Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Yahoo RSS Reader: I heart Firefox (IE, what IE ?)

I am sure that this is a temporary bug (or even buguette), but I can't get the new Yahoo RSS Reader to display my feeds on Internet Explorer (V6 with latest patches, both on Windows 2000 and Windows XP) whereas it works great on Firefox. I am all for Firefox but developers should at least test Internet Explorer a little bit :-P.

 

                   Firefox displays RSS Feeds properly                                     No feeds in IE

Tags: sarcasm

Les Blogs II: Session on Investing 2.0

 
Updated

Seven Five days to go before the already sold out “Les Blogs II” begins. I will be leading the session on Investing 2.0, or investing in a Web 2.0 context - in which not that much investing is required. There have been plenty of panels and speeches on the subject, including the VC 2.0  panel of the Web 2.0 conference that I liveblogged.

That's why I thought about doing something different this time, namely go through a number of trends, themes and memes that have developed over the past year and get the panel's reactions, analysis and hopefully predictions on these. We'll go through mega-trends (blogging, search,...) as well as emerging ones. And I do count on the audience to throw some themes at us, and react/contribute/disagree to our thoughts.

The tagline of the panel, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, came up for one good reason: my panelists and I want it to be provocative, informative - and fun. Talking about the panel, I'll be joined by two one of the most clued-in actors of Web 2.0 from the Bay Area: David “VentureBlog” Hornik and Om “Gigaom” Malik, and an European open source advocate, Tristan “we don't need no stickin' VCs” Nitot Yahoo Europe Head of M&A Simon Levene. Unfortunately Tristan Nitot had to cancel his appearance on this august panel, which means that we won't have representation of the open source movement (not our fault), but at the same time it is great to have one of the GYM buyers executives given the critical part the big three play in the startup ecosystem these days (reportedly competing against VCs and al). And I just learnt from Om that a story got him stuck in San Francisco. I will announce his replacement in the next few hours... What's wrong with me, they are all leaving my panel :-(.

I talked about all this during my pre-conference podcast interview with German PodcastHer and Blogher Nicole Simon, who's doing a great job putting us in the context of the conference through her bloxpert series of interviews.

So get ready for the session, at 3:45PM on Dec 5th, right after the break... and please - participate.

Tags: lesblogs

Paris Entrepreneurs Dinner - Dec 7th - Sold Out

Update: the dinner is now sold out. Closing the comments to make sure no one registers here.

Marc has just posted about our upcoming CGS dinner in Paris, following Les Blogs II. It will take place on Dec 7th at the Bistrot Vivienne, 4 rue des Petits Champs in the 2nd arrondissement - starting at 8PM sharp.

We have booked a restaurant that is almost twice as big as the previous one, and we still have about 10 9 seats left are now sold out. Leave a comment on Marc's post if you want to join us, and I look forward to seeing you there!

Tags: CGSDinner3

Yahoo Mail becomes a full fledged RSS Reader - and messes up with MyYahoo home page

TechCrunch reports that the new Yahoo Mail (still in closed beta ?) now offers the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and display the content as a river of news, etc. Makes sense.

You can add feeds by entering their URL, or selecting from a very limited set of tech-focused feeds. Bit raw given the ever increasing number of blogs out there. Rojo and BlogBridge have implemented directories of feeds per industry, allowing new blog readers to start somewhere, which is an idea that ought to be considered.

What does not work *at all* for me is that this list of feeds is actually the list of news sources displayed on My Yahoo. Which means that adding/removing feeds from your RSS/Email reader also changes the content of your MyYahoo home page - without any warning or notice. Hello ?Importing the content of MyYahoo would be appropriate, but could we at least get an option to avoid this, as opposed to be forced into using a single list ? I understand that the goal of Yahoo is to democratize RSS, but that is pushing it.

I appreciate that this is beta service, and therefore will suggest that change request as a priority one update.

More:

• Michael Bazeley has additional details: RSS, meet Yahoo Mail
• John Furrier scored another exclusive podcast announcement: PodTech Exclusive: Yahoo! RSS Goes Mainstream with Yahoo! Mail and Alerts

PopTech podcasts are worth a listen

I have discovered the PopTech conference last year through its coverage on ITConversations. I was not able to attend the 2005 edition but I have been enjoying the sessions made available on ITC over the past few weeks. They are truly worth a listen, especially the two part program on the Future of Africa.

