Marcelo Calbucci

 

    I'll be attending the Poker 2.0 tomorrow with a few other cool (influential, maybe?) people from the Seattle startup community. Don't miss it.

 

    Sampa is looking for a Flash developer to do some work for us. This is a part-time/contractor work and the main task is to create a new Family Tree module for us to replace/augment our AJAX-based Family Tree.

 

    Let me now if you know of someone that is great at creating amazing Flash apps. We want to hear from him/her.

 

    Great news. Sampa and yours truly have been featured on the Seattle Magazine on an article about Seattle (of course) and Web 2.0. Please, buy a copy instead of reading it online. :)

 

    Anyway, it tells a bit about all the people building the new wave of companies in Seattle and all those crazy ideas.

 

    Besides me, Douglas Gantenbein also interviewed great names of Seattle's startup scene, like Suresh Kotha (professor at UW), Jonathan Washburn (ActiveRain), Oren Etzioni (CS professor at UW), Tom Alberg (Madrona), Glenn Kelman (Redfin) and Dan Shapiro (Ontela).

 

 

    I just presented at the WTIA. It took me 7 minutes to present and the Q&A lasted 10 minutes.

    I begun by getting a laugh out of the crowd (don't remember exactly what I said), but it certainly helped. I tend to have these spontaneous moments that I don't prepare for and I don't know where it comes from, but the audience usually enjoys. That's one of the reasons I hate to be over-prepared to give a talk. It kills spontaneity.

    My goal was to tell the story of what Sampa used to be, what Sampa is now and where we want to go. I think the mission was accomplished.

    The Q&A from the panel was much easier than I expected.

    The other good thing was the fact there was only 50 people on the room, so the worst case scenario I've made a fool of myself to just 50 people. :)

    It's a bit weird to blog about the "competing" companies at the WTIA since I'm a presenter, but I just can't stop myself:

Demoxi
Demoxi is an interesting proposition w/ interesting technology to create a new ad serving platform that lives on your PC. Remember when you'd install some application and it would hijack your adds, show you popups, and control your PC? That's what Demoxi is, except they are doing it w/ the end-user in mind. So you control what happens, how it happens and when it happens. That's my understanding. I think there might be something for Sampa users since we are branding ourself as a "family safe" company Demoxi positioning is very much aligned with us.

Earth Class Mail
I've seen they talk many times, and the whole send your mail to ECM and check it online simply doesn't work for me, as a consumer, but I can see the value for the enterprise or people that are seldom at home because they travel a lot. I think they will burn a lot ($$$$) of cash. The initial cost to get going is very high and they probably need a few million customers to break-even.

Yapta
Yapta is really interesting and valuable to travelers. They nailed the technology and the website, but they have to create a brand and attract customers. I blogged about this before, but I think they should either merge with TripIt or duplicate TripIt's technology, which isn't that hard to do. The most valuable aspect of Yapta is the opportunity to get a refund on a price reduction of an airline ticket you already purchase.

    I'm a Web-Consumer guy. That's my industry. I love to be part of it, I find it exciting and I want to dedicate the rest of my life to it.

    Hearing the morning panel (Keith Grinstein, Steve Lidberg, Mike McSherry and Sid Parakh) talk about the Wireless industry I can think of a single word to describe it: b-o-r-i-n-g.

    For me, Hardware, Wireless, Server Products should just work. Those are the commodities for me.

    What you might not know is that on a previous life I worked on Telecommunications and on that world, software and the web are the commodity and the hardware is the key differentiation.

    In other words, I'm glad there are people that are passionate by things I find boring. Otherwise I couldn't do what I love to do.

    The WTIA Investment Forum is about to start. Several companies will be pitching to investors, entrepreneurs and service providers about their company. I'll be presenting Sampa.

    I might try some living blogging between my mental rehearsals of the presentation.

    At this point the place feels very empty. The Welcome by Ken Myers was supposed to start at 8:30, but it's already 8:35 and the room for 300 people has less than 20 right now.

 

    I have too much to write about and too little time since I'm preparing for the WTIA presentation tomorrow (I'm soooo unprepared that I'll make a fool of myself) and I'm heading for the UW Business Plan Competition in a few hours.

 

    Anyway, this is what I have to say:

 

• I had coffee with Andy Sack yesterday. This guy doesn't stop amazing me on his way of talking, his energy and the good that he's doing for the startup community in Seattle. Is there a State medal we should nominate Andy for?
  
