what you think, and what experiences you’ve had in the comments below.

Jonathanscard

Jonathanscard — a geeky 2.0 take on the “give a penny, leave a penny” concept — has been all over the news recently (if you haven’t heard the backstory, this is a good place to start). I’m surprised at all the harsh words over my brother Sam’s hacking of the social experiment.

For example, one HackerNews commentator wrote, “Did Sam Odio’s blog get hacked? Because I refuse to believe that the Sam whose comments I’ve been reading on HN would steal from someone. Sam how is what you’re doing different from what Anonymous et al are doing? However irritating Jonathan’s experiment is, it doesn’t give you the right to impose you idea of morality on them” and plenty of other comments.

And It’s funny to see those comments on a site titled “HackerNews.”

HackerNews Comments

The $625 amount Sam transferred off of Jonathanscard onto another Starbucks card was the exact amount my startup, Socialize donated to the card to promote its SDK Speed Challenge competition.  That was not an accident.

Sam took a social experiment and ran a social experiment on it.  The money that he transferred was funded by Socialize, and Sam’s donating the funds to a good cause.  The card has already been bid on eBay past its face value, garnering even more funds for Save the Children  (which is an awesome hat trick.)

Jonathanscard was a social experiment, so isn’t what happened exactly the point?

8/14 UPDATE: Read Sam’s update about the experiment and his Q&A about the reaction he’s been getting

Shane swears this photo wasn't staged! Click to enlarge.

I recently met Shane, the CEO of Joyride.com.  Six weeks ago, he found my blog about our SOMAcentral office and inquired about space there.  That inquiry kicked off a camaraderie that led me to ask him today if he’d let me follow his progress as he worked to launch his business.  He agreed, so here’s the setup:

I am surrounded by San Francisco based startups every day.  And one of the things I forget about is how different SF’s “lean startup” mantra is from other parts of the country.  New York may be like this as well, but I’m not sure other urban centers are (if you disagree, I’d like to hear about it in the comments).  Among the big proponents of the lean startup philosophy are Dave McClure (check out his Startup Metrics for Pirates deck / video and presentation at FounderConference 2010– 3rd video from top) and Paul Graham via his essays, among others.

Shane has been working hard to launch Joyride.  When he came to SF to visit, we had a very animated discussion about how he could pare his concept down to the “MVP” to launch sooner, and then iterate quickly on his core feature set.  What functionality did he really need to launch?  How could he launch with less?  What was the absolute core product?  You can imagine what side I was on — point #2 of the Socialize Core Values Manifesto guarantees that we launch early and then iterate quickly.

There’s a strong argument to the contrary, though.  In April of last year I wrote a post titled “Could the 80/20 principle be wrong?” where I speculated on the importance of focusing on a few things but doing them very well.  But exactly where does the line between “MVP” and “very well” lie?  How do you know when you’ve reached your MVP?  It’s a hard question to answer, but in my experience everyone always overshoots it by a mile.  A great example of a business that didn’t overshoot it is CloudApp.  It has a very limited feature set but executes on it super well.  I just checked, and I’ve used CloudApp 48 times today.  Just unbelievable that I use it so much — and I don’t know how I survived before I had it (I had to email the screenshot as an attachment? gasp!).  And everyone in our office uses CloudApp all the time as well.  Just one sorely needed feature — the ability to communicate a picture I see to someone else (via a screenshot), executed flawlessly.

So when Shane emailed me today, I was thrilled.  He wrote:

From: Shane

Subject: JOYRIDE Shifting Into HiGear and Doing It "Lean"

Daniel,

I want you to know that you've been part of the inspiration for a rework of

JOYRIDE. Leaner. Smaller product. But launching in 90 days. And our offices

have been reworked since my first trip to San Fran. Our landlord knocked

down two offices to make a large co-working space (pic attached). Prior

to this we were split into 5 offices.

Thanks bro. Keep in touch.

Shane

PS Shane — I think it’s especially cool that you knocked the walls down.  I’d love to hear how you feel about that decision after a few weeks — was it the best thing to happen to your office, the worst thing, or no big change?  Of course I’m hoping it leads to more collaboration, but let me know if that’s not the case.  I’ve found that Ikea sells some great, inexpensive partitions, which you can find here, if you need to restore some semblance of privacy, especially for people who need to be on the phone a lot.

I’ll be following Shane’s progress on Joyride as he launches, encouraging him to guest post on my blog if he wants to, and I’ll be posting my own updates.  I’d also love to hear about your experiences paring your product down so you can launch sooner, and if you’re happy you took that approach.  I’d especially like to know if you feel that you launched too early, before your product was ready.

This is all fresh in my mind as well, as we just launched the Socialize SDK for iOS and Android (see TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb coverage) and we’ve been iterating like crazy to get the SDK to a point where developers are excited to integrate it (the good news — just got our first live app, an Android app, running Socialize!)

Want to see a bit more eye candy?  Check out the JOYRIDE offices and many of their sweet rides they use for marketing and shooting drives around the world:  Click here for a full photo gallery.

If you’re fundraising, or thinking about it, there are a lot of places to turn.  This blog post is a great place to begin for advice on an angel or Series A raise.

While many entrepreneurs are ‘too busy to blog,’ others take the time to share the knowledge they’ve amassed.  I’ve created a “bundle” of the top RSS feeds of entrepreneurs who blog, as well as a “bundle” of the top RSS feeds for angels and VCs who blog.  Subscribe to them both.  Included are blogs from the likes of Chris Dixon, Brad Feld, VentureHacks (Nivi & Naval), Dave McClure, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and others — basically all rock stars for geeks.

I’ve also written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.   Also useful might be the Founder Conference 2010 and Founder Conference 2011 videos I captured.

I’d also encourage you to ask me for the free VentureHacks bible material.   More on that here.

Click to read my review on Amazon

But lastly, there’s a great new book by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.  It’s a must read if you’re thinking about fundraising or currently fundraising.  You can see my full review of the book on the Amazon page.  I generally encourage you to get all the free material you can (and even strike deals with folks like VentureHacks to bring you their normally not-free material for free) but in this case, the book’s cost is minimal and will pay for itself many times over.  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  It’ll make your fundraising process more successful, and it’ll make you fluent in the language that VCs speak, giving you access to more deals and faster results.  Like Bob Nelson, a great advisor of ours once said, “You’re only as good as your second-best term sheet.”  This book will help you get into that position.

Anyone who knows me knows I really stress being able to play a computer like an instrument (and if you think you can, then prove it).  Us geeky types are in front of our computers for 12+ (often 16+) hours per day, so every loss of efficiency translates into a huge cost in time — and time is the most precious asset of any hardcore entrepreneur.

One thing I’ve done is to really customize my Google Apps email pane, with functionality from Rapportive (THANK YOU for the Highrise raplet, guys!), Boomerang, TwitterGadget, Gmail Auto BCC, Labs custom keyboard shortcuts, Send & Archive, etc.  I’ve also found some great Chrome extensions, including 1Password, Bit.ly, Awesome Screenshot, and by far my favorite — a Basecamp text auto save extension that saves what I’ve written in Basecamp when the page is closed.

You might also like my blogs on playing a computer like an instrument, cloud app + vanity URL, and switching to Gmail from Mail.app.

Here’s what my email pane looks like, with a detailed video below that walking you through how I use everything.

My favorite feature?  The awesome picture of my wife, of course!  If I’m going to be looking at email for hours each day, I might as well make it enjoyable!  I just replaced the standard Gmail logo with a custom image.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now That's what I'm talkin' about!

Taking a break from tech for a blog post about coffee (but if you’re in San Francisco, you seriously have to check out StartupHouse).

Specifically, I’m exploring how to make great coffee.

The thing about making great coffee is that it means something different to everyone.  Here’s what it means to me:  The coffee is dark and flavorful.  It doesn’t taste like it’s watered down.  It has a great aroma and makes me smile when I drink it.  I guess this blog is really about how to maximize the ‘smile’ factor.

Luwak coffee goes in raw, comes out... flavored

I’m no coffee pro or snob.  Just a guy who wants better-than-average coffee.  My colleague Jeremia, who knows a heck of a lot more about coffee than I do, just informed me the other day that the lighter blends actually have more caffeine than darker blends, because the caffeine is roasted out of coffee the longer it roasts.  Now there’s a guy who knows his coffee.  To thank him for that pearl of knowledge, I just bought him some raw Luwak coffee, straight from Indonesia.  We’ll see what he does with that bad boy.

Today I tested three burr coffee grinders to figure out which one was best: the Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder , Bodum Bistro Electric Burr Coffee Grinder, and Mr. Coffee BVMC-BMH23 Automatic Burr Mill Grinder .  Previously we had been using the Capresso 464.05 CoffeeTeam GS 10-Cup Digital Coffeemaker with Conical Burr Grinder but the coffee just wasn’t coming out with enough flavor.

The Bodum was the winner

So here’s the new plan: Test these 3 burr grinders, pick the one that grinds the best coffee, and then use a Zojirushi Premium Thermal 1.85 liter Carafe, Brushed Stainless Steel carafe along with a No. 6 filter size plastic filter cone (which fits perfectly inside that model carafe) and boil water on the stove to run through it.  (My guess is that the CoffeeTeam GS didn’t make “high smile factor coffee” because it didn’t ge the water hot enough.  Just speculation on my part though, all I can say is that it wasn’t as good).

Coffee cone + Carafe

This new plan is actually going back to the old plan — my wife and I were boiling water and running it through the filter cone + carafe before with great “smile factor” results, but the burr grinder we had been using, the Black & Decker CBM210 Stainless Steel Burr Coffee Mill/Grinder , was a pain because we had to hold the button down while it was grinding.  It also made inconsistent sized grounds. So after trying the CoffeeTeam GS because I thought it’d be easier (wake up timer!) I’m back to the manual original burr grinder + boiling water + filter cone + carafe approach.  This time, hopefully, with a better burr grinder.

The winner for me was the Bodum Bistro Electric Burr Coffee Grinder because of its hardened steel burr grinding mechanism, ability to easily turn it on & off, and glass holder receptacle.  The  Capresso 560 Infinity Conical Burr Grinder was quieter, but annoyingly, the timer can’t be stopped — you have to wait for it to time out.  The Mr. Coffee BVMC-BMH23 Automatic Burr Mill Grinder was a total fail because of its inferior burr grinder design.

The final coffee setup

Please leave your own opinions and comments below!  Especially if you have tips on how to make higher smile factor coffee.  Oh and by the way, I put agave sweetener in my coffee instead of sugar (available at Costco).  Lower glycemic index = happier body.

Here’s a video where I put the three grinders through the test:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some great pictures of the Socialize crew!

