WatTF? - Jim Murphy

I just read Randall Howard’s post: Early Adopters versus Business Models: Shooting Yourself in the Foot?

My liked the end when Randall raises the issue of mobile data rates and the inevitable dampening effect it has on Canadian (and American) mobile software development companies - startups especially.

The problem is more pronounced in Canada but the US has the same structural flaws - its just so much more pronounced here due to lesser competition, higher complacency, and more monopolistic tendencies.  But, in either case we are effectively giving up on wireless innovation in North America if we don’t have a startup ecosystem and fertile early markets to try out products and business models.  The only thing I see in the mobile space that is fertile these days is the bullshit in the ads.

Java is an enterprise software language and almost never used “out in the wild” where Web 2.0 style sites and services live. At least that’s what I keep hearing. Most web types think in terms of PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby it seems.

One thing I’ve come to realize is that there is remarkably few multi-lingual programmers out there. You usually find people attached to a programming stack the way a baby duck attaches to its mother. Programmers follow around their stack quacking that its best/only way to solve their particular problem. I know we would like to think this doesn’t apply to us but I think most of us have been “baby ducked” early and that shapes how we look at the world for a good long while.

If you’re under 30 and build web stuff then you probably know PHP. Why is that? More than likely because its always been there and its free. Every cheap host has a PHP runtime available so that’s what you were “baby ducked” on. As you got more sophisticated you might have started to look at newer environments like Python or Ruby. Thats what everyone you talked to were talking about.
Alternatively if you work in a corporate environment theres a pretty good chance that you’re writing in Java or .NET. You don’t signup on godaddy + cheap host for these projects because you have an IT operations group that takes care of machines, app servers, databases and provisioning for you. YMMV.

These are 2 completely different worlds that have nothing to do with the language and everything to do with the stack and people around the stack. Web 2.0 style projects don’t use Java as a rule NOT because the syntax is wrong or its slow or anything like that. I don’t know of many cheap hosting providers that make Java or .NET available unless you get into dedicated or virtual private setups where you control the entire stack. They exist but are far from the norm - and they aren’t comparably cheap. Instead the model is around FTP of text files and interpreted languages since its easier to manage those environments in a shared host environment. So the ecosystem of people in that world have different expectations.

Enter Amazon EC2 and the larger cloud computing approach. We’re “baby ducking” a new generation of developers that think in terms of cheap utility cloud computing where you don’t FTP text files to a shared hosted server - you have control over the entire stack by default. You own the whole thing.

This shift makes Java development in the cloud a viable option especially to ex-enterprise developers that are de-siloing their applications, systems or selves to reach beyond their firewalled-gardens and out into the Internet at large. Mix-in the emerging renaissance of new languages that target the JVM but offer technical or programmer productivity advantages and the JVM may not look so staid and corporate as it used to.

So we may see an increasing number of enterprise Java developers (ducks) that participate in Web 2.0 style projects after all.

Disagree?

The fine folks at AideRSS have made their GoogleReader integration available today. Its no hoax - the real deal. I’ve been running versions over the last month or so and its changed the way I manage my ~300 (and growing) feeds.

Here’s to our evolution to better subscription management!

1. In the beginning, I would subscribe willy-nilly to feeds, like I was hoarding streams of Internet knowledge, kind of like Diggs or De.licio.us links often with the same filter.  It didn’t take long before I accumulated significant attention debt and would feel increasingly inadequate when I’d get through less and less of my subscriptions each day. Like any addict, this didn’t change my desire to hoard feeds continuing at 5-10 / week.

2. Eventually I bucketed my feeds in 2 categories, not wanting to go overboard building some contrived hierarchy of folders or tagging system that I’d never use. So bucket #1 was called Favorites and bucket #2 was called Monitor. I’d try to keep up on all posts in my Favorites bucket and just sorta hunt and peck through the Monitor bucket. It took about a week before I never looked in the Monitor bucket and my Favorites was my new tape worm of time.

Coincidentally (or not), Jeff Fedor mentioned that AideRSS might help “Read what matters“. That appealed to me for obvious reasons. I started using the AideRSS service to process feeds for many of the subscriptions I was Monitoring. It was pretty intriguing and once I had some feeds pared down and wired up in my reader I felt on top of things. But it took a few too many clicks to keep up with - so new unfiltered feeds started to creep in.

3. Enter the AideRSS Google Reader Extension. Available today is a customization of GoogleReader done inside your FireFox browser, the AideRSS FireFox addin brings the filtering of feeds directly inside the GoogleReader experience, simplifying reading and managing feeds. So now you subscribe to feeds then dial in the filter to go from all posts to good, great or just the best. This can cut a feed volume down by an order of magnitude.

Heres a screen shot of the filtering in action:

You can install the extension at http://gr.aiderss.com/

Congrats guys - nice job!

