Marcelo Calbucci

    How about a first meeting of 3.5 hours?

    Today the Sampa team went to a meeting with another startup in the Seattle area. The meeting went from 1:30 pm until 5:00 pm. Not bad for a first meeting.

    I won't tell which company is so we don't spoil the surprise if something comes out of that.

    Basically, they don't do what we do, but their users would like to have what Sampa offers. On the other hand Sampa does a little bit of what they do, not all, and what we do isn't great. It is actually one of our weakest points, yet, our users need it.

    Why don't we do that by ourselves? Why we don't fix this problem if it is so important to our users? The short answer is because it is hard. It is hard to implement, manage and do it right.

    There is a lot of business, marketing and technical discussion that should follow, but we are startups, so in a month or so you should either see some integration between the two companies or the deal didn't go through. Keep watching reading.

 

    I just published over at Seattle 2.0 the list of Seattle Startup Index, which is ordered by each company Alexa Ranking.

 

    Sampa moved to position #26 (from 29) by gaining 5,398 positions on Alexa Traffic Ranking.

 

    There are also 30 new companies on the list this month (!), including Groundspeak, Remote Control Mail (formerly known as Document Command), LexBlog, Down2night, Popshops, Instacalc, Mercent, Bus Monster and more.

 

    Check it out.

 

 

    I'm no expert in economics, I'm not an academic, I'm not a great speller (or good at grammar), and I'm the last person that should be pointing others mistake in using popular expressions. But still, if I can teach you something useful, why not?

    The biggest mistake that people make when referring to the 80/20 rule is that they think it sums up to be 100% and that is incorrect. What if I tell you about a 90/20 rule, would you think I'm incorrect? Mostly people would, but it is not.

    Basically, the official 80/20 rule comes from a guy that did a study (a while ago) and realized that 80% of resources X were being consumed by 20% of the "consumers", so the opposite also is easy to understand: 20% of the resources were being used by 80% of the "consumers".

    In other words, you are talking about 80% of A by 20% of B, where A and B are distinct entities.

    Last Thursday I went to the Amazon Start-up Project, and Matt McIlwain, a Venture Capitalist from Madrona was talking that 99% of companies don't need (or should not) use VC money. He is correct. Most service companies (lawyers, consultants, cleaners, restaurants) and most mom-and-pop shop cannot return the multiples that VCs expect, and they are the majority of the US companies.

    The mistake that McIlwain made was referring to it as the "99/1 rule" when he meant to say the "100/1" rule.

    See, there are only two ways to interpret 99/1 and neither work:

• 99% of the companies consume 1% of the VC money;
• 99% of VC money is consumed by 1% of the companies;

    What he should have said is that 100% of VC money is consumed by 1% of the companies, hence the "100/1 rule".

 

    Yesterday I went to the first Amazon Start-Up Project event, which was organized by the AWS team (Amazon Web Services). I did some live blogging.

 

    By far, this was the best event of the year for entrepreneurs. Why? Because it was a room full of entrepreneurs and investors (and the AWS team), but that was it. Other events always have a lot of service providers (lawyers, consultants, agents, etc.), usually on a rate of 4:1 (4 services providers for each 1 entrepreneur/investor).

 

    Jeff Bar talk was good. It was a great overview of the AWS platform (S3, ECS, Message Queue) and how companies can take advantage of that. It makes a lot of sense.

 

    My only two complaints about the event was the audio that was hard to hear on the back, and the projection screen which was too low and you could not read the bottom 1/3 of it.

 

    There was a short talk by Smartsheet.com and Jamglue.com. After the break Matt McIlwain from Madrona Ventures gave a standard talk about what VCs like to see on companies and he hyped a little the Seattle-area for the great opportunities around here.

 

    Four ex-MSNSearch members were there: Me, Brady Forrest (now at O'Reilly, and he was moderating the panel discussion), Josh Petersen (43 Things et al) and Christopher Payne (ex-MSFT VP of Search, now building his own company).

 

    I also meet some other great people:

 

• Max Ciccotosto, founder of Wishpot.com. We had exchange a few emails on the past but this was the first time we've met face-to-face. Max knows a whole lot about Mobile (Email/SMS/MMS) after spending 7 years on Microsoft Exchange. This is the guy I'll bug when we are implementing SMS features.
  
• Daryn Nakhuda, co-founder of EyeJot. Very nice guy. We are going to get together to talk some ideas that might be beneficial for both of us.
  
• Josh Herst, founder & CEO of TripHub. Geoff Entress from Madrona introduced us. He looked like a nice guy and we didn't have enough time to talk.

 

    Besides those, I also had a chance to catch up with Jeff Barr and Steve Rabuchin, both organizers of the event.

