Blue Bootstrap

7/4/1776 - ToDo List: 1) Start a Country 2) Find Funding

232 years ago today, a bunch of guys in Philadelphia made one of the riskiest decisions of any startup in history. Thumbing their noses at the world's dominant power, these guys said "There has to be something better"; upon signing the Declaration of Independence their very lives were at stake and many paid a deep personal price in the years to come. Today is a celebration of the Founders of this country and the gift of liberty they gave a then struggling group of colonies.

Today with oil at $144/barrel, the housing market in utter disarray, the dollar getting pounded on the exchange markets, a sluggish economy, a war against terrorism, and a presidential election in which both candidates seem more concerned with how much money the Federal government can spend and regulations it can impose instead of protecting the liberties of Americans, America is going through a rough patch. To some, it appears our best days are behind us.

Don't count me in that group.

We've been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

From a commentary by Gordon Sinclair that aired June 5, 1973 on CFRB in Toronto, Ontario Canada :

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.

As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The  Americans did.

They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help... Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans.

I'd like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.

Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?

You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times ... and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them ... unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.

When the Americans get out of this bind ... as they will... who could blame them if they said 'the hell with the rest of the world'. Let someone else buy the bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbours have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke.

This year's disasters .. with the year less than half-over has taken it all and nobody...but nobody... has helped.

 

Have a happy 4th of July.

PitchCamp

Live blogging from StartupLounge's PitchCamp.

Going around the table with introductions and initial pitches.A lot of interesting ideas that people are pursuing.

"Drink your own Kool-Aid. Learning Should Never Stop. The day you think you know it all, you're done. Embrace change and other viewpoints" - Scott

Part 1: The Pitch

One-line pitch - answers 4 key questions:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• What pain do you solve?
• And for whom? (what customer?)

i.e. "Acme Software provides a web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system aimed at middle market companies that cannot afford the expensive products offered by current vendors in the market."

Conversational Pitch:

• Intro
• Describe
• Hook
• Close

Skilled workers, where art thou?

I read this story today in which AT&T's CEO says that "We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs" referring to filling 5,000 customer service positions that AT&T is moving from India to the U.S.

I think what he really meant to say is that he's having trouble finding people with the required skills who are willing to take the salary he's offering.

How I Picked Blue Violin

Servinity, a local company, posted on its blog how it picked its name and logo. I thought I'd share how I picked Blue Violin because it's a question I get asked occasionally and because the process I went through was so much different than Servinity's.

I started work on Ratchet, the product's original name, in 2005 and originally intended to create a desktop application. I didn't like the look-and-feel of Visual Basic controls so I started to create a mock-up in HTML of how I wanted the product to look. During that process, I figured out that I could deliver Ratchet through the web and voila! Automated testing delivered through the browser.

A couple of months after that, I wasn't happy with the name Ratchet and felt a different, better name was needed. I tried a couple of different names like QAWebTest but honestly, generic names like that suck. I remembered reading a story that said consumers can't distinguish any fast-food restaurants that include the name Taco and felt that applied to boring names like QAWebTest.

Being out of ideas and at a Mexican standoff with myself, I went to iStockphoto and started looking at pictures to get the creative juices flowing. That's when I found the following picture:

The rest, as they say, is history.

Let There Be Light

Tonight I released the full source code to Blue Violin under the GNU Affero General Public License. You can get the code at http://code.google.com/p/blueviolin/ . I chose the Affero General Public license because it allows users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. 

For those who aren't familiar with Blue Violin, it's an automated testing tool for websites that's delivered through your browser; currently, it only works in Internet Explorer. My hope is that I'm offering something useful to the community that allows any organization to take advantage of automated testing and website monitoring. I truly believe that the core technology behind Blue Violin, called Ratchet, is very good and on par with some commercial offerings. However, the documentation sucks. Although the source code has been released there aren't any instructions on how to compile the code or create an environment to run it in. The documentation will be online within a couple of weeks at www.blueviolin.org but if you have any questions on how to get started, feel free to email me at josh.watts@blue-violin.com or call me at 770-715-1334.

 

 

 

David Heinemeier Hansson is an idiot

I read this blog post [via Jeff Atwood's excellent Coding Horror blog]:

"While I can certainly understand the reasons why some people go with Linux, I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice. I know a few that are still stuck in the rut for various reasons — none of them desire.

I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don't care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.

So if you haven't switched already, stop procrastinating. Get it over with. If you have any desire working for the rising rank of companies building their business on open source technologies, you don't want to carry a liability like that around on you resume. Being labeled a 2005 Switcher is bad enough."

Obviously, those of us writing software on a Windows computer are knuckle-dragging cavemen. The biggest fallacy of his argument is that the choice of your operating system classifies you as either a l33t hax0r or a woeful Windoze luzer; this is just a different twist on the classic religious wars such as vi vs. emacs. Besides, I thought the whole point of creating web applications was to free the customer from the desktop and provide rich features regardless of the operating system being used. Oh wait, only if you're using OS X. And Ruby on Rails. And if your first name is David; the rest of you can suck it.

