Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

Successful upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard - this is the best OS yet from Apple

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:55:00 -0800

I have been working on Apple equipment since the Apple II+. I ran a Mac computer consulting company for ten years. I have seen much of the good and bad that has come from Apple over the years. I think that this Operating system version is the best Apple has ever released.

It was a long upgrade because I wanted to ensure that it went smoothly.

It involved:

buying two of the five Leopard Take Control books ($15USD for the bundle - CHEAP and GREAT!) http://www.takecontrolbooks.com
reviewing Macintouch reports (1/2 hour)
running Diskwarrior 4.0 on my drive first (and on my backup drives); (1/2 hour)
making two complete bootable clones of my machine; (2 hours) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper
getting a VersiontrackerPro (http://www.versiontracker.com) membership ($50 for a year) and it helped me find, download, and install updates to about 40 applications. WORTH the price. (3.5 hours)
making room on my drive (1 hour of cleanups);
refreshing both backups again (smart updates using Super Duper - also a great little tool)
running the actual OS (used archive and install) (at least an hour - went to sleep instead)
ran Software updates (1/4 hour);
read "Take Control of Customizing Leopard) and did all system tweaks (1 1/2 hour)
tested out the newest applications (Mail, Calendar, Address Book);

First impression after reading both Take Control books (get them - they're worth it) is that Apple finally fixed many of the annoying things that had been in Mac OS X since the inception.

Pros:

The Finder is WAAAAY better, smoother, more sensible, faster.
Spotlight finally makes sense. They got rid of that sort of pseudo search window that was neither app nor utility nor modal dialogue - what the hell WAS that thing?
The whole system feels faster.
Spaces itch a scratch I have wanted to itch for a long time. I thought they'd be useless. I have used them for a half-hour and think I'll use them forever now.
Mail finally has bulleted lists (and they work!)
iCal finally put all three views (day, week, month) into the same window and it doesn't jump all over the place annoyingly like it used to (each window had its own place and they sometimes jumped around when you switched between windows.
It feels cleaner, more consistent (thank god the brushed aluminum look is entirely gone!!), and somehow more solid.

Cons

I have built at least a thousand backup scripts. Time Machine does what the best scripts in the world do.
But it's not there yet. You can't control it's schedule and you can't make bootable backups with it.
Use SuperDuper for that instead (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper) and use TimeMachine for incremental data snapshots over time.
Safari is fast...but you can't load multiple home pages at start and it still doesn't work with Google Apps properly so it's not really an option for daily use;

General comments

The dock is not as bad as people have been bitching about.
The menu bar's transparency is not a problem as long as you have a background with a light bit at the top.

Great job Apple. I feel like I have a new, fast, clean Mac on my desk!

Inspired by Tim Ferris - working a week in Paris WORKED

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:04:00 -0800

I read an awesome book recently that made me rethink many things about location, work, and business. It was Tim Ferriss' book which I highly recommend.

"
"The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" (Timothy Ferris)

I recently had reason to head to Paris for personal reasons. I thought I would use the trip as an opportunity to try working somewhere other than Vancouver - to see if it's really possible to relocate and still work? Of course, in Ferriss' world, you only work 4 hours a week. Unfortunately I didn't get to experience THAT part of the plan.

It worked. Here's how I did it.

I moved all of my landline numbers into a Vonage account about a month prior - personal home phone, company land-line from San Francisco, company land-line from Vancouver - the works. I set up one voicemail box for all of the numbers and forwarded that to Simulscribe which transcribes voicemails to email (and does a pretty darned great job at it). Then I set up the cell to roll-over to the same Simulscribe address.

Once in Paris, I plugged in the phone and Vonage box. And realized that whoops - you can't plug 110V devices into 220V. I had fried BOTH of them. Or so I thought. It turned out that fortune favours the stupid. One of the plug converters was fried so it never passed any current through.

So I bought some transformers (220V to 110V step down transformers) for my other various chargers, bought a couple of plug converters (for the Apple power supply and the new phone that I bought) and plugged it all in. It took a couple of tries but after a call to Vonage tech support, the Vonage box was up and running on the local DSL connection and voila - my phone was plugged in and ready to receive calls at any of my numbers.

I have to admit that it was freeing (and a bit strange) to have people look at my calling code and say, "OH! You're in Vancouver!" and then have to explain that no, in fact I was in Paris, ten hours ahead of them! The sound quality was as good as it is in Vancouver, which is to say, on par with the regular plain old telephone lines that I had before.