I hope that I'll find the time to attend the event in 2006 - I find PopTech to be one of the most inspiring conferences out there.

Twenty, Three hundred and forty six, Three hundred and fifty

As I am getting ready to go shopping and cooking for Turkey day, I thought I would share a few lucky numbers of the day.

Twenty

The Web20 Workgroup now has 20 blogs. No the objective is not to start the next Gawker or Weblogs Inc, Yes the idea is to offer a valuable resource covering a number of perspective regarding this new generation of web services and applications. Mike assembled the list that I replicated below:

Category	Sites
Analysis & Trends	Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe, Susan Mernit's Blog, Web 2.0 Explorer
Companies & Products	TechCrunch, SolutionWatch, eHub
Design & Usability	WeBreakStuff, Bokardo, ParticleTree, Emily Chang
VC & Business	Jeff Clavier, Nivi
Podcasting	PodTech, Web 2.0 Show
Tech & Development	Programmable Web, CrunchNotes, Librarystuff
Commentary	Scripting News, HorsePigCow

Three hundred and forty six

It is the position of this blog in the new Feedster 500 that co-founder and CTO Scott Johnson just announced. I know: lists are bad bad bad, but hey, thanks you all for the attention love.

And even though it has nothing to do with my number of incoming links found in RSS feeds on the system, I should remind you that I am an angel investor in Feedster.

Three hundred and fifty

That’s it! Les Blogs II is sold out – two weeks before the event that will gather 350 people in Paris, France. I am really looking forward to the conference, and all the parties, drinks, dinners, hang outs that will ensue. I will blog shortly about my session on “Investing 2.0: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, and suggest how the audience can prepare for it.

Yo Loic! What did we bet again when I told you that we’d sell out at least two weeks before the event ? Congratulations .

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Check these references before making a hiring decision

Buddy Ed Sim just posted a useful note on the Importance of back channel reference checks. The person you are looking at hiring, or take money from, will volunteer contacts who will provide glowing reports about her/him. In order to get a more nuanced view (nobody's perfect), you do want to find other references in or through your own network. Former colleagues are obviously the most natural sources, and in the case of a senior startup executive, former investors also fit the bill. Services helping with these “investigations” are obviously search engines, specialized databases like Zoominfo (which has an uneven quality of data and coverage) and LinkedIn (that has even developed a specific feature for that purpose).

As Ed states, it is critical to do a thorough job when going through these references, because like software bugs, fixing a mistake costs way more than avoiding one:

A wrong hiring decision for an early stage company can be a killer! All too often startup companies want to run fast and furious and hire that killer executive candidate ASAP without doing the extra work required to determine the right fit. In this particular case, through the back channel references we were able to find a number of inconsistencies about a candidate's effectiveness at a prior startup, his reasons for leaving, and his overall management skills. While the references were balanced and fair, they were far from glowing. In fact, most of the back channel references were consistently mediocre which for me was a vote of no confidence. Sure, you should always expect to get a couple bad references if you do enough of them on someone, but if you see a consistent pattern of concerns or “areas that need to be managed” emerge from those references, it is time to move to the next candidate. In fact, let me extend this message and state that doing back channel references should be standard business practice. Why learn in 3 months that a particular executive, VC firm, or business partner was not a right fit, if you can piece together that information beforehand? Just a little more work in the diligence process can save you lots of frustration in the long run.

Whilst we are at it, I would actually go even further: whenever you are hiring an executive, directly or through a recruiter, you want to check - as in confirm - previous employment, diplomas, etc. I recently talked to an entrepreneur whose company had hired a CEO who seemed to check out during the interview and “references” but quickly fell short of expectations. It turned out that this CEO had doctored his diplomas and employment history. Whilst it is most likely a case of the recruiter doing a piss poor job (technical term), it is ultimately to the board, and investors, to make sure these checks are properly done.

From syndication to synchronization: bi-directional RSS is under way with SSE

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's recently appointed CTO, announced this morning the release of a preliminary specification of SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), allowing RSS to be bi-directional. The draft was released under Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike) - which means that anyone can implement it, hack it, modify it, as long as due credit is given to Microsoft, and changes are also made available under this license.