 

    The biggest surprise was the number of startups on the event. Probably more than 100. I need to do some serious updates to Seattle 2.0 blog.

 

    I expected to see a few people that were not there: Kelly Smith (ImageKind), anyone from Twango, anyone from BlueDot, Hans Omli and others. How did you guys miss this?

 

    I hope Amazon does another event like this soon, however I was told they would take this on the road now, so it might take a while until they are back in Seattle.

 

    This is way bigger than I was expecting. I'm here at the Start-up Project and Jeff Barr just gave the first talk. There are more than 250 entrepreneurs and investors here. Really cool. I wish I had the time to meet with all of them, but it won't be today.

    I'll blog more later.

 

    I'm just about to go to this Amazon event called the Start-up project. I love this idea because it is very likely I'll meet a few entrepreneurs from Seattle, people that I know already and some new ones.

 

    Exchanging idea with somebody that is going through the same thing that you are is the best way to learn something new. Better than books, better than a seminar, better than anything I can imagine. That is why I love this kind of networking events.

 

 

    Yesterday we presented at the Alliance of Angels. As always, Paul did a superb job at explaining why the problem matters, why Sampa has the right solution and why we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.

 

    We got a bit more than half-dozen angels interested in talking with us and a couple of VCs as well.

 

    This morning I thought it was a bug and the MSNBC page didn't load properly. Nope, it did load properly. They decided to add a dashed underline to every link. Yay! Oh, and they also changed the link color from black to a blue. Double Yay! How long it took for them to do that? My guess is a 2-4 months.

 

    That is the problem with old-style Internet businesses (yes, MSNBC is old). They are afraid of taking the jump. They cannot think outside the box anymore and all they do, release to release, is to change colors and graphic elements and that is it.

 

    They refuse to change their layout, content style, or how things are presented to user. Even CNN.com made bigger and bolder changes on the past.

 

    What about user engagement, you know, the new "it"? Nothing new on this front. No surprise.

 

 

    As an entrepreneur I'm always look for ways to connect with investors, particularly angel investors. There is a handful of organizations in the Puget Sound that make it easier to connect with those investors, like the Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum and the Puget Sound Venture Club.

    Some of these organizations can cost you anywhere between $300 to $5K to present to investors, which for a startup can be a hefty price to pay if there is no good outcome.

    After talking with a bunch of entrepreneurs last week, it was a consensus that Zino Society was the worst $1,500 to $5K they ever spent. Why? According to them, not only they didn't get any funding, but they had the feeling that the investors were not that interested in investing at all.

    That is pretty bad for Zino Society. For example, Keiretsu and Alliance of Angels are very open about the results startups get presenting at their forum, which is usually around 50% getting funded. Zino Society? Nowhere to be seen any stats about their group.

    Ok, it took forever, but we joined the party. Now we have Netflix (like everybody else) and our first movie was Walk the Line. I thought that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were very good, but that was it. The story wasn't interesting.

 

    The next question is why am I writing a movie review on my blog, which I never did before? To show off our new Blog About a Movie feature.

 

    Try it out at your own site.

 

    I think startup culture is very powerful. It can occur on startups, on established company, even on large mamoth corporations. A startup culture foster innovation, creativity at solving day-to-day problems, a higher risk-reward approach, etc.

 

    The flip side is old-company mentality. You know the type of company I'm talking about: Ten layers of bureaucracy, endless unproductive meetings, work scoped so thinly that nobody has true ownership of a piece of the product (nor accountability).

 

    Well, this morning I was reading what was supposed to be a great blog post by Naffziger, a VP of Engineering at Judy's Book, and it talked about when great people don't convert into great teams (for me there is a simple word that describe why this happens: synergy). He gives 5 tips to "fix" that, but the first one was really painful:

"Clearly define responsibilities. Managers need to clearly define the boundaries between responsibilities and ensure those boundaries are upheld. Team members need to be congratulated for excelling in their role and discouraged when they unproductively stray into someone else’s role."

    That is a tip that I would expect coming out of Microsoft's Core Competencies cards, not from somebody working in a startup.

 

    My view on this is that if you have people that are "unproductively straying into someone else's role" you have two bad people on your team: the person "straying" for unproductively and the person that is uncapable of receiving input on his/her work.

 

    On startups everybody needs to know what everybody else is doing. More than that, anyone should be able to influence somebody else's work without creating chaos. If they are either creating chaos or being unproductive, they are not fit for a startup.

 

    I would go as far as to say that overlap of responsabilities is a good thing in startups, contrary to well established companies. If both persons are really capable and "hungry", they will not fight, but seek each others input at making their part better. If they fight, there is lack of synergy and it doesn't matter how "A-players" they are, it won't work.

 

    About the other 4 tips that Naffziger gives they are not bad (or great). They are just common sense that some times need to be said (written) out-loud (in a blog): Highlight success, encourage feedback, increase feelings of security and let time work.