There was only one glitch and that was more to do with the Siemens phone than anything else. It would ring but only at the moment it was actually ringing, could you hit the "ACCEPT" button. In between rings, it didn't look "pick up able". Weird.

But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.

I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL... Or maybe Costa Rica....

Guy Kawasaki and Glenn Kelman provide counter-points to the "serial entrepeneurs are the best entrepreneurs to back" theory

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:09:00 -0800

Here are two interesting articles: one from Glenn Kelman, and a follow on from Guy Kawasaki on why serial entrepreneurs might not in fact be the best bet for funders. Interesting perspectives and I recognize some of Guy's cautions from my own experience.

Worth reading both articles.

Bugatti Veyron races an EF-2000 jet fighter - this is AWESOME

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:36:00 -0800

I found this stunning YouTube video on John Chow's blog here.

The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.

VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!

Quotes from Sequoia's Don Valentine

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:12:00 -0800

This post at VC Confidential contains some fantastic quotes. I have excerpted a few of my favourites.

"The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to learn."

“All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason - they run out of money.”

"Great markets make great companies."

"I like opportunities that are addressing markets so big that even the management team can't get in its way."

"I am 100% behind my CEOs right up till the day I fire them."

"The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient."

"One of my jobs as a board member has been to counsel management to avoid distraction and to execute with constructive paranoia."

All fantastic and useful quotes.

Day 7 - Winging my way back to North America

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:20:00 -0800

Not sure what to say. Too many conflicting emotions as I sit in Heathrow waiting for my flight back to Vancouver. Maye I will later.

I'll be listening to this all the way home. I got it from a very dear friend who means a great deal to me.

"Breathe Me" by Sia (the soundtrack to the final six minutes of Six Feet Under shown here below.)

Day 5 in Paris - a run around Ile Saint-Louis

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:21:00 -0800

I decided to get out for a run in the cold sunny weather today and ran around Ile Saint-Louis:

It was a crisp beautiful autumn day. I was the only runner in shorts, and one of the only runners out at ALL. There don't appear to be many runners in Paris. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

On the way back home, I ran through a back alley and found this great cathedral.

And a few blocks from home there is a little shop with this sign. I liked the sign and thought that it was worth taking a photo.

There are a lot of tiny little shops near our place that have art in them. Wait what on earth is that in the window??

It's a bust of Michael Keaton's Batman. Creepy.

Day 3 in Paris - Bikram's yoga and a successful shopping trip

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 06:50:00 -0800

Aujourd'hui était le jour 3 ici à Paris. Olivier et moi réellement avons obtenu de prendre le petit déjeuner ensemble, alors il se dirige pour travailler, et je suis allé au loin au yoga de Bikram. Il y a un petit studio impressionnant juste près de notre endroit, droite autour du coin d'un magasin de Apple.

(photos courtesy of www.yogabikramparis.com)

Alors je suis allé de nouveau au au braver les bas-côtés de BHV pour trouver un fusible pour le transformateur que j'ai fait sauter, et pour acheter quelques dishtowels. Je suis parvenu à diriger ma voie par ces essais et tout le personnel était très utile aussi longtemps que j'ai souri. Beaucoup. C'est un fait que des humains sont câblés pour sourire sur la commande pour long car vous les rayonnez un sourire et puis leur demandez de vous aider à parler meilleur français, ils semblent répondre bien.

Maintenant de nouveau au travail sur mon timezone américain du nord !

Oh yes, a little promotion for Vonage. I brought my Vonage adapter here to Paris so that I could have all of my North American phone numbers ring here. And it's working perfectly. So my SF and Vancouver numbers all ring my phone here and I can call out just like when I'm at home in Vancouver. It's a bit surreal actually how well it works. When did VoIP actually start to work?? It used to be a nightmare.

Technorati Tags: paris, bikramyoga, puppy, travel

Day 2 in Paris - A Hole in the Wall and a Noisy Alley

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 06:47:00 -0800

Today was my first weekday in the city. Unfortunately, there are no Crossfit gyms here in Paris. Seems like a business opportunity to me. There are about 30 gyms in downtown Paris, 22 of which are one chain.

The first gym I found was actually a combination gay sauna, bar, and weight room. All in one. Not quite what I was looking for. On to the local mega corporate chain Club Med - owned by...Club Med. Lots of neon, a lot of space, a ton of machines and almost no free weights in site. And it was also $36/day! Next, I went looking for the local Univers Gym. I never did find it. But while I was looking for that gym, I found this building facing a back alley. It looked like something from the future - possibly a set for Gattaca or Minority Report:

And then right across the street was an entry way that took me from the future all the way back to the past:

Inside a massive park was this man sitting with his feathered friends:

After wandering in the park here for a bit, I headed back to the other side of town to try to find Body Gym.

