Marcelo Calbucci

    I'll be going to the Entrepreneur University (EU) this Thursday. This event is organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur University (NWEN) every year and I attended the last 2 years. They used to be at the University of Washington, but this year it will be on the Sheraton Hotel in Seattle.

    Of all the training, seminars, classes, breakfast meetings, and talks that I ever attended, the EU is by far the best. It is full of entrepreneurs, the presenters are fantistic people (most of them) from all realms of expertise to make an entrepreneur succeed. I end up meeting interesting people and you can always find a familiar face. Usually somebody from MSFT that is thinking about leaving. :)

    Last year Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, just knocked it out of the park. His presentation was awesome (I tried to stalk him into looking into Sampa, but that didn't work).

    This year presenters include Pete Higgins (2nd Ave. Partners), Jon Roberts (Ignition Partners), Craig Sherman (Wilson Sonsini) -- BTW, Craig is Sampa's lawyer, Jim Sinegal (Costco's CEO), and a few others.

    The interesting (maybe obvious) thing is that you never know which presenters will be good or bad. Their status, years of experience, position, wealth and other factors are not indication of how good they are at giving a talk.

    Well, I'll be there from 7AM until 8PM, so if you see a guy handing out free business cards that is me (or somebody else).

    About 10 days ago I remembered that I needed to go to Apple's website to find out if my battery was recalled. It had been a couple of months since the whole deal started and I have not received any letter.

    So, on October 21 (Sunday) I went there, entered my laptop serial number and bingo. It was recalled. I filled in the info and receive an email confirmation.

    Then, just 3 days later I received a letter from Apple telling me the battery had been recalled and I should go to the website. A-ha! I'm ahead of you -- been there, done that.

    Yesterday, just 5 business days later, I received my new battery. I was pretty amazed since on the confirmation email they said it could take between 4 and 6 weeks. My luck was to go to the website before Apple mailed their hundreds of thousands of customers.

    The only un-Apple thing in this whole process was the letter explaining how to return the old battery. I was two pages long! I'm sure they could have simplified and made it short.

    Of course you love your family, friends and co-workers (some of them, at least), but in the context of (your) business their opinion is very tainted. Let me explain better.

    If you are embarking into the tough world of Startups, and you leave your safe and secure job to try to create something new, usually, the first thing that a reasonable person would do is to validate what he or she is going to do. And who is better to ask them the people around you? They are right there.

    $&@#... that is you falling into a pit.

    You asked the people that like you the most and are probably most afraid of offending you, or shattering your big dream. Why would they do that? Maybe you do have a couple of honest friends that will tell you the "truth", but that still is useless. Why? 'Cause they are not your customers!!!

    Repeat 3 times: Ask the Customers! Ask the Customers! Ask the Customers!

    When you hear your friend Mark telling you "this is the most brilliant idea I heard in a long time", or when your Entrepreneur Aunt Janice tells you "you've got what it takes to make this idea into a successful product" think twice. They might be experts, they might know the field, but are they your customer? And they can't say they will buy or use your product, you have to be sure they will.

    People can say whatever they want, but once you ask for an upfront payment for the product to help with the R&D effort, if they don't put the money down, they are not your customers.

    Now, on the context of keeping you motivated and support you during tough times, having the comforting words of Family and Friends supporting your idea is very important, but that is that. It won't help you get more customers if your product doesn't solve their needs.

    ImageKind is this cool website released recently by Kelly Smith (a friend of mine) and others.

    If you read the "The Long Tail" you'll understand what I'm talking about. This is just a few of the reasons I think this will be a successful Web 2.0 company, in no particular order:

1. From day one, they understood the revenue model;
2. They are empowering all artists, professional or not, to create their own web-based art gallery and sell it directly to customers.
3. They totally enable the "long tail" effect (very low cost of carrying millions of items).
4. They understand the space (Adrian has a framing business).
5. I exchange many emails with Kelly while they were building ImageKind. They put a lot of effort into creating a great user experience.
6. They are creating a business eco-system (think eBay).
7. Kelly gets things done;

    Enough said.

