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datablogging
7 Months Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Thanks to Dylan who pointed out that blogs are 10 years old. Kinda hard to believe, honestly.
Gave me a chance to review the reger.com platform history (scroll down). In 1997 I was starting to build the datablogging concept although at the time I was just trying to track my own stuff on a web site. I had heard of the blogging thing but thought of it as something different because it didn't incorporate charts, graphs and data. But over the next year or two I noticed that the things blogging platforms had looked a lot like what I was building. They didn't steal from me, of course. We were just dealing with similar problems. Over time I incorporated most of the key pieces of a blogging tool while still developing the data side of things. Viola, datablogging.
But the most exciting things that have happened to me in the blogosphere have had nothing to do with technology. I inadvertently summarized these things in a post called joereger.com is the Worst Blog Ever. I've met a bunch of great folks. Nat, who I met through blogging, even got me a Christmas present despite the fact that we've never met in person (note: if you're a guy you'll want to check out the link... and not because of my present.)
Blogging is really about the people.
Well, actually, I've long held a strong belief that blogging is 1/2 about the social element... having a pulpit from which to voice an opinion and interact with others. This social outbound property is what's universally discussed when it comes to blogs.
But I believe that the other 1/2 of the value comes in the form of having your own history recorded for you to look back on later. The more you record the more you'll trigger memories (which I also sometimes call nostalgia triggering). And let's face it, life is about building memories so if you have a tool that helps you keep and maintain more of them then it's valuable.
People have been logging for centuries. Captain's logs. Explorer's logs. King's logs. War logs. Blogging is the latest and arguably most powerful form... web logging. It's exciting to see that it's ten years old now. I can't wait to see what happens to it in the next ten.
My guess/hope is that the blog will become the repository... a place to store your digital life. Complete with privacy controls that allow you to share/protect everything. Integration with physical devices like GPS, camera, bathroom scale, car, etc will feed your repository with stuff. And you'll annotate that stuff, providing perspective in much the same way that you blog today. It's a concept that I know will happen but that I don't have the resources to affect yet.
Happy birthday blogging.
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Thanks to Barbara for setting up this meeting with one of the Southeast's premier venture capitalists. We presented datablogging... and a little dNeero when the question of what we're focused on now came up. Our goal was to find a CEO for the datablogging project. Market feedback and connections to potential CEOs for the datablogging piece were important. A few names were thrown out which will make for a great start. Sig and Melanie were both excellent participants in the meeting, both providing valuable feedback. The monkey's on our shoulders to gain some market adoption or revenue (or both) to take one (or both) of these products to the next level. As Sig noted, there are two types of entrepreneurs... those that go from zero to three million... and those that go from three million up. The former is a slightly more rare bird. Many thanks to Imlay Investments for the time today!
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
I'm getting really antsy to launch the new product, dNeero. It's been too close to launch for way too long. That last 10% of detail work (patents, business processes, banking, trademarks, content proofing, bug fixing, etc) is taking much longer than expected. The market is ready for the product. I'm tired of coding and want to get my balance on with sales, presentations, etc. But I have to be patient. There are certain things that we need to do before a public rollout. One very important thing is to run it by a number of people in the blogosphere that I trust. I'm hoping to begin that process next week and then launch into a public beta the week thereafter. Also need to start coordinating some attention in the trade magazines/publications of our target market(s). Lots to do and lately I've been too focused on the product itself. The urgency for me to get us launched increases daily to the point that I'm not able to sleep well or ever feel like I'm really able to relax.
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
In 2005 the government changes the laws regarding daylight savings time... so geeks have to do some geeky stuff. Upgraded to Java 1.6 which is DST compliant. Didn't take too long but it's always white knuckles doing anything on a production server.
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
This is really cool and one of the key arguments in favor of blogging as a social news resource. Today both Vanessa and Anna went riding at Stone Mountain Park. They had very different experiences.
Excerpts from Vanessa's Post: Up early this morning to meet up with Dana, Anna and Kelly for some serious loopage at Stone Mountian. Although windy, it was warm. ... I stayed to hit 45 miles. Me and my tunes. The ride was awesome. I thought a lot and it turned into a Forrest Gump ride. I thought about the past year and how this time last year I was stressing over Powerman North Carolina. This year I am really excited about Powerman Alabama. ... Nothing like a day with the Ladies!
So, good post by Vanessa. As a reader I have a sense of what happened, who was there and (even more importantly) what Vanessa thought about it all.
Excerpts from Anna's Post: The only good thing I can say about today's ride was that I got to see Dana and hang out with her a bit. As I drove out to the mountain I felt great-happy to be out. It went downhill from there. I was underdressed which sucks-especially while standing around the parking lot for 15 min. waiting for people when I should have just taken off and gotten warmed up. ... The first loop sucked and I didn't feel social at all. ... I feel like I'm ok out there on the bike, but my entire body is not used to hills at all. I was sucking wind on the last hill before the parking lot. Oh well-3 loops or 15 miles of crap. That summed up today.