On the way, I passed through the Place de Bastille, a very large roundabout with this in the center:

It was ever more impressive zoomed in:

Eventually I found the gym. I almost didn't go in. The front entrance was all graffitied (graffited?) over. But once inside, the owners were friendly, the gym had real people working out hard, and they had free weights, a somewhat old change room, and the whole place looked like it needed to be...closed....or renovated. Perfect! And the price was right too. Managed 10 sets of "Cindy" (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats) in 20 minutes. That was about all I could do today between my minor jetlag and my bum cramps from the flights over.

Once the workout was over, I wandered home feeling like I was going to be sick. I'm sure that was the workout and not the jetlag which is gone by now.

As night fell, the neighbourhood seemed to get LOUDER as people came home from work. This is the view out of the window. It's pretty funny to watch. It eventually settles down though by bedtime.

Technorati Tags: crossfit, paris, gym, travel

Day 1 in Paris!

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:19:00 -0800

Hi all,

Here are some pictures from Day 1 in Paris. I'll be working and living here for the next two weeks. My blogging application is acting a bit weird so the images are all really small. I'll try to fix it for the next posts.

Here is Olivier at the Eiffel Tower. He was disappointed that I didn't think more of it.

The sun shone for a few minutes but otherwise it was a slightly chilly fall day. The grounds were not too busy.

Yes these are Citroen 2CVs. You can rent them. The renters all seemed to have bought berets for the occasion. Or perhaps they provide them with the cars?

I loved the way this guy parked his Smart Car. It was almost like he was trying to hide it behind the parking meter - "You can't SEE me!"

"Here lived Antoine de Saint-Exupery from 1934 to 1940". Home of the author of "The Little Prince".

Napoleon is interred here:

Sorry about the rotation. My darned iPhoto upgrade keeps rotating the photos the wrong way and it won't fix them. Here is Rodin's The Thinker from three sides. I didn't realize how buff Rodin's models were! They were either all gym rats or else he made them larger than life.

Looking out the rear of the Musee de Rodin at the gardens.

The backside of The Triplets.

Technorati Tags: paris

TALK: PR 2.0: How Social Media Is (and isn't) Changing the Rules of Public Relations

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:27:00 -0800

Last night, my good friend Ean Jackson and I had the pleasure of speaking at the Canadian Public Relations Society on PR 2.0. We had a nearly full room, and the group was engaged and we had a great time meeting everyone. There were some great questions from the room and some good healthy debate as well.

Here is the slide deck.

When will I be able to sync my Google docs automagically into my laptop folder for offline access?

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 31 May 2007 08:39:00 -0700

Here's what I (and many thousands of road warriors) want Google.

I want a local cached always up to date copy of my entire Google docs set of files. I want to create a folder on my local drive and it should automagically sync with Google docs without my ever thinking about it so that whenever I get on a plane, not only can I search for it using Google desktop or Spotlight (I'm on a Mac) and see the contents, but I can open and save files into it. And even drag word/excel files into it too. And when I get back online, it should auto-sync to my Google docs folder. I'm currently in chaos with a big batch of old files on my hard drive and a batch of new files on Google docs and duplicates in both places and frankly, it's becoming a nightmare.

Google, I have said it before and I'll say it again. As long as you maintain your commitment to privacy and security, I'm okay with giving you my documents and I'll pay you too. I need this functionality and so do others.

UPDATE: As I was about to post this, my friend Jonathan Lambert pointed me to this article about Google Gears - a toolkit for building offline apps. Looks like we're on the way.

This video made me smile and laugh all the way through it: a crazy Friday night at Crossfit suffering with good friends and enjoying life

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:22:00 -0700

I'll keep this short or I'll get all sappy. I love hanging out with this group and pushing our bodies and suffering together. It's the best thing I could possibly do with my time. Thanks guys (and girls).

SOHO Infrastructure: Comparing Webex Meeting Center and Gathering Place for doing Mac-hosted web conferencing

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:02:00 -0700

Ahhh, the joys of setting up infrastructure from scratch. We need a web conferencing application that can be hosted from either a Mac or a PC and it turns out that despite the fact that there are somewhere close to a billion web conferencing applications out there, there are only two that actually work from the Mac: Gathering Place or Webex Meeting Center which can only be found in their Small and Medium Business section of their website.

