Marcelo Calbucci

Thought 1: Never announce your product at 4PM Pacific Time.

I sent email to bloggers at around 4PM and to friends shortly after. The first few blog posts started to roll in around 4:30 (Brier Dudley of Seattle Times was the first), and a lot of them only happened at 5:30-6:00PM. Who reads blogs at those hours? Well, a lot of people actually (particularly in Asia), but it's about 5 times less people than those who read it between 10:00AM and 2:00PM. Also, we made it to TechMeme at around 11:00 PM last night until early this morning. Ugh!

I knew this, so why did I do it like that? First of, I knew we would hit some volume related bugs and I didn't want too many users at once. Second, I had several meetings today that would keep me away from my Dev machine and I didn't want all the hell breaking lose while I was away. So last night, after launching TweepML I had dinner with my kids and when I went back home I stayed until 11:30PM non-stop fixing bugs and improving the UX. I'm felling pretty god right now about the stability of the system.


Thought 2: OAuth is a bad user experience

A lot of people will disagree with me, but I make a case why OAuth is good for Twitter, but not good for your applications end-user. Read it at the TweepML blog.

Today I'm announcing the launching of TweepML.org.

See a simple explanation at TweepML Blog.

A simple explanation: TweepML is a format to share groups of Twitter users. TweepML.org is a service that allows you to create and manage your lists, and also find other interesting lists to follow.

Go ahead and check it out.

Feedback welcome. Bugs are expected. :)

I just announced it today at the Seattle 2.0 site the people who’ll be available at the StartupDay Advisory Room.


Let me tell you how I came up with the idea for the Advisory Room, but first, let me tell what it is: It’s a place, part of the StartupDay conference, where attendees can book private 1:1 meetings with other entrepreneurs, investors and professionals, like lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, etc.

I’ve been planning on something like StartupDay for more than a year, but events are very expensive and very risky. If people and sponsors don’t show up, you might be up for a $20,000 or $30,000 bill.

Over more than a year ago I started to think how I can deliver a ridiculous amount of value to sponsors so that they couldn’t refuse to be part of this conference, and at the same time make it valuable to attendees. On a typical conference, sponsors are invited to be speakers as well. I don’t have a problem with that, I just wish there was more disclosure about it.

However, I didn’t want a lawyer telling attendees how to raise money, or a designer telling about the value of User Experience, or a VC talking about monetization through advertising. I wanted entrepreneurs who been there, done that. I’m not saying the lawyer, designer or VC will not add value, but they have a different lens. They talk a different language. They worry about different things.

Without speaking spots for sponsors, how do I entice them to be part of this conference? A logo on the website was probably not enough. Then a light come over my head. Why not let sponsors talk directly to attendees one-on-one? The sponsors are being part of this because they do add value to startups, so attendees of StartupDay would have questions to those sponsors. When I left Microsoft, I spent quite a bit of time talking to lawyers and accountants, figuring out the office space market, financial planning, etc.

Then the Advisory Room came up to be. About half the people on the Advisory Room are sponsors of StartupDay and paid to be there. There are no hidden elements here, because we list their name and firm just by their logo. The other half are people I invited because they are either successful entrepreneurs, or successful investors.

The Advisory Room – and StartupDay itself – is an experiment. This is the first time we are doing a conference for “pre-entrepreneurs” and we are trying to understand what works, what doesn’t, what attendees/speakers/sponsors like and don’t like about it, but we are not afraid to innovate because we have nothing to lose (except by $30,000 if tickets don’t sell, so please buy a ticket).

When you go to Computer Science school you learn a lot of theories. You learn about data structure, databases, networks, compilers, OSes, microprocessors, algorithms and a lot of other fundamentals. With all that you also end up getting some hands-on experience with a few languages, applications and OSes, but certainly nothing compare to how much you learn once you are building real products in the real world.

Now that I'm in-between startups (aka, unemployed) I keep thinking if this isn't the right time to learn a few new things. Here is what's top of mind in terms of technologies and applications I'd like to learn better:

• Flash: I have a pretty good handle on HTML, CSS and AJAX, but there's just so much I can do with that. Sometimes I know there are things it'd be much easier to do in Flash, but I know nothing about that.
• Illustrator: I'm getting better and better by the day with Adobe Illustrator. I like it much more than Photoshop, but a lot of simple tasks I'm still struggling with and there is a lot more Illustrator can do that I'm not even aware of. I'm actually considering if I should attend some training or classes on Illustrator.
• Cloud Computing: When I started Sampa there wasn't a cloud computing as we know today, and that was just 4.5 years ago. I'd like to know more about Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.
• MVC: Now we are getting into ultra-geek speak. Sampa was built with MVC (model-view-controller) even before ASP.NET/C# supported it natively. Now MSFT is shipping their own MVC solution and I'd like to learn that. And it should take just about a week, so I probably should just do it.

For me it's all about productivity, so I won't spend two months learning something to help me save a week. ASP.NET MVC is a no brainer, I'll just learn it. Cloud Computing is very much dependent on the project. I don't trust CC for high-availability apps, but for most Web 2.0 services it should be fine. Illustrator I'm just getting by and slowly learning the trade. Flash probably would take me several weeks just to get to the basic level and that doesn't add up because I can always find a good Flash developer to do it in a day or two what I need.

For almost 3 weeks I was blogless. Sampa shutdown its servers and I was in doubt between Wordpress or Blogger and I finally settled for Blogger (more flexibility) and spent the last day trying to get my old posts here and they are all here and integrating Disqus.

Here is what you should expect from me over the next few months in terms of blog posts.

• The organization of StartupDay and general thoughts on Seattle 2.0.
• The launch of a new project (coming this week)
• My next startup -- At this point I'm convinced that I should do a startup in the travel space. I'm brainstorming with several very smart entrepreneurs, investors and people who love to travel about ideas.
• Random thoughts on technology and some rants from time-to-time about politics, "green & clean", economy, and baby products.

Anyway, it feels great to be blogging again.

I'm trying really hard to make Blogger the new home for my blog, but I can't figure out how to import my existing 500 blog posts here.

Blogger doesn't support any kind of Importer except from Blogger's own Atom format. I tried converting MovableType into Blogger and Wordpress into Blogger and neither works. Not sure what I should do next.

Has anyone successfully imported a Wordpress or MovableType into blogger?