• I went to nPost Network. Event was packed, fun. I was really impressed by RescueTime (way to go Tony), and with Alerts.com. On Alerts.com it reminded me of a time that we talked about our "personal assistants" that would find things that mattered to us, tell us of things that we care and wanted to be remembered, etc. Alerts.com has an aroma that resambles it. Finally, Nathan Kaiser just did a great job organizing the event.
  
• Lastly, went to Jackson Fish Market to see Hillel unveil his new baby. I've got there 7:50 PM and it was packed, the food gone and I've got a half cup of beer from a Keg and it was gone too. Oh well, the event was fun and I saw some old friends I haven't seen for ages. Hats off to the JFM team to pull out a launch party like this (this is how startups should be doing it).

 

 

    Let me just clarify my post yesterday about Hypocrite Day.

 

    If you read it carefully, what I'm saying is that saving the planet is much bigger than what any individual can do, and bigger still than a majority of individuals could do together. It's mostly on the hands of governments and heads of industries to fix global warming.

 

    Now, let's be clear that driving a hybrid is better than driving a non-hybrid (and biking to work is better than both). Local polution levels also benefits from hybrids, but it has no affect at the global level.

 

    Yes, we should do the right thing and buy cars that consume less gasoline, recycle, try to eat organic and non-transgenic food, bike and walk more often. But don't be mistaken that if all of us did that we'd be saving the planet, we wouldn't.

 

    I love when people start talking about saving the planet, buying organic food and having a green life style. Today is Earth Day which can also be known as hypocrite day.

 

    Let me start with all the people that drive a Prius and think they are saving the planet, and I have more than a dozen friends on this category so they will forgive me for telling the truth.

 

    Prius is not a "green car". No hybrid is a green. They are still internal combustion engines which *do* releases all kinds of bad stuff into the air, except instead of putting 100 lbs of shit in the air per year, they put 70 lbs of shit. Yay! Mother Earth thanks you.

 

    Now, let's suppose that everybody on the planet decide to stop using their cars and either ride a bike, use a hydrogen or electric car or walk to work. How much good would this do to global warming and saving the planet? Zilch! Nada! Nothing! Surprised?

 

    Most of the polution that is destroying the planet doesn't come from cars, or from any other source where individuals have control over. They come from airplanes, factories, power plants, big delivery trucks, trains, etc.

 

    Here is a fun fact: A single cross-country airplane trip will probably generate all the carbon monoxide your car will generate all year long*.

 

    The sad part is that I don't have an answer fo us to save the planet, but I know for sure people telling me to not print an email to save some trees is not it!

 

    Happy Earth Day, Earth.

 

 

 

* Need to verify this claim, but I'm pretty sure it's true.

 

    It has been more than 14 months since I gave any pitch/talk about Sampa. Since then, Paul has been doing all the pitches, demos, talks and answering the phone.

 

    This Thursday you'll have a rare opportunity to see me talk about Sampa's past, present and future - from product to business through marketing.

 

    Register for the WTIA Investment Forum (today is the last day) and come see me.

 

 

 

    I have a full schedule next week. I'll probably get to meet a bunch of new people, drink a lot of beer and see some good old friends on the following events next week:

 

• Tuesday: nPost Networking Event at Columbia City Theater
• Tuesday: Inaugural Jackson Fish Market Secret Society Meeting at their new place in Pioneer Square
• Wednesday: UW Business Plan Competition Investment Round at UW
• Thursday: WTIA Investment Forum where I'll be representing Sampa and presenting our past, present and future (DeBeers theme song on the background) at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.

 

    If we haven't meet yet this is the perfect opportunity for you to bribe me to move your company up on the Seattle 2.0 list. I accept beer, scotch and wine, but not mixed together.

   

 

    In case you haven't heard, Alexa changed the way it computes its Ranking. Sampa being a product for non-techies always suffered a lit bit on Alexa, since its ranking used to favor "tech-savvy" oriented sites. Because of that our Ranking moved from about 48,000 to 29,000.

 

    And to top it all off, there was a mistake on the March/2008 Seattle Startup Index in which Sampa's Compete ranking were way off, and I didn't even noticed back them and even blogged a technical explanation of why that was the case.

 

    Anyway, Sampa is now ranked at # 42 on the list. I'm pretty confident we can be at the top 20 by the end of the year.

 

   

 

    This is a list I've built over the last 2 months on ways for you to advertise your house for selling it online (and offline). I haven't tried most of those, but I thought it would be useful to share it.

