May 2006 Archives

The time has come. It has been just over 8 months since I came to Prague to develop Sproutit with Charles and Peter. But, today marks the official beginning of the westward migration of the galavanting trio back to California. In case you are wondering, we have been planning our move back to the states for quite some time now, and thus far have not had to change our plans much at all.

I have been asked what I will miss most about Prague by many of my friends here. While material things are usually the answer, this time my best response was “the essence.” Basically, the ability to not have a car and still be able to go anywhere. Being able to wonder past the castle anytime I wanted. Walk across the famous Charles bridge that is 700 years old then return to my youthful flat of 100 years. But most of all, the friends I have made here, professionally and socially.

SO, to my beloved Praha, I bid you farewell.

The grand finale of the interview with Kevin Sladek of VideoEgg.

The quattro. A continued talk with Kevin Sladek.

Magic number three in a series of five.

2 of 5 of a chat with Kevin Sladek of VideoEgg.

Ladies and Gentlemen. Your attention please.

Here at Sproutit, we decided that we could do more than offer web apps to help teams and small businesses, we can also teach what we have learned. So, that is what we are doing with the brand new, straight out of the box, new car smell, Simple Business Workshops. So, far we have nailed down venues for San Diego and Chicago and, we are busily making calls to finalize DC, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, Toronto, and London.

After meeting with Kevin at SXSW in Austin, I just knew I had to get an interview. Here it is.

Eight Media likes Management by Feeds:

But seriously we’re already so interrupted with our daily tasks and phone calls that this might be a perfect or near perfect solution. We get updated with the info we need when-we-need-it not during -were-doing-something-else. (from Another productivity booster)

Good point. I’ve been working on a new page at Squidoo about Management by Feeds, explaining a bit more how it works and how you can get it adopted into your business. It’s the new new way to get things done.

alarm:clock euro just posted a nice piece on Sproutit and Mailroom. This interview was very different from most others I’ve done because the Valerie, the author, was really digging more into the business side of Sproutit. Read everything she wrote, but here is what I found more interest:

Here’s one of the cool things I love about Management by Feeds. I have a folder in NetNewsWire called “Sprout Companies”. This contains the blogs of all of our clients (that I know about). If there is a big event happening in the life on one of our clients, I know about it. Even if I don’t write to them, it makes me feel good to know that.

(For example, Omnidrive has had tremendous response to their new web-based storage solution. They are growing really fast. If you need to share files across the internet, you definitely need to give them a look.)

One thing we’ve learned since starting Sproutit is that personal touch one of the most precious commodities in the online. It seems like many people who start Web 2.0 companies are fascinated with the seemingly low costs of running a business. They can build a product for $10K, spend nothing on marketing, do support by email.

All of that is true and important, but you can’t use your website to hide from your customers. It may sound simple, but there is no better way to build a growing group of loyal customers than to simply become friends with them.

We have been hard at work optimizing Mailroom these last few days.

This morning (6AM EST) we just deployed some performance optimizations that should help a bit.

Rest assured though, we’ll always be working to make the service faster.

Due to this deployment, it’s possible that if you were logged into Mailroom this morning, your session was expired after the upgrade and you’ll have to re-lgoin.

Sorry for any inconvience, but we hope it’s worth it!

Dilbert is starting his own internet company now. Today’s strip highlights the reason we moved to Prague instead of finding a garage in CA:

We move back to California in July. We’ve had a great time launching our business from Prague, but the business is just growing too fast to do it from here. We’ll see you in the States soon!

While doing some research I came across the online version of a magazine I used to subscribe to during my undergrad years. Take a second to find the article then imagine the flashing ads to go along with it.

Here is the deal. Most of us don’t mind ads. I personally like them because it usually means I get cool stuff for free. What really bothers me, though, is when I can’t see the cool stuff through all the poorly placed annoying ads. It doesn’t get my attention and make me want to visit your site; it just makes me annoyed and I leave. Lose lose.

The new generations don’t respond well to advertising because they have been abused. Instead, they listen to each other for advise and recommendations. Social networks are all the rage because it is the only place people feel safe getting information. We are living in a Mass Marketers nightmare.