So, another good post by Anna. As a reader I can use Anna's post to verify Vanessa's facts about who was there, what happened, etc. But then I get a completely different perspective on the effect of what happened. Vanessa loved the ride... Anna hated it.
To me this is fascinating because it can be extended to all aspects of life. Imagine a pep rally at a college being blogged by 250 students. Or a bar room fight. Or anything else. With multiple perspectives you can balance out the bias that each person has and you can make your own conclusions about what happened. This is a very new concept for news. In the past we had journalists who told us what happened. We trusted them to interpret for us. And we still have them... but now we can also look to people with much higher levels of credibility and relevance in our lives... like Anna and Vanessa. They can focus the story to things closer to home.
There's a whole area of focus on social news as it relates to traditional journalism. I certainly can't summarize the whole movement except to say that this is an incredibly powerful concept. I just loved seeing it in action tonight on the blogs. Thanks for the honesty and sharing A & V!
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
One of the most thorough datablogging articles that I've seen out there. Written by John Tropea, the article does a great job of moving from the high level vision to a features discussion. Most pieces I've seen out there skip all of the great features we've got.
I can’t see why datablogging hasn’t taken off in many industries, it’s different than straight up blogging, from this example it enables you to over a period of time discover, trends and behaviour…how perfect would this be in the sales industry, etc…
...
datablogging has been around for a while, I thought there would be more copycats, maybe it’s ahead of its time. I do like the idea of recording and documenting your personal life, we all like looking at old photo’s and reading old journals, well this is that sort of thing to the extreme.
Ditto that. We're working hard on ways to expand this and give the capability to more people. The main thing holding it back is my lack of ability in certain areas. We've always said that publishing is only about 1/2 of the value in blogging... the other 1/2 is in the creation and perusal of your personal repository. Thanks to John for the article!
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1 Year Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Stewart's doing this daily updates style of blogging that I use to blog my general stuff. The title of the post is the date. Each "dispatch" blurb is timestamped underneath the post for that day. It can certainly be done by hand, but I have a secret page built into the reger.com platform that makes it easier.
To do this style of blogging I use a secret page called quickpost.log. It's at http://yourblog.reger.com/myhome/quickpost.log. When you get to this page it'll simply list your logs. Choose one and you'll get a single text input box. Type what you want to blog.
It'll take care of the title of the post (like "Thursday, February 1, 2007") and the timestamping of each sub-post (like "02:59:46 AM:") automatically. It'll also update the date of the post to the current time so that your most recent stuff pops to the top of your blog. When the date rolls to the next day it starts a new post for you and aggregates all of your dispatches.
This is how I post from my cell phone... I have a Treo with a built-in web browser so I just go to that quickpost page and start typing. Actually, I have a couple bookmarks in my phone browser for separate logs that I can post to. Happy blogging!
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
New feature that allows you to include thumbnails of files for each entry inside of an entry list. I didn't feel that the right-side column of photos on joereger.com effectively organized the most recent pictures. There was too much of a disconnect. In the center column, entry text. In the right column, entry thumbnails. Why shouldn't they be friends with each other? Now they are.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Had a good meeting with Dave from Operational Security Incorporated about their super tricked-out Humvees and datablogging. The basic idea is that the OpVees, as they call them, are mobile communications platforms that law enforcement and emergency responders can use as they handle situations. Each OpVee costs somewhere north of $200K. If you think about the Katrina situation, much of the turmoil was caused by the fact that existing communications were useless... cell phones were dead, land lines were dead, etc. OSI steps into the scene with a mobile sattelite dish and more comm equipment than most police stations. Datablogging then provides collaboration and data collection facilities on top of the comm links. Pretty cool, and potentially life-saving, application of datablogging. We're just talking right now but will move to some demoable prototypes fairly quickly. Thanks to Dave for the time and for letting me snap some pics.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Spent a little less than four hours getting the latest code to production. It's been a while since a production build and this one includes some big back-end changes in the data structures for the move to Hibernate. Let me know if you find anything broken.
Update 4:18PM: Already found a bug... new posts are declined by moderator. Working on the fix.
Update 4:44PM: Sweet! Quick fix. Found locally. Tested locally. Launched in a build to production. Tested on production. Lemme know if you find anything else anomalous.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Joern and I are back on track. What caused us to get off track? A few things.
First, development cycle timing. Working with Joern in Berlin and me in Atlanta we struggled to find a rhythm. Joern has a million other things happening, as do I. So we did a number of stop-and-gos. Sometimes what could have taken a couple hours, took a week or more. Note that I say "could have taken" not "should have taken." Neither Joern nor I has 100% time to devote to this project. The holiday season came and went. Things lagged on. Who's fault is this? Probably more mine. I'm responsible for keeping urgency on the project. If I had an issue earlier on (I didn't) I should have contacted Joern. When I did realize an issue, I contacted him and we talked.