Dan, Alessandro and Champ outside the Socialize offices in downtown San Franicsco, CA

Trey, Harp, Champ, Alessandro and Daniel at the Giants game, courtesy of SVB

Fawad, Alessandro, Dan and Hunter in San Francisco, CA

Alessandro, Trey, Hunter and other Socialize employees (backs turned) at the Rib Whip BBQ Truck

Sean, Trey, Daniel, Hunter, Alessandro, Sue, Isaac, Champ, Dan, Christine and Fawad at the Rib Whip

Click to enlarge: Massive open space on the first floor is great for events. It'll be a shared co-working space.

I just got a preview of a hot new coworking space that’s brand new (literally weeks old) in downtown San Francisco.  The address is 880 Harrison street.  Here’s a video I just did of the space.

If you’re interested in leasing space here for your startup (or would like to do an event in this space or inquire about the Hacker Hostel), please leave a comment below and I’ll introduce you to the people running it.

The space is going to be called “Startup House.” It’s three levels, with offices on the 2nd and 3rd floors.  The lower level is a HUGE open space, where they’re going to put co-working desks (and the rumor is, maybe some exotic cars sprinkled around — you know, for character).

There’s also a separate part behind the main building where the owners are considering putting a “Hacker Hostel” for out of town developers (or just those who need a place to crash).  The embassy of New Zealand is going to be putting a launch pad space in the building.  Thanks to Elias (the guy behind StartupBus) for showing me around the space

Here are some pics.  More pics below the video.

Click to enlarge: 3rd floor office/communal space

Click to enlarge: Absolutely *massive* roof deck

The outside of the building from Harrison St.

And here’s a six minute video I just took of the space:

Click To Enlarge

I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t know all that much about the state of mobile advertising today, which is the first thing I said on the panel I was just on at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference.  I have a perspective as a developer of apps from my past life running a mobile consulting business (which we’ve since sold), and as a publisher of over 7,000 apps through our AppMakr platform, which integrates AdMob, Millennial Media, Medialets and custom ad units.

I have, however, been getting deep into the world of DSPs, SSPs and RTB (here’s a great article about how those crazy acronyms work), and with Socialize, we’re building a next-generation Interest Graph out of thousands of mobile apps.  This will provide deep user data for advertisers, which is why I participated on this panel, along with:

• Jim Payne, CEO of Mopub
• David Williams, VP of Mobile Product Management at AT&T Interactive
• Zephrin Lasker, CEO of Pontiflex
• Jon Phenix, VP of Publisher Services at Nexage
• Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder of Mobclix

Devindra Hardawar, the lead MobileBeat Writer for VentureBeat led the discussion focusing on the past, present, and future waves of mobile advertising, as well as an overview of where mobile advertising is headed.

Here’s a video of the panel (sorry audio is so low — crank it up!):

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s no question about it, Facebook is cleaning up with its Social Graph.  Representing your real-life friendships in a digital manner, and helping you find new friends by trusting those you know makes a lot of sense.

But something interesting has happened along the way:  Facebook has blinded many of us to a plain truth:  The Social Graph is just one component of the Interest Graph. Or to put it another way, Facebook has created a $70+ Billion company by connecting us through friendships.  But incredibly, there’s a much larger opportunity lurking under the surface — the Interest Graph.

Let me tell you about what the Interest Graph is, why this is true, and how many people have missed it.

First, let’s talk about interests.  Each of us as human beings can be defined as a collection of our interests.  Let’s just peg the number at 3,000 interests.  Let’s say that each of us has around 3,000 interests.  Those interests may include our gender, race, nationality, place of employment, language, favorite wine, favorite city, favorite designer brand, and the list goes on.  For example, everyone who works at the same company shares an interest. Never will everyone who works together be friends. Friendship is just a proxy representing some number of shared interests (enough to want to be “friends”) in this long list of interests that binds us together.  Some of these interests may be very temporal:  For example, this week, I might love a certain type of music or band.  Next week, I might have moved on to a different interest.  Some interests may only last minutes, or even seconds:  When the sun hits my eyes, I have an interest in sunglasses.

And at any moment in time, there are probably many thousands of people around the world who are interested in sunglasses at the same time.  Human interests ebb and flow together:  When there’s a moment of national unity, like after a natural disaster, the interests of many of us align more greatly than would otherwise be the case.

And the funny thing is, we’re all intimately familiar with the Interest Graph.  If you’ve ever been to a stadium, rooting for a team, the Interest Graph is obvious to you:  Not everyone in that stadium is a friend, but many share a deep passion for the same team for a few hours.  Then everyone leaves the stadium and goes on with their lives.

And therein lies the problem:  Whether we’re talking about long-term interests, like nationality, race or gender, or short-term temporal interests, like wanting sunglasses or rooting for a team, although we all intuitively know and understand the Interest Graph, we’ve never been able to efficiently quantify, measure and leverage the Interest Graph.

Facebook has done the best job, because friendship is a type of proxy for the Interest Graph:  When you friend someone on Facebook, you’re basically saying “this person shares enough interests with me that I’m willing to consider them a friend.”

We interact on a regular basis with people who aren’t our friends, though, and for anyone who’s really a power user on Facebook, you know the awkward feeling when someone ‘friends’ you who isn’t really your friend.  You only have two options:  Accept their not-so-real friendship, or ignore them completely.

Google+ has taken a more segmented approach to the friend problem with Circles.  You can define different levels of friendship around interest-based groups by creating various circles.  But still, this is like threading a needle using thick gloves:  All of these approaches are clumsy, because they require the user to take action to define their interest-based groups.  And most of us are not likely to spend copious amounts of time defining circles for all of our interests, and obviously there’s no way that 100,000 people at a stadium are ever going to create a circle with each other for a 3 hour game.

The net result has actually been a very lonely experience.  For example, if you were on a mountain biking website or in a mountain biking mobile app, you’d share an interest with everyone else who’s also on the site or has downloaded the app, but today there’s no way to talk to those people.  It’s like you’re all in a big room together, but the lights are off.  Although there may be 1,000 people on the same website as you at the same time you are, or there may be 1,000,000 people who have downloaded the same app as you have, you don’t know who any of them are, and you’re not interacting with any of them.  And to be clear, these aren’t your friends on Facebook, these are just people that share one specific interest with you — mountain biking.

And even more significantly, brands that are trying to ‘connect’ with users using tools like Facebook Connect are missing a huge, key point:  While they are getting all of their users to connect with their ‘friends,’ the brand is missing out on the opportunity to connect all their users with each other, i.e., the people who all actually share an interest in the brand.

When you zoom out and look at this problem from a macro perspective, you end up with a graphic like the one at the right.  Everyone is connecting with their social graph, while there is no way to connect users with a shared passion together.

And it’s incredible that 1) this is happening, and 2) this is not obvious to brands.  Once I show brands how they are missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with everyone who shares an interest in their brand, regardless of ‘friendship,’ a light bulb typically goes off.  An easy way to illustrate this is by using mobile apps as an example:  ”If a million people download your mobile app, they will never all be friends on Facebook.  But they all care about your brand, because they downloaded the app.  How do they talk to each other today?”  (Typical answer:  they can’t.)

Focusing more deeply on mobile apps for a second, this also makes empirical sense to most people: How many apps have you downloaded to your smartphone, used once, and never used again?   And no wonder — it’s a very lonely experience right now.  When you open an app, you can interact with the content of the brand, but you can’t really interact with the other million people who also are interested in the brand.  So if the app’s content doesn’t grab your attention every time you open the app, you don’t have a reason to stay in the app.

But humans are social creatures!  We enjoy engaging with others who share an interest with us.  We enjoy being around people that share a language, or a culture, or an interest in the same types of wine.  We like to hear tips about the best mountain biking trails, or learn a new skill.  Humans use shared interests to connect.  Downloading an app where you can’t do that is like walking through life without ever talking to anyone.  It’s simply not natural.

My co-founders and I started Socialize to solve just this problem.  How do we quantify, measure and leverage the Interest Graph in a way that will allow brands to connect with users who share an interest, sometimes a very temporal one, but aren’t necessarily friends?

We’ve created a social, cloud-based API service that connects users with shared interests.  Unless you’re super geeky, that probably won’t make a lot of sense to you — but the effect will be obvious:  When you’re in a mobile app, you should be able to share your opinions about the content of that app with everyone else who has also downloaded the app.  We make that happen through a set of social features, including comments, sharing and likes.  We allow a user to make a comment on a story in an app, and every other user who has that app can read and respond to that comment, regardless of their Facebook status.

The beauty of this approach, starting with mobile apps, is that mobile is very intimate.  People pretty much always carry their phones with them, and they download apps that represent their interests.  Think of the apps you have on your phone as a digital representation of who you are as an individual (we call this your ‘Socialize Genome.’)

Furthermore, we can leverage best-in-class social networks like Facebook and Twitter, by allowing a user to authenticate with those systems.  So if you’re in a mountain biking app, for example, and you make a comment, not only can we let everyone else who has the app see that comment, but we can use Facebook to export that comment out to your circle of friends — your social graph — many of whom probably don’t have the app.  In this way, Facebook fulfills more of a marketing role, while Socialize is the glue that binds users together and increases engagement within the app by connecting the existing community.

In this way, via our social API service and the iOS and Android SDKs we’re creating, Socialize is creating an Interest Graph across thousands of mobile apps.  Unleashing a community of users within one specific app is great for that app’s developer and that group of users.  But even better, the net effect at a macro level is that Socialize is creating a brand new type of interest-based network across thousands of apps.  And we can start to do some really amazing things with that network.

One simple example is what we call Interest Gravity.  While as an analog human being, I might not know what interests I share with someone I’m riding in the subway with, or I’m walking past, if I have Socialize running in enough apps on my phone, Socialize can form a pretty complete profile of my interests as a user.  And if Socialize is doing that on enough phones, we can use that network to calculate the number of shared interests between two phones (well really, between the two people carrying those phones).  That’s the Interest Gravity between those two people.  If they have many identical or similar apps, we know they have a number of shared passions.  We’ve created algorithms to go pretty far down the rabbit hole based on this concept.

At this point a light bulb may be going off in your head, and you may be thinking, ‘can Socialize know too much about me?!’  And you’re right — like SpiderMan says, “with great power, comes great responsibility.”  One of the main tenants of this Interest Graph approach is that we build it in a very responsible way, keeping the user in control.

If you’d like to learn more about Socialize, or the Interest Graph in general, I’d suggest you read the braindump on Socialize.  We’re also hiring, and offering a $10,000 referral fee for senior hires.  Socialize is based in San Francisco, CA.  If you really want to dig in, watch my 45 minute screencast on why I believe that mobile is way bigger than most people realize.

And I invite you to post your comments below — whether you agree or disagree with anything I’ve written here.  Specifically, I’d like to know if you believe that quantifying the Interest Graph is as big a deal as I do.inter

Click to Visit Jess3 Blog

Thanks to Chris and the JESS3 crew for making me into an ingredient in their Startup Mixology techcocktail infographic (bottom left of the image).

