latoga labs

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.

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…)

Close on the heels of my side box comments about NewCorp’s influence being felt at the WSJ.com, I listened to an interesting discussion on KQED’s Forum about the Future of Newspapers on Friday. It was an interesting discussion that included Phil Bronstein, the departing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The discussion about how newspapers make money and can continue to make money today was quite interesting. Especially when you extend the same concepts to online services and this mentality of free advertising supported services. My biggest complained about my recent visit to WSJ.com was that there were all these animated advertisements that started to jump out at me. It was very distracting and frustrating, I felt like I had to work extra hard just to find and to read the article I went to the WSJ.com to read.

We find ourselves in an interesting catch-22. Ideally, you create a product or service that others find valuable and willing to pay for. With advertising, you create a product or service that can attract a lot of eyeballs and then sell advertising to support it. Who cares if the product or service is hard to use or requires you to spend more time on it than you should to accomplish a task…that’s more eye balls, more clicks, more advertising revenue.

I have thought that mixing the internet advertising technology with the newspaper would be the best way to support that business. Have customer configured ala-cart services and advertise within those services that helps pay for these services. Customers get to read what they want and the advertising helps pay for it. But, how do you allocate the advertising resources out to pay for the content? that could lead to popular content thriving while the meaningful, but less popular, content being starved.

So then, how do you pay for the services that our society as a whole really needs? How do newspapers pay for the in depth reporting on social topics that are important (even if us readers don’t realize it yet)? Is it enough to have the popular content pay for the not so popular content?

This is a constant battle that most founders and CEOs of web2.0 like startups are dealing with every day…pay for service or advertising paid service. The parallels continue…

Ah, Halloween. The day that all the ghosts, goblins, and zombies come out. Unfortunately for a co-worker of mine, today was the day that his Windows laptop become a zombie. He flew across the country to spend a day working on a customer deliverable with members of the team that are based out here in San Francisco, only to spend at least 2 hours today trying to get his Windows XP laptop to work correctly.

I thought this was a timely, as this morning I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that talked about the 50 Gigabytes of crash data that Microsoft can receive in a day from Windows users who click the “tell Microsoft about this problem” button when something crashes on their systems. Luckily for the poor Microsoft engineers who have to sift through this data, my co-worker didn’t click that button at all today.

All of this made me appreciate my MacBook an the MacOS even more. Even with the reports of installation bugs in the latest upgrade of MacOS, I can’t fathom going back to my old Windows system. While traveling, I don’t even give it another thought as I sit down next to fellow business traveler on a plane and open my MacBook, have it wake from sleep, I login and start working in under 10 seconds while they are waiting for their computers to startup.

In the little over two months that I have been using my new MacBook–wow, it’s only been just over two months, it feels like so much longer–I have not had it crash once. Ok, well…that might not be technically true. It did technical crash this morning…I was actually shutting the computer down to swap batteries when the system encountered some error and I got the “your system encountered an error, please manually power down” message. I don’t count this because it didn’t effect my productivity (I was already shutting down the system). This was actually during one of the zombie moments my co-worker was dealing with and I was rebooted, and back to productive work before he stopped his cursing…the system still wasn’t working.

And I don’t even know how many times I have put this system to sleep during this period. I would conservatively estimate 100+ times since I receive it. As so many others who have made the switch, it just works. I could never say that about my old Windows system, especially with regards to putting it to sleep! This being said, I’m still taking the pragmatic approach of waiting for the next patch release of Leopard before upgrading…even thought some of the features like spaces will be just improve my productivity even more.

I haven’t spent much time writing about my switch because, quite honestly, I’ve been too busy getting work done. It’s gotten to the point where it just seems natural to rely and even depend on my computer just working. Today’s events just reminded me of how fortunate I am (and surprises me at how foolish corporate IT departments are at undervaluing their employees time by not considering the Mac as a technology platform).

Love my Mac…and I can’t afford to go back!

Side Box: One issue that is a bit annoying, mostly because of the battery drain it causes when I’m traveling, is the CPU over cycling that Firefox seems to have on the Mac. I used Firefox exclusively on my old PC and never noticed a constant CPU consumption issue. With Firefox on the Mac, it always seems to be using 10% or more of the CPU time on the computer. Even when Firefox is hidden from view and there is nothing running in the windows. Very frustrating as I always seem to have about 6-10 web site tabs open to various things that I’m working on or reading. So when I travel, this constant background CPU noise shortens my battery life by a noticeable amount.I haven’t had a chance to research this yet, so if any one knows a solution to this please share!

