latoga labs

Earlier this week I got together with a group of entrepreneurs I know and I was surprised to learn that one of them is starting to instrument his online application to provide Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities. Granted, he didn’t realize that what he was doing was BAM, but that just shows that as a business person he intuitively knew he needed to instrument and monitor his business.

This is a very smart move on his part. Early on in a startup’s life cycle all the focus can be on the business of the end users and forget about the business of running the business. With limited engineering resources, where do you invest them? Most startups will invest all of those resources into their product offering. Only later, when the product complexity has grown and they are out talking to investors do they realize the mistake they made.

This particular entrepreneur is the founder of Amahi, which offers a linux home server. You sign up for the Amahi service, which is currently free, and then download the Linux based software needed to run your home server. Amahi has highly automated the process of getting everything installed and up and running, in the end you have your old PC re-provisioned as a home server for your “family intranet”. You can then monitor your home server from the Amahi website.

With their new instrumentation, Amahi can now monitor how many people have signed up and where each one is in the installation process. If a customer stalls out somewhere in the installation, Amahi now knows about it and can proactively reach out to provide assistance. Beyond that, as the person running the Amahi business, the Founder now knows what his conversion rates and time frames are for customers for each stage of their installation. If Amahi ever needs to go talk to investors for funding, this information is invaluable as it shows how their business works and provides the investors a sense of comfort that the business is being professionally managed.

As a long time statistics hound, I worked in the early day of the web providing application instrumentation for running explosive web businesses. We were always focused on the technical instrumentation of the servers, but I also got interested in the business possibilities instrumentation provided. BAM has been a decade long initiative to move that instrumentation up to the business level, an initiative which was highly successful. However, BAM typically focuses on larger companies. The principals of BAM can just as easily be applied to Startups with just as much value. The startups just need to invest the time to build it into their system from the start.

Tags: , Amahi, BAM, Home Server, Startup

In a previous post Green Scene Hits Your Code, I mentioned how a friend of mine loaned me a Kill A Watz. I realize I am a bit behind on posting the results from my non-scientific home test.

For about two weeks, I had the Kill A Watz monitoring the electrical usage of our home entertainment center. Specifically a:

• Panasonic 42″ Plasma TV
• Sony DVD Player
• Sony VCR Player
• Yamaha Subwoofer

(It’s a really simple home entertainment system. And yeah, I know, the VCR is an antique. Even worse, I don’t own a DVR…which would have driven up my numbers.)

The Kill A Watz records the number of hours it is plugged in as well as the total Kwh of electrical usage. The primary goal of my test was to see how much electricity and money I would save by physically pulling the plug on all this stuff versus having it sit in standby mode. Everything is plugged into a power strip. For about one week, we just left everything in standby mode. Then for about another week, we flipped the switch on the power strip to off when we were done watching TV.

Here are the numbers from the Kill A Watz (note: it wasn’t an exact week for each run):

Stand By Mode	167 Hours	8.03 Kw	48.08 watts/hour
Powered Off	281 Hours	8.53 Kw	30.36 watts/hour

So, by out right turning off the entire system we saved 17.72 watts of electricity per hour. If you calculate this over an average 30 day (720 hour) month with the cost of electricity from my last PG&E bill, ( ((17.72 watts x 720 hours) / 1000) * $.22708 per Kwh ) you end up with a monthly savings of $2.90! Saving me about 2.5% of my electric bill.While that’s not a lot of savings, overall. It’s a start. More importantly it started me thinking about the power consumption of our house in general. The findings would be much more substantial if I ran the same test in my home office. Turning off my 4 hard drive NAS system, all my networking gear along with the computers when not in use — even if just overnight — would result in a huge savings. I actually did this a few years back when my wife and I went on vacation for a 3 weeks; physically powering down all the gear in the home office and the home entertainment center cut our electrical bill almost in half that month.Coincidentally, I recently came across an article in the Economist talking about two devices that monitor the electrical usage for your home as whole. The Owl and Wattson are both similar devices, they have a sensor that attaches to where you power comes into the house and a remote display that shows you your usage. The Wattson has more stylish flare as well as the ability to output data to a computer for further analysis, but today is only designed to be used in the UK (both actually come from the UK). Both do essentially the same thing, let you view your power consumption in real time.

It is amazing to see how much energy different items in your house consumes. One thing I noticed with the Kill A Watz is that when the plasma TV is running, it consumes between 200 and 400 watts of power depending on if the scene is dark or bright. A curious discovery. While these types of gadgets don’t do much on their own to save electricity, the awareness they help raise is a great start.