This was in response to the Mixology panel I was on in DC on fundrasing from entrepreneur, angel and VC perspectives.

Enjoy the cocktail!

I’ve written before about our challenges using Basecamp as we grow.   To me, Basecamp is akin to Democracy:  It’s not great, but it’s the best thing out there. (If anyone knows of better project management solutions, please post them as comments on the other thread — Basecamp is getting very long in the tooth and while I’m hoping for a significant overhaul, I’d switch to something else if I could find another solution that addressed our pain points, as 37 Signals hasn’t given any indication that one is coming.)

In response to a comment on that post, I’m posting below the “How To Basecamp” guide we’ve created for our employees.  This guide was created by Christine, our Wordsmithstress at Socialize, so thank you Christine for putting this together.

Note: there are some videos & screenshots in the internal document we use that are private and aren’t in here.  I’ve done my best to replace them with blurred out versions.

About Basecamp:

Basecamp's Opening Screen -- Click to Enlarge

Basecamp is a project management tool created by 37signals that creates an accessible digital trail that email can’t. There’s a bit of a learning curve with Basecamp, but you’ll soon get comfortable with the system the more you use it.

Once you’ve made an account, to access Basecamp, you can login at http://[your_domain_here].basecamphq.com. We recommend that you bookmark your to-do page (and choose the timeframe—this week, today, in the past, etc.—that works the best for you). With that bookmark, you’ll always enter Basecamp through the view that’s most important to you: all the tasks you have to do!

Keep in mind that Basecamp will remember your navigation. What does that mean? Well, if you were previously looking at Christine’s to-do’s for the week, the next time you click on “To-Dos” on the Basecamp navbar, you’ll see Christine’s to-do’s. You can navigate out of this view by changing the parameters in the right hand corner. Keep in mind that Basecamp will also remember your navigation through projects. To switch out of a certain project, you can click on “Switch to a different project” to change project views or head back to the dashboard to shake it clean (y’know, like an Etch A Sketch).

Organization:

Sometimes the terminology can be a bit confusing. Here’s a rundown of Basecamp’s different levels of organization.

• Dashboard: The bird’s-eye view of Basecamp. From here you can see what everyone is working on and access a list of projects you’re privy to (right-hand column). Keep in mind that your activity will show up on the dashboard view, so people will be able to see your comments and such.
• Projects: Sometimes pertaining to a specific department, projects are a high-level view of the big columns that prop up Socialize, Inc. Since these often coincide with the organization of the company itself, they should be created sparingly—think of projects as very broad and large-scale.
• Milestones (now part of the ‘Calendar’ tab): A mid-level view of department goals. These are what we’d call “projects” outside of the Basecamp world. For example, an in-house Socialized app launch would be a milestone.  Every milestone should have a due-date and an owner, even if the due-date is an arbitrary date two years out.
• To-Do Lists (“Buckets”): A lower level view that breaks down what needs to happen in order for us to reach our milestones. If we’re launching the Socialized app, one bucket could be “Generate Buzz.”
• To-Dos (these live inside the To-Do List buckets): The micro view, all the little steps you need to accomplish on a (usually) day-to-day basis. A to-do can only be assigned to one person as a time. Under the bucket “Generate Buzz,” we might task Jeremia with demo-ing our Socialized app at a tech schmoozing event.

To-Do’s 101

Cool Basecamp feature: The ability to create a threaded comment discussion around a to-do. Click to enlarge.

To-do’s are the building blocks of Basecamp’s project management system—these are your day-to-day tasks.

If you would like someone else to take on a task, you must create a to-do for them. The task creator is responsible for making sure the task is created properly. The to-do must fulfill the three following requirements: (1) it is a separate to-do (not a comment in another to-do/task), (2) it has an owner (the person responsible for accomplishing the task), and (3) it has a due date. If you task someone in a comment thread of anothe rto-do, they will not be able to find this task under their to-do list. Create a separate to-do (and even link the original conversation) so that they can easily find the task.

To create a to-do, you must be within the desired project. From the dashboard, find the appropriate parent project. From this page you can either add a to-do to an existing to-do list or create a new list as the to-do’s home.

Sometimes, a task is ongoing and has no real due date. In this case, the task can become a to-do list or it can be labeled as ongoing (e.g. “[O]” as a type of recognizable nomenclature). Try not to use the messages functionality, as for some reason Basecamp implemented messages in a way that doesn’t allow people to be added/removed in later comment threads– very annlying. Ideally, you want to-do’s to be both measurable and actionable. Meaning that it’s hard to measure the success and endpoint of a to-do like ”comment on blogs”—a more quantitative to-do would read “comment on 5 blogs” and be dated for a week away.

It’s possible to hack the system a little bit. Basecamp is great for managing various deadlines and tasks, but sometimes you want a repository for suggestions or ideas. 37signals offers other tools for this purpose (like Campfire), but you can manipulate Basecamp for this purpose as well. Create and designate a to-do list for messages and ideas. As these items become actionable, they can be dragged into a different list to become real to-do’s with owners and dates.

Tl;dr? Here’s the basic gist:
1.    Task creators are responsible for assigning the to-do on Basecamp.
2.    Don’t task someone in a comment.
3.    All to-do’s need a owner and a date.
4.    Don’t use the messages functionality.

Searching

It can be hard to search on Basecamp, and there’s no advanced search option/filters either. This video is an overview of searching (spoiler alert: use shortcut Cmd+F to help you find the keyword in question).We suggest searching through projects (rather than across all of Basecamp) to narrow down your scope. And, you know, you can always admit defeat and just search through your email as well since Basecamp will always email you when you’ve been tasked or included in a comment.

Tips and Tricks

• If you’re using Google Apps, add their Google ShortLink Labs feature so you can make short links (e.g. “go.getsocialize.com/mother” to access The Mother) to frequently used Basecamp buckets, to-dos, etc.
• “Tag” a bucket or to-do with unique keywords to facilitate searching. For example, tag a website-related task with “Charlotte” (get it—Charlotte’s Web?) so that you can search for that keyword rather than the ubiquitous “website.”
• When something is marked “private” in Basecamp it means that it’s private to your company (i.e. ALL of Socialize, Inc. employees). It does NOT mean it is private to only the people active/included in the bucket list.
• Tired of checking off 5 people’s names every time you make a new comment on a task? Create an email distro list for that team and grant Basecamp access to that email address. Keep in mind, though, that tasks should be assigned to individuals and never to a distro list.
• FAQs
• If a milestone has a due date, then does every task also need to have a due date?  Or if a task doesn’t have a due date, but is in a task list that has a related milestone, do we just assume the corresponding task is due when the milestone is due?
• Every task needs a due date. Why? Tasks are the little steps we take to reach a specific milestone. Sometimes, tasks need to be completed in a certain order. Because Basecamp offers several levels of organization, you may see or access the task without seeing the milestone due date. Adding that due date will ensure that you can keep yourself accountable to getting the task done on time.

Do you have other tips on “How To Baescamp?”  Please post them as comments below.  I’m especially interested in any 3rd party services that address some of the main pain points we’ve been having.

Daniel on the cover of WSJ, 2004

I have several amazing service provider resources in my life, including an outsourced HR professional that is stellar, a personal trainer that’s ripped, and a patent attorney that seems to know how to patent or trademark just about anything with value.  I also know the services world intimately well, as I used to run a real estate brokerage as well as a mobile consulting company.   I got a lot of press for those companies, including writeups or quotes in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Washington Biz Journal, CNN, TLC, Newsweek, Discovery, BBC, The Washington Post and others.

That’s why it drives me crazy when service providers say things like “blogging my knowledge-base isn’t consistent with my business model.”  So, being true to writing a blog about something when I’m passionate about it, I’m going to make an argument that as a service provider, providing free and full access to the amazing knowledge you have in your head will actually turn you into a superstar vs. killing your business.  It will actually allow you to make way more money with way less effort.

First, let me acknowledge that it’s a hard argument to accept when your entire livelihood hinges on the knowledge you have in your head.  You’re not selling any product.  You’re just selling your time, and your expertise.  But the reason I’m right is a fundamental truth about human nature:  People love attention.  And they want to be around those that have it.

It goes deeper than that, of course.  But really, that’s what this is about.  Either people are attracted to you for some reason, or they’re not.

The reasons vary — in my blog about applying social media, I talked about the Angelina Jolie effect.  In a similar vein, I just watched the Never Say Never movie about Justin Bieber in which pre-teenage girls go berserk about him (I know he’s only 16 but seriously, it’s a very inspiring movie no matter how old you are — watch it!).

Another reason people might be attracted to you is because of your beautiful mind.  You may have domain-specific knowledge that nobody else in the world has.  Knowledge that you can command a lot of money for.  In fact, as I say in my blog about social media, I argue that the sharing of SME (subject matter expertise) actually forms the foundation of successful social media initiatives.

These concepts form the foundation of my argument:  By sharing what you know, you attract people to you.  People that have the types of problems you can solve.  And because of social media tools like blogging, you can share that knowledge in new ways — ways that literally didn’t exist just 10 years ago — that are very efficient with your time.  And if you’re a service provider, you know how valuable your time is, because it’s your primary monetizing mechanism.

And so that brings me to the part that’s not so obvious:  The natural reaction of service providers is that by giving their extremely valuable SME out for free, they will lose the ability to monetize it.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The reality is actually the exact opposite: By sharing what you know freely, you attract to you the people that have the problems you can solve instead of you having to go out and find them.  And importantly, since everyone’s problems are specific to their situations, while your audience may be able to apply some of what you know to their situation, they won’t be able to apply it completely to their situation.  They will still need you, even if you blog about everything you know.  In fact, the more open you are, the larger the audience that will respond to you.

That truth actually creates a virtuous cycle.  You blog about something only you know or have figured out, and your audience tries applying it.  They may see some benefit from the effort, and yes you lose the ability to monetize on that part.  But almost 100% of the time, they either will a) know that you could solve their problem more completely than they can, b) know that they don’t have time time to apply the solution themselves, or c) try to not use you, apply the knowledge themselves, fail miserably, and then be even more desperate to retain you.

And the beauty is that you’ve created a situation akin to the sirens of Greek mythology: Customers come to you because they feel like they already know you from reading your blogs, and they already know you can help them.  You don’t have to sell them on you and your expertise.

As a service provider, finding new clients is typically very difficult and consumes a large portion of your time — precious time you could spend monetizing.

However, if you’re at the top of your game, it’s even worse, because you have a good pipeline of business from existing customers, which feels good, and you have a strong referral base that keeps new customers coming.  Pretty good life, right?

But here’s the problem:  All those customers know that the more people they refer to you, the less attention you’ll be able to give them, so they refer cautiously.  It’s you service providers that are on the top of your game with a strong pipeline that are missing the most by not blogging, because you’re missing on an opportunity to catapult yourselves into the stratosphere.

