A quick Halloween-related post. My brother has some highly creative pumpkin carving skillz. He’s ably aided and abetted by my niece and nephew.

Behold: pumpkin carnage:

The 2007 Line up:

A classic from last year:

And my personal favorite:

My skills don’t warrant a photo… Trust me
P.s. Al: Congrats on the new job!

Categories: Thought o' the Day, Tip O' the Hat
No Comments »

I’ve spent the past week re-writing the business plan.  Followers of this blog will know exactly how I feel about that. 

The good news is that it came out 12 pages shorter.  That at least saves a few electronic trees.  The other excellent news is that I found a number of recent reports that apply specifically to what we do.

Back in January, a teensy tiny company called Accenture conducted a survey of 1000+ middle managers in the US and UK.  No typo, that’s one thousand managers.  The purpose was "to uncover wide-ranging insights about the way they gather, use and analyze information."

The title of the press release rather gives the game away:  "Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless".

Here are some highlights:

• Each manager spends two hours per day searching for information
• 59 percent said they miss valuable information almost daily because they can not find it
• 57 percent said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information was a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs
• 53 percent said less than half of the information they find has value to them
• 45 percent said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge — it was easier to find out what the competition were up to
• 42 percent said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week

We live, eat and breathe this stuff, and I still find those numbers shocking…

Categories: Business
No Comments »

StartupWeekend comes to Chapel Hill this Friday.  Did you sign up yet?  If not, why not?

I’ve got no idea what we’ll create, but it’s sure to be interesting. You can read my earlier thoughts here…

Thanks to Glen Caplan and Hutchison Law for jumping in and donating the necessary legal work.

Categories: StartupWeekend, Thought o' the Day
No Comments »

And finally, Act 3…  I presented much of the background in my two previous posts (here and here).  So lets get down to business…

First, a quick recap:

1. Data growth is out of control — there’s too much stuff stored in too many places
2. Data is growing way faster than we can use it, so more and more data is becoming less frequently used
3. The combination of 1 & 2 undermine the efficiency of today’s data management tools

I also mentioned that hierarchical systems break down if too much information is added  That leads me to another key point in our view of the universe:  the traditional idea of structure needs to change.

The problem with permanent structure is that it doesn’t handle unforeseen exceptions.  And the more data a system contains, the greater the odds are that there will be exceptions that need to be handled.  The scramble to update systems to handle Y2K were a classic example of just how painful this can be.   

We think it’s better to evolve structure into a transient user-driven thing that gets deployed at the time of consumption.  It’s a mechanism to increase convenience at a particular point in time, rather than a foundation that a system is built upon.  It turns out that meta-data (a.k.a. tags) can be a great tool to drive structure.

What we are building is a tag-driven system that unifies all your different data sources within a single interface.  You could think of it like an RSS aggregator, but for any kind of data.  Through a combination of smart and sneaky methods, we are automatically tagging data as a user organizes and interacts with it — no manual tagging is required.  Those tags drive all kinds of useful functionality that helps you organize the data.

The end result is a personal library for all kinds of data that makes sense to you.  Each individual library can be connected to other libraries, while maintaining your unique perspective on the world.

We’re getting ready to broaden our beta program.  If you’d like to participate, use the "Contact" link on our home page to send us an email.  All you’ll need is Firefox and a broadband internet connection.

Categories: Business
No Comments »

By now you’ve probably heard that the big Softies are ponying up $240M for just 1.6% of Facebook.  I’ll save you reaching for the calculator — that puts Facebook’s valuation in the $15 BILLION range.

Quite a few folks are saying how absurd this valuation is, and I agree.

However… it seems to me that one of the most likely buyers of Facebook would have been Google.  Especially after Facebook rejected Yahoo’s paltry $1.6B buyout offer last year.

I don’t think even the MoneyG (as I like to call them) would spend $15B to buy Facebook.  Doubly so given the lack of return on their YouTube investment.

Yet Facebook probably wouldn’t have sold for a price Microsoft were willing to pay.  So instead, MS went strategic (and in my experience, that is something they can be masters at).

In my opinion, the net result of their investment is "if I can’t have you, neither can anyone else"…  Microsoft have effectively locked up the allegedly hottest company on the planet for a mere $240M.

When you consider what Google et al have been paying for companies many have never heard of (even though they’re good), I think Microsoft look pretty darn smart…

P.s. I am way behind on my blog reading, so if smarter folks than me have already beaten this to death, I apologise…

Categories: Thought o' the Day
No Comments »