Next, a semantic issue. The initial Chiba implementation I handed him a while back had a classed called ChibaServletReger.java. But it wasn't a servlet... it started out as one but I had to deform it to the point that it was no longer a valid servlet. But the name caused Joern to start on the path of a servlet integration. As he did this he unfortunately had to learn the lessons I had already learned in the couple of months of integration that I had done. As any new developer comes into a project there's a learning curve. Our codebase has a lot of lines. Some areas are well-architected... others, not so much. I didn't identify quickly enough that Joern was off-path and simply repeating my issues. Joern figured it out yesterday and realized that we need an API-coupled intergration, not a protocol-coupled integration. Who's at fault on this issue? Both of us. I should have been more precise in my articulation of the problem. Joern should have dug a little deeper into my integration instead of assuming it was a servlet integration.
We also struggled with theories for a while. We said we were going to start simple but we didn't. We jumped into some pretty tough technical discussions about theoretical performance and load issues. I have no doubt that these discussions will benefit us in the long run, but they didn't help us get the job moving. And without getting over the initial learning curve we weren't really as effective at those discussions as we could have been. I have a lot to learn about Xforms and Joern has a lot to learn about our system. Start simple, advance. We both believe in it, but we didn't do it as effectively as we could have. Who's at fault? Probably me more than Joern. I like to paint a broad brush picture so that developers have context as they develop... so that they can make judgement calls using that context. I believe I provide clear guidance in the form of bulleted emails, but with the many other emails floating around my message probably gets a bit obscured. So I can improve there.
The good news: we're back on track. How'd we do it?
We talked. Joern called and we talked through frustrations and got to some focus. I shot down some technically cool approaches in favor of some that just work but aren't sexy. And I've been trying to get back to Joern within an hour or so to get over the timing issue and keep the development cycle going. I've also made sure that we both understand what it is we need to accomplish better than I did before.
All basic stuff. Nothing Joern or I haven't already learned a million times before. But just knowing how you're gonna get bitten doesn't prevent the biting from happening. I'm just glad that Joern is as professional, flexible and bright as he is. It's been good working with him and while I paint the picture of a project with woes, we've actually gotten a bunch done already. No project is going to run perfectly. As Rolf once told me "every project has a big Gotcha." And things won't run perfectly from here out... we'll still struggle with the same issues. But we're a lot more likely to effectively recover from them.
I'm striving for perfection and optimization of funds. Analyzing the woes is a lot more fruitful than saying "hoorah, hooray, everything is perfect." Thanks to Joern (and Uli) for all of their hard work. We'll get there guys!
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
So, Tantek Celik disagrees with me as he writes to Chris:
Chris,
The perceived value that you see is exactly why this whole topic is such a massive trap.
It is very seductive (especially to programmers) to think that you can define a format for formats (a meta-format shall we say), *once*, then implement *only that*, then have every specific format magically work.
In practice, this never[*] happens. It's been tried *numerous* times. DTD, XML Schema, etc. In practice, key portions/features of really *useful* specific formats (like HTML) *always* fall outside of the meta-format, and
*must* be specified in prose of a specification. This is specifically why I designed XMDP to be to absolute minimum of what is necessary to define/recognize a vocabulary. I'm working on some extensions for includes (to transclude multiple XMDP profiles or portions thereof into a single profile), but other than that, I consider XMDP "done".
In the spirit of "don't reinvent what you can re-use", anyone seriously desiring to work on a format-of-formats should *first* teach themselves DTD, and XML Schema *at a minimum*, before having the arrogance to think they can do better.
And yes, exploring a format-of-formats is very much off topic and not just outside, but *against* the philosophies and principles of microformats.
http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats
Thanks,
Tantek
[*]The *one* exception that I know of to this that adherents have had (at
least) some amount of success with is RDF. If you're really interested in generic format-of-formats type discussions and all the abstractions present therein, there is already a community that has far more experience and understanding and desire in that space than the microformats community.
My reply:
> before having the arrogance to think they can do better.
I'm not proposing that we create a replacement for XML Schema or any of the other great technologies out there... just that we agree on one as the "most frequently used, most standard, most common, baseline, generally accepted but not perfect" way to describe a microformat.
As you note, there are a lot of ways to crack this nut. And this is the fact that I'm having trouble with. Toolmakers, aggregators and innovators are having a tough time with microformats because each new one that pops up requires custom code. Instead of taking a leadership role, choosing one and advocating adoption, you seem to revel in the establishment of many microformats. I'm questioning where the customization should be... at the user level where apps are differentiated? Or at the format level?
Why should each format have to start at ground zero, write custom plugins, force users to install them and then gain adoption? Why should Technorati have to write custom code at the format level for each format (of course it needs to write custom code at the business logic layer... that's how we all differentiate). If we agree to a framework, even with all of the limitations of whatever framework we choose, aren't we helping users use microformats more?
What about the people from National Geographic who want to set up a format to track wildlife? Should they have to understand XML Schema to take part in the microformat revolution? And what about the people in middle Iowa who like to count hay stacks? Should they have to learn arcane programming languages just to define a two field microformat (hay stack color, hay stack size)?