 

 

UPDATE: Dave Naffziger just added a thoughtful comment making his point clearer.

 

    It is very common for Web 2.0 companies to suffer major performance or scalability issues (usually both). This is not different from outages on the Web 1.0 age. Even major companies like Amazon and eBay suffered a lot of growing pains with reliability of their service.

    Recently, a key person at Twitter (a growing Web 2.0 startup) complained about the pain of making Ruby on Rails scale.

    About 18 months ago, another entrepreneur from Seattle asked me what he should use to build his new service. He knows quite a lot of technology, but he is not a developer, so, for him, it was a matter of what skills he would be looking for on a developer.

    I'm no fanatic. I believe that if you are an expert on PHP, you should build your company on PHP. If you are expert on ASP.NET, you should use ASP.NET. If 50% of your developers know ASP.NET, and 100% know Ruby on Rails, you should use Ruby.

    On his case, he was in doubt between Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET. I told him both would be fine, although I don't really know anything about Ruby, except that Ruby on Rails is an unproven technology. It doesn't mean it is not going to work, or it won't scale, or it won't be reliable, etc. It is just there are not enough sites built on it. Nobody questions a website built with Apache and C++ ISAPI. It has been done a million times and it can scale beyond anything imaginable.

    He has chosen ASP.NET. His service is running and growing fast and he had not had any problem with scalability of his application or architecture yet. He did had some storage issues though, but that was independent of framework or platform.

    The lesson: Build stuff using the tools you know. Better yet if what you know is guaranteed to work.

 

    Tough question. The shortest answer is no.

 

    For me to consider a technology that requires a client-side platform, I'd probably would like to see 50% or more of adoption on our user base. Silverlight at this moment has close to 0.00001% (give or take a few digits).

 

    Microsoft did other stuff on that past that didn't get any adoption, so, if they fail with this one it won't be the first time.

 

    As a startup, every bet you make has to bring significant return and move you forward. A single bet that doesn't pan out is enough to kill your business. For now we are sticking to well-known, well-established client technologies like a browser, HTML and Javascript. Turns out that 100% of our users have that and near 100% of the Internet population have that as well.

 

    Our presentation on ESIF yesterday landed us a paragraph on the Seattle P-I today, by John Cook:

 

"Investors who listened to the presentation of Sampa -- a Redmond Web site creation service -- were so impressed with the backgrounds of Chief Executive Paul Gross and Chief Technology Officer Marcelo Calbucci that they wondered why the startup even needed angel financing. Gross has spent 25 years in the software industry, most recently serving as an entrepreneur in residence at Ignition Partners. Before that, he held senior vice president positions at Microsoft and Borland International."

 

    First of all, we are honored by the "so impressed [with our] background" part. After Paul's presentation he had to leave the room so people could discuss the company, but I stayed (hidden in the back) and I heard a few people praising the team. My favorite was a gentleman that said "...this is a dynamite team...".

 

    Second, I feel the need to explain why we need Angel Investing since John Cook paraphrases somebody on the audience that asked that question, and here it is...

 

 

    I absolutely have no money left to invest. I literally invested 100% of my liquid assets in Sampa. I also sold my nice BMW and put into Sampa. My wife has a full-time job and she can pay the bills. I have not received any salary over the last 28 months and I have no discretionary spending money whatsoever. The angel money will not be used to pay me a salary (that I will wait until the Series A).

 

    Paul, on the other hand, already made financial investments (besides his time and career investment) in Sampa. He is also going to reinvest side-by-side with the new investors, and, like any smart person would do, it is good to have external validation that you are going somewhere and that we are not drinking too much of our own Kool-aid. Another reason that we need other Angels, which Paul explained during the presentation Q&A session yesterday, is that he has put the bulk of his "risk capital" into founding a clinical research network for Hydrocephalus -- a brain condition that his son (and other 1 million Americans) have.

 

    In summary we do need Angel Investors and hopefully that need will be met on the next few weeks with investments from angels that we've encountered on ESIF, Alliance of Angel and Keiretsu.

 

 

UPDATE: A blog post by John Cook with more details.

 

 

 

    If you follow this blog you saw some mobile-posts yesterday, during the Early Stage Investment Forum. The event was good. There were about 30 companies presenting, and more than 300 attendees for the full-day event. I was told that about 100 those were accredited investors, Angel Investors or VCs.

 

    They recommended that companies arrived at 6 AM (!!!) to set up their booth (a.k.a. 3-feed of a table against a wall). Paul and I decided it was insane. We are a software company and 6:00 AM doesn't exist on our clock. Paul got there at around 8:30 and I got there at around 9:00 AM.