These appear to be only two real options:

Gathering Place

Cost: $29USD/user/mo with no ongoing commitment and a 14 day trial.
Pros: Simple, easy, loads quickly, draws faster than Webex, and allows the viewer to resize the screen they are viewing (to shrink it.) Includes voice calling inside the session. Minimal feature set (in this case, a plus.)
Cons: The software crashes whenever I quit it on my Mac. They don't know why. Minimal feature set. Limited kinds of sharing compared to Webex.

Webex Meeting Center

Cost: $90USD/user/mo and requires a 12 month minimum commitment. What planet are these guys living on? I mean, the application is nice but I'm not sure it's THAT nice.
Pros: Full-featured application that lets you share a desktop, an application, a browser (when you go to a webpage, your viewers go to that webpage in THEIR browser - good for showing YouTube videos or high-bandwidth sites.)
Cons: Expensive.

What about Gotomeeting.com or Microsoft LiveMeeting?

Gotomeeting can't be hosted on a Mac. LiveMeeting can but only if you use Safari. Bleeeccchhh.

What about some of the new, lightweight conferencing applications?

Vyew is completely unusable and honestly just baffling. It doesn't work properly on the Mac at all.
Yugma crashed when I tried it too.

This industry is AWFUL.

I have joined Hinchcliffe and Company! (out of the corporate world and back into startup chaos)

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:24:00 -0700

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world. I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn't be happier. I feel like I'm "home".

Now that I'm out, I'm taking on a few different projects. I'm working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area - helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that - sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best "job" in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It's going to be a crazy and fun year - I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn't changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven't spoken in a while and we'll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

CEO blogging. Scott Adams and Dilbert strike again.

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:59:00 -0700

This is painfully funny.

Notes from Web 2.0 Expo Monday April 16, 2007

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:58:00 -0700

Here are a few interesting notes from the opening sessions:

Jeff Bezos

a better question than "what's changing in the next five years" is "what is going to be the SAME over the next five or ten years?" because that allows them to build a sturdy business.
he talked about the current services: message queuing, storage, computing and fulfillment. They can take inbound data jobs, store your data, store your physical goods, and provide computing cycles. So what would they build next? He wouldn't say but he did say: "when you build a house, you build from the ground up."
So what would they build next? I think that one of the next services they will offer is a billing platform for all of that so you can turn around and bill your customers for their usage of those services. But that's just my opinion.

Battelle interviewing Mena Trott, Joe Krause, and Jay Adelson (Digg)

Krause: It's relatively easy to find buyers who you can sell it to for $5M. Having a $10M business means having fewer buyers. Having a $50M business means that there are really only one or two potential buyers. This impacts whether or not you want to take VC money. Because if you are taking VC money, you need to go for much higher multiples (see below.)
Joe Krause made an interesting point: You might want to sell and get a 5x or 6x return on the money which is good for you, and good for your employees. But your VC is thinking, "These guys might be the 100x opportunity." So they're not excited about your 5x return and can fight it. Interesting dynamic.
Biggest mistakes: "What was your biggest mistake"?

****Krause: Not launching our business model at the same time as we launched our product. We launched the product and learned a lot about it for six months. But then we launched our business model six months later and had lost those six months - we didn't learn anything about how people valued our application. Because you can't have those conversations with people about value...until you are charging!

Apollo / Kevin Lynch:

COOL demo from Salescorce.com's Apollo desktop. VERY nice. Same with the eBay Desktop application.
WOW. Awesome word processor that is online/offline called Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity. It does TABLES properly! For an HTML type text editor, that is unbelievable!

UPDATED: Seth Godin: The best time to start anything...is NOW

Troy Angrignon — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:05:00 -0700

I have to duplicate this entire post here. It's brilliant. Thanks Seth for the post. I filed this under Business AND Life Lessons.

The best time to start is when you've got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
The best time to start is when the competition is far behind in technology, sophistication and market acceptance.
The best time to start is when the competition isn't too far behind, because then you'll spend too long educating the market.
The best time to start is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
The best time to start is when you're out of debt.
The best time to start is when no one is already working on your idea.
The best time to start is when your patent comes through.
The best time to start is after you've got all your VC funding.
The best time to start is when the political environment is more friendly than it is now.
The best time to start is after you've got your degree.
The best time to start is after you've worked all the kinks out of your plan.
The best time to start is when you're sure it's going to work.
The best time to start is after you've hired the key marketing person for the new division.
The best time to start was last year. The best opportunities are already gone.
The best time to start is before some pundit declares your segment passe. Too late.
The best time to start is when the new generation of processors is shipping.
The best time to start is when the geopolitical environment settles down.