I understand your desire to not standardize on a definition language. Because doing so will inherently create limitations to what can be done. And some things just can't be done with a basic approach. And those things that gain massive adoption probably shouldn't be done with a simple approach.
I'm talking about the long tail of microformats... who's looking out for all those users?
Users are crying out, on this very mailing list, every single day for an easier way to create and use microformats.
Maybe we should see microformats.org as the high-end solution with the flexibility to cover everything. But I think we also need a microformats Light that enables most of the functionality that most of the people are looking for.
In the last 5 days I've seen these microformats proposed:
Bookmark Exchange Format
Attention Microformat
Citation Format
MicroId
Plants Format
Work of Art
Conversation
Following this list you see these requests all the time. This week's performance would predict 260 microformats in a year. And really, if somebody's posting to this mailing list they're probably hyper-plugged in to geekland. If we think about our users... the millions of people we rely on to make all of our geeky stuff actually useful... how many formats do you think are out there with pent-up demand?
I'd say... um... a lot.
And how many formats has microformats.org created/sanctioned so far throughout its history? I see nine specs. Eleven drafts. Thirty seven exploratory discussions.
That's 21% of the requested formats we're seeing on this board. And I'd argue that it's about .01% of the total number of microformats that our users would like to see and be able to use. Think of all of the hobbies out there... all of the interest groups... they all track custom data of some sort. Sure, we don't care about that data type... but it's their life... they're passionate about it. Who's serving them? Who's enabling them? Who's letting them publish so that smart entrepreneurs can leverage that data into the next aggregation phenomenon?
To me this user-oriented analysis paints an obvious argument for a format-of-formats. The current microformat mailing list and developer community is doing great work but it's not supporting the users who want a quicker means of creating and using microformats. I could be wrong on this... please prove me so.
Microformats should be the plumbing and grease for this thing we all (begrudgingly) call Web 2.0.
I want to be clear on one thing: I love the work being done on microformats.org. It is truly valuable and innovative. The process and ideals are wonderful. The people doing the work are collaborative and productive. I am in no way against what's being done. And I appreciate and completely understand Tantek's strong desire to squash my ideas quickly before I distract people from the work already being done.
I simply see a big gaping hole in what's being done today. What I've been told is essentially that I can take my hole and go play elsewhere. I don't like hearing that, but there's likely little I can or should do about it. If the users and readers of this list don't agree with my ideas and proposals then I should be kicked off. I promise I won't be a nuisance.
But before I go I'd like to ask everybody whether they agree with me in principle: do you think that creating and using microformats should be easier for the average user? If so, do you think that a format-of-formats approach would be helpful wherein a user can simply define ten quick fields with XML, upload the file to their blog server and start blogging?
Because there's nothing technically challenging about this proposal. As replies to my message have pointed out there are already numerous technologies that do this. All we need to do is choose one and advocate toolmaker adoption/plugin development (movable type, live journal, drupal, etc). Choosing and advocating is the issue here... not technology. Something is better than nothing to fill this microformat long tail void.
The ability for users to quickly define formats and use them to collaborate, meet, find and innovate is a critical next step. I'd like to help it happen. Here or elsewhere. Hopefully here with the support of you, the people who actually understand this stuff.
> I'm working on some extensions for
> includes
> (to transclude multiple XMDP profiles or portions thereof into a single
> profile), but other than that, I consider XMDP "done".
Interesting. I'd enjoy looking at these. Heck, maybe XMDP is exactly the sort of format-of-formats that I'm looking for. If so, and if you're still actively developing it, why am I arrogant for asking whether something like it exists?
> The *one* exception that I know of to this that adherents have had (at
least) some amount of success with is RDF.
Ok, so that's another possible answer to my original question. Yes, RDF is an option. Again, why am I arrogant for asking about something that has had "some amount of success"?
Sorry for the intrusion today. Let me know if you're interested in working on a format-of-formats with me. I've already received a number of kind private messages from people who say this is exactly what they're interested in seeing.
Best,
Joe Reger
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
From a post by Marc Canter to the Structured Blogging mailing list:
> This is one of the CORE issues I've been faced with - with my own
> 'structured blogging' efforts.
>
> We'll have some first pass ideas for CSS style sheets for each kind of post
> - so PLEASE feel free to make suggestions.
>
> That will be a core new function in the next 'Phase II' of SB.org.
And my two cents, as posted back to the mailing list:
It seems to me that we need to agree to a common microformat/structured blogging format definition language first. I don't care whether that's xml schema, rdf, xforms, etc... and I don't want to kick off an esoteric religious debate.
Once we define the way that we define a structured blogging format then each toolmaker can write one master structured blogging plugin. For example, if we settle on XML Schema then a single XML Schema file defines the structured blogging format for something (say, a Movie Review). WordPress, MT, Drupal, etc can then write a single plugin that accepts the XML Schema and displays it on screen for CRUD operations (Create Retrieve Update Delete).