 

    There was the big room where people had breakfast and lunch and where all the "booths" were set. Then, there were 3 parallel sessions where companies from different industries would present, from chocolate manufacturer to performance review software, from a wine bar to consumer web.

 

    I've met a ton of entrepreneurs, like Jon Clemens that founded Jakoba software, Meetul Shah from Knouen, Jordan Mitchell from Others Oline, Phil Cohen from Adapx, Peter Weiss from HyBlue, Allison Nelson from The Local Vine, and others.

 

    Events like this always have their fair share of ex-Microsoftees, some are entrepreneurs, some are investors, some are looking for a startup to help, or are still working at Microsoft and desperate to quit and do something exciting.

 

    On the VC side of things I've met Eric Monsowitz from Maveron, Rick Lefaivre from OVP, Tim Porter from Madrona, which was also the moderator of our presenting room.  Meet a handful of angels that I won't disclose their name for now.

 

    What is worth it? I have to wait a couple of weeks to tell you if anything good comes out of that, and by good I mean the 2-3 angel investors that we are looking for.

 

    This turn out to be a great week for Sampa. Actually, let me rephrase that and say this is a great month for Sampa.

 

    Here is the scoop: We have just been selected to present at the Alliance of Angel's luncheon next Wednesday.

 

    But the good news doesn't stop there, we also got... Well, I can't tell that otherwise it'll jinx it, although I'm not a superstitious person.

 

    To round up the month:

 

• We are presenting tomorrow at the Early Stage Investment Forum. Paul and I will be there the whole day, so if you want to stop by and chat just come find us. We will be wearing blue tutus so it makes really easy for anyone to find us.
  
• We've been selected to present at the Keiretsu Forum in their June meeting as well.

 

    All in all, over the next 8 weeks or so probably every single Angel and VC in town will hear about our business plan.

   

    Tomorrow, I *might* live-blog the event. It all depends on Internet and my availability during sessions.

    First of all, I'm deeply saddened by the incident yesterday. Students at the height of their lives shouldn't be a target or witness to this barbarie.

    That said, when I wake up this morning and they had identified the shooter as a native of South Korea, on the US with a temporary student visa, something big happened. It caught by surprise pretty much everybody.

    Before I continue, let me say that I'm against violence, hypocrisy and everybody having the right to own a gun (most people should not be allowed to own a gun).

     Now, the irony starts where yesterday night, unknowingly of the true identity of the killer, people were already talking about violent videogames, violent TV shows, second amendment and even accusing the wrong person!

     Well, this kid was not brought up in the US. How about that?


    

 

    This Thursday our very own Paul Gross, Sampa's CEO, will be presenting at the Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF), an event organized by NWEN.

 

    I'll be there to support Paul and Sampa on this important event. I hope to see some known entrepreneurs and investors and I'm eager to meet new ones as well.

 

 

 

    Amazingly enough, Sampa gets more page requests from crawlers and bots than from real users. For example, yesterday 59% of the page requests were from crawlers and bots, only 41% were from real users.

 

    Of course, on our stats we always discard the crawlers because those are not real users requesting pages and they can actually really inflate your number of Unique Users and Visits because crawlers (mostly) don't support cookies.

 

    So, in prol of helping my fellow Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, I'm listing some of the strings matches that we use to detect if a user-agent is a crawler:

 

Crawlers:

 

• bot
• crawler
• spider
• spyder
• fetch
• perl
• search
• feedseek
• screenshot
• scout
• thumbnail
• reader
• mediapartners
• jeeves
• ia_archiver
• slurp
• yahoofeed
• yahoo-blogs
• del.icio.us
• nutch
• netnewswire
• moreover
• stackrambler
• boitho
• blogpulse
• snap.com
• everest
• filangy
• stumble
• zyborg
• baldric
• hanzoweb
• yacy
• wazzup
• python
• feedcheck
• dragonfly
• netcraft
• grabber
• linkwalker
• egothor
• irlbot
• psbot
• heritrix
• tmcrawler
• libwww
• jakarta
• httpclient
• java/1
• wget/

 

    Besides those, any user-agent that has less than 15 characters is considered a crawler. I have to update this list every month, because every month there is at least a couple of new crawlers where the user-agent string doesn't contain the word "crawler" or "bot" and most of the time it is from some CS university.

 

    Now, we also have a list of feed readers, which are crawlers but they are working on behalf of a real person (mostly). On those cases, we treat them a bit differently because we want to grab the number of subscribers from that feed.

 

    We don't use the subscribers of feeds to our UU count, but we are still interested in knowing how many people subscribe to each Sampa site feed. The reason we don't use it is because if somebody subscribe to a feed it doesn't mean the saw it. Bloglines might say that I have 25 subscribers, but maybe only a handful really read what I write (in Bloglines), and the only way to detect that is by adding a tracking-gif on each blog post, which is something we are not planning on doing for now.