I'll come back to SEE in a minute but witnessing Microsoft quickly putting together a specification, that had an overstated goal of being simple, making it available under CC and engaging with the industry so openly feels novel. Can someone point to previous examples or is it the first time ? Microsoft's previous efforts to “embrace and extend” industry standards often led to incompatible specifications with proprietary extensions. Ray writes about the genesis of the idea:

Shortly after I started at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to meet with the people behind Exchange, Outlook, MSN, Windows Mobile, Messenger, Communicator, and more.  We brainstormed about this “meshed world” and how we might best serve it - a world where each of these products and others’ products could both manage these objects and synchronize each others’ changes.  We thought about how we might prototype such a thing as rapidly as possible – to get the underpinnings of data synchronization working so that we could spend time working on the user experience aspects of the problem – a much better place to spend time than doing plumbing.

Re SSE, if it is as simple and open as it seems, it could be the building block that has been missing to build richer application interactions, where calendars, contacts, etc. can be peered without going through a centralized repository. Though synchronizing calendars is much harder than people originally think, and that's why calendar companies are getting funded. I wonder if they looked at SyncML, another general purpose XML standard for synchronization. I could not find any mention in the FAQ.

I just saw that Niall thinks he will have working SSE code tonight. Got to love that open source production model. Update: Niall has finished his prototype.

HBS Tech Panel: Valley of Destiny or Valley of Doom ?

I had a bit of a bard time getting out of bed this morning after last night's TechCrunch/Riya party (where is that headache coming from ?), but I wanted to attend the end of the HBS Tech conference organized by my friend Chris Yeh. Particularly, the panel “Valley of Destiny or Valley of Doom” looked promising, and gathered (from left to right in the picture): eSilicon's Jack Harding, Dave Winer, Mike Arrington and Bayosphere's Dan Gillmor. The question at hand was the position of Silicon Valley in this next economic cycle, the effect of off-shoring and whether we are in a bubble or not. An ambitious program...

Jack started by defining the terms off-shoring (building abroad) and outsourcing (sourcing from someone else), and explains that companies now support the global delivery of technology to a global market - which means that the concept of off-shoring in a global economy is very relative and “passe”.

Dave asked whether Silicon Valley deserves to be at the center of the technology world, as it has been for the past 30/40 years. After living here for 22 years, Dave left because he felt that the Valley had lost its technology focus to get into marketing or retail opportunities, and lost its focus on creating great technology and rewarding the engineers responsible for these innovations.
For Mike, who sees almost all new Web 2.0 companies coming to his door step (literally) in order to get coverage on TechCrunch, people start companies in Silicon Valley because of the confluence of talent (experience, capital, powerful support networks). However in a global market, companies are seeking engineering and product talent wherever it can be found. He mentions the example of his own stealth startup, edgeio, whose lead engineer is based in London and lead designer is based in Portugal.
For Dan, the major differentiator of the Valley was the culture of risk: this tendency of people to quit their job and start new companies. However the Valley is so expensive that it has priced itself out as many people can no longer afford living here. He ventures that company will only afford to have their headquarter here and will have engineering and operations in other parts of the country/world.

The panel then debated whether the point that whilst the Valley is the center of the technology world, it is not the center of intellectual life - Dan pointing out that there is no art institute of international renown. People in the audience chimed in to explain that cultural diversity is a key building block of the culture of the Valley - and that it did not matter per se that San Francisco/the Valley was not a major cultural backbone. Dave went on a rant about Google and other leading companies are not mature enough to go beyond appearing to the world as arrogant bullies, which has an impact on the image of all companies coming from the area.

Chris used the example of Riya being reportedly acquired by Google before launching is a sign of a new bubble, and asked panelists for views. Dan made the point that the previous bubble was led by the public markets, that lost hundred of billions of dollars when the bubble burst. In this new cycle, innovation is funded by angel investors and venture capitalists - as it should be - and the public markets are very challenging to enter, especially in the new regulatory environment. Mike states that there is no bubble because VCs are not funding companies that are not worthy: these only producing feature sets, addressing too small or unproven markets, and they remain “reasonable” at large. I certainly agree with Mike.