Tags: Energy Consumption, Kill A Watz, The Owl, The Wattson

Wow, it sounds like the main stream tech media might be catching up to what the users who have moved from Windows to the Mac OS X have been saying for a few years now: “It Just Works”:

• Business Week: Apple’s OS Edge Is a Threat to Microsoft
• Computer World: Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn

Not that this is anything new to a large number of people…but when a Gartner analyst makes a warning like that against one of the analyst industry cash cows…or was it just stating more of the obvious. When you read through the details, the Gartner analyst are essentially telling Microsoft to turn Windows into the MacOS.  Only Apple already swallowed the horse pill of starting from scratch and upsetting their development community 8 years ago.  It would be interesting to see how Microsoft handles the same situation (which it must).

Tags: , Apple, Microsoft

Today I was talking with a fellow entrepreneur who told me about a new class of web2.0 companies that I had not heard of before.  Financial portal sites that you give your financial account login info to and then they screen scrape those sites to provide you a single portal view of all your information and then anonymously compare it to the community.

Are You $#@& Kidding Me?  (Pardon my censored obscenity…)

That was my initial reaction when I heard this.  Giving some 3rd party website my login to my social network or photo sharing site for data aggregation purposes is one thing (and that is scary enough), but who in their right mind would give some 3rd party website the login to their financial accounts?

And yet, that is exactly what Cake Financial, Covester (recently raised $6.5M in funding), and others are doing. Granted, I don’t know a lot about these firms at this point, I know Cake claims to integrate all your finanical data and Covester might be more of a money management social network (wasn’t this already tried with the messages on Yahoo Financials?  I know insiders who leaked data and caused possible financial damage to their companies on sites like that).   I am both surprised and not by the fact that these companies exist and are getting funding.  I just hope that they are thinking of the long term and learning from the recent financial scandels and are putting real safeguards in place to protect themselves, their investors, and most importantly their communities.

Time will tell…

But I do think this just shows the real need for Open Data sharing access that is the corner stone to the new value proposition for most of the internet based services.  This is an area that I have been doing a lot of thought and research on lately.  First by building a proof of concept demo for SnapLogic that integrates an open with a not-so-open service to show the added value of the combination.  And Second, leveraging that initial POC and my years of selling experience to come up with a number of interesting ways to leverage these two data types to provide disruptive changes in the sales process and possibly organization of sales teams (more on that later…).  I have also been working through a number of real business differentiating photography sharing capabilities that use the same concept for FocalPower.

The need for services to enable their uses to access and share their data and metadata with other services/users is real and valuable.  The real trick is choosing the right level of openness  to make it usable by the masses and proliferate while enabling new revenue generation.  You have to balance the openness with the protection of your users.  How do you do that such that you don’t prevent the innovation that this type of openness allows?  Look at all the innovative things that have come out of the open API on Flickr.  Opening up your service via an API to share data and metadata has to be an all or nothing proposition with regards to who has access to that data.  Placing too many restrictions just stifles the innovation.  Note I said restrictions, not safe guards.  There needs to be safe guards in place to protect the users.  And the ability to users to opt-in to the open access or different levels of the access.

The key thing in all these integrations is for the users to read the terms of service!   You may be invalidating your terms for using a service if you give your login information to a 3rd party.  And, like the ownership rights grab that have been making waves in the photography industry, you might not own all the information that you expect to own if you use a service.

Tags: Integration, Open API, Open Data

Since my mind is on efficiency this morning (see previous post about Facebook) I wanted to share an interesting blog posting I’ve had open in a browser for a few weeks now.  Steve Sounders, web performance guru from Google and previously Yahoo, posted some interesting thoughts on how green is your web page?

Steve did a quick mental experiment of calculating the CO2 emissions caused by bad code on a large website, he used wikipedia as his example.  I find this a bit interesting on the cyclical nature of the topic.  I might be showing my age a bit here, but back when I was a lad learning how to code up on the frozen tundra, we actually took into consideration efficiency and the cost of operations (maybe it was our proximity to Cray Research that drove this…).  I find it interesting that the green movement is causing this topic to be thought of again but in a different way.

I have been doing a little fun project like this myself at home.  A friend loaned my a device called Kill A Watz, which you plug into a power outlet and then plug other electrical devices into the Kill A Watz. The Kill A Watz then measurs how much electicity you are using on that one outlet.  It can track over time and give you the KW over a time period as well as real time watt usage.  I am using this on our home entertainment center to measure how much electricity is uses when it’s in standby mode.  Watch for a posting on that next week.  (I will give a teaser and let you know that a flat panel plasma TV uses twice the electricity when displaying a bright scene than when displaying a dark one…)

Tags: Coding, Efficiency, Performance