Actually, as you've probably guessed, the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.

Thanks Seth.

30 Days of Sustainability 2007 is coming!

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:32:00 -0700

30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 - May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.

UPDATED: Under the Radar Relay Fri Mar 16, 2007

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:47:00 -0700

Many of you know that I was on the selection committee for "Why Office 2.0 Matters" - a one day conference being organized by the Dealmaker Media team in SF. The one day session will look at 32 of the most promising companies emerging in the Office-productivity-on-the-web category.

As part of the run-up to the conference, the team decided to hold a blog relay - "The Radar Relay" - where different writers would summarize the week's Office 2.0 news at the end of the week. This is my week. But you might want to start here first if you haven't been keeping up to date until now.

Also, if you haven’t registered for Under the Radar yet, the readers of this blog can take advantage of a special price at this link. I’ll be there, to see what the judging panel think of the selections that our committee made, and also to give a brief talk about Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

On with the Radar Relay. Tthis week has been ripe with office 2.0 news. There is so much that I'm going to do it in point-form:

A web application designed to help people through their bankruptcies was cited for "practicing the law without a license" and its creator was charged and found guilty. The case is currently under appeal. (thanks to Kurzweilai.net for the link).
The Office 2.0 Database tipped the scales at over 450 Office 2.0 startups. 95% of those will be gone in 36 months but who cares? As Paul Kedrosky says, "It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp" when you want to get to the other side.
Gianpaolo gave us an 8-floor, 3-bullet point "Why SaaS for the Enteprise" pitch. I would add to his points the ability for users to pilot-test without IT involvement (which really rolls up to shorter time to value though). I think his 3 bullets are absolutely awesome. Concise, and to the point.
The world continues to twitter about Twitter. Millions of people pinging each other with little tidbits of information on what they are doing at the moment. I know that many of the things that take off seem to confound people but you have to realize that deep down in biological and spiritual cores, we are social creatures. We are designed to be social from the ground up. But as people leave organized religion, and as fewer people get married, and as fewer people have kids, and as fewer people live in multi-family homes, there becomes a vast social vaccuum waiting to be filled - hence the explosion of blogs (find your community), photo-sharing (meet people with an appreciation for art), SMS'ing silly messages to each other, or signing up for Twitter - these are all manifestations of a desire to find and stay connected to a community in an ever more disconnected world. I don't doubt that we will develop a bunch of these tools along the way and will eventually be in partially aware, partially connected states to our communities at all time - but will be actually be social or have any friends? It reminds me of the quote I read the other day, "I unsubscribed from all of my social networks so that I would have time to invite friends over for dinners!" Also, here is a shortcut to using Twitter.
Google's diabolical plan to plant people in Microsoft is paying off. Microsoft has managed to make Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 both slow and destructive to data at the same time as Google has launched their applications with a service level agreement (that they breached already.) Lots of notes here on Zoli's blog.
Anne Zelenka posted "Ten Things I Hate About You, Web 2.0". Funny list. Anne, how about Office 2.0? I'll start with my top four most annoying things about Office 2.0:

NOT ONE COMPANY has managed to make a text editor that doesn't completely suck.
Do we really need 50 spreadsheet apps? Are we really that lacking in creativity?
Web 2.0 was about wasting time. Office 2.0 is really about being productive with your time. We need more web 2.0 in office 2.0 or the conferences are going to be REALLY dull.
Just because you have an Office 2.0 company doesn't mean you have to forget about: customers, pain points, revenues, or long-term viability.

Phil Wainewright has a good post on the Saugatuck report showing that SaaS has hit the knee of the curve or as he writes: "SaaS hits the hockey stick." I'm sure he meant the curvy part near the bottom of the stick near the big flat part that hits the little round thing-a-ma-jig. Go, Beavers, Go. As you can see, I'm not a hockey fan so I prefer the knee of the curve story a bit more. He writes: "Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this
year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical
applications." I think it's instructive to look at internet banking. People didn't want t o use it either because they were afraid of the web - until seemingly overnight when everybody's Grandma joined web-banking.
Harry McCracken over at Slate wrote a decent review of the Zoho office tools suite. I agree with Harry that their suite seems pretty advanced. However, I have tried to use them for real work and have still found enough holes that I couldn't use them. Particularly Zoho show which was nearly useless. The other apps seemed somewhat better. But they have achieved a heck of a lot and I wish Raju Vegesna and his team the best.
AvenueA-Razorfish's new Digital Outlook Report 2007 was released (thanks Guy Kawasaki for the heads up). Some highlights:

"In retrospect, the massive digital disruption we’ve experienced over the last 12 months should have been anticipated. But it seems few were fully prepared for the speed and depth of the changes. Perhaps it’s because the changes weren’t just about what Web sites became popular or what new technologies were introduced. Rather, it was a broader cultural change. Consumers’ expectations of their media evolved. The places they trusted to provide information and entertainment changed. New outlets for consumers to express themselves emerged."
"“Great service. Creativity. Flexibility. A passion for their product and for finding ways to push innovation within their organization. A desire to understand clients’ objectives and not to retrofit them into their own. The hallmarks of great Web publishers are obvious, yet subjective and elusive. Those who are focused on delivering real solutions are best positioned to become partners to agencies and advertisers.” - Sarah Baehr, VP Media, New York.
"Information seeking equals entertainment: Once upon a time, play was more deeply integrated into our daily lives, but that changed with the introduction of industrialism. Then came the Internet, and with it, a reemergence of play in new ways. Information as entertainment was a core concept we heard from our study participants, and one that we can see around us as well....Any way you look at it, play is back, and it’s here to stay."
"Mobile phone use will grow—but not for talking, according to our participants. Phones calls are considered to be invasive in this hyper-culture, to be used only when necessary. For ordinary use, a quick text message will suffice, and many of our respondents didn’t see themselves reversing this trend in the future."
Overall, this is a fantastic report. Get it. Read it. Take action on it.

Dick Costolo wrote a great post titled Too Many Companies? where he addresses an entrepeneur's question about whetehr or not he/she should go out and try to capitalize on a maket opportunity. I agree with Dick. You can't know anything really when you start. It's all a best guess. Once you have done the basics of identifying whether you are entiering what could be a high-growth market, something that you are passionate about, and that you have (or can soon have) a great team to build something with, then get out there and do it and adjust on the fly. Not wait until you "have it figured out".
Cisco bought Webex. For 64x earnings or 8.4x revenues. ($3.2B for 2006's $50M earnings on $380M revenues). I agree with Michael Arrington who questions the value of such a deal when Webex is being disrupted SERIOUSLY by a lot of light, fast, cheap, and frankly much better competitors. Of course, Webex has real revenues that will accrue to Cisco's bottom line and can actually "move the needle" on Cisco's income statement. Hopefully they were buying the revenues and not the technology. I also agree with Paul Kedrosky who says "While this is not your father's Cisco, it's not clear just whose Cisco it is becoming either." When they bought Five Across, it could have been an aberration. Adding Webex to the mix means it is definitely a trend. For it to make any sense, there would need to be some follow-on acquisitions that signal a clear shift in corporate strategy and a redefinition of what and who Cisco intends to become in the next few years.
Darren Barefoot did a nice little review of three new-to-him Web apps: Harvest for simple time tracking, Buxfer for moving money easily, and WhosOff for tracking holidays in the office. Very fitting for the Office 2.0 Relay!

That's a heck of a week!! Lots of interesting things happening and I'm sure we'll have another crazy week next week as we get close to the actual Dealmaker event.

Have a great week ahead everybody!

My new (other) blog: Team Sport Goofy

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 17:20:00 -0800

I am signed up to race with a friend of mine for this year's BC Bike Race, a 450-500km, 7 day stage race on mountain bikes that goes from Victoria to Whistler from July 1st to July 7th. We put together a blog so that people can follow along if they want as we train. Our team name (and blog name) is Team Sport Goofy. Come and join us for the ride!

Dilbert: How's your project? It's a steaming pile of failure

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:54:00 -0800

Every time I read this I go off into fits of laughter. Having spent fifteen years now doing project management on one thing or another, I can relate to this very deeply. Sometimes Scott Adams really nails it.

Quote of the day

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:58:00 -0800

"This is an A to B conversation, so C you later."

Enterprise 2.0: Corporate Wikis reviewed (update)