Because your pricing mechanisms must be based on the laws of supply and demand for you to have parity (not be overwhelmed vs. not have any clients), it’s only by greatly increasing demand that you can give yourself access to the options that will make you not just rich, but wealthy.

Just look at service-based superstars like Oprah, or motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, or musicians, or movie stars.  Their service-providing talents are so in-demand that they can make products out of them.  Think about that for a second:  Productizing and packaging your expertise.  There are plenty of other examples — writing books, or making audio/DVD programs (think P90X).

Most service providers never get to this point, and many don’t care to.  That’s OK — believe me, when I write this blog I’m fully aware that I’m doing myself a disservice by encouraging any of you whose services I rely on to spend your time publicizing and then productizing your expertise so you can sit on the beach drinking MaiTais instead of spending time with me.

But even if you don’t want to productize your expertise, you have another option (which is still detrimental to me, but here goes):  Just raise your rates.  The more in-demand you are, the less you have to work to maintain the same income.  And who doesn’t want more free time?

I moderated a stellar group of panelists at yesterday’s Digital Media Conference in Arlington, VA, where we talked about the iPad’s disruptive effect on media (speaking of disruption, check out the Disruptathon event the night before DMC).  Here are the panel details:

PANEL: Media on the iPad and Tablets
(Digital Media and Mobile Tracks)

Panelists
Matt Jones, VP Mobile Strategy & Operations, Gannett
Rob Pegoraro, Tech Writer/ Former Washington Post Tech Columnist
Martin Ringlein, Co-founder & Senior Consultant, nclud
Jeff Tennery, SVP, Publisher Services, Millennial Media
Moderator: Daniel Odio, CEO & Co-founder, Socialize Inc.

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by VCs, and research analysts discussing digital trends.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I captured a panel of VCs at yesterday’s phenomenal Digital Media Conference.  On a related note, I’ve written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read about my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.  Hope it’s helpful.

PANEL: Investing in Digital Media: VCs Speak
(Digital Media Track)

Panelists
Philip Bronner, General Partner, Novak Biddle Venture Partners
Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures
Tige Savage, Managing Director & EVP, Revolution LLC
Thanasis Delistathis, Managing Partner, New Atlantic Ventures
Moderator: Paul Sherman, Editor-in-Chief, Potomac Tech Wire

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by research analysts on digital media trends, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Steve Case was interviewed by Paul Sherman at yesterday’s Digital Media Conference in Arlington, VA.

I also captured a panel by research analysts on digital media trends, a panel by VCs, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

I asked Steve a question about focus, saying that as an entrepreneur I had to be extremely focused, but I saw him doing many things (he’s Chairman of Revolution, StartupAmerica and The Case Foundation) and I asked him if the need for extreme focus lessened when one has many resources at his disposal.  He said ‘no,’ but then said his focus is on entrepreneurship, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I could, for example, say that my focus is on entrepreneurship too, or that my focus is on being a human.  Saying one has focus at too macro a level seems to cheapen the value of focus and render it meaningless.  Or, maybe I just don’t understand his position because I don’t have access to the kind of wealth he does to execute his vision.  What’s your opinion?  I’d love to hear your comments below.

Here’s Steve’s interview.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little bonus — John Trimble, the Chief Revenue Officer of Pandora, gave a keynote right after Steve, and I captured that one too:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s the Twitter stream:

Yesterday’s phenomenal Digital Media Conference kicked off with research briefs by analysts from Comscore, Parks Associates and CEA.  Here was the panel title:

Research Presentations: Top Digital Media Trends
Shawn DuBravac, Chief Economist & Director of Research, CEA
Elise Neel, VP, comScore Marketing Solutions, Director, comScore
Heather Way, Research Analyst, Parks Associates

Two highlights include that Google Android growth continues to beat Apple’s, and that 1mm smartphones being added per week.

I also captured keynotes by Steve Case & John Trimble, a panel by VCs, and I did a panel on the iPad + Media.

Here is video of the panel, and the Twitter stream is below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Props to Frank Gruber and his entire TechCocktail crew for a great event in DC last week called the Startup Mixology conference.

Steve Case gave the keynote, followed by a variety of panels and presentations.

I was on a fundraising panel that explored various aspects of raising money for a startup. You can find the live blog transcript of the panel here.  On a related note, I’ve written a series of blog posts about our experience raising $1MM for AppMakr.  The raise took us 14 weeks, and my goal is to help other entrepreneurs do it more quickly and efficiently.  You can read about my “Fundraising Cribsheet Manifesto” here.  Hope it’s helpful.

Here’s a video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Disruptathon is a unique event, largely because the audience votes for the winners in realtime via a mobile app, but also because it focuses on disruption.

Last night I presented Socialize in the Disruptathon competition which took place at Gannett’s headquarters.  ReadWriteWeb, which covered the event, had this to say:

Socialize was proclaimed the winner by the crowd, which voted on special iPod Touches that were handed out to the audience and returned to tabulate the final results. Socialize provides websites with a software developer kit (SDK) intended to “quantify the interest graph.” Of the eight companies that took the stage, Socialize was the company with the clearest technological vision and most potential to be integrated on a large scale within media apps. CEO Daniel R. Odio described it as “unleashing the community that is hiding in your app.”

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!  Here’s Disruptathon’s press release.

You can watch the seven minute video here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And you can see the awards ceremony here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Pete Erickson for his fantastic work, and to the Socialize team for building such an amazing company with me.  Pete, we want to see Disruptathon come to Silicon Valley!

I’ll be in DC for three events on June 16 and June 17.  If you’d like to meet up, drop me a comment below!

	I’ll be on a panel called The Realities of Funding at 1:25pm on Thursday June 16th.  Here are details: 1:25 – The Realities of Funding - David Steinberg, Jill Stelfox, Daniel Odio, Christopher M. Schroeder, Bobby Ocampo, John May
	Socialize was selected as one of eight finalists to present at the Disruptathon – Media event.  Here’s more about the event, Thursday evening, June 16th:   “What are you doing to stay up with the rapidly changing world of media? Welcome to the Disruptathon Media Event where we’ve done the hard work for you. After a national search of more than 100 companies and a competitive down select process, our team of media industry judges have narrowed the field down to 8 businesses the media industry should know about.” Event is at the Gannett building in McLean, VA.
	I’ll be moderating a panel at this year’s Digital Media Conference at 11:40am on Friday June 17th:   PANEL: Media on the iPad and Tablets (Digital Media and Mobile Tracks)  Panelists Matt Jones, VP Mobile Strategy & Operations, Gannett Rob Pegoraro, Tech Writer/ Former Washington Post Tech Columnist David Katz, Executive Director, Digital Media, Starz Media Martin Ringlein, Co-founder & Senior Consultant, nclud Jeff Tennery, SVP, Publisher Services, Millennial Media Mario Armstrong, Tech Commentator Moderator: Daniel Odio, CEO & Co-founder, Socialize Inc.

I attended last year’s FounderConference, which was at MSFT’s Mountain View campus, and captured the content of the event.  I also took a panoramic shot that Alain used for the 2011 conference, and in exchange he comp’d a ticket for me to attend this year.

As part of my goal to help entrepreneurs worldwide be more successful (i.e., my fundraising manifesto), I’ve captured the content of this year’s Founders Conference below.  This year’s event was much larger than 2010, at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts, with about 500 people attending.

Some of the highlights for me were:

• Guy Kawasaki (pictured onstage above) giving tips to entrepreneurs and generally entertaining everyone with his past experiences — he’s very genuine.
• Naval Ravikant of AngelList describing how to pitch to investors
• Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, discussing how Evernote has succeeded with a freemium model (see my notes below).
• George Zachary of CRV and other VCs describing investor pitch do’s & don’ts
• There were many other speakers — here’s the full agenda

Phil’s talk was, for me, the most valuable of the day.  Phil dug into detailed metrics for Evernote, including how many users stick around past the first 30 days (answer: about 55%), how long those users stick around after 30 days (answer: Nearly all of them — amazing!) what percentage of his userbase he monetizes from free to pay, at $5/month (answer: 0.5% in the first month, but rises to almost 24% of the users that stick around after 36 months, again amazing).

Phil also discussed how Evernote focuses on adding users organically, and shared a bunch of stats on the business.  The most amazing chart is the one I took the picture of, at right — it shows a Silicon Valley-style hockey stick graph, except, as Phil points out, for 2 big differences:  1) It’s real, not a projection, and 2) it’s a graph of revenue, not users.  Phil got a round of applause for that one, and the graph shows what look like  sediment layers of each traunch of users as he defines them, and how much revenue each provides.  Watch the video for full details, it’s worth catching.

There was also a great presentation by Tim Young on his Magic 5 slides he’s used for fundraising.  You can find the related TechCrunch article here.

Here’s my quick hello at the start of the conference:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Phil Libin of Evernote describing Evernote’s growth (my favorite talk of the day)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tim Young discussing the “Magic 5 Slides” of pitching

Click here to view the embedded video.

Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Founder Pep-Talk’ followed by Naval Ravikant:

Click here to view the embedded video.

VC Pitch Session & Panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Robert Scoble and Loic Le Meur discussing how to build traction with social media:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Panel on how to launch at a conference:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brian Wong reviews 1 minute pitches

Click here to view the embedded video.

CarWoo’s experience raising money from Y Combinator as 2 married founders with children

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a picture of everyone at break:

I needed to get from our office at 153 Townsend St over to Kicklabs at 181 Fremont St.  In the elevator on the way down, some colleagues suggested I try Uber.

I’d ridden in their pedicabs at SXSW and figured, why not, so I installed the Uber iPhone app and asked for a driver.

Sofian showed up 4 minutes later in a cream colored Lincoln Town Car (the only cream colored executive sedan in the Uber fleet, he proudly informed me).  He was super professional and friendly.  The ride cost me $20 — about 4 times what a cab ride would’ve cost, so as a cash conscious startup founder I won’t be using Uber on a daily basis, but when it’s raining out and I can’t find a regular cab, or if I’m with clients, then no question, Uber is awesome.  And Sofian said he exclusively gives rides through Uber, meaning the startup has uncovered an AirBnB-like way to create entirely new type of taxi-plus type service.  Very impressive.

Here is Sofian explaining Uber to me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s what it looks like from the Uber driver’s side when Sofian ends a trip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some pictures of my trip:

The 'Windows menu' at Alexander's Steakhouse

I have to give some kudos to Microsoft.  Earlier this week I was invited to a dinner for “mobile influencers” in Silicon Valley.  Where did they choose to host the dinner?  In Cupertino, of course.   To my left was a mobile product manager for eBay, and across from me one from Foursquare.  Microsoft is obviously serious about mobile, and I think everyone is very curious to see how their big bets pay off.