    Election time makes you think about a few things. When I first heard of the Electoral College in the US I was a bit surprise. How come something like the 2000 election could have happened? Where somebody wins the public vote, but loses the presidency.

    My americans friends point out that this is to keep the system fair and avoid small states of not having any representation. I can't get over how stupid this is.

    And then I realize another problem with elections, which is widespread on all countries of the world...

Why is representation by geography?

    That is another thing that can be perceived as stupid.

    Why people from Washington State gets to elect 9 representatives and people from Vermont gets to elect 1? Clearly, this is because the population of Vermont should be about 1/9th of the population of Washington. So far so good. But the laws being approved at the federal level are mostly about national or global issues, so why geography matters?

   What if, instead of dividing the House of Representatives and the Senate by state, it would be divided by race, age, gender, religion, social class, etc.

    Right now 13% of all Americans are Black, the Senate has 100 seats and the House has 435 Representatives. That means to be a true representation of the US, there should be about 13 black senators and 56 congressman on the house. Let's see...

    In the House there are 40 black representatives (by my account) which is not bad, but on the Senate there is Barack Obama, and ... Nope, that is it. One black senator. Clearly, Whites are over-represented on both houses.

    Now, we can use the same type of math for the other factors:

• Age: this is the oldest congress in history with an average of 56 years-old for Representatives and 61 for Senators. The median american age: 35.3 years old.
• Gender: Women should have a few more representatives, since 51% of the population is female, but according to Wikipedia, only 15% are congresswomen, while 85% of congressmen.
• Religion, Social class, etc.

    My suggestion is a new House of Representatives that is effectively a representation of the US population. Clearly you can't have a 7-years-old representing his age group, but besides some minor issues, you can get a pretty honest and representative system.

    Divide each candidate into the following profile:

• Ethnic group: Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, Others
• Age group: 18-35, 36-49, 50-65, 65-older;
• Gender: Male, Female
• Religion: Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Other Christian, Jewish, Others
• Social class: A, B, C, D, E

    Divide each voter into the same profile as above, so that each one can only vote for people that fit their profile. Each profile is considered 100% of the votes, which means if a black candidate gets 80% of the votes for black candidates, he ranks higher than a white candidate that gets 60% of the votes from white voters.

    Stack rank all the candidates and you've built yourself a representative House of Representatives.

    Now, there is some complicated logistic to make it work, but if it did, it would be awesome.

    Robert Sutton is publishing a book called "The No Asshole Rule" and Guy Kawasaki got an early edition of the book. Guy summarizes very good points from the book.

How to detect an asshole:

"...If you hear someone at a Starbucks order a 'decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n’-Low and one NutraSweet,' you’re in the presence of an asshole. ..."

He also has many tips on how to avoid being an asshole and how to deal with assholes. Worth reading. Link.

    I used to have this theory that every electronic should stop working after 5 years, so it forces you to upgrade. Computers, TVs, DVDs, MP3 players, etc.

    However, for certain things it should be more like 3 years. Like Digital Cameras. The evolution of digital cameras is more impressive than the evolution of Microprocessors and Hard-disks.

    My Canon Digital Rebel is showing its sign of aging. I bought it the same week that Canon released it at the end of 2003. It was the first worth having Digital SLR. When they released the 8MP version (I think it was last year), it wasn't enough of a difference for me to replace mine (w/ 6MP), but now with the 10MP the story starts to change.

   The battery of my camera is almost dead. The noisy on low light it is bothering more nowadays (because they new cameras are better). And the flash memory that I use on this camera is so freakin' slow that is unbelievable.

    But I'll need to wait at least until next year. Right now all my resources are going to Sampa.

    I probably bit more than I could chew, translation, building the Geo-Database for Sampa was probably the hardest feature to date on Sampa. There are many aspects that make it harder, but the number is probably the lack of consistency on terms of geographical names and cataloging them.

    I want a Geo-database to do two things:

1. Given a geographic name (city, state, square, river, etc.) return an unique identifier for that location and its coordinates.
2. Given a coordinate, find the most likely geographic entity that this point belongs to.