And each of them can compete by providing additional extension points. For example, Reger.com may not allow CSS customization... but WordPress will... so WordPress will win over the users and the users will win from competition.
The display/editing of blog posts seems a separate concern from the format itself. Companies like PubSub/Technorati are going to be more interested in the definition language because it allows them to understand the markup their spiders are seeing.
SB clearly needs both pieces. It needs toolmaker flexibility to enable end-user simplicity. And it needs standardization of the format to describe formats so that aggregators can create social network effects across the blogosphere... i.e. so that we can all play together in format land.
The form elements that are used in browsers are generally the same. You've got dropdowns, check boxes, input boxes etc. Xforms and XUL are two technologies attempting to bridge the XML-to-UI gap and may be worth consideration.
SB, as a provider of open standards, has to decide what it offers as standards to encourage SB adoption. I propose that the work it's doing currently is to offer individual formats (Review Formats, People Formats, etc). This is incredibly important and fruitful work. But I also believe that SB should step a level higher to describe a format-of-formats... a standard way to describe something that's SB'd.
I don't believe that SB should step into the implementation technology side of things. For example, I don't think it'd be fruitful for SB to require a feature-complete Xforms implementation in an SB-approved blogging/publishing tool. As long as the tool allows the user to import files of the format-of-formats type, create blog posts and publish them in an SB-approved manner then it should be seen as compliant.
Tons of work is already happening along these lines in this group and in the microformats.org group... I know I'm preaching to the choir.
Back to Marc's comments. I agree with him. A one-size-fits-all CSS formatting for a format-of-formats won't give enough end-user flexibility. The format-of-formats CSS would allow you to style a dropdown, but would not allow you to define a kickass Album Review page layout with the cover pic in the middle and title in big honkin' blink tags (if you're so inclined).
But I think that a blended approach where the format-of-formats CSS covers the basics like how to get dropdowns on screen and then specialized CSS overrides/enhances presentation is ideal.
As you can tell, I'm trying to get to a point where the toolmakers don't have to hard-code anything in their system to support a basic new SB format. I'm interested in working on this format-of-formats but I need a lot of feedback from everybody here before I propose anything. I'm fairly technology-agnostic, but I know that each of us has preferences and technical barriers.
I certainly don't want to sidetrack any of the great work happening already. Maybe I'm discussing "Phase III" of SB.org?
Let me know what you think.
Best,
Joe
Update: I suppose I should RTFM every now and then. This is a great start in the right direction. Thanks to Kimbro Staken for the pointer to MicroCormat Definition (MCD).
Update: And apologies to the microformats.org mailing list where this topic is off-limits because it's difficult to solve while making everybody happy. There's a guy named Dr. Ernie Prabhakar who may be interested in taking this challenge on with me off-list... or maybe we should start a sub-list to respect Tantek's desire to not approach this issue. I just feel it's critical to the future growth of the movement.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
At 3:08PM today, Friday the 10th of March 2006, I had something of a breakthrough idea. None of the pieces of the idea are new... in fact Reger.com is a leader in all of them. But our discussions lately helped me reorganize the pieces and see things in a new light. More to come as I can release it.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Friends who are using our software: thank you. I know that you have many blogging platform options and that we present some usability challenges to you from time to time. Your enthusiasm and continued blogging is appreciated and incredibly helpful to us. As always, don't be shy about telling us what sucks. But mostly, thanks for choosing us.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Sr and I had the pleasure of meeting and presenting to Alan Urech today.
Mr. Alan Urech is a Senior Executive with 30 years experience in the healthcare industry. Working at both hospitals and vendors, he has significantly grown multiple organizations' profitability and market share using his strong strategic, tactical and operational business skills. He has a Masters Degree in Healthcare Administration, is certified as a Green Belt in Six Sigma and is registered as a MT(ASCP).
Alan's experience includes Senior positions in healthcare organizations including hospitals and vendors. These vendors include HBO & Company (now McKesson) and Eclipsys Solutions Corporation, both information technology organizations. At HBO & Company, he was part of the team that grew the company from about US$5 million in revenue to about $350 million in 12 years. The company was sold in the late 1990s for about US$14 billion to McKesson.
We met at the Caribou Coffee on Mansell Road. Amazingly, Sr. was early!
We're focusing our sales & marketing efforts into the health & wellness markets. We didn't know that Alan was in this space already but once we got to pitching it was clear that we wouldn't have to explain the industry.
For me the primary outcome was continued validation of our move into the health & wellness markets. Of the five market opportunities we presented he only balked at one and generally agreed with the others. This is great news... he's certainly a guy who'd know.
He offered a number of connections to other people that he'd like us to meet with. Possible advisory board members. Possible investors. This is great and we look forward to meeting with these people and reporting back to Alan.
Alan's very academic when it comes to evaluating a company. He teaches entreprenurial classes and consults with early stage companies. So he knows what he wants to hear and how he wants to hear it.
He presented us with a list of stages of company evolution. We told him where we were on the spectrum. That's the stage where he invests.