There are good programmers and bad programmers and the choice of operating system or language won't magically move you from one group to the other. A bad programmer using OS X and Ruby is still a bad programmer. I would have a hard time hiring a programmer who was so stricken with his choice of technology that he was blind to the benefits of other choices. If you have a desire to work for a company where technical decisions lead to unwavering zealotry, then 37signals sounds like a great place to work.

Personally, I like Windows because I'm comfortable with it, warts and all. And I like open source software such as emacs, PHP, MySQL, Firefox, and Appcelerator. In fact, I like open source software so much that I'm in the process of releasing Blue Violin as open source software. I do so because I do care about using the best tools.

In a follow-up post, he elaborates further:

"On the other hand, if you want to work with open source technologies like the Rails stack of Apache/lighttpd, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Ruby/Rails, etc, I find a strong disconnect with doing so from Windows. It's just not a natural fit neither from a technological, cultural, or political perspective. Actively pursuing or celebrating this unnatural fit raises a red flag for me."

All of the products he mentions run fine on a Windows computer. Here I am just trying to get my work done only to find out that I'm a technological Frankenstein and scare away small children.

And he continues:

"As such, I'm a bit surprised by the apparent controversial nature of the original posting. Sure, it was worded with enough sting to likely cause a reaction. But that 37signals, and companies in general, base hiring decisions on a sound technical/cultural/political fit surprise me to come as a surprise. "

Oh, be still my beating heart; feigning surprise is at the best naïve.

Think for yourself and choose the best operating system, language, framework, chocolate milk, candy bar, or paint color that's going to give you and your product the best chance for success. When people ask me "what programming language should we use on this project" I ask them what language they know the best and immediately recommend that language. Any technical choice you make has its benefits and problems and your job is to make sure you understand both; you should always be able to argue both sides of a technical decision or you really don't understand the choice you make.

Lastly, your customers – they don't care. They just want stuff to work.

Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition Exhibition

Last Thursday I went to the see the participants in the Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition exhibit their ideas and hear a bit about their products. I was impressed by the wide range of products I saw and the enthusiasm of the students.

Companies

Accerleryes

"Personal Supercomputing" - Their software uses a graphics card's processor, or GPU, to perform mathematically intensive operations; one of the demos they were running was real-time edge detection in a video. They have 150 beta customers that includes some big names such as Google and Siemens. From a pure computer science perspective, these guys are on the bleeding edge and has the potential to be a breakout company.

DiagNano

"Teflon for molecules" - this is a biomedical product that allows doctors to provide a faster and more accurate cancer diagnosis. Their technology prevents molecules from sticking together.

Zeus Portal

An online collaboration and portal software product that allows companies to provide an internal social network for their employees. They're targeting small & medium-sized businesses. A product to keep an eye on.

Syzygy Memory Plastics

This product was the coolest product I saw; plastic that becomes soft when held in your hand but retains its shape when it cools. I'm waiting until they come out with an earpiece for my Bluetooth ear piece. A great product that's simple.

Payflex

An electronic payment system for restaurants and retailers that enables consumers to authorize payment via SMS or a keyfob.

Puritech

"Artificial kidney" - They've created new dialysis technology based on the separation of molecules in the presence of an electric field.

Audiallo

Wave signal processing that based on biological audio processing. I had an interesting discussion about how the human ear processes soundwaves. The technology is initially targeted towards producing better hearing aids; not a bad move considering all those baby boomers fried their ears listening to that demon music, rock 'n' roll.

Travel Relics

Creates custom travel posters using a customer's photos.

JAT Biodiesel

Creates diesel from the seeds of the jatroepa tree which contain 40% oil. The jatroepa tree is easy to grow and be harvested only 3 years after planting. The company claims it can produce biodiesel at ½ the cost of ethanol.

Kilorie

A mobile-phone health and nutirition management services. For now, they allow a customer to get nutrition information via SMS and upload what you ate so a doctor can track what a patient eats. They are launching in 4 weeks.

ElectriSense

Uses a buildings internal wiring to locate anything that's been tagged with custom transmitter; initially targeted towards the healthcare industry.

 

Awards

Sustainability

• JAT Biodiesel – winner 
• Puritech – runner-up 

Best Elevator Pitch

• ElectriSense 

Showstopper

• Accelereyes 

Innovation

• Syzygy

Gang of 5

We're getting the band back together.

At Capital Connections last week, I saw Anne Simons of brandeo. I haven't seen her in a long while and we talked about how we both missed the Gang of 5 meetings so we decided to get it rolling again.

What's Gang of 5? The FAQ is below but I describe it as open-source entrepreneurship – a group of people, no more than 5, who share their successes, failures, networks, knowledge, and opinions. The Gang of 5 had a big impact on me as I started Blue Violin. For me the most important are that the gang supported what I was doing (I love my wife but at times she thinks I'm a bit daft with this "entrepreneur" thing) and gave me a sense of accountability. It forced me to start thinking about Blue Violin as a business as opposed to a programming project.