    For #1 I could have used your traditional geo-coder (from Yahoo, Google, ServiceObjects, etc.), but the problem is that they don't return a unique identifier. Using the city name is not a unique identifier because many cities have the same name, using a combination of the neighborhood + city + state + country would be unique, but it would be too long to store on each picture (for Geo-Tagging).

    The problem with implementing #1 is the amount of duplicate names. For example, there are more than 40 places in the world named "São Paulo". In 99.999% of the cases, when somebody types São Paulo they are probably refering to my birth city and not the other tiny places around the world. Same thing for places like Paris, Tokyo, London. All of those names identify many places, but they are likely to be refering to "Paris, France", "Tokyo, Japan" and "London, England".

    So, the only way to return the correct value in the correct order is to use some kind of Importance factor. In my view, and on the context of pictures/blogs, the things that make a place more likely to be what the user is looking for are:

• The population of a location: Higher the population, more likely to be a match;
• The size of location (as in how many square kilometers of area) -- Think of a national park or river (it has no population)
• The number of tourists per year -- this is interesting because a lot of tourists hot spots don't have a lot of population, like Seychelles, Cannes, Venice, Angra dos Reis, etc.

    To make the ranking more reliable, I manage to get the population of about 30,000 cities. But I'm still not happy, because my database has about 3 million locations.

    How to get the size of locations? That is probably the hardest thing to get in terms of Geographic databases.

    The number of tourists could be extrapolated based on the number of hotel's and/or the number of hotel rooms on that place. But where to get this data from?

    I just got the database to work, the code in place and searching for "São Paulo" returned the big city in result #1, which is what I needed. I feel a bit relieved that the system works the way I designed it. I spent way too much time on this, while I should have re-dimensioned the feature to make it simpler. Two weeks are gone and just 1 feature gets implemented. Very frustrating.

    I just got an email from UPS that I was 99.9% sure it was spam. Turns out it was a legitimate email, but it was poorly done.

    First the message comes from "QuantumView [QuantumViewNotify@ups.com]". Seriously? Is that the name that you guys choose? I'm sure it is some kind of internal tool or service on UPS, but as a customer it couldn't be less effective. Couldn't it be called "UPS Shipping Notification" or something less bizarre.

    Then it comes the title of the message:

    "UPS Ship Notification, Tracking Number 1Z341YAY21587224761"

    Ok, not bad, at least it says it is a UPS package info with the famous UPS tracking number, but it doesn't really tell me anything. It looks like spam. If it has a link on the body it sure must be spam (wait, there is a link in the body of the message!)

    There is two mistakes on the title, first, it doesn't tell me who is it from, nor tells me that you guys know who I am. Next time, try this.

    "UPS Shipping from Digital Room to Marcelo Calbucci"

    Just by having my full name on the title is a big plus. Most spammers only figure out "marcelo" because that is the email alias. Telling who is shipping the content also helps because you'll immediately identify what it is. UPS knew about Digital Room because it appeared on the body of the message.

    Now, the worst part of the email is the body. It has a lot of legal disclaimers right at the top, it has the shipper ("Digital Room") buried in the middle of the legalese, and it has a poorly formatted content, all in black, that makes it extra harder for me to see my name, the content being shipped, the tracking number.

    My suggestion for emails like these, are to stack rank what are the 3 most important things that you want to get across. Put them right at the top, easy to identify and read, and then add all the crap from the Marketing team, from the Legal team, from the great guys from IT at the bottom. On the case of this message, the 3 most important things are:

1. Who shipped the content;
2. What is the tracking number;
3. When is it expected to arrive.

    There was one super cool thing about these email: It didn't have any embedded or linked images.

   I just figure out my Rank at Technorati is 574,980. Since they are tracking more than 50 million blogs, that puts my site on the top 1% of all blogs. That is good or bad, depends how you look at it.

   My goal on the next 6 months is to move my blog from the top 1% to top 0.3%. Since the blogosphere is doubling every 6 months, that means 100M blogs and my blog rank must be in the 300,000 or so.

    So, I'll write a lot of interesting stuff, not like the crap that I've writing so far. :)

UPDATE: Decio pointed out a flaw on my math. I thought I was at the top 10%, while I'm already on the top 1%. So, my new goal is to make to the top 0.3%.