"So he wrote a check on the spot," you exclaim! Not exactly. He said that we're not quite ready. When pressed he said that it could be a revenue milestone that we should hit, but I'm unconvinced.
Five years ago when I talked to folks about funding they said that my product needed to be fleshed out more. I did that and found an international group of users. Three years ago I was told that if I only had a customer, just one or two, that funding would come. Now we have the U.S. Army and others. And a sales pipeline as big as the Alaskan Pipeline. About a year ago I was told that we needed a management team, or at least more people involved.
We got game.
We've all heard of script kiddies hacking something together on the weekend and getting $10M in funding two weeks later. We blow these folks away in terms of business plan, market opportunity, team members, existing product, actual customers and just plain old long term vision.
When an investor says that we need these things I feel they're politely saying "I pass but I want to keep my eye on you." It's certainly better than a verbal "I pass." But it's not the check writing that we want to see happening.
So what is it that we're missing?
I'm not sure. But I have numerous theories. One theory that's in favor right now is that I'm too middle ground. There's a spectrum of entrepreneurs from the wide-eyed college kid to the seasoned vet. As an investor you look at the college kid as being high risk but if they've got a good enough idea you know that you can demand lower valuations and slap them around enough to make them successful. As an investor you look at the seasoned vet as a known entity with a solid plan and while you know you can't push them around or take over a large equity position the lower risk profile is attractive.
I'm somewhere in the middle. I've been down this road before. I've been kicked in the balls enough times to know what sort of deal I don't want and I know enough of the tricks of the funding trade to make an investor realize that he/she can't bully me. I've got a six year track record growing a technology in a hot arena. I've got a business strategy to apply that technology that makes sense. All these things point to treating me as the seasoned vet and investing because I'm more likely to succeed.
But physically I look more like the college kid. This, in my opinion, creates some confusion in the minds of investors as to which end of the spectrum I'm at. The investor mind bounces back and forth between the two views of me and ultimately, unable to find the answer, sticks me in the middle... which is a bad place to be when you need to differentiate.
Just a theory.
Alan sees tons of business plans. After our meeting he went to judge a business plan competition downtown. He does a lot of this sort of stuff.
Our meeting ran from 10AM - 12PM. The important thing to note is that Alan had his next meeting (being a judge) downtown at 12PM. We think this was a good sign.
Alan also provides consulting services to young entrepreneurs looking to raise money. He takes a percentage of money raised and charges a monthly retainer for his time. We're going to go it alone for a while but it's certainly good to know that we can bring in Alan if we need to.
Alan was very kind with his time and very helpful with our presentation. For me it's bittersweet. On the one hand I truly appreciate and value the feedback and education. On the other I know that if Alan was going to fund us he would not be educating... he'd be talking more about equity numbers or something else deal-based.
In the early days, five years ago, I would approach investors in this "educate me" capacity. I told them that I didn't want them to invest, but that I wanted them to educate me. It would seem that some conversational cues from those early days trigger the investors we talk with into that mode. I need to look out for it and try to keep things on the "we want an investment partner" topic.
More important than anything else here (my typical hyper-analysis) is the fact that Alan's just a really nice guy. Very well-spoken and easy to get along with. I sensed that he truly cared about our business and about us as people.
He mentioned a product demo that he saw where a device the size of a pda shoots a keyboard in light onto your desk and then the screen up onto the wall in light. Wow! I wish I had a blog when I predicted it, but I've said for a number of years that this interface method would eventually happen. I think I used to articulate it as a smart watch with laser keyboards of some sort. Glad that it'll be reality soon... I'll have to get one.
One flub in the meeting regarding my father's role in the company. He's our strategy guide. Our janitor. Our sounding board. Our hosting helper. He does whatever he can to help in visible and invisible ways. We haven't found a clear way to articulate that without just assigning him a random title. But Alan picked up on it immediately and dug in a bit. Good for him.
He also dug in a bit on the mission statement. He argues that it should more succinct and include more business elements. Fair enough. But the mission statement is our long-term "whole ball o' wax" vision. Somebody proposed that we rename what we have now to be our Vision Statement and then adopt a more market-oriented mission statement. I'll think on it but in general I don't want to have too many statements hanging out there. The mission statement tells us what we want to be when we grow up and who we want to provide value to.
Big thanks to Alan for the time today. We thoroughly enjoyed it and are sure that it will stimulate some good discussion.
After the meeting with Alan we debriefed on the patio... it looked warm and sunny. We almost froze.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Big thanks to Pawan for working on a weekend to get tag sizing working. I couldn't wait to see my tag map. The more images and/or entries a tag has associated with it the larger the font size of the tag. Nothing new, really. But new for Reger.com users. WahoO!
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
From Marc's blog: I have all these high ideals about how open source infrastructure should enable a distributed mesh. But no one seems to care and no one seems to be willing to fund it. So we just go and build it ourselves. Well no one but PubSub I should say.
