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Updated: 19-12-2005; 9:54:40

Paolo's Weblog.

Martedì, 25 maggio 2004

Linked In Investments

Investing in Linked In and some explosive growth numbers.
Last week I had another great dinner in San Francisco with Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked In. Reid is one of the most impressive and visionary friends I know.I am very proud to join its investors list. Reid has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million in November last year. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. A round with business angels that I participated in will be announced within a few weeks.[ Loic Le Meur Blog]

We have just started using Linked In to try getting in touch with people who might be interested in K-Collector. It's too early to say if it's going to work, it definetly looks promising (I'd be happy to be a satisfied testimonial ;-).

After having used the Linked In site quite heavily for a few days we can say that there are several features we would like to see developed on Linked In (starting with a bunch of RSS-based ones). I'm ready to pay for these additional features. Actually I might even pay for the tools as they are today if some restrictions would be removed.

Loic is listing some impressive numbers, the Linked In network is definetly getting huge, I wonder what is the critical mass they are trying to reach before turning it in a business.

10:29:41 AM

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Lunedì, 24 maggio 2004

There's yet another discussion on Scoble's weblog [via Scripting.com] about orange XML icons.

But the real challange here seems to be getting to any decision. For how long have we seen these discussions discussed over and over again? Did anything change?

Do we miss the big gorilla imposing its way to everybody? Do we have to wait for Microsoft to put an orange (or gree, or whatever) button everywhere?

PS: I think that trying to promote the XML orange icon as a logo, a brand, could be a good idea. See it as a symbol, not as a word or a button.

10:22:39 AM

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Sabato, 22 maggio 2004

How to charge for weblogs

Dave: It's lame to charge for weblog software based on how many weblogs you make and how many authors there are. A weblog isn't that big a deal. Manila lets you make as many weblogs as you want with as many authors as you want. Today's modern $2K computer can manage thousands of weblogs. Charge a fair price and don't fuss over how many blogs they make or how many people edit them.

I my experience the most significant cost when hosting any kind of web site or providing hosting software is support. And from a support POV charging per site/per user makes probably some sense (the more users, the more support - a server with 1000 users will trigger more support requests than a server with 1 user).

Providing a decent support is *the* challange for small companies willing to grow as we have seen in many cases. If you're not willing to provide customers' support, then charging per user per blog is evil ;-).

8:28:00 AM

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Venerdì, 21 maggio 2004

A couple of guitar-reated notes:

Amplitube Live is a very cool amp simulation app, absolitely worth trying and with an extremely cool GUI (only recently I discovered that it's made by an Italian company... that must be why it's so cool :-). Thanks to Sandro for the hint.

If you like guitars and happen to be in London you can't miss Denmark Street. Thanks to Matt for taking me there (and not letting me walk into any of the shops ;-).

11:49:12 AM

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Giovedì, 20 maggio 2004

We're catching up

Italy approves 'jail for P2P users' law. Download songs and spend up to three years in prison By Tony Smith . [The Register]

Mr. Berlusconi government is catching up whith his overseas buddies. Sigh!

While our politicians are taking care of somebody else's interests, a few proud bloggers are doing their best to represent our interests.

6:04:33 PM

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Getting LinkedIn at work

If you are on my LinkedIn contact list it's quite likely that in the next few weeks you will receive from me a request to get in touch with somebody you know.

Among the other channels which we are using to promote and sell our product, K-collector, I decided that we should try leveraging on the digital social networks that we have built in the last months. We are currently targeting medium-large corporations which, we think, could benefit faster and in a very measurable way from our tools.

Even if, of course, we are interested in sales, what we really want is the opportunity to start conversations with people who could become users of our products and have a deep knowlege of their environment and could provide very valuable feedback.

3:18:25 PM

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The google connection

Google for the desktop?.
NYT write-up of a local search tool codenamed “Puffin” that Google apparently plan to give away sometime soon.
The New York Times > Technology > Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft
Also from Google, some proposed principles “to help fight deceptive Internet software", and Aaron just got a full terabyte for his Gmail.
There’s a connection somewhere…
[Raw]

With one terabyte available and broadband becoming ubiquitous, soon we'll start upstreaming all our stuff (not only our email) to google's servers. You can only imagine how specific ads will get at that point.

