We are the web

I love this description of the World Wide Web of today, from Kevin Kelly in his recent Wired article We Are the Web:

The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn’t everyone?). I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.

Woa! Sounds like an awesome achievement, doesn’t it! But we’ve only scratched the surface. Remember, we’re in a world of accelerating change, so this is just the beginning. Strap in folks, we’re in for a wild ride!

Ringtones by Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read two years ago, and one year ago and last summer, but instead just stared at it each day.

Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.”

Nerd heaven.

No more Slashdot for me (yes, you read right)

Three sites I use often are Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular. If you want to find out what’s hot right now on the Internet, those sites will tell you (although Memeorandum usually gets the news even before these sites).

I saw a blurb on Programmable Web about DiggDot.us, which launched yesterday. Diggdot.us combines results from all three of those sites into one very clean interface. Stories have been de-duplicated, and they claim to have additional content as well.

Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.

If you are a news junkie, this is for you. Or at least, it will be once they have an RSS feed. Shame.

You read it here first

MicroSoft’s Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) last Monday´s morning, a “specification that extends RSS from unidirectional to bidirectional information flows.” And, wow, is Microsoft starting to get with it. They’ve released it under Creative Commons license, the same license that covers the RSS 2.0 specification. Anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon the specification even for commercial reasons.

See Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer and the FAQs.

For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.

SSE allows you to replicate any set of independent items (for example, calendar entries, lists of contacts, list of favorites, blogrolls) using simple RSS semantics. If you can publish your data as an RSS feed, the simple addition of SSE will allow you to replicate your data to any other application that implements the SSE specification.

SSE can also be used to extend other formats such as OPML.

New companies will be built on the back of SSE. And you heard it from me first!

What agile programming is not

In the immortal words of Dilbert/Scott Adams, "Agile programming doesn't just mean doing more work with fewer people." See the cartoon.

Trend Spotting

Wired Magazine has a great article this month on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard Tim’s name was in 1994 at NetGenesis when GNN appeared on the scene. I remember when it was acquired by AOL for $11 million and I thought to myself “holy – there could be real dollars in this Internet stuff.” The article reflects the way I think of him and the business he’s created.

Wired also had a short fetish review of the super-bitchin Optimus Keyboard. I’m ready for about five of these when it finally ships.

7 Questions to ask

Due to recent experience, I wanted to post on some thoughts about recruiting and things to consider when trying to enter a small, mid-level company. Keep in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive list, merely a suggested seven.

If you are receiving employee options, what is the number of fully-diluted outstanding shares? Typically, option grants are a key component of compensation in a start-up and are often promoted as such. But the details surrounding stock options are often complex and confusing for non financially-oriented individuals. It is best for employees to understand as much as possible about their option grants (this subject could be the topic for an entire series), but the first place to start is to ask how many outstanding shares there are. From that point, one can calculate the percentage of the company an employee will own and a better gauge of the magnitude of this compensation component. It surprises me how many startup employees I know who are excited to have received a grant of x number of options, but never bothered to ask what relative percentage of the company that translates into.

Has there ever been a down round, a flat round, or a CEO change? Any of these three events are an indicator that the startup has faced some difficulties in the past and may not be on track moving forward. If one of them has occurred, prospective employees should seek out as much information as they can the context of the situation. After all, there are exceptions to blind the assumption that these are a black mark (e.g. a founding CEO stepping aside to make room for professional management could be an indicator of successful growth). However, if any of these issues have arisen, it is a signal to dig deeper into the health of the business.

What is the burn rate and how much cash is in the bank now? Even if a start-up is successfully executing, it could still face a cash crunch if it is not yet profitable. Employees should ask to find out how much longer the company will ride without the infusion of another round capital. While the actual answer to this question won’t necessarily provide a definitive answer about the ability for the company to access both cash and capital, it will open up a discussion about it.

What is the plan for exit strategy and its timeframe? The answer to this question is a soft one with many factors, and can always change depending on circumstances. However, it is best to find out management’s view of a possible exit strategy. Is the company pieced together for a quick flip, building for multi-year significant value creation, or plan on holding for the long term as an eventual cash cow (for founder/investors)? These expectations will affect not only how long employees may be working for the company as it exists today, but more importantly, the resulting surrounding corporate culture.

Could you meet the CEO, the founder(s), and those on the management team? Start-ups are all about the people involved. And there are a small number of people who are largely going to affect the organization. Even if an entry-level employee is going to work in engineering, I think it makes sense for him/her to meet the VP Sales; likewise, a marketing manager should meet the CTO. Yet it might not happen unless the prospective employee requests it. The handful at the top are going to have a profound affect on the future of the company as a whole and the position (regardless of function), and therefore it is best to meet as many people possible in the company possible before joining.