We were given updates about Microsoft’s upcoming ‘Mango’ WindowsPhone release, which they say “closes the gaps” in functionality shortfalls and introduces some new features.  It’s apparent Microsoft is very excited about the release.  Microsoft also discussed some of the upgrade issues users have had and how dealing with multiple manufacturers across different carriers on a global scale poses challenges that they’re working to fix.

WindowsPhones for attendees

It’s no secret that Android activations have been on a tear — here’s a video showing global Android activations between ’08 and ’11.  Microsoft wouldn’t disclose how many WindowsPhone activations they’re seeing, and while that number is likely below where they’d like it to be, it’s obvious that a sleeping giant has woken up to the importance of mobile, and there’s a “bet the company” vibe in the air when you hear employees talk about how important WindowsPhone is to their future.  It harkens back to Microsoft’s entry into the browser wars, and we all know how that turned out.  The difference this time is that there Apple and Android are much more formidable competitors with a significant headstart.  I’ve written in the past about how I believe mobile is going to be way bigger than people realize. Microsoft, apparently, believes this as well. It’s going to be an interesting several years.

We just launched AppMakr for WindowsPhone and Microsoft has been marketing it.  We’re placing some bets on Microsoft, and we’ll see how they play out.

I and several hundred other SF hipsters got to spend some quality time with the GirlsInTech crew tonight watching Dennis Crowley talk about the rise of Foursquare, and why we should all check in more often.  Liz Gannes of the WSJ’s AllThingsD did an hour-long interview with Dennis, who was in town scoping out office space for an expanded Foursquare presence in San Francisco.  Dennis said Foursquare is up to 8.5MM users and growing at 1MM users per month.  Dennis also talked about Foursquare vs. Facebook, as well as why Foursquare has stayed super focused on checking in with the real world.

The best line of the night was Dennis talking about the iPhone being a ‘hot pocket’ in your pants.  Oh, and also plenty of talk about Clippy, the MS Office paperclip, and how that relates to the future of mobile.  Check the video out for the full rundown.

But first, I got a hot second in with Dennis giving some tips to tech entrepreneurs:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Props again to Adriana (seriously, two events in one day?!  You’re busy!) for setting this up along with the SF chapter of GirlsInTech (even if you’re a guy, check it out, seriously).

Here’s the video of the full event (more pics below):

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also got to peek around at FoundersDen, the new tech space for tech startups.  I still prefer SOMAcentral across the street, but FoundersDen has its high points.  Check out this pano of the space:

A line out the door to get in!

Liz from AllThingsD interviewing Dennis

You might know SecondMarket as the go-to stock exchange for private companies, but apparently they’re also positioning themselves as thought leaders in the mobile space as well.  It’s smart — I’ve said before that mobile will be way bigger than people realize, and it feels like they think so too.

Props to Adriana for setting this event up; it was stellar.  Here are some quick notes I took on what was covered, but take a look at the video below to consume the entire thing:

• Android in-app purchase
• Year of tablets… Tablets in enterprise
• Vitality in mobile and importance of Facebook and twitter
• Mobclix, one of the creators of Cost Per Install, about apples change in policy
• Ngmoco says html5 isn’t there yet

This is the camera rig I use to capture content. Click on the picture to learn more about it.

With the world requiring instant communication and access to information at the touch of a finger, companies are responding by utilizing mobile applications in ever more creative and pervasive ways.  Join SecondMarket for our upcoming Breakfast Roundtable, featuring industry experts who will discuss trends and opportunities within the mobile marketplace.

Featured speakers:

• Charles Hudson, CEO and co-founder, Bionic Panda Games
• Holger Luedorf, VP of Mobile, Foursquare
• Jason Oberfest, VP of Social Applications, ngmoco
• Michael Shim, VP of Mobile, Groupon
• Krishna Subramanian, CEO and co-founder, Mobclix
• Moderator:  Tim Chang, Partner, Norwest Venture Partners

Here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click to Enlarge, or See Below

Brendan Baker, an MBA student at Oxford, created a phenomenal infographic (pdf) of our $1MM angel raise for AppMakr.  Here’s how to read it and what it means.  Additionally, below is a 7 minute interview I did with Brendan going over the top points gleaned from the infographic.

Brendan followed our raise from before I even moved from DC to SF last summer.  I made a few trips to SF as I began the raise process, and then moved to SF fulltime in July 2010.  The raise was wrapped up by October 2010 (here’s the party we had to celebrate!).  The core of the raise happened over a 14 week period.

How to read the infographic:

• Chronologically, left to right, with dates at the top, starting in June and ending in October
• A beginning dot is an intro, then the resulting line is how long the intro took to play out
• Large circles are successful funds raiseed
• Brendan separated the intros into 3 groups, on the right-hand side:  Timewasters, Old School and New School intros

Lessons learned from the infographic:

• I didn’t realize this until looking at the data, but not a single intro where someone made a one-to-one introduction worked out.  I call this the “Rule of 10″ and it means “Only take intros from people willing to give you at least 10 introductions.  Don’t waste your time with someone who says ‘I have an investor to introduce you to.’  The sample set is too small to be statistically significant, so use the Rule of 10 at your own risk!  But it is interesting that none of the one-to-one intros worked out.
• Timing is important:  I tried to do the raise over the summer.  Bad idea.  Focus on spring, with fall being second-best.  Avoid summer and holidays.
• Nail your message:  We iterated on our message during the raise (not ideal).  Watch the video for more details.

View the slideshare from the related blog on Brendan’s website

Here’s the video interview between me and Brendan:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Virgin America is running a forward-thinking social media campaign at San Francisco International Airport’s new Terminal 2 that just opened yesterday using Facebook and Foursquare checkins.  The idea is great — as you check in at various Virgin locations, you get badges, from “ground crew” for a few checkins, up to “captain” for the max number of checkins.

I tried it out when I flew into T2 on Virgin yesterday, and had high hopes.  Unfortunately, it’s a fail, for now, because it doesn’t work.  My guess is that the GPS simply isn’t good enough indoors yet.  Kudos to Virgin for trying something new — now technology just has to catch up to the marketer’s ambitions.

Here’s a video of me trying the Virgin T2 Takeover social media campaign:

Click here to view the embedded video.

UB4NMPGFXCRE

Yesterday I moderated a panel on mobile web vs. native apps, courtesy of Digital Media Wire’s conference track at the National Association of Broadcasters NABShow conference in Las Vegas.  Here’s the session description:

Mobile Apps v Mobile Web: What’s the Winning Formula?
With the proliferation of the Apple iPhone and iPad, Google’s Android platform and new Blackberry services, there has been an explosion of growth of mobile applications of all kinds. At the same, more consumers are accessing content through the “mobile web”, i.e., sites created specifically for mobile devices and accessible through mobile browsers with no download or installation required, than ever before. With the huge buzz around apps it would seem that mobile applications are taking over, but the race is far from over. This panel will discuss the competing considerations in determining whether to go app
or web. Will the “mobile web” eclipse “mobile apps” in the future? Who will be the winners and losers?

The session featured the following panelists:

• Gadi Mazor, Co-Founder & CEO, Nobex Technologies
• Peter Scott, VP, Emerging Media, Turner Broadcasting/NBA Digital
• Jason Deal, SVP, Digital Account Director, Initiative U.S.
• Jim Spencer, Founder and President, Newsy

Here’s a video of the event:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I recently gave a keynote and was a panelist at Potomac Tech Wire’s “Seed and Early Stage Funding Outlook:Raising Capital For Startups” event at the Ritz Carlton in McLean, VA.  You can see the handout I used during my talk at left (click to download PDF).

For those who attended the event, AngelList has graciously allowed me to give away their 90 page e-book titled “Pitching Hacks,” their 1,396 page “Venture Hacks Bible” and their sample cap table, which together usually sells for a combined $47.

Below is the full agenda and video.

Seed Stage Outlook 2011 is part of the Potomac Tech Wire breakfast series that brings together senior executives in the Mid-Atlantic to discuss technology issues in a conversational, roundtable environment moderated by the editor of Potomac Tech Wire. The two panels at this event will focus on seed-stage and early-stage funding from the perspective of both entrepreneurs and funders. In addition, a DC-area entrepreneur who recently raised $1 million from various angel investors through AngelList will give a brief presentation on his successful fundraising.

Funders Roundtable:
Jonathan Aberman, Managing Director, Amplifier Ventures
Kiran Hebbar, Partner, Valhalla Partners
John May, Managing Partner, New Vantage Group
Thomas Weithman, Managing Director, CIT GAP Funds
Moderator: Paul Sherman
Additional speakers to be announced

Entrepreneurial Presentation:
“Cliff Notes on Raising Your First $1 Million Through AngelList” by Daniel Odio, Co-founder, AppMakr
Entrepreneurs Roundtable:
Richard Fawal, Founder, WatchParty.tv
Fahad Hassan, CEO,  Always Prepped
Daniel Odio, Co-Founder, AppMakr and PointAbout
Morris Panner, Co-founder, groupflier
Additional speakers to be announced

Moderator: Paul Sherman

Video (my keynote is at minute 57):

Click here to view the embedded video.

6/26/11 Update: Our company internal “How To Basecamp” instructions now posted by user request.

We’ve been power Basecamp users for several years.  Basecamp is a minimalist-style project management system created by 37 Signals.  While Basecamp has had its shortfalls, my view has traditionally been that Basecamp is much like democracy:  It may not be perfect, but it’s the best thing out there.

Recently, though, our company’s internal communication needs have been causing Basecamp to creak and groan under the weight of larger-scale use.  Employees have started to complain, and they’re right:  The way we’re using Basecamp hasn’t been ideal.

I’ve taken the initiative of evaluating Basecamp vs. other tools for our company, and as part of that role I’m going to publicize the main gripes we have about Basecamp to see if anyone out there has suggestions or best-practices to help us make good decisions for growth.

I’ll also send this blog directly to the folks at Basecamp, but I’m not expecting much:  37 Signals is typically not super interested in listening to customer feedback unless it’s on their terms.  If I do get any responses from them, I’ll post them in the comments section below.

In this post I’ll lay out several main points:

• What we love about Basecamp
• Problems we’re seeing with our use of Basecamp
• What we’re doing to mitigate these problems

What we love about Basecamp:

Basecamp is in many ways a magical tool.  We first fell in love with it when doing projects with external partners.  We’ve used it with partners ranging from Microsoft and other Fortune 500 clients to local design firms.  The main thing Basecamp does well is offer relief from email-based project management:  Everything gets put into a web app with “just enough” functionality without being overbearing, and email can still be used to get alerts and respond to threads.  It balances the use of email well, while removing the main problems email presents, like the lack of a threaded history across all participants over multiple messages, the lack of accountability and tasking and difficulty creating knowledge repositories.