Brother, I hear ya.... but people are paying attention to you. Sure, in person they can't not pay attention :) But they also "get" what you're doing and appreciate it. I think I've said it a million times and I'll say it again: I wish reger.com could be more involved in the standards that you're working on. Not just with words on the blog... but with code on the floor and APIs galore. We're bootstrappin' right now... trying to get ahead of the often-viscious "demo-pilot-install-maybe-revenue" cycle. Put us on the list of those that care and appreciate but aren't (yet) contributing code. We'll get there.
Now we’re at that same threshold again. Only this time its DLAs (digital lfiestyle aggregators) and what I’m now calling ‘persona editors’. Its gonna take a LONG time for folks to grok me - again.
Grok. Wait, what does grok mean? It's not dirty, is it?
But that’s OK - I’m patient like the happy Buddha on the hill.
A little patience and a little advocacy. People want their personal nostalgia repositories... it'll happen.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Reger.com users will now notice a new groups popup that comes up after you post your entry. This is somewhat obtrusive on purpose. We want to stimulate more social interactions. We're going to beef up the social networking features... they're all in there but somewhat hard to find. So we're going to put them in your face for a bit. Eventually we'll give you a setting to quickly turn these things on and off but for now we'd like to get some groups going. Stuff like the "Atlanta Triathlete Group." We'll see how it goes. Give us feedback.
You'll also notice that your author profile picture appears with your posts. We're going to start working this picture in more and more. It makes your site more personal. And we're going to start doing a lot more cross-site stuff like the Groups functions. So on a list of blog entries from many users you'll see a bunch of small faces. And, if you like, you can use a cartoon photo... or just leave the default one in there.
Entry tagging is new. We've had image tagging for a while but now we have entry tagging too. And an awesome tag map that sizes your tags based on the number of times you've used them. A'la' flickr. There's a bug with the sizing code but we'll have that worked out shortly. Very cool feature.
On the images popup window you'll find tag links, entry links and the image description. Very helpful when clicking from the homepage list of images... you can quickly find the entry that it's from.
A bunch of back-end stuff has been added and/or fixed. Stuff to let other companies private label the site.
Some new templates were launched but so far the level of detail isn't there. I'm the bottleneck and will get to it soon.
Email validation should cut down on spam which slows everybody's sites. A new streamlined signup process helps people get into the game. A new password recovery process is much easier than before.
Overall a lot of good stuff happening! Let us know what you like and what you don't like!
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
How much storage will it take to store your life?
24/7 video of your entire life
24/7 audio of your entire life
Everything you've read
GPS data of every place you've been
Every email you've gotten
Every picture you've ever taken
Biometric data of your entire life
So I set out tonight to make a wild ass guess at how much storage it will take to store a life. I'd like a number in bytes. So, let's break this down:
1) We need to know how long you'll live for. In the interest of being conservative on the estimate I'll choose the longest possible realistic value. The American average life expectancy for a male is 73 years.
2) Video of your entire life: What quality? What codec? Early cd-rom video ran at about 1.5Mbit/sec. Typical DVD data rates are from between 3 and 10 Mbit/sec. We'll certainly use a variable bit rate compression of some sort. And compression technology will certainly advance. Let's choose 5Mbits/sec. This translates to 1438.83Tb/life. But wait... we don't just want to see what's going on in front of us... we want to see what's happening on all four sides. So let's multiply that number by 4. We're now up to 5755.32Tb/life.
3) Audio of your entire life: We don't need full CD quality. Most of our life isn't lived in a concert hall so MP3 quality will be just fine. MP3's do a data rate of between 128 and 265Kbps which translates to 73.66Tb/life.
4) Everything you've read: How much do you read in a day? Wow, there are a lot of speed reading sites on the web... who knew? Apparently the average college student reads between 250 and 350 words per minute. We'll use 350. That's 21000 words per hour. But how many hours on average does a person read? Gotta love the internet... the Canadians in 1998 read an average of .4 hours per day. And Canadians are smarter than Americans. But let's assume some sort of librarian bookwork worst-case-scenario. 5 hours of reading. Hey, it's her job. That's 105000 words. But how long is a word? Wikipedia has some metrics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Words_per_article where they mention that "200 readable characters (roughly equivalent to at least 33 words)" so the average word is about 6.06 letters long. We'll use 7. So we're up to 735000 bytes/day... not much really. We'll call it 1Mb.
5) Ah, email: I did some quick searching and then decided to just use my Outlook PST file. In the last year my pst has collected 4Gb of girth. I do a good bit o' the old email, but it's really not the text of email that's the problem... it's the attachments. And this is largely dependent on whether your friends spam you with fart videos (keep 'em comin' guys!) and whether your mom sends out a bunch of digital pics. Let's assume that over a lifetime we'll start doing more video email and file sharing. I'll choose 10Gb/year.
6) GPS data: Let's say that you want to record your lat/lon ten times a second throughout your life. Each lat/lon will be roughly "+41.4053339525534/-73.9705181121826"... or 35 bytes... or 350 bytes/sec. That's .805Tb/life.