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:01:00 -0800

Over the past month and a couple of conversations, I have had the opportunity to speak with Ross Mayfield, CEO for Socialtext. Ross has very rightly pointed out that there have been major changes since July 2006 when the original posting went up and I agreed that since I'm keeping the post up, that I should be current with where Socialtext is today. They have done a lot of work since my July 2006 post, including:

updating the interface in version 2.0 which was released around August 2006. It is indeed cleaner and simpler than the original one by a long shot. Nice job on that guys.
releasing an open source distribution of the wiki;
they released a mobile version (I have not looked at this);
they released an offline sync tool that allows you to take all or part of the wiki with you offline, make changes, and then resync them. I haven't tested it but that is a really cool feature. Now that we're building out a lot of pages in our wiki at our office, I can see the value in having that ability, although as with all syncing/replication, the devil is in the details.
Basic text-editing, the core of the application is still really really basic. Tables are not functional at all, with no real ability to move rows and columns.
They have also announced that they are working with Dan Bricklin on combining Wiki Calc with Social Text to create Social Calc. I pointed out to Ross that if they are planning on using a spreadsheet tool to also be a table tool, that I'm not sure I believe it. They are different animals with different behaviours (or at least, traditionally they have been.) He is attempting to use Social Calc to be a universal sheet / table editor right within the main wiki page. It will be interesting to see if that bet pays off. I'm all for simplification and innovation. If they can combine the two into one functional sheet/table editing mode, good for them.

So, what does this all mean? Has my opinion changed? Well in the days since I wrote this, Atlassian and Socialtext have continued to grow at reasonable rates, and the market for corporate wikis has heated up. Some of their competitors have been aquired and gone into the horizontal layer (Jotspot into Google). And they are now being joined by companies like Jive Software with Clearspace or Blogtronix and SystemOne. It's time for me to do a new vendor bake-off I think.... Until then, here is my one-line horribly opinionated overview of the vendors at the moment but I realize I'll have to do them all justice by reviewing them more fully very soon. Here goes:

Atlassian/Confluence: solid enterprise wiki with on-premise and hosted options; an ecosystem of partners who extend the wiki functionality; a solid team running the company that is focused on revenue AND profit; and a somewhat dated interface which they are addressing in the next release; extensive management tools; really solid exporting functions. I recommend this product, despite its UI quirks as they are focused tightly on being profitable above all and on knowing who their customers are.
Socialtext/Socialtext Workspace: many deployment options: hosted, on-premise, appliance; nice looking and intuitive interface; focused on solving the hard problems (mobile, offline) but slow in dealing with the fundamentals (the text editor is still really bad - tables are awful and functionality is very limited); have been early and loud proponents of wiki use in corporations; very supportive of the open source movement; are working to integrate in Social Calc - too little too late? Jotspot has spreadhseets, Google has Google sheets, Zoho Office has sheets, everybody has sheets; less obvious management and administration tools; If you need mobile and offline use, Socialtext is your only option. The text editing is limited and the lack of useful tables is a non-starter for me but maybe not for others. Also the only remaining appliance/wiki vendor now that Jot is out of the picture.
Blogtronix: doing some very interesting work by combining blogs, wikis, and social networking for the enterprise. I have not reviewed them but a friend called the other day to say, "These guys are "coooooooooooool" so I'm intending to check them out soon.
Jive Clearspace: a single platform that combines blogs, wikidoc module (for creating documents collaboratively), forums, document management, identity, and reputation into one seamless whole. Great visual design; solid fundamentals (they are the forum technology used by Apple, SAP, and Citrix for example); new product though so may have standard v1.0 issues; wiki functionality is really aimed at document creation rather than large-scale wiki development. I'm just reviewing the product now but haven't made any final determinations at this time.

Stepping up to the bigger picture, there are two overall trends going on here. Much if not all of the features found in collaboration tools today is going to be heading either down into the horizontal players infrastructure (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM/Lotus), or else becoming features inside other industry categories (enterprise software for example!) Second, I believe we're about to see the same pattern we saw with enterprise applications many years ago: the rise and fall of stand-alone applications and then the rise of comprehensive suites, particularly as consolidation hits. In the social software space, I think that will play out as applications becoming suites and both of them being consolidated into larger vendors quickly. It should be an interesting year or two ahead of us.

Event: April 24, 2007: 21st Angel Forum, Vancouver, BC

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 23:50:00 -0800

On Monday, March 26th, 2007, Bob Chaworth-Musters and his team will once again be offering their Investor Ready 101 course, a fantastic day of coaching for young companies to learn how to prepare their investor pitches. This is a lead-in to the Angel Forum that will be held on April 24th, 2007.

At the Angel forum, my friend Martin Bliemel and I have the good fortune of facilitating a day of investor pitches where 30+ companies will pitch 70-100 investors their idea for a new venture. The Angel Forum was founded in 1997 by Bob Chaworth-Musters and is now the oldest and largest angel group in Canada. To date, it has held 20 Angel Forums in Vancouver resulting in over $20M being raised for emerging companies..