Jason Fried and the other folks at 37 Signals also obviously put just as much thought into what features not to include as those they do include.  For example, back in 2005 Jason wrote on a blog “We all have ideologies. Yours includes an absolute necessity for Gantt charts. Ours doesn’t. We just have different opinions of what is required for good project management.”  And that’s fine with me — most software is so feature rich users have no idea where to start and never use most of the functionality.  37 Signals definitely does a great job of revealing functionality over time when the user is ready to utilize it.  I’m also a heavy Highrise user and this is apparent in Highrise as well.

So let me be clear:  What I am asking for is not necessarily an increase in features.  In fact, I don’t know what the answers are to the issues we’re having.  What I do hope, however, is that folks at companies like 37 Signals can re-think their systems based on some of the frustrations we’re having and present solutions to these problems.

Problems we’re seeing with our use of Basecamp

I am wording the issues we’re having with Basecamp as “our use of Basecamp” on purpose:  It’s become obvious to me that our company staff (myself included) are not well trained on the use of Basecamp.  We’re not disciplined with the tool, and that’s causing problems.  Some might argue that users shouldn’t need to be trained if the tool is good, and at some level that’s probably true, but at this point I’m expecting that no matter what tool we end up using, we’re going to have to implement a “best practices” guide at the very least, and possibly institutionalize a level of discipline in using the tool that we don’t have today.

So with that in mind, here’s our list of specific issues, ordered by pain level:

Searching: Click To Enlarge

Searching for content is difficult and inconsistent. As you can see from the screenshot at left, we are putting a lot of content into basecamp.  Each bubble shows the number of comments attached to that task.  We’re often getting to the point where items have 30+ comments in them, with some topping 100.  Basecamp’s search functionality is very limited — it’s picky about how search terms are entered, and when it returns results, it vomits up a long list of items, with messages, to-do’s, milestones, comments and media all intermingled.  We’ve resulted to trying to memorize keywords from posts to find them later, and in some cases even putting nonsensical words into the post so we can do keyword searches for that content later.  (what does the word “flamingo” have to do with the project?  Nothing, except that it’s an easy word to search for later!)

Anyone vs. Anyone: Click to enlarge

There is an option box on the right side where a user can search for items only assigned to them (or find tasks that are assigned to, say, anyone) but get this:  If you want to search across all projects for tasks assigned to anyone, you can’t do it.  In Basecamp’s Dashboard view, the search for “anyone” is only for tasks not assigned to anyone, i.e., unassigned tasks, while in a project view it’s what you’d expect:  Anyone means anyone.  Not being able to see a macro view of all tasks assigned to all users is a vexing issue with Basecamp.

No auto-save. This is another issue that just drives me up the wall.  When you type content into text boxes in Basecamp, you lose it if you close the page.  There have been many times I’ve written notes in a to-do and then lost the content.  This is especially difficult because Firefox’s private-browsing keyboard shortcut is just one key away from the “switch between tabs” keyboard shortcut, and Firefox closes and re-opens all tabs when you enter private browsing, so whenever I accidentally hit that key, I lose everything I’ve written but not saved in Basecamp.

Message vs. To-Do: Click To Enlarge

Messages and To-Do’s work differently. I don’t know why Basecamp implemented messages and to-do’s differently, but the fact that they did has made messages unusable for us.  For example, when I write a message the image at left is what I see.  I can checkmark certain user’s names to decide who should receive an email notification about the message.  So far, so good.

But get this:  If I want to post a follow-up comment about the message, I can’t change who gets pinged!  Here’s what it looks like. (Really astute Basecamp users might point out that technically you can hit an “edit” button in the message to change who gets pinged, but that doesn’t count:  Most users will never find that, and it’s kludgy to use even if you do know about it).

To-do comments: Click To Enlarge

To-do’s, on the other hand, work differently.  Every time you make a comment, you can check off the names of the people you want to receive that comment.  This is critical.  Being able to select people for email notifications cuts down on “email comment spam.”

This difference in message vs. comment functionality has caused us to hack Basecamp:  We have a specific to-do list for messages, so we can use the to-do system to post messages to each other.  But this hack is sub-optimal because it clutters up our to-do’s, and we lose the value of the to-do list bucket naming convention.

There’s a related issue here, too:  When users get an email comment notification and hit ‘reply,’ every user who was originally pinged gets that reply.  It’s like hitting the ‘reply to all’ button with a bunch of people in the cc line, which I’ve blogged about before as being an indication of terrible email etiquette.  The only way around this issue currently is to log into the Basecamp page and un-check certain names when you reply with a comment.  I’m not sure exactly how this behavior can be improved, but what I do know for sure is that when someone hits reply in an email comment notification, it shouldn’t automatically go back out to everyone who was originally pinged.

No logging history in to-do’s. We have one employee that consistently re-dates to-do’s.  I wish I had a trail of when the task was originally due so we could have conversations around that issue.  Currently, there’s no history of due date changes in the task.  This would be a very easy problem to fix — any changes could just be logged as a comment in the task history, or shown on the right side of the task, or similar.  It would be really handy to know who changed a due date, when the change was made, and what the previous due date was.  While we’re on the topic of logging, I’d really like the ability to see who was notified of each comment made.

Peek-a-boo! Click To Enlarge

It’s hard to move tasks between projects, and impossible to move comments between tasks.  Basecamp allows us to create separate projects.  The way we use this is to create a project in Basecamp anytime we begin a new initiative.  But oftentimes, an employee will create a task in the wrong project.  Currently, the only way to move that task is via an itsy-bitsy little button titled “move”.  The problem is, you can only move an entire to-do bucket list.  So if you want to move a task to a different project, first you have to make a throw-away to-do bucket list, then move that task into the bucket, the move the bucket over to the other project, then move the task out of that bucket into the correct bucket, and then delete the throw-away bucket.  Yuck.

You've been pwned: Click To Enlarge

While we’re on the topic of tasks, here are two other big gripes:  The task owner, task description and due date cannot be changed while in the detail view of the task.  Strangely, you have to exit the task to edit the task owner, description or due date.

Secondly, in the dashboard to-do view across all projects, the task owner, due date and description cannot be changed.  In fact, you can’t even click on the task.  Instead, you can only click on the to-do bucket list name.  Then, you have to find the task in the bucket (which can be daunting in its own right if you have dozens upon dozens of tasks in a bucket) and only then can you edit those items.

What we’re doing to mitigate these problems

Basecamp is growing long in the tooth.  It hasn’t had a major update in years, and I have to think (hope?) the folks at 37 Signals are aware of most or all of the issues above and are hard at work on an upgrade, like we recently saw for Highrise.  Still, I can’t base our company’s strategy on hope — especially from a vendor that doesn’t communicate with its users on when to expect an update and what functionality it will contain.  So, we’re starting to explore other options.  One very promising one is a new startup called Asana.  You can watch a great 51 minute demo video on Asana showcasing its approach to project management.  (One note to the Asana folks if you see this:  The inability to choose who gets pinged in a “reply” email comment notification appears to be an issue in Asana as well).  Overall, the Asana approach looked good.  If you know of other Basecamp-like systems, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section.

I’m also creating a best-practices and training document for our company’s use of Basecamp.  Things like “don’t just reply to an email alert.  Instead, log into the system and choose who gets pinged in your response” type stuff.

I’ll also note that internal company communication has been a difficult issue that even major corporations with huge budgets haven’t been able to solve.  I used to work at GE, one of the best run big companies in the world, and these issues were much worse there than it is at our 30 employee company.  As social media matures in the b2b space, I’m very interested to see what companies like Yammer roll out.  And I’ve written before that lack of communication between people creates some of the world’s biggest problems.  We’re not mind readers, and technology hasn’t yet figured out how to help our analog brains leverage digital benefits (although in this blog post I write about how mobile will be way bigger than people think, and will mitigate the analog/digital differences).

I’d love to hear any tips from you in the comments section below, especially if you have best practices, pragmatic tips, or software you’ve successfully used to improve communication at your company.

But wait, there’s more:  Feedback from employees.  I also asked our employees for their list of gripes with Basecamp, which are as follows for anyone who really wants to dig into this:

Christine writes, “Most of my issues tend to be with navigation and feeling like the experience is not very intuitive. A project management tool designed to keep things organized, laid out, and easy to see should not require so much user training. It should make sense to the user—otherwise it takes up more time than it saves.

Here are some screenshots that illustrate a few of my frustrations, but I will follow up with a video later to further explain my navigation gripes.”

“OK, here are two more screenshots that illustrate the same point: that Basecamp doesn’t let me see who’s been notified of/included in the conversation or original message.”

Jerry writes:

1) What do you love about Basecamp?

- Information is recorded and archived for retrieval.

Jason writes:

Will writes:

Nick writes:

The recent research about epigenetics has convinced me of the importance of getting in the best shape I can before I have kids.  I used to be in pretty good shape (i.e., 11 hrs, 52 mins finishing time for the JFK 50 mile run), but 10+ years in the startup grinder and the inherent lack of balance in life has left me out of shape.  So, I recently got a trainer (who’s been kicking my butt 3 times a week) and I’m committed to making the time to get back into shape.  It’s also something that’s important to our corporate culture as we grow. One example is ordering healthy food & fruit for the office.

It’s also hard for me because I have a very unhealthy relationship with food.  I eat quickly, which means I usually intake more calories than I need.  It’s also hard for me not to finish my plate, and it’s especially hard not to eat food if it’s in the house and it’s something I’m craving (does anyone else have experiences where food ‘talks to you’? If so, tell me about it in the comments!).  Re-adjusting the relationship I have with food is something I’m working on, but it’s not easy.  Hence the epigenetics part:  If I can get into better shape before I have kids, my hope is that my kids won’t have to deal with issues like these over their lifespans.

Related: There’s a great article in the NY Times titled “Is Sugar Toxic?”  It’s worth a read.  Do you agree?  I’d love your thoughts in the comments section.

I’m tracking my progress.  Here’s what it looks like so far, with projections for where I want to get.

Being embedded squarely in the middle of the fast-growing mobile revolution, our company has a unique perch which I’ve wanted to codify into a vision document for some time.  I finally found time to do it, and the resulting video is below, along with the slides below that.  I’d love your thoughts & comments on what points you agree or disagree with, and why.

Here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to play the video faster, say at 1.5x speed, you can download it from the vimeo site (here’s where you download it from).

Here’s the transcript:

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And here are the slides I go through in the video:

Some Big Thinking about small phones

It still surprises me that people send emails out like this one where they cc dozens — or in this case hundreds– of  (well known) people. The biggest risk is a complete lack of control over what a recipient will say when they ‘reply to all’.

I’m writing this blog post so I can send it as my ‘reply to all’ response when I get emails like these. I may as well educate someone to the dangers of what they’ve done as well as the etiquette rules they’ve broken by doing so.