Are there plans in the next six months to hire anyone along the chain-in-command between your position and the CEO? Start-ups often have key vacant positions open as the companies expand and grow quickly. I recommend explicitly asking if there is an anticipated change in the reporting structure in the foreseeable future, as any modifications or additions (even those a few rungs up in the ladder) could significantly affect employees’ roles and responsibilities.

How many employees did/does/will the company have six month ago, now, six months from now, a year from now? Employee count is a strong (but not a perfect) proxy for management’s and investors’ outlook on the business. Start-ups hire ahead of growth (or at least predicted growth), which translate into a viable company, a healthy work environment, and future internal opportunities. Financial figures and projections are helpful indicators, certainly, but are often a distortion of the full picture (especially early on in a company’s cycle). The growth in employee count (or lack thereof) directly signals how much work needs to be accomplished how rosy the expectations are.

How Much Software can be Developed in a Year?

QSM, a company that maintains a vast database about software projects, looked into how much code we can develop in a year. Click here(PDF) for the full report.

Only about 10% of projects they studied delivered more than 75,000 SLOC
in 12 months. But those efforts spent a pile of money cranking so much code so fast. These big projects burned 117% to 419% more cash than a similar 139,000 SLOC project delivered over a longer period. Fast is expensive.

About 60% of the projects shipped under 10,000 SLOC in a year.

The report concludes that the biggest program practically possible in 12 months runs about 180,000 SLOC, and will use a team of 70 to 100 people. It will cost two to four times more than the same project with a more relaxed schedule.

That works out to 150 to 214 SLOC per programmer per month.

Now, that is a men's room *TGIF Post

Am i wrong?

Beat your competition, do not eat the crumbs

Sorry that it took me so long to post again, but I have been preparing and learning about an obscure art in which sometimes we engineers cannot handle our big, fat brains. Marketing and sales.
Being confronted with some new soon to have responsibilities, I've been extensively studying and learning from the market.
And so, I began to wonder what do credit card services, mobile phone carriers, and financial services all have in common? An extreme dedication to the practice of arbitrage marketing.

Arbitrage marketing is used when you know that your products and your competitors’ products are equally unhelpful and hard to use, and that for every customer you tick off so much that they leave your fold for your competitor’s, that your competitor has done the same and their ex-customers will be coming your way. It is a strategy that forces customers to change lanes, but knows that since the road wasn’t built correctly, no one is going to get anywhere any quicker.

Example. Should I hold a BBVA credit card, or one from Santander? As far as I’m concerned, the service is equally bad, the interest rates are equally preposterous, the web-sites are equally as hard to navigate, down as frequently and calls to technical services are equally poorly responded to. So the only reason I would pick one over the other is because the other one ticked me off. And then when the new one ticks me off, I move again.

Every week I get about three offers from BBVA and SAntander’s competitors, so when I feel like it, I’ll move beyond them. It’s a commodity and no one is providing differentiated service.

Example. Mobile phone carriers. I use Telcel. Why? Because my father used Telefonica and had horrible coverage, a friend or two uses Unefon and hates her service, and another friend uses Iusacell and is always complaining about her network outages. Those are obviously not representative situations and I’m not meaning to speak badly about any carrier. My point is, I chose my carrier based on minimizing an expected poor result.

What though would I think about carriers, credit card services etc if I just made my judgments from advertising?

Iusacell is a hard worker and is always making sure I am taken care of, Telcel has a very attractive spokesperson (not sure how this would influence me, but they seem to want to stick to this strategy), Unefon is cute and the logo always looks to be having so much fun, and Nextel is the thinking-person’s carrier, just look how clever their ads are.

Citibank makes my world possible in a way no other credit card could do, American Express is relevant to me, just witness the introduction of the urban-oriented ‘black’ card, and the rest of the banks are always smiling.

The images projected by the advertising are beautiful, but totally irrelevant. I already have an opinion about carriers (or credit card services, or cars, or banks...) based on my experience and the experiences of those close to me. Their reputations have preceded them.

So all the money they spend advertising during baseball playoffs or anywhere else is in support of the arbitrage marketing strategy. They need to make sure that when I’m at my wit’s end with Telcel, that I choose them when I switch.

What though would be the opportunity if you decided that arbitrage marketing is not the correct strategy any longer, and you decided to follow proximity marketing?

Seth Godin describes proximity marketing as the opportunity to differentiate yourself in a crowded category by being BETTER than your competitor.

And how do I learn that you are better than your competitor? I certainly do not learn that from the latest creative campaign, no matter how fun-loving, image-relevant or attractive. I learn that because I experience your product as being better or, even maybe more importantly, I am told by someone I trust that your product is better.

Think about it from your customer’s point of view. Think how powerful it would be if your customer chose you not to minimize an expected bad experience, but because they are glad to engage with your product and company?

Arbitrage marketing is widespread and it is ridiculous, and wasteful. But it opens opportunities for those who are willing to walk away from it.