Jack stated that in his world (semi-conductors), entrepreneurs, VCs and the rest of the ecosystem is maturing and is getting better at its trade. The issue however is government recessing in its ability to execute on its duties.

Dan had the final word on the risk generated by the housing bubble currently underway, and the fact that education in this country is falling behind other countries, even if US universities are still recognized as leading ones. Seeing California schools tank in the ranking is certainly a great concern of parents, who might not be able to afford sending their to higher quality private institutions, and might lead them to leave the area.

Note that I only captured a subset of the panel which got into heated discussions on certain topics - and it is regrettable as Dave said that the end that there won't be a podcast produced out of that session.

Technorati Tags: hbstech, techcrunch

Kaboodle - a collaborative shopping and research service for the non-geek

A couple of weeks ago, one of my most recent clients - Kaboodle - soft launched its collaborative shopping and research engine. The service allows users to collect and aggregate information about products, gifts, wishes, travel destinations,… on personal pages that can be shared with family, friends or the public.  Under the hood, Kaboodle automatically extracts key pieces of information from a web page selected by the user - including image, title, description, price and stores these nuggets alongside the URL of that web page. It just takes the simple installation of the Kaboodle bookmarklet, and a quick read of the tutorial, to get started.

What I found remarkable in Kaboodle, and got me engaged with the company, is the non-geek focus of the service, which is really targeting the average Internet user who needs support in her/his research of items to shop, plane tickets to buy, etc. Funny enough, my 8 year old complained a week ago that bookmarks of his browser did not allow him to save the description and the picture of the gifts he is considering requesting for Christmas. Bingo! Sort of Web 2.0 for the masses, without tags, RSS feeds and mashups - though all these features are on the short term development roadmap.

Kaboodle is also an implementation of the concept of the “3rd page of search”, as described by Charlene Li - which is basically an aggregation of search results that “make sense” relative to a specific context. That context can be very specific and personal, or be mapped as a generic use case. For example, let’s say that I am researching a bunch of add-ons for my brand new Powerbook G4. I can come up with a page like this one which is useful for me, and then share it with others. This is where tagging, collaborative filtering and making sure that search engines properly crawl these pages will be critical. Net net: the time I have spent in finding the proper accessories can be re-used by others with no additional effort.

Then this week comes the beta release of the Yahoo shoposhere (see TechChrunch's coverage) - as opposed to social shopmarking, a term invented by Brian Benzinger when he wrote his very thorough review of Kaboodle. Concepts are similar except that the shoposhere is based on results of queries hitting the Yahoo Search/Shopping engine and that less information is extracted/saved per “pick”. Whilst it is interesting, that feature does not give access to the best items/prices available on the market, since only Yahoo affiliates are searched, or more broadly to any type of information you may want to aggregate alongside shopping information - like the best online resources for new Macintosh users listed next to items to be shopped.

Kaboodle has released last night a suite of new functionality: a badge allowing bloggers to provide access to their Kaboodle page, new types of pages, and... more servers. Yeah, already. You can see the badge on the right column of my blog, which points to the “Standard” page.  3 new types have been added: Top picks, Wishlists and Giftlists. My “Favorite Books”“ page is a Top picks for example.

My Favorite Books

www.kaboodle.com

One of the great features of Kaboodle is its ability to collaborate around an object, either by adding items and modifying existing ones (wiki style, but upon invitation) or commenting/voting (blog style). For example, it would be great if you could help me pick up a coffee machine for the office. There are a bunch of these out there, I have ”shortlisted“ a few of them on this page, and your votes would help choosing one.

So go ahead, try Kaboodle, and tell us what you think could be done to improve the service. And don't get me wrong, geeks are welcome as well but they might find more interesting to create a clever combination of tags and a mashup application to replicate the functionality :-).

Additional coverage:

• Reuters: Kaboodle makes sharing Web bookmarks easier
• TechCrunch: Kaboodle Launch: Bookmarking + Wiki
• Om Malik: The whole kit and kaboodle
• Comparison Engines: Kaboodle - An Experiment in Social Shopping and  Kaboodle - Social Shopping
• The Guardian Unlimited: Save the pages you see in Kaboodle
• Digital TechLife: Kaboodle - making comparison shopping easy (the most spot on review from a user to date)