I can’t wait till the inevitable happens, especially here in Canada: Extreme disruption of the entire wireless/mobile value network. Google has an recent announcement that I wish I understood - seems excessively rosey - but if somebody’s gonna do it this group are as good a group as any: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Philips. Bring it, guys.

Phones are computers. Its gonna take the software industry to disrupt the walled gardens that so under-serve and over charge consumers. Any value network that treats its consumers this badly can’t last forever, can it?

Our guys don’t know the meaning of the word bored. Especially with bikes in the dining room! W00t!

Our tricycle built for two:

“Hey, peeps! Peace!”

If you’re interested in understanding the culture of software startups run don’t walk to Paul Grahams collection of essays. Paul knows of what he speaks. He runs Y-Combinator an unconventional incubator for starups in Boston and the valley. Though as if to prove that no one’s perfect he’s a serious Lisp-head.

When I first read some of Paul’s “Hackers and Painters” essays I felt I finally found someone that articulated the obscure, inchoate thoughts feelings I’ve had about programming and startups. No one has ever captured the strange and wonderful subtleties of this area like Paul Graham.

His latest is called “You Weren’t Meant to have a Boss” I love the Corn Syrup sections where big companies are likened to high-fructose corn syrup and startups are fresh organic food. Love it. Live it. Part of the reason I love startups is that they stretch me as a person.

Whats your favorite essay of Paul’s

I’ve been trying to get a sense for how much the Amazon Web Services means to Amazon in terms of $ today. Its a strategic initiative with lots of buzz but how is that translating? The numbers seem somewhat elusive from what I can find in their public filings and round the web. If anyone has better info please send it along - much appreciated!

There are indirect indicators of adoption growth in a recent earnings announcement: in terms of bandwidth:

“Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined. “

4th quarter no less - that would be the holiday rush. I can imagine that S3 in particular is a bit of a bandwidth intensive but thats a pretty significant milestone. I’m also not sure if that includes bandwidth use by content delivery networks (Mirror-Image by the looks of things) or just from the Amazon data centers themselves.

In MeatSpace terms the numbers are impressive:

“Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter.”

So serious scale is not only possible but people seem to be using it.

Strong adoptions mixed with snippets from a GigaOm post on Amazon’s impact on the startup world are encouraging for startups. I particularly like the Randy Komisar quote on how the changing economics impact investing:

“We’re now at a point that business plans really don’t matter, It’s an iterative process of quickly getting your ideas into the hands of others.”

“Before — there was a black art. We don’t need gurus, we have a market.”

This is so refreshing. The “old” model of crafting a business plan and polishing a pitch on a brilliant idea that your team could execute to hit a home run just seems so much of a gamble compared with the alternative. I’ve seen the “we have the perfect idea now lets get funded and strap the rockets on we only have one shot” approach before and let me say it takes years off your life. I love calling this empirical model out and getting on with it. Having to pretend that you have everything all figured out before you’ve tested the market in order to get funded is incredibly disingenuous.

The fact that its much cheaper to get to strong prototype and that we have a emerging culture of iteration+community+feedback means that we can take some of the gamble out of the process leaving a better mix of the “good risk”. I wonder what kind of other effects this will have. The standard pattern of 5-7 years, 10X />$100M exits will get tweaked.

From the “Woulda-Shoulda-Coulda” department. The historic Dalby house was sold recently to a real estate developer set on remodeling (a great idea) and turning it into a medical office (a not so good idea).

When we moved to Elora last fall we were psyched to have what we though a cool local bar to stumble to on occasion. Of course, on our first attempt to stumble to it we were pretty underwhelmed by the stench and shocking lack of ambiance of the place. A 143 year old building that looks like the “Times Square of Elora” (hold you snicker) should be a focal point of the downtown core not the blight that it has become.

I gave some serious consideration to offering to buy the place and turning it around. I walked the building, spoke to some of the tenants and schemed for several nights on if an upscale brew pub might work there, with function rooms and more community connection then the current format. I think less small town hotel and more gentrified might have worked.

I figured it would go for the high 6 figures and the repairs would be steep too - especially to bring it back to what it could be. Given those numbers I sat on the idea, not knowing if it warranted a $1M investment to go into the drunk-fight-refereeing business. $525 is a decent price, I think.

The Guelph Mercury has some coverage of the sale and future plans.

Aparently its going to become…wait for it: a medical practice. Crap. I love the idea that somebody is taking it on to clean the place up, restore it - the town will be better for that. But for me a medical practice office is a place you drive to. It has no soul. It does not belong at the nexxus of a community like Elora. Elora is quirky and vibrant and hip. In any other storefront I think a medical practice would be fine but there is so much potential for this location I’m saddened - mostly on my own lack pulling the trigger.

Mindreef graciously accepts our 5th Jolt award, thats 3 in a row!  Congrats to us, and our customers!

What do you call it when you think you’ve finished an IM conversation, closed the IM window but then the person  you’re chatting with gives you a little extra “seeya” or “l8r” which pops the window back open?

Please add your fav term to the comments.