Another thing with ads is it can make your beautiful site full of rich content look like a discount car lot. Creditability goes to zero in a heart beat. Remember when you did research in college and had to use at least two sources from a “scholarly journal?” I’m pretty sure I never saw a blinking gif “Your Ad Here!”

So Mike, please, use ads responsibly.

The final installment of our chit-chat.

Part two of the chat with Scott Lake.

Through my travels I am always interested in cost of living. Many different indexes exist and one of the most popular is the Big Mac index. This could be agood measure for you, if you eat at McDonald’s. I don’t, so it didn’t work for me. Around the Sproutit flat, we talk a bit about cafes and coffee, so we have the Espresso index. But, we have come to find that not all espresso is created equal…(I have a dream).

But, one that is very common and something we can all relate to around the world is gas. Fuel. Plain and simple. The variances are negligible, so we can say that it is all the same. (If you work at Shell or Exxon…get over it). So, in the US, prices have climbed a bit to the low and mid $3 range per gallon. In Europe, over the last 2 years it has remained about the same at €1 per liter (hint… 3.8 liters per gallon) or $5 per gallon. When I lived in Japan (2000) gas was going for about ¥100 per liter or about $5 per gallon, again. So, I try to keep an open mind about gas prices as they go up in the US. We still pay less than most everyone.

Although, I was always curious about the ‘most everyone’ in my mind. I had yet to see a less expensive price on a pump anywhere. Well, the search is over. Here in Cairo, I found it. I walked up to the pump and read 0.900 which didn’t mean anything until I asked. That is .9 Egyptian Pounds per liter. 1£E = 17.5 cents US. That’s right. So, 1 gallon is equal to 60 cents. “Holy cow!” is right.

If it is any consolation, the coffee isn’t any good here.

A three part series with Scott Lake as he chats about the newest Rails app, Shopify.

In addition to allegedly leading marketing efforts here at Sproutit, I also co-direct a nonprofit venture called Blogswana. Blogswana is an attempt to use social software tools to increase AIDS awareness in the African country of Botswana. One of the problems we had was email.

A typical lumbering, old-style kill-crush-destroy NGO (non-governmental organization) has a huge overhead: Tons of Western-salaried employees, insurance, office space, sub-contractors and, of course, expensive suites of software, including email management. Naturally, the overhead a company like this needs is gigantic.

One of the criticisms of the old-style NGO is that, at best, only pennies on the dollar get to the people who need it. The other complaint is that the money that does get into the target country winds up more often gilding toilets in presidential palaces than providing for the hungry or sick. But lately, there have been the first stirrings of a movement I (unapologetically) call, NGO 2.0.

Like for-profit companies of the 2.0-ish persuation, NGOs of our ilk are adaptible, agile, entrepreneurial, direct-to-user outfits that utilize “customer” content creation. We use as many web applications as we can; in fact, that’s all we use. But here’s the problem: email.

Unfortunately, the top three providers of free, web-based email services are also egregious flaunters of ethical business standards. They assist tyranical governments in censoring their citizens and even help them to convict them of trumped up crimes. All for the sake of theoretical, future increases in market share. It’s hard to be a do-gooder with an email that twirls its moustache like a silent movie villain.

Alternatives, such as Hushmail, though well-built and ethically smirch-free, are difficult for the average person to use.

So, to make a short story long, I decided to put my mail where my money was and employ Sproutit’s Mailroom, not just as an email management system but as our primary email service.

In addition to sending and receiving email for free and from anywhere, Mailroom also gives us the ability to answer and manage the email as a team, which is integral to our efficiency and was a monstrous pain before. It also, equipt as it is with a quick-learning artificial intelligence, automatically forwards mail to the proper recipient, while allowing acess to anyone in the company. It also suggests proper responses to day-to-day inquiries.

I’m really pleased with this solution and I would encourage all the rest of you out there who are involved with non-profits to consider Mailroom, like us, both as an email management system that is particularly well suited to the collaborative, NGO 2.0 way of doing business and as your primary email service.

A continuation of our chat with Aaron Boeving of Clear Function, makers of Chalksite.

There seems to be a lot of rips in the fabric of space. Four times in the last week, I have come across sites with similar tones as the one below, as I was viewing my Vodafone account.

Brief interview with Aaron Boeving of Clear Function that has introduced Chalksite.