 

1. Zillow (Mark it "For Sale")
2. Targeted Advertising on Zillow ($0.01 per impression)
3. Redfin
4. Craigslist
5. Trulia
6. Roost
7. MSN Real Estate
8. Realtor.com
9. TourVista
10. Google Base
11. House.info
12. Facebook Marketplace
13. Targeted Advertising on Facebook
14. Postlets
15. Windows Live Expo
16. YourListingOnTV
17. CyberHomes
18. Eppraisal
19. Create a site/blog on Sampa
20. Create a video tour and post on YouTube
21. Add pictures to Flickr
22. Flyer's on your company's kitchen/copy room
23. Comcast on Demand - Real Estate Listings
24. Email friends, co-workers and family
25. Send Letter to Neighbors

 

    Are there any other that I missed?

 

    I'm selling my house in Redmond. Since most readers of this blog are on the Puget Sound and a good number on the Eastside, maybe it'll work:

 

    The house has 3 bedroom and a bonus room, formal living and dining, kitchen w/ granite and new stainless steel appliances, family room, laundry room, master bath with walk-in closet, fully fenced yard, 3 car garage, great curb appeal, Cascade view, on the Abbey Road (Education Hill) neighborhood.

 

    Open House is Sunday (April 20th) 1-4PM.

 

    The MLS number is coming shortly. But you can find plenty of information on this site I put together (using Sampa of course):

 

www.redmond-house-for-sale.sampasite.com

 

    You can also check out this house on Redfin and Zillow.

 

 

    I published the Seattle 2.0 Startup Index today.

 

    If you pay close attention to it you'll see one thing about Sampa... We dropped 16 positions!

 

    Pretty scary stuff? Not really... There are explanations and is simpler than it might look.

 

    First of, a minor factor has been that both Alexa and Compete rank better for startups that have a "geekier" audience. Every time we appear on TechCrunch our Alexa rank shoots through the roof. From October until April we had almost no mention on the press, hence, the people that had the Alexa/Compete toolbar would not visit our site.

 

    Second, and what in my opinion caused the largest drop on our ranking, is that we started moving friends & family sites into their custom domain, if they wanted it. So, for example, I used to run the Seattle 2.0 site out of "seattle20.sampasite.com", but I decided to move it to "seattle20.com". Neither Alexa nor Compete knows this site is running out of the Sampa infrastructure, so they don't include that into the UU/PV count.

 

    The reality is that once we start offering Custom Domains for our customers in a few months, our Alexa and Compete rank will each day reflect less and less of the reality of Sampa growth and traffic. Oh well, we have Google Analytics to save us.

 

 

 

    The big news is actually two news items and is pretty big for all people involved with Sampa. First, we closed a $1M financing round with several local and Bay-area angel investors. Second, and most importantly, we released the version 2 of our product that will make a dramatic change to our engagement, stickness and viral rates.

 

    On the financing side, we got great names investing on us, including a lot of great people that didn't want to come public about it for personal reasons, but some angels are ok to be named, including: Geoff Entress (Madrona Venture Group), Alex Algard (WhitePages.com), Jon Lazarus, Rick Schell (VC at OnSet), John Hansen (ex-Lightsurf) and Mike Koss (StartPad). To all our investors, I'm very thankful for your belief in what we are doing and we know this is just the beginning. I want you to know I'll do my best to make this work!

 

    Funding is great, but doesn't get you anywhere if you don't put it to good use. And that leads us to our new product launch. That is the big news of the day.

 

 

We chopped the head off!

 

    In the end of November we decided that there was nothing that we should re-use from the existing interface into the new interface (almost nothing). So we freed ourselves (and our minds) of have to be constrained by what exists already. Sampa, technically is a combination of multiple systems and components that create the service, but for our users it's the UI!

 

    We re-created about 20% of the service (the part that users see) and made it amazingly trivial for anyone to create a web site. The flip side is that we had to remove some features to make it simpler, and we won't put them back in unless we can figure out a way to make it fit and be easy to use. We got bloated, and now we are slim, slick and cool.

 

    The press is already talking, some w/ nice reviews, some not so nice. But, hey, we are just starting w/ V2 and it's already years ahead of V1. Check out these articles: TechCrunch, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Times, GigaOm, Mashable, WebWare and VentureBeat.

   

    I'll write a lot more over the next couple of days/weeks on the funding raising part and the new product part. Stay tuned.

 

    For the last few months you've seen me writing less and less on this blog.

    I write about what I'm living in the moment, but we have two news coming out tomorrow that took almost all my time over the last few months. Also, to maximize the punch of the news items, I had to keep it quiet. But expect a flood of very powerful, insightful and revealing blog posts starting after the press releases hit the wire!