 

    The list of strings to identify a feed reader is:

 

• bloglines
• yahoofeedseeker
• newsgator
• feedster
• feedfetcher-google
• netvibes
• pubsub
• sharpreader
• rssbandit
• feedbite
• zhuaxia

    One of the biggest problems with feed readers detection is the new IE 7 and Outlook 2007 that use the IE 7 regular user-agent, making it impossible to distinguish between a user that subscribe to a feed versus a user that just click on the feed link.

 

    I hope this helps your startup and if you have other crawlers, bots or feed readers that I'm missing, please, let me know.

    On the last ten days four very important Sampa sites where created. They were created by very close friends. And why they are important? Because these people used the Sampa Alpha version more than a year ago and never came back. I didn't bother them recently to create sites, but they did without even talking to me.

    The sites created are one about a couple the moved to Washington DC and thought that a blog would be a good way to keep in touch with friends in Seattle. The other is another couple just creating a personal site. The third site is a guy that wants to create easy pages if he wants to sell something on Craigslist and the third is a personal site of a female friend.

    Most of them are Microsoft people -- so they shall remain anonymous -- and they could have created their site on MSN Spaces (Live Spaces) or Office Live. I'm sure they have sites on those services as well. But the fact that they are using Sampa speaks a lot to our feature list and overall user experience. Maybe they can't do what they want on MSN Spaces (Office Live is mostly for business anyway) or maybe Sampa had just the extra thing that they needed.

    IMHO, this is a sign that we are moving our user experience on the right direction.

    BTW, we have three new features just released: Blog About a Book, Redesigned Site Overview and Wide-Width Templates.

   

 

    Our binaries and all the necessary files to run Sampa keep growing. Right now, Sampa is a 20MB deployment. To transfer this data from our 768Kbps-uplink to the datacenter can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.

 

    Our deployment script would copy the content and deploy it as it was being copied. The problem with that strategy is that IIS doesn't have all the files ready to switch-over to the new version, so, between the first and last file notification it would take 2-3 minutes, thus, upgrading the Sampa site service would take the system "offline" for about 2-3 minutes. Well, the queue will not stay with a request for more than 90 seconds or so, so a lot of page requests were being dropped.

 

    By doing a tiny change to the deployment script, we went from 2-3 minutes of downtime to 40 seconds!

 

    All that we had to do was to copy the files to a temporary folder and from the temporary folder copy to the target folder. Works like a charm

 

    I always wondered was most applications, during setup, don't copy the content from the CD to the disk and then install if from the disk. That would be so much faster instead of doing disk-seeks on a slow CD-ROM.

 

    Here I'm on my happy afternoon, almost code complete in a super cool feature when I take a break to read some blogs (200+ of them every day).

 

    The big news is MySpace blocking PhotoBucket. This is super interesting for the business that I'm in, so I go ahead and read a few posts.

 

     Michael Arrington on TechCrunch write a post called "Can PhotoBucket Survive Without MySpace?" (Shouldn't "without" be in lower case?). Bla, bla, bla, quote some other bloggers, argues that PhotoBucket is a destination on itself, can survive on site ads, yada yada yada, then...

 

"...And many MySpace/Photobucket users will simply leave MySpace and go to one of its many competitors rather than lose the ability to embed their Photobucket media ..."

 

    <johnstewartish>Wwwwhat??????</johnstewartish>

 

    Are you kidding me Michael? (I'm sorry, Mr. Arrington -- we are not that close).

 

    He continues...

 

"... Re-creating a profile at another social network takes a lot less time than re-uploading hours of video..."

 

    I'm not sure where to start. Humm... Let's start by the obvious stuff.

 

    Uploading a video takes longer than creating a profile on a Social Network. You win that. I say that buying bananas at the supermarket is faster than ordering a new Dell Server. Ha!

 

    MySpace is not about pictures, videos or podcasting (anyone doing podcasting still?). MySpace is about people. Unless you get a good chunk of your friends to move with you to a new social network you are not leaving.

 

    Contrary to normal people, like 99.9% of the population, Michael Arrington probably buys a new house and move across the city when his favorite organic market moves to another neighborhood, after all, it takes longer to get groceries every year than it takes to find and buy a new house, right?

 

    Will MySpace users move to another social network? Maybe a tiny percentage that won't be enough to be a blip on MySpace management dashboard. More likely, users will start uploading videos to a new service or just add plain old links to their PhotoBucket stuff (I don't think MySpace will block links).

 

    Can Photobucket survive without MySpace? Yes, but it got bruised really bad. They probably get a lot of their traffic from embedded widgets on MySpace and they are going to lose that, thus dramatically decreasing their revenue from ads.