If you’ve arrived at this post because you’re a fellow mass cc recipient like I was, welcome. Do you want to get some value out of the mass cc email you’ve endured? Why not read one of my blog posts about technology for entrepreneurs?  Maybe the one highlighting my fundraising manifesto, about how AppMakr raised $1MM leveraging AngelList (with interviews of Naval as well as George of CRV and Shai of SVB).  Or the one about our awesome company culture and our company’s Core Values Manifesto.  Or maybe about the Things I Know to be True.

Enjoy, and subscribe if you want more.

There are two things I know to be true.

1.I know family is more important than anything else. I didn’t always know this. I am fortunate to have a wonderful wife who taught it to me in my 20′s, vs. learning it on my death bed, as some do.

2. I know that some of the things I think to be true, probably aren’t true. That one’s a bit of a mind bender, but it keeps me curious about the world.

That’s about it for the things I know to be true. There are many things I think to be true.

I think the purpose of life, to the extent that there is one, is to create, and to be happy. To create a family, to create a better world for others, to make ‘something from nothing.’ Relaxed dinners with lots of conversation and great company make me happy. Many other things do too.

I think humans suffer from a lack of communication, and to the extent that can be resolved, much of human suffering can be too. When the rich live in gated communities away from the poor, when one religion does not tolerate another, when two races do not intermingle, or even speak, then the human psyche hardens to those it cannot understand. Communication, even if forced at first, resolves the world’s most painful issues, and it creates environments in which many different types of people get equal chances, like in Egypt recently.

I think organized religion is generally harmful and hurtful when taken as a whole. Humans are imperfect, and religion classifies people into groups which then start having a hard time communicating with those who don’t share their beliefs. I’m sure many people will disagree with me on this one. See point #2 above.

I think we are not alone, not only in our universe, but in all of them. Recent scientific discoveries give me hope. Possibly related to that: there may be forces greater than us at work. I like the idea that we temporarily borrow energy to form our beings and then release it back to the cosmos when our time is up. Overall, though, I don’t think we as humans have the capacity to understand whatever may be greater than us, so I don’t fret over it too much.

I believe at some point in the future the human race will figure out how to bypass many of the physical factors that limit our lifespans, and people will start to live long enough that time will take on a different meaning. People will look back and have a hard time understanding the limiting factors that constrain us today, like old age. I don’t think I will live long enough to see this, though, and I’m OK with that. Maybe my kids will, or their kids, and that thought makes me happy.

I believe often people are afraid. They are afraid to be different. They are afraid to be wrong. Afraid to take a chance. Afraid to stand up for what they know is right. Afraid to be the first. And I think that’s too bad. I try not to be afraid. It can be hard.

I find that often the best things I accomplish are when I almost gave up. Or right when everyone else has. Just showing up, and then just trying harder than anyone else is one of my most useful tricks.

I also believe there is a cost to everything. And that most people don’t realize this. There’s a cost to asking for a raise, to having an extra slice of cake, to not spending enough time with your wife… to anything. There’s a cost to me spending the time writing this post, and to you for reading it. It’s time that’s spent and can never be recovered. I try to always make sure the cost is worth it.

I believe the most valuable asset we have is time. It’s a diminishing asset and none of us know how much of it we start with. It’s a motivating thought.

I think politicians need to learn to say “I don’t know.” They are dealing with some of the most complex issues on the planet, often with no formal training on the subject. I would trust and respect politicians much more if they didn’t pretend to know all the answers and have opinions on everything.

I find that my political views are getting more conservative as I get older. I’m not sure I like that. I used to feel that being conservative was a cop-out. Its easy just to think about yourself. I have a conservative family member who once said “people should get what they deserve.” That resonated with me. On the other hand, I’m just not sure that someone who was born addicted to crack because his mother used it would fare too well under that plan. I find myself conflicted about this.

I’d like to know what you think. Let me know in the comments below.

There’s a great 2 page spread in Aprils Entrepreneur Magazine about AppMakr.  You can read the full story here.

It’s a great article about how AppMakr enables non-developers to create apps.

My favorite quote is the subtitle, “AppMakr’s do-it-yourself mobile application development platform turned Filter Publications into a mobile app developer”

Also mentioned briefly in the magazine article is the fact that AppMakr now builds for Android and Windows Phone apps in addition to iPhone apps — functionality that we literally just turned on yesterday.

Naval Ravikant of AngelList spoke to a sold out group at yesterday’s Hackers & Founders event held on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA.

If you’re just starting to seek your first round of funding, Naval’s talk is the best place to begin.  You can also read my fundraising manifesto of how we raised $1MM for our company in 14 weeks (and how you can do it in less time than it took us).

In the video below, Naval discussed:

• How the funding landscape has changed, and what it means for you
• Whether or not we’re in another “bubble”
• What’s most important — and what’s not important– when you’re seeking funding
• How AngelList works and how to take advantage of it

Here’s the video of the event:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re a small start-up, so you wouldn’t think we’d be able to take 12 of our co-workers to SXSW in Austin, TX.  But thanks to a great idea by my co-founder Sean, we were able to do it, and it was a blast.

We couldn’t afford to pay everyone’s airfare, so instead we hit on a compromise:  We offered a “work-cation” to our employees — they pay their airfare to get to Austin, and we’d cover the hotel + pay them each $100 cash for spending money.  In exchange, they’d get to spend the weekend in Austin during SXSW and we’d all party in the evenings, while working during the weekdays while we were there.  It worked out great.  It was an incredible bonding experience for all of us, and even though we stayed in the worst hotel in Austin, we all had a blast.

I can’t stress enough how awesome and important it is to really kick back with your team and get to know each other as people.  Especially considering how hard we all work, spending some time together outside of work is really fun, great for everyone, and part of our company manifesto.

In fact, we had such a great time that even other companies were putting our crew on their websites.  Here is a picture from the ServerBeach website showing us at their party.

At SXSW this year, I also saw a rise in the use of QR codes, as well as augmented reality and video capture on iPad 2 tablets.  We also all used Beluga, a great group messaging app that changed the way we interacted with each other during the event (one of those things you’re not sure how you lived without).

Here’s a video Isaac made of our trip, and below it are pics just a few of the many moments we all shared together during SXSW:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was great to see Fred’s post today about Airbnb.  It’s very refreshing to see a VC describe a “miss” in honest terms.  Fred writes, in part:

“But we don’t always get it right. We missed Airbnb even though we loved the team. Big mistake.”

From my experience raising $1MM for AppMakr last fall, I quickly learned that “if it’s not a yes, it’s a no” meaning no matter what reason an investor gives you, unless it’s a “yes” nothing else matters.  And I heard many versions of “no” — two investors gave me firm verbal “yes” commitments before changing their minds (one couldn’t come up with the funds, and another said after doing more research on the market, he got cold feet.  If you want to know who they were, please leave me a comment on the blog.  I won’t ‘out’ them publicly, but I will warn you privately if you request it, so you don’t have to go through the same experience I went through).  But far and away, the biggest reason for a “no” I heard was “we love the team, we’re just not sure about the business.”  So, what Fred said about missing an opportunity because of the team really resonated with me.

To be clear, I also believe that the “we love the team” line is also an old investor standby line that many investors might use disingenuously to create a “soft no” situation for the entrepreneur.  (That’s a blog for another topic, but the fact that investors want to avoid burning bridges with entrepreneurs by giving soft no’s is very misleading to the entrepreneur and not a good thing.)  So while I don’t know if VCs meant it when they said it to me, I did hear it a lot, and I do know that we have a helluva team and that will ensure our company’s success.

And thanks, Fred, for being open and honest in your blog.

Mayank Jain, a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, related to me a great event he attended recently in NYC.  I invited him to write a guest post about his experience:

“I recently attended the Kairos Society Global Summit held in the UN building in New York and the New York Stock Exchange. What they’ve done at Kairos is truly amazing. Started in his freshman year by Ankur Jain at the Wharton School of Business at UPenn, the Kairos Society’s mission is to “Do well by doing good.” Focused on social entrepreneurship, it assembles the top college entrepreneurs from all over the world including Europe, China, and India in an effort to make a difference in the world.

In the UN building some of the industry leaders in their fields gave speeches demonstrating the possibilities of all the world’s exponentially growing technologies. Speakers included Thomas Goetz, Editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, and Peter Diamandis, founder of X-Prize Foundation. In the NYSE, the top 50 most innovative companies set up booths to show their start-ups to other students, CEOs, and many business and political leaders.

As I walked around the trading room floor, it was both amazing and inspiring to see what these students had done. The main thing to take away from this is that age doesn’t matter when you’re trying to change the world. For those who are worried about the future of the world, after attending the Kairos Summit, I can assure you that it’s in good hands.”

– Mayank Jain

If I pointed you to this blog it was because you either came up to me after a panel, or you pinged me via email asking to meet.

I’m always looking for ways to gain and share knowledge in efficient ways.  In the spirit of my recent posts on knowledge building and creating process (even around the importance of sentences), I’m going to try to create a process around people contacting me based on something they read from my blog or wanting to meet.

The absolute best way to interact with something you read on my blog is to comment on the blog.  I get pinged every time there’s a comment and I respond in kind.  I’m working to really create a community around the blog’s core content, so I appreciate comments.  Sometimes I’ve had entire conversations on the blog, like I did with Alex at the bottom of this one. I prefer to have these conversations in public when possible because the conversation becomes part of a public knowledgebase that anyone can learn and benefit from — this is part of the reason I said that Henry Ford would love blogs.  Plus, it’s part of our company manifesto to capture content (point #13!)

And sometimes I invite people to have lunch at our office in San Francisco — we cater lunch every Monday & Thursday.  If we have a good conversation in the comments section of the blog and want to continue it in person, company lunches are typically a great time for me to do that and I’ll invite you to join us.

Thanks, in fact, to Alex, for precipitating this blog post based on the email below.  Hope to see you for lunch tomorrow!:

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Alex wrote:

Hi Daniel, 

I am in SF tomorrow.  I was wondering if I couldn’t steal an hour of your time to talk to you about how you got your company started.  Perhaps we could meet in the morning around 9:00 or 9:30 or in the afternoon around 2 or 3.  Please let me know if these are possible.

Best regards,

Alex

Our company PointAbout, Inc has been researching health insurance options for over 6 months now.  I’ve always understood health insurance to be a complicated mess, but the more I dig into it, the more I wish I didn’t have to.

Several of the executive staff at PointAbout have evaluated various health insurance options, but we haven’t been able to find a plan or provider that gives us what we want.  So, I’m turning to my blog with my wish list for company-provided health insurance to see if anyone has any suggestions or ideas.

First, some setup:  We have about 25 W2 employees, and another 12 parttime to fulltime independent contractors doing work on a project basis.  Of that total, we have 12 people in California, and the rest are in the DC area (DC/MD/VA).  Everyone has different needs/wants:  Some have families, some have their own personal healthcare at good rates and want to keep it, some have personal healthcare but want to move to a corporate plan because it would be cheaper.