It’s been a long ten years, and oh how you have grown…

A few days ago, I welcomed back into my life the Mac. It was time for a laptop upgrade (what does it say when you have worn half the lettering off your keyboard?) and I was ready for a change. Like most, I wasn’t that excited about a laptop with Vista on it. And my existing laptop–an IBM ThinkPad which I absolutely admire–was starting to show it’s processor age as well as strange OS level behavior (like at times it wouldn’t be able to resolve DNS names which essentially made it useless online…after hours of trying to fix that, I finally just gave up and rebooted it when it occurred!). It was time to make a change for the better…for the betterment of my productivity. I bought a new PowerBook Pro.

Since I had it customized (maxed out the memory and added the larger/faster hard drive), I had to wait a few weeks for the computer to arrive. That wouldn’t have been so hard if it wasn’t for the fact that the software I ordered with the Mac (Parallels and MS Office) kept arriving at my door in separate boxes. Finally, I got an email saying that my new laptop had left the factory. Like a kid waiting for Christmas Eve, I kept checking back to the FedEx tracking website to keep tabs on my Mac. There is something perverse about watching the delivery progress of something built half way around the world:

Then, the same day I’m to leave for a business trip, I see that my Mac has been loaded on the truck. Oh, the pressure! I don’t have to leave for the airport until Noon, if the laptop arrives at 10am, do I have time to get it functional so I can take it on my trip? I sure was going to try!

So after about an hour and half (I had a half hour interuption to deal with a work issue), I had the Mac booted up for the first time, configured, installed my needed software, and connected to my mail account to start syncing my mail. I don’t think I would have been able to do that with a PC. In the end, I wanted time to get re-aquanted with my old friend (my first laptop was a PowerBook 510 which I bought 12 years ago and replaced 10 years ago). And what better time than on a 4 hour plane ride? So I ended up packing up both laptops and headed off to the airport. So, seven hours after it left FedEx’s Oakland facility, the MacBook Pro was back within sight of it’s arrival point.

I brought the ThinkPad along as a backup and to transfer over my work documents. That night at my hotel, I set up a peer to peer wireless network between the two machines, connected the Mac to my shared documents folder on the ThinkPad, and copied over all my files in an hour. I have tried many times to get a peer to peer wireless network to work between two Windows laptops and was never successful. Worked first time with the Mac.

I plan on documenting my experiences transition from the PC back to the Mac over the course of the next few weeks. And I’ll start off by stating a few of my first impressions:

• Apple definitely has the entire user experience down! From unpacking the laptop from it’s briefcase like box, to the bare essentials presented to you when you remove the styrofoam. The laptop itself even came in a nice protective sleeve. It is quite an experience.
• The small usability things that Apple focuses on do make a huge difference. Something as simple as a well designed power supply seems so trivial, until you have one. I was expecting to have to buy a second power supply–I have 5 for my ThinkPad and they are strategically placed around my entire house–but the design with the unfolding prongs which can be replaced with a longer power cable is ideal. I leave the power cable plugged in at my desk at home, and just take the brick and the unfolding prongs on the road.
• The lack of the Intel Inside sticker was something that I completely overlook until I saw this article today.
• The fact that the machine comes out of sleep mode in under 5 seconds is amazing. I was getting jealous stares from other windows users on the plane tonight as I opened the laptop and started typing within 5 seconds! It’s shocking how much time you loose waiting for the windows machines to come back to life. I does take longer for the Mac to go to sleep, about 20 seconds. I think that is due to the 4 Gigs of RAM in my machine that have to be written to disk (I used a 2 Gig model that did go to sleep faster). Regardless, this is still about half the time or less that it took my Windows XP machine to go to sleep…and about 20-30x faster than waking an XP machine up!
• So far, I have not encountered any issues with any of my documents from the PC. Since I have office installed (needed that so I could connect to my companies exchange server for email), all the docs that I have needed opened right up. I’ll be watching this closely over the next few days.
• It has taken a few extra moments here and there to figure out how to do something that was second nature to me on a PC…like right clicking on a mis-spelled word to fix it! But, after a few seconds of experimenting with the FN, CTRL, and OPTION keys on the keyboard, I figured out the right combination to replace the right click action on the PC. There are a few things that I already think will take me time to get used to, like the lack of a dedicated page up, page down, and backspace key.

All in all, I’m glad I spent the extra money and moved back to a Mac. Cool factor aside, I can tell already that I am able to be more productive with this machine. The learning curve isn’t that great. And I doubt my previous experience has much to do with that since a lot has changed in the past 10 years. I’ll continue documenting my experiences here on the blog over the next few weeks.

I used to roll my eyes back a bit when I heard other people say it, but it’s true.. the Mac OS just works. What a novel thought!