 

 

    An investor asked us recently why we compute our viral rate in terms of registrations and not in terms of visits to Sampa.com.

    In other words, we compute our viral rate based on the number of new sign ups to our system, not on the number of visits to our site.

    We know of other companies that consider their viral rate how many people visited their site referred by another user.

    Both methods are correct, it depends on which kind of website you have. For us, Sampa.com is not a destination site. Users go to www.sampa.com, sign up for the service and they are off editing their site on a different domain. So, tracking viral rate as the number of visits to Sampa.com makes very little sense.

    On the other hand, a site like eBay, Google and MSNBC are destination sites. Traffic matters, visits matter, unique users matter.

    For us, all that matters as well, but not on www.sampa.com.

 

    There is a short-term part-time dev work available on a new startup in Seattle (not Sampa) to do some ASP.NET development.

 

    Shoot me an email if you are interested or know somebody that is.

    Everyday I take my son to the daycare. In the 20-minute drive he always sleeps after about 10 minutes (he is only 14 months old). My wife and I don't like to wake him up when he is sleeping because he is like us, he gets in a very bad mood if somebody wakes him up and that ruins his days.

    And what the heck does this story has to do with Crossing the Chasm? Simple: I read a book in the parking lot of the daycare while waiting for him to wake up and today I started reading Crossing the Chasm.

    I bought this book a year ago. An investor recommended it to me. I bought it, read about 3 pages, closed it and said "it is not for me". Well, it was not at that time. I think this book is more focused on Startups that already have significant traction in a niche and want to go mainstream.

    A year ago Sampa had no traction. We didn't have a public beta. Now things are different, we have significant more traction and are understanding each day a little bit more about our customer and the market. So I decided to give Crossing the Chasm another change.

    I'm still not sure how well it translate into our business and at the stage we are in now, but it will be a good reading.

 

    Yesterday I received a letter in the mail from Adhost. They are a web hosting company in Seattle which I used to host my server at their facilities a few years ago.

 

    I always had a pretty good experience with them. They are not a big shot hosting company, they were personal, provided a good service at a good price. I had to leave them for another hosting closer to my office in Redmond because going to Seattle every time I need to install a new server or do a hardware upgrade was a hassle.

 

    So, in 2005 I left them.

 

    The letter on the mail was long and explained that their customer database had been compromised by a hacker and they couldn't clearly figure out what was stolen, but to be on the safe side I should keep an eye on transactions on my credit card.

 

    First of all, I commend them for being so upfront about it and quick at communicating it to customers.

 

    But then I ask myself: I have not done any business with them for the past 2 years. Why they keep my information on their customers database and why the heck they keep my credit card number as well?

 

    The answer is simple: most companies have a hard time letting it go of former customers. They want to make it easy for you to come back so they keep your account information active. They want to make it super easy for you to "buy" whatever they are offering, so they keep your credit card on record as well.

 

    I think we would be safer if, voluntarily or by law, every business would erase your credit card / billing information after 18-24 months without any activity.

 

    Now, for taxes purposes, some of that information cannot be permanently erased (only after 7 years), but they could definitely go "off-line" into some encrypted tape-backup at some accountants office, making it that much harder to steal.

 

    You might not ever have noticed, but there are quite a few different ways to implement drop-down menus on websites.

 

    First of all, on a Windows and on a Mac, all menus from all applications behave exactly the same. They can have multi-level sub-menus. When you click on a menu and it expands, it sticks there even if you take your mouse off the menu. If you click on another menu or anywhere else on the screen the menu closes (like contextual menus, a.k.a. right-click menus).

 

    On the web there is no standard. Menus are implemented with Flash or Javascript and each site does a different thing. You have the case where menu expands automatically on mouse-over, or require a click, menus that close on mouse-out or click-out, menus that have arrows indicating submenus or not, etc.

 

    For Sampa, I've made a very early decision that Menus would behave very similar to Windows' menus. Two basic reasons: First, users are used to its behavior, and, second, and more importantly, the Windows menu are very accessible and discoverable.

 

    The problem with menus that disappear automatically on mouse-out (instead of on click-out) is that some users have difficulty keeping the mouse over the menu.

 

    Why do I bring that up? From time to time, somebody, either a tech-savvy user or a newbie, complains about the way we do menus and our way is the least common on the web, but it is the easiest one, IMHO, for users.

 

    I tried and I keep trying to contact Del.icio.us about their problematic web service but they took a page from the Google book and they don't respond to their customers.

 

    Sampa integrated Del.icio.us in December of last year. It was a pretty easy integration, they have a fairly simple and documented API, so it wasn't a pain, and we added some very neat twist to the integration: Bookmark via Email.

 

    Sampa customers did start using the integration after all, you just needed to provide your username and password to integrate with Sampa.