The gang itself had a good mix of marketing, sales, and overall business knowledge and that's one of the keys to forming a group – make sure you have a good mix of talent across the spectrum. I'll be starting a Go5 in the north Atlanta area in the next week and am encouraging others to form groups in their area – Buckhead, Midtown, wherever. If you have any questions or would like help in starting your own group, please feel free to contact me.

frequently asked questions

Q: In layman's terms, what is the "gang of five"?
A: Gang of 5, or Go5, is a group of entrepreneurs that get together to discuss the challenges of starting a business. Our goal is to offer constructive advice for our members and assist them by offering an environment where ideas can be exchanged in confidence. By building a network of local entrepreneurs, we can encourage and support entrepreneurial activity.

In short, we are a group of entrepreneurs helping each other - it's that simple.

Q: What will it do for me, or help me achieve?
A: Go5 gives you honest feedback, advice, and moral support. We can also help make introductions to other entrepreneurs or business people. Just as important is that by helping others you're helping yourself. When you're listening to a group member discuss his/her problems or pitching his/her business, you're going to get help for your business. It's a feedback loop of the best kind.

Q: How do I actually start my own "gang of five"?
A: You probably know some entrepreneurs through other networking events. Grab a couple and meet at a local coffee house or restaurant and discuss your ideas. Once you get going, reach out to other entrepreneurs and invite them. We can help you get started with our meeting template and advising you as your group grows.

Q: Is one "gang of 5" related to others?
A: The Go5 is a loose confederation of gangs that are united in purpose but may differ in how they are run. All that we ask is that you encourage entrepreneurial activity in your area, are accepting of new members, and welcome Go5 members from another group.

Q: Who runs the "gang of 5"?
A: While it's helpful to have someone lead the group, you and your group run the gang. If your Go5 isn't achieving the results you think it should, feel free to retool your meeting template or try something new. There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to run the gang.

Q: What does it cost?
A: Money is a precious resource for the bootstrapping entrepreneur. You might have to spring for the occasional cup of coffee but that's it.

Q: Where do the "gangs" meet?
A: Your local coffee shop, restaurant, neighborhood park, a member's dining room - anywhere you want.


Q: What if I can't attend the weekly meetings due to a conflict (like my day job)?
A: Try to stay in touch with your gang as much as you can. While it's important to make occasional appearances at your Go5 meeting, you can offer your assistance through phone or email. You can also start a Go5 group that meets at a time that's convenient for those who are holding down a day job while they're getting started.

Q: What are the thoughts or recommendations on having more than one person from the same startup in the same "gang"?
A: That's fine but the startup only gets one slot for an update or roundtable discussion to prevent a meeting from being monopolized. It's also worth having each member join a different gang, if possible.

SoCon08

Live and on the scene.

I'm uploading my pics to Picasa – click and see what you look like at oh-God-thirty in the morning.

[8:45 am]

Jeff Haynie is up.

5 Big Events that changed our lives in the past 12 months

• Facebook
• iPhone

  Best selling smart phone – changing the mobile web.

• Radiohead

  Talking about Radiohead's "name your price" for their In Rainbows album. They made an estimated $10-12 million which goes directly into Radiohead's pocket. Much much more money than if the album were distributed by a record label.

• GuitarHero

  The game industry (video games, not gambling) is bigger than the entertainment industry. Guitar Hero III sold $100 million in the first week of release.

• MySQL

   

  Sun agreed to purchase MySQL for $1 billion. MySQL is the world's largest and most deployed open source database. Chances are you've used MySQL without knowing it because it's the database engine behind a lot of the most popular websites.

   

Good presentation by Jeff. Nothing earth-shattering if you keep up with tech blogs but a good synopsis for those for whom technology

[9:34 am]

People sharing what's been going on since last year and what they're up to now. Mentioning that you're trying to make money with social media seems to be taboo. Umm…. I don't get that.

[10:49 am]

Chris Heuer is talking about blending social media and business. Chris is an engaging speaker and is doing a great moderating the discussion.

In my experience, social media has mixed well with Blue Violin. I used blogs to find out what was going on in Atlanta's entrepreneurial community when I first started BV and later met them in person. Meeting those initial people led to introductions to more people. It's come full circle because I use twitter, Facebook, etc. to help me keep track of what people are doing. I'd also add that in order to get the full value out of your network, virtual or not, you have to participate. If you don't participate you don't matter.

Sorry if some of the pictures look terrible – I bought a new camera yesterday and am still learning how to use it.

SoCon08 Dinner

SoCon is upon us once again and it started tonight with dinner. It was good to see how many people showed up (I believe around 160) and the number of difference topics people were discussing. I saw a few people I haven't seen since SoCon last year and it was good to spend a few minutes catching up.

The Friday night SoCon dinner is one of the best events of the year in the Atlanta tech community because everybody is sincerely interested and excited about the event and meeting each other.

I've posted my pictures of tonight on Picasa – see everybody tomorrow!