12:29:37 PM

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Martedì, 18 maggio 2004

Frontier's kernel opensourced

Yesterday Dave Winer announced that at some point in the next few months there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.

It's a quite interesting news since I, just like Marc, would not be here today if it wasn't for Frontier and, of course, Dave.

When in '99 we decided that our company best development path would have been providing to our customers tools to maintain their web pages by themselves, Frontier had been a very natural choice. We developed a full CMS with Frontier, one which is still silently humming behind the scenes of hundreds of web sites, from some very small ecommerce ones to some very large corporate portals.

Also our new knowledge management product, K-collector, is currently a Frontier-based application.

Since first I heard about Dave's intention to release the Frontier kernel I have been wondering about how we could contribute to this effort. After all, having received so much, I feel we should give something back.

I don't know if we'll have time and resources to contribute to the kernel (we'd surely like to squash a few bugs which have been hunting us for all these years for the sheer pleasure of doing it). What we have is a mountain of Frontier code. From xsl-based template rendering to full blown e-commerce applications, from customer profiling to easy content editing, from directory-structured web sites to sql database integration...

Maybe we could release some parts of IdeaTools, or we could partner with UserLand to better take advantage of a stronger and more open architecture. Nobody can say what will happen, hopefully it will be fun.

3:17:20 PM

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Lunedì, 17 maggio 2004

While in London

While in London also I met Loïc and Andrew. It was the first time we met: it has been a good meeting.

At the moment there's no business going on between SixApart Europe and Evectors, still we are all working in the blogosphere, we are talking to the same people, often trying to sell products and services to the same customers and we mostly believe in the same things. This is why it makes sense to meet, to exchange ideas, to try as hard as we can to find common grounds and to build something together.

This is an entirely new business, it's worth trying to establish some new rules.

5:13:01 PM

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When I left for London last week I had left Radio running on my G4, with everything ready and set up to let me blog and browse my aggregator while on the go. But of course, Murphy stroke (actually it might have been somebody even more important).

Just while my plane was taking off from the Trieste airport I did notice some stormy clouds approaching, but only when I landed at Stansted airport I learned that a thunderbolt had struck our office. We lost:

adsl router
ethernet hub
ethernet cable (!)
the motherboard of a Mac Cube

This created more than a little disruption, and it took quite some time and efforts to my partners Monica, Simone and Fabrizio to bring the company back on-line while I was partying in London. Everything is working again now. Great work.

3:56:04 PM

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Mercoledì, 12 maggio 2004

Blogger party in London tonight. There's a bunch of people I'll be happy to meet again. There's a lot more I'll be happy to meet for the first time. More later.

10:46:33 AM

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Martedì, 11 maggio 2004

Welcome to the googleblog (well, kinda)

So here we are: the official google blog.

The fact that such a big and visible company is going to use weblogs to communicate with the rest of us it good. The fact that I can't subscribe to their feed because the aggregator I use doesn't support the standard they're pushing is sick.

Update: you can get the atom feed converted to RSS here. Who knows, if they start seeing enough referrers coming from a conversion to rss site they might realize that not offering RSS is not strategic. It's stupid.

11:29:39 AM

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Lunedì, 10 maggio 2004

Time for ENT 2.0?

It's very interesting to read Danny's toughts about ENT and RSS 1.0. Maybe it's time for a new release of the ENT specs, RSS 1.0 compatible. Oh... and what about Atom?

11:26:42 AM

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Giovedì, 6 maggio 2004

http://www.google.com/blog/

4:58:04 PM

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Mercoledì, 5 maggio 2004

Social filtering

I happen to have a few "famous" friends in my contact list on LinkedIn, people who everybody would like to know. This means that from time to time I get a message from somebody (I usually kinda know) asking me to put somebody else (whom I don't know) in contact with one of these famous friends (usually it's Joi Ito ;-).

There are cases when these messages look like they could interest my contacts, other cases when they are clearly spam and then... there are the grey ones. Messages which don't look spam but that most probably do not interest the person down the line (even if it's very hard to say if you don't know pretty well the person).

In these cases my choices are:

forward the message anyway (running the risk of not being a good "friend")
decline to forward (theoretically running the risk of preventing a deal from being done)

There are risks in both cases, but also some very interesting opportunities.

Plenty to think about as far as social networks dynamics are concerned, uh?

6:06:53 PM

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© Copyright 2005 Paolo Valdemarin.