 

    The problem is that on an ordinary day we have anywhere from 50 to 100 failures calling the Del.icio.us API, always with the error: 503 Server Unavailable. If you go to their site they tell you how to play nice with the Del.icio.us service. We do that. We do everything. We even implement a mechanism to prevent more than 1 request per second, but it doesn't matter. We continue to get hundreds of errors per week.

 

    That is not a great experience for our customer and Del.icio.us is not being responsive (or responsible as a matter of fact).

 

    Does anyone that reads this blog had a similar experience? Do you know somebody in Del.icio.us that can help us investigate this issue?

 

 

 

    People that read my blog know that I'm pretty interested in Alexa Ranking. It is a reasonable way to get a handle on the state of most popular companies' websites. Are they going up? Are they flat-lining? How they compare to similar companies?

 

    For those that don't know, Alexa is a sample-based system. They gather information from all the users that installed the Alexa Toolbar (a couple of millions). All data collection is anonymous. And, with any sample-based system, it is likely to have a fairly large margin of error.

 

    Some of the pros of Alexa, and the reason I like it, include:

 

• Easy access to a site's ranking on the web. Just go to www.alexa.com and click on Traffic Rankings.
• Historical graphical data of reach, page views and the Alexa Ranking, which is their magic combination of reach and page views.
• With the Alexa Toolbar you get a few freebies as well:
• Instant Alexa Ranking for any site that you're visiting.
• Domain Registration information on a single click (this way you don't need to do a WHOIS query every time you just want to know which company/person owns that domain).
• Alexa data is free!

 

    On the flip side, Alexa is a bit dangerous and should be used carefully. The problems include:

 

• Since only toolbar data is used to compute the Ranking, only sites visited by Toolbar users get credit on their system.
• The Toolbar, being a non-default browser extension, requires some level of technical expertise to install (at least more than simply using your browser), thus, skewing the data towards more technical people.
• Sites/Services that use multiple domains (sometimes the users own registered domain) are not correctly represented.
• Sites that use HTTPS extensively (e.g. Fidelity.com) are also not well represented.
• Since all collection is anonymous, Alexa cannot normalize the data like a research institute would do it for the web demographics. Compete.com tries to do that, but there are so few Compete Toolbar users that their data only works well for the top 1,000 websites of the web, while with Alexa up to 1,000,000 websites you've get pretty good coverage.
• Alexa data only works if the site *is* the service. For example, you cannot, an should not, compare YouTube.com with Ford.com. Users don't go to Ford.com to enjoy the experience at their site. They go there to gather information for an off-line task (buying a car), while YouTube.com is YouTube and there is nothing else.

 

     Alexa could improve a little (or a lot), but doing some modifications. What I would add is:

 

• Visit time: In a Web 2.0 word, page views is not the metric anymore, but how many minutes a user spent on a website per visit.
• Additional ISP traffic information: Alexa could partner with one or more ISPs to gather information about traffic from a different point of view. With the right privacy safeguards in place, that could be very valuable.
• Increase Toolbar adoption: Google went out of its way to make sure he could cut as many distribution deals for their toolbar as possible. The make a lot of money out of the toolbar. I'm pretty sure Alexa also makes a certain amount of money of their toolbar so they should be doing some distribution deals themselves.
• Add demographic data: I absolutely don't mind sharing my age, gender and income level. I do mind about entering an email address or a name. Contrary to what people think, most users will enter the correct information (I saw a study about zip codes used on Hotmail that proved that). That would not only make Alexa data more valuable to advertisers and company, but it would help improve the data itself by normalizing against the Internet population.

 

     Some of these features could be part of the "Premium Alexa". They already have my credit card number (Amazon.com), so signing up for $12/year for a Premium Alexa would be a no-brainer for me. Heck, I would pay more than that even.

 

    That is right, Domain Name prices are being raised to $30.43 if you buy them... on the year 2030.

 

    And that is wrong. They should cost $30.43 today ! ! !

 

Background

 

    VeriSign owns the distribution of all dot-com and dot-net domains (and a few others) authorized by the ICANN (the Internet body responsible for names and numbers on the Internet). They have a monpoly contract with ICANN and currently they sell the domains for $6.00 on bulk-orders for registrars (companies that sell domains to end users). ICANN has authorized VeriSign to raise their prices 7% every year. This year VeriSign is raising the price of a domain name from $6.00 to $6.42 per year (for new domains or renewals).

 

    I tell this is an absurd. VeriSign should immediately raise the price to $30 per year, or more. I beg them to do it. You should as well, and here is why...

 

 

Domain Case

 

    With domain names being so cheap, anyone can buy one. Every company has multiple domains names (sometimes hundreds or thousands), lots of bloggers have their own domain name, lots of individuals have their own domain name. In fact, there are more than 65 million registered dot-com domains.