Event: March 23, 2007: "The business case for social software in the enterprise", presented at the Under the Radar / Office 2.0 Conference in Mountain View, CA

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:40:00 -0800

My friend Debbie and her team at Dealmaker Media are running the "Under the Radar: Office 2.0" conference in Mountain View, CA on March 23, 2007. Aside from having been on the selection committee with some fine folks (Rod Boothby, Richard McManus, Zoli Erdos, Ismael Ghalimi, Stowe Boyd, Ori Weinroth, Brad Feld, and Rafe Needleman), some of whom I know, and others whom I have admired from a distance, I will also be presenting a customer perspective on why it's imperative that we employ and deploy social software in the enterprise.

It should be an exciting day. We have a fantastic slate of presenting companies, Sean Wise and Rafe Needleman will be moderating, and we have a full panel of judges that will vote on the companies that have the most compelling businesses and offerings. Should be fun!

Event: March 21, 2007: "Maximize Your Revenue From Your Web 2.0 Venture", presented to AJAX World in New York

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:27:00 -0800

I have the good fortune of speaking on March 21, 2007 at AJAXWorld and have chosen as my topic, "Maximize Your Revenue From Your Web 2.0 Venture". The event "blurb" is here:

What do you do to maximize your revenue? The options are exploding, the ecosystem is becoming more complex and nobody seems to be able to simplify the ideas to the point that they are actionable. Which pricing model? Which ad network? Where? Why? This talk will look at current strategies for maximizing revenue from your Web 2.0 site. We'll explore what top sites are doing and provide you with lessons you can take away and implement on your own site.

Resourcs: Event site, Powerpoint (not yet available)

Event: April 30, 2007: "From Web 2.0 to Office 2.0: How the social web will impact our working lives" for the High-Tech Communicators Exchange

Troy Angrignon — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:20:00 -0800

Ean Jackson and I will be presenting on Web 2.0, Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 to a group of communications professionals at the High-Tech Communicators Exchange on April 30, 2007. Location is TBA. (Event site, [Powerpoint not yet available]) The purpose of the talk is to explain how the Web 2.0 principles are migrating from the "consumer web" into the office, bringing more collaboration into the workplace.

Club Fat Ass' Capilano Canyon Night run, no hot tub, murderball in the pool, and potluck party

Troy Angrignon — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 00:10:00 -0800

Thanks to Ean and Sibylle for throwing a great Club Fat Ass party - the Capilano Canyon Night Run. About 40 30 of us gathered at the William Griffin Rec Center tonight to do the run.

Sibylle threw me out of the short distance group, so Blue and I joined the tail end of the long course team. Thankfully Doug was at the end doing sweep. Then I stopped to wait for Doug...and lost the group entirely. So I joined up with Ryan and Ellie...and we got lost. We backtracked and found Craig who led us....onto the short course.

Finally we intercepted the Long Coursers, lost Ryan and Ellie to the LC team and Craig, Blue and I ran on through the night in relative solitude enveloped in fog. When Craig and I were almost done the course, I was attacked by a pack of coyotes that ripped at my flesh. One by one, I beat them off me, and ran to catch up with Craig. [Update: Apparently somebody at the party spread rumours that there were no coyotes and that in fact I tripped into a prickle bush that tore up my leg and hands after doing my business in the bush - the nerve of some people!]

The run ended about 1h 30 min later back at William Griffin, and was followed by a quick trip to soak in the hot tub at Harry Jerome. Lo and behold, the hot tub was out of order. Or they saw us coming all covered in mud and decided to put the sign up to stop us from muddying up their hot tub!

So, never a group to be daunted by such a thing, we created a game of six person, four ball murderball in the pool, much to the dismay of the lone swimmer in Lane 1 who we seemed to graze more often than he wanted.

Murderball was followed by a fantastic potluck at Ean and Sibylle's place. Unfortunately it looked like it was full swing when I had to hoof it back to get to bed so that I could get up early for a ride with a buddy.

Thanks for the great evening everybody!

Ean Jackson, welcome to the blogosphere! Can't wait to read the new blog. I mean book. Or is it a Blook?

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:41:00 -0800

Let me be one of the first people to welcome my friend, Web 2.0 Manifesto co-author, and speaking partner Ean Jackson back to the blogosphere after a couple of prior attempts. He is using his spiffy new Terapad site located at http://www.21centurysales.com. I can't wait to hear about his experiences building off-shored sales programs for his customers. I expect that this will be a blook (Book blog) worth watching.

If you have any interest in learning from a sales master as he combines his sales knowledge, his business mentoring, and his interests in both technology and off-shoring, I recommend you subscribe. It should be interesting and fun to watch as it progresses.