So here’s what we’re looking for, ideally.  Does this exist?  Or a variation of this?

Offer employees a monthly bucket of money (start at $100 per employee per month and increase it as we grow) and let them choose how to spend it… health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, dental, vision, etc.  Have the employee pay 30% of the health insurance plan so they have skin in the game– that encourages them to choose the HDHP plan.  Also, put a certain amount of Health Savings Account (HSA) money in annually (maybe $500?) for each employee who chooses HDHP.

Since the HDHP is cheaper for the company, encouraging the employee to choose it by having them pay 30% of the health insurance premium and putting some cash towards the employee’s HSA (that rolls over annually) while paying $100/mo for anything the employee wants to spend it on feels like it’s strike the best balance for all parties involved.

And it would be ideal if the employee could put that $100/month towards their own, or their spouse’s healthcare costs — i.e., they don’t have to go with our plans if they didn’t want to, but could put that money towards the healthcare they’re already buying (pre-tax, if possible).

(Thanks, by the way, to Michael T. for suggesting this approach — I won’t post his full name unless he’s OK with me doing so)

Anyone know if this can be done?  Any suggestions about alternate approaches that have worked well for others?

One of our employees (thanks Sue!) recently alerted me to the fact that I was at 94% of my Gmail quota.  Although we use Google Apps to host our business email, we’ve been able to get away with the free version since we’re under 50 users.

To say that I’m an email fiend is putting things lightly.  While I was at 94% capacity, nobody else among our 42 users was even close.  The nearest 2nd place was at 13%, with few others above 2% or 3%.

I didn’t want to upgrade to the larger account (and have to spend $50/year per user) just because I was approaching the limit.  So instead, I used a program called FindBigMail, which charges $4.95 to analyze your Gmail account to find large mail items.  Their tag line is “Pay $4.95 to save $50/year” and it works, because they’re right!

There’s also a great Lifehacker article on how to find large mail items, since Gmail doesn’t let you sort by attachment size.  Below is what the FindBigMail analysis looked like after it ran for about 30 minutes.  I was able to forward the large offending emails to a backup account I own, and then delete them from both the regular and sent boxes to lower my usage.

Another great event by Paul Sherman’s Potomac Tech Wire last week, as he hosted the Social Media Outlook 2011 event at the Ritz Carlton in McLean, VA.

Here’s the description from the PTW site:

Social Media Outlook 2011 is part of the Potomac Tech Wire breakfast series that brings together senior executives in the Mid-Atlantic to discuss technology issues in a conversational, roundtable environment moderated by the editor of Potomac Tech Wire. The panel will focus on trends, developments and business models in social media.

Keynote:
Addie Connor, Director of Advertising, SocialCode (a subsidiary of the Washington Post Co.)
Keynote: Top 10 Social Media Trends in 2011
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence
Panel:
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence
Addie Connor, Director of Advertising, SocialCode
Jodi Gersh, social media manager, Gannett
Chris McGill, SVP Strategic Partnerships, UberMedia
Scott Silverman, co-founder, ifeelgoods
Debbie Weil, author and social media consultant
Moderator: Paul Sherman

Here’s the first of two videos.  This video has part of Addie’s keynote + Rohit’s keynote:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the video of the panel (skip ahead to minute 4 for the start of the panel):

Click here to view the embedded video.

My buddy John Gorman told me about Michael Benson and his amazing work, which was done in cooperation with NASA, and I had to post it here, it’s so impressive.  You can also learn more about Benson’s exhibition, titled Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes.  Rumor is that if you have some disposable income, you can pick up a few large, limited prints… I was afraid to ask what they cost!

Although I didn’t get the chance to attend the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this year, I’ve been hearing a lot about various strategic partnerships, tablet announcements and the like.  I think, though, the absolute coolest and most innovative thing I’ve heard come out of the Congress were these Android pins.  No joke.  DP Venkatesh of mPortal (and a luminary in the DC mobile community) brought these back from Barcelona and had them on his desk.

It’s not the pins, per-se, but it’s what Google did with them.  The way DP describes it, Google gave various pins out at various stations.  Each station housed a brand active in Android (brands like CNN, Samsung, etc.).  And there were many different styles of pins.  That’s the key — it became a competition to collect all of the different types of pins.  Pretty genius, and it encouraged everyone to visit all the Android stations and reach out to others in an attempt to “get the one  missing from your collection.”  (DP, if you read this and have any more details to add, I’d love to hear more in the comments section below.)

Here are a few more pics:

I’m back in DC from SF for a week, which coincided with a dcMOMO event which I attended last night.  Mad props to Suni Vaidya for building up dcMOMO (the DC chapter of the international Mobile Monday organization).  She’s recently brought Oren Levine from Nokia, Hans Horn from Millennial Media and Kate Kingberger from CTIA on as board members.  As a past board member before I moved to SF, I have a deep personal affinity for the group and continue to support it and its objective of educating audiences about the power of mobile within consumer and enterprise spaces.

The event last night was around Digital Media and Mobile Content.  Here’s the event description, and a video of the event is below:

And here’s the video of the event:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mad props to my brother Sam, Product Manager of the Facebook Photos team, as well as the entire Photos Team for their pivotal role in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.  Amazing and significant change because of what you guys have done.

From CNET and others: “New rumor hints RIM tablet to run Android apps“

Figured I’d celebrate with a suggestion for a new Blackberry logo.

Aah, such a small thing, yet so satisfying:

If you’ve read my blog much, you probably know I often go by “DROdio”.  I bought the domain drod.io and hooked it up with CloudApp, so now when I take a screenshot, it automatically gets uploaded + hosted on a custom URL.  For example:  I’ll take a screenshot of me creating this blog post, and here’s the resulting image, hosted by CloudApp: http://drod.io/1U1L0B3s2c261f1w2n1o .

And here’s a custom URL on Bit.ly using Bitly Pro: http://go.drod.io/fqMLvq

If what I’m saying is confusing, just watch the video below to see both of these in action!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been using the Kodak Zi8 camera for several years now, and it’s been a workhorse of my ability to capture content.  I originally reviewed the Zi6, and then reviewed the Zi8 more recently on this blog, and I also did a post on using a wide-angle lens with the Zi6 or Zi8.

But recently, I gave a speech at TJHSST and the Zi8 failed to record the video correctly, so I decided it was time to revisit my setup, since capturing content is so important to me (as per our company manifesto points #13 and #19).

The price of the Zi8 camera has come down so much since its launch (from above $200 to under $100 now) that I decided to use the following strategy:

• A main tenant of my ability to capture content is that I always have the device with me, since I often don’t know ahead of time that I’ll want to capture content.  Therefore, I’ll always carry with me one Zi8 camera ($98), one stereo digital condenser mic ($29.94) as well as one X-shot extender ($19.95) and a mini UltraPod ($12.32).  This is in my bag at all times, and gives me a solid content capturing setup for under $175.
• However, there are times when I know that I do want to capture content (such as today’s LAUNCH conference).  And for that, I’ve created a more in-depth setup with some additional components.  I use a Shaun Jackson Design bag called the “BackOffice” and since I had an extra one laying around, I pulled out the middle insert that’s typically used to store a laptop and instead turned it into a container for this more detailed componentry.  It’s comprised of another Zi8 camera like the one above ($98), a Rode microphone ($149), a lightweight compact mini tripod ($19.99) that extends from 10.5″ to 40″ for standing on the floor, an X-shot extender ($19.95) — it’s the same as the one I keep in my bag above — as well as a larger UltraPod ($17.98) that is able to handle the Zi8 + Rode Mic + Adorama Camera Grip ($12.90).  I also bring an Olympus audio recorder ($39.88) so I can record audio separately from video.  Throw in the cost of the foam ($16.00) and a 16GB SD card ($26.49) and the whole rig costs right around $400.

Here’s a video of the entire setup, with pics below that:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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And here are pics:

I got Jason Calacanis for a few minutes today during LAUNCH. I asked Jason what happened with TechCrunch (“different ideas” he said), what LAUNCH is all about (basically, awesomeness for startups) and what he wishes he’d done differently earlier in his career (“think bigger”).

You can also see my LAUNCH coverage of Brian with Green Goose, and Adriana with Girls in Tech.

Here’s the video with Jason. He committed to responding to comments posted on this blog, so if you have more questions for him, please post them below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I spent a few minutes with Brian Krejcarek, founder of Green Goose.  I walked the entire demo pit at the LAUNCH conference, and Green Goose was by far the most interesting company in the pit.

Green Goose has created proprietary hardware running at 915 MHz in the form of small stickers that can be stuck onto everyday devices, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, toys, etc.  as well as a software platform that makes these ordinary devices “smart”.  The stickers connect to a small device that plugs into a home router (styled like a small green egg) and has approx. a 200′ range.

Brian gave me a demo of the technology platform by brushing his teeth, playing with toy swords and taking his daily medication.  After each action, a web app showed the action having been taken, and brian accrued points for each action.  This is a cool, real-world way to stop data from being lossy (see Manifesto point #13) and capture it in fun ways.  It gets to the “gamification” trend (props to Nathan Lands of Gamify.com!) that’s impending.

Here’s Brian’s working demo of Green Goose’s technology:

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE:  Brian made it to the demo stage; here’s the last bit of  him up on stage (sorry no audio):

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here’s a picture of Brian showing off his “smart” toy swords:

I caught up with Adriana Gascoigne, the founder of Girls in Tech, at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco.

Adriana has a great story about her reasons behind starting Girls in Tech.  Several years ago she was the only female employee in a startup with 50 employees and decided “that was a problem.”

She created Girls in Tech in 2007, a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent and influential women in technology.”  The organization now has 57 chapters worldwide (including NYC, China, and Paris) and has had heavyweight speakers like Twitter CEO Evan Williams at Kicklabs last Sept, and an upcoming session with Dennis Crowley of Foursquare in April.  I asked her why she named it “Girls” vs. “Women” in Tech and she said it was because “it’s more fun” and lighthearted.  The good news for men:  Yes, you are allowed to attend.

Here’s the quick 5 minute interview with Adriana:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Mario Schulzke and the folks over at IdeaMensch for doing an interview on PointAbout and AppMakr and some of the thinking from the founders that’s gone into the direction we’re moving in.

At the Goldman Sachs 2011 Technology and Internet Conference.  You can also see other related panels where I captured content.

Here was a panel on social commerce by:

• Kevin Hartz, CEO Eventbrite
• Jordan Glazier, CEO Eventful
• Matt Evans, CEO Gaggle of Chicks

Just a few quick notes on this one:

• Kevin: 200MM tickets sold last year, doubling this year
• Jordan:  8MM monthly uniques.  17MM registered users.  SEO is key.  4MM local events to choose from at any given point in time.

Here’s the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.