 

    Now, let's say you have a new business, a pet shop, and you want to look for a good domain name. Forget pet.com, that was taken a while ago. Forget any combination of the word "pet" with pretty much any other word that would generate any meaning (petsmart, petfood, petshop, petstore, ...). All taken as well. How about using the city name, like petseattle.com? Taken. Heck, you end up with something that has 3 dashes and 15 characters or more and that none of your customers are capable of remember or spell it.

 

    That all would be fair, if those domain names were being used by "real" businesses, but they are not. Do me a favor, go to www.petseattle.com. Is that a   "real" business? Depends on your definition, but they have nothing to do with pets. They just bought the domain name to sell it to somebody else with a huge overhead.

 

    That would be fair except the problem with domain names being so cheap is that people buy thousands of domains in the hope of selling a couple for tens of thousands of dollars. Wouldn't you invest $6,000 in domain names if you knew you could get $20,000 by selling two or three domains in a year?

 

    And then there are companies like Marchex that make a living by buying hundreds of thousands of domains and showing nothing but ads on those domains. Just pick a random product and put between "buy-" and ".com", let's say "buy-car.com". What do you see? A site that only purpose is to drive traffic to other sites, using advertising and affiliate programs as a mean of generating revenue. They don't really create any value.

 

    It gets worse. Some sites are just created to mislead customers. Look at www.hosting-review.com (#6 result for "Hosting Comparison" on Google). This is not a "real" business. Nobody really evaluated/compared anything there. Clearly, the "IX Web Hosting" paid a lot of money to appear between some known and some unknown hosting companies to make it look legit.

 

    On cases like this, the increase from $6.00 / year to $30.00 / year won't make much of a difference, but on many other cases it will. Remember that these people / companies have thousands of domain. If they were spending $6,000 per year on those domains, it will be a big deal if the cost was $30,000.

 

 

Compare to Phone Numbers

 

    What if, somebody could buy any telephone number for just $6 / year, and they could buy them in bulk, with an easy process, just a simple form and they reserve all the numbers for 444-xxxx for $6,000 / year. Anyone that wants a 444-xxxx needs to buy it from that person, and he can mark it up as much as he wants. Let's say, $100 / phone-number / year (that is a 1500% ROI). Ok, you might say "screw the 444, I'll buy a 445-xxxx for $6.00 / year". Oops. Another company bought that range. Wait a second... More than 800 companies bought 1,000-number ranges and all the numbers left are being used by other customers. Think about that.

 

    Would the US government do something about it if phone numbers (which is limited by their nature) were being manipulated like that?

 

     Call your Representative in Congress, call your Senator, call the President (avoid the Vice, though), call ICANN, call VeriSign. Call whomever is necessary to make this clear misusage of a limited resource stop.

 

     Let's do something. Now ! ! !

 

 

 

    Yesterday was a cold morning of spring. I was looking forward to wake up on a Sunday morning not because it was April's Foul day, but because it was the first day of the month. And on the first day of each month I receive a wonderful email. Our Monthly Stats Report (yeah, I'm very nerdy, I know).

 

    Paul and I have been doing some estimates at what our Page View count and Unique User would be for the month since we needed to turn in a business plan and presentation to ESIF and Keiretsu by last Friday.

 

    Page View is quite easy to estimate. If you have 29 of 31 days of data, you can estimate pretty close by assuming that the average of the last two days won't change. So, just multiply the sum to date of PV by 1.06897 (31/29) and you get very close.

 

    Unique Users on the other hand don't work like that, because the sum of the daily unique users is not the same thing as the monthly unique user. For example, if Joe visited the site on Tuesday and on Thursday, both days will count 1 for Joe in terms of Unique Users, but the monthly is not the sum of that, it is just 1 since you don't want to count Joe twice.

 

    Enough of the theory.

 

    We were expecting a growth of 40-45% on Page Views and Unique Users for the month of March compared to February. So I knew pretty much the range of numbers I was expecting to see. By the time I opened the email....  boom... I was blown away.

 

    Our Page View had grown by 66% and our Unique Users by 107%. Can you believe that? One hundred and seven percent!!!

 

     At first I was reluctant in believing that number. I thought it might have been an error, since we were expecting a much lower number. Then I realize that we had our expectations all wrong because I did a stupid math mistake in the middle of the month and projected the growth at 35-40%.

 

    Now, it is a matter of seeing if this is a viral uptake of Sampa or a data anomaly.

 

    Either way, I absolutely don't expect our growth to be 100% in April. Heck, if we grow by 50% I'd be thrilled. Doubling the user base every two months is fantastic. Doubling every month is impossible. We did the impossible this month and I don't expect it to continue like that.