7) Pictures: I take a lot of photos. I have a 6 megapixel camera (it's not the size of the sensor... it's how you use your lenses). And a 1Gb storage card. I probably download the card an average of once a week. That's about 142Mb of high quality photos per day. Seems a little light for the future. Let's assume 500Mb/day. That's 13.3225Tb/life.
8) Biometric data: A heart rate reading every second. And a core body temp. And, I don't know... a bunch of other biometric data. Skin voltage levels to tell when you're lying. Bladder fullness. Tear duct fluidity. Fingernail length. Nanotech people... it's coming. Similar to GPS data... let's give a little more room for data though. Instead of 350bytes/sec, let's do 1K/sec. That's a lotta bio data... but we're talking about putting your life into data. That's 2.3Tb/life.
And the grand total... drumroll please... 6,499,335,712 Terabytes!
Or 6,499,336 Petabytes.
Or 6,499 Exabytes.
Or 6.5 Zettabytes.
How much would that cost today? I went to dell.com and configured a 3Tb storage area network machine with RAID (I want my life backed up) for roughly $15K. So I'll say 1Tb costs $5K. Scaling up to 6,499,335,712 Tb I certainly wouldn't expect to see that cost stay linear.
Google's estimated total storage in its farms is 4.5 × 10^16 bits... five orders of magnitude less than the storage required for our human life.
At my house I counted roughly 1020Gb... a little more than 1Tb or 1/6,499,335,712th of what I'd need to store my life.
I'd like to throw down some Moore's law into this equation to see what a reasonable cost for this would be.
This is just a wild ass guess. Nothing scientific about any of it.
I'd suspect that within 50 years we'll have another important data stream: mental. We'll be able to record brain signals and mine them somehow. That could take up a lot more space than video.
Compression would also improve. I've chosen some pretty hefty data levels for video and audio. I'd settle for a lot less. Very quickly on the spreadsheet I dropped the video rate to 1Mb/sec and audio to 64K/sec... 971,007,834 Terabytes.... quite a bit less... but still a lot for 2006.
Personally, I'd want to have my entire life in 4-way video. But some people wouldn't want to pay for that so I suspect that tools to crop daily data either automatically or manually will grow. For example, stop recording while I'm sleeping.
Other aread of the discussion could center on social effects from such data capture. Governmental surveillance, interpersonal effects, etc.
And battery technology would have to progress... or dissappear... I'd love these devices to run on ATP... an extra burger a day and I'm good to go.
Just some fun for the evening. Feel free to shoot holes in this.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Big code launch to improve the signup/login/password recovery process. Signup is now much easier, requiring a lot fewer fields. Login now happens with your email address, which most people remember fairly easily, unlike a username which is easy to forget. And the password recovery can now be done via email. No password is actually sent out via email, but a link enabling you to do so is.
For existing users there could be some difficulty. You'll now log in with your email address. Email wasn't required previously so many of you don't have one in the system. But there's a link below login in red that gets you to a page where you can log in with your username/pass, choose an email address and have a link sent out to you. We've tried to make the process as simple as possible.
And some users who had many accounts with the same email address will find that we chose the most recently-logged-in to account and left the email in there, blanking the email on the other accounts. You'll have to go through the link below login to associate another email address with each account.
Please use the forums if you have difficulty.
We understand that these are hardships, and we apologize. The advantages are big. User simplicity and spam fighting... accounts must be validated by email now. And the ability to tell you when we're going to have downtime in the future.
This is the first outcome of something we're calling The War Room Sessions. Four of us at the projector with the site, finding ways to make it easier to use... fixing things on the spot... with war room intensity.
Expect more good stuff in the near future.
And yes, all this is why I haven't been posting much lately. Busy, busy, busy.
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2 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
Good meeting with Seth Goldstein and his team at Root.net. The manhattan offices are amazing. The thinking is even better. Lots of great stuff will come out of these guys.
Some commonalities and some differences between what we call a datablog and what they call a vault. One thing's for sure, the user needs to be in control of their own data.
Thanks for the time and the great conversation!
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3 Years Ago | Posted to: datablogging
There's a time value of money... it increases in value over time. And a network effect for Web 2.0 companies... the more people on the network the more valuable it is. But there's also a time value of information.
In many circles the value of information decreases over time.
Take the stock market. Knowing the price of a stock at 11AM helps you a little at 2PM, less at 3PM, less still the next morning and is essentially worthless a week from now.
Take scientific knowledge. While there are always gems hidden in old scientific papers, in general the majority of scientific papers become obsolete by being disproven or expanded upon. The value of scientific papers, in general, deteriorates with time.
In our hyper-information-driven age we tend to think that the most current information has the most value. Twenty four hour news channels beat into our heads that we need headlines from around the globe within seconds. RSS feeds give us updates from our industry-of-choice in seconds. Phones now feed us news on tiny screens. The message is clear: get your information now, while it's still hot.
But when you look at personal information you see the exac | | |
A Weekend of dNeero Design