For Amy on her birthday

i am life,
the essence of all that is.
i am Sorrow, i am Joy
i am the light that lies upon the sand
i am the root,
the ingrown growth of all the land
Embodied in Cloud the Mountains stretch forth
i am the innocence of unkown days
i am rivers of feeling
their paths intertwined
my existence an element
in the passing of time

copyright Tim Wolters 1988

"Liberalism is a Mental Disorder"

I was recycling some cardboard this morning and someone had used a magic marker to pen, "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" on the side of the recycle bin.

This sign of conservative bravado, striking at the heart of liberalism at the recycle center got me thinking about the heart of conservatism. Perhaps a liberal could pen something similar on a large corporate logo, the symbol of a corporation that puts profits above all ... but alas, Enron is gone.

Being a Founder

I've recently had some conversations around what it means to be a founder of a company and thought I would pass these thoughts along to the blogosphere.

A founder takes on more risk and more responsibility and puts the company first. A founder is the last one to go on salary and the first one to come off salary in hard times. A founder generally works longer hours than most of the staff while trying to find that something that will finally put the company over the top. If need be, a founder washes the dishes and takes the trash out. A founder rallies the troops to him. A founder keeps the communication lines open to all parts of the business, looking for holes to fill and ways to help out. A founder is cost sensitive and looks for ways to extend the company runway.

Being a founder is not an entitlement day to day other than the receipt of an accompanying sense of satisfaction in creating something new and useful in the world.

... and, for all of his efforts, in the long run the founder hopes to be well rewarded financially

move over Entourage

I stuck with Entourage for almost 10 months, but no longer. There are several reasons for this: the Mac apps are easier to use and simpler, I like the threading feature in Mac Mail which shows all of the emails grouped together that were replies to the original email or replies to replies, The Mac Calendar is soooo much more aesthetically appealing, I can sync the address book and the calendar to my ipod (I gave up on my Treo 600 several months ago for a smaller simpler Samsung and really started missing the calendar functionality)

... and the coolest thing (drum roll here), you can bounce spam email messages :)

"To discourage someone from sending you email, you can reject, or "bounce" messages from that person, as long as the return address is valid. When you bounce a message, it appears to the sender that your address is invalid. This is useful for rejecting mass mailings from companies whose mailing lists you've been added to after buying products from them."

commitment to your passion

I watched the Agassi vs. Baghdatis 2nd round US Open match on Thursday night completely awestruck. The match will go down in history as one of the truly great matches of the Open, but the bigger story is the information before and after the match. You see, Andre is suffering from a herniated disc and sciatica. I personally know how much pain sciatica can cause. Some days you can't even get out of bed the pain is so great.

Agassi is retiring after this open and his commitment to see it through extends beyond the pain he is going through. After Monday's four set match against Pavel he received an epidural steroid injection to reduce inflamation. I've had three of these (you're only allowed three in a one year period due to the long term negative effects on the body). I don't know how he played as well as he did or even at all on Thursday after having the injection only Tuesday. It typically takes a week or so for the pain of the injection to go away.

Thursday's match was absolutely brilliant and became a war of attrition over five long sets (nearly 4 hours) with Agassi outlasting his 21 year old opponent who started having muscle cramps late in the fourth set. Point after point, Agassi grimaced in pain as he relentlessly pursued some very good corner and drop shots from Baghdatis . He certainly lost quite a few points, but came through when it counted, winning the match.

After the match the San Jose Mercury News reported that when Agassi was leaving the Billie Jean King complex at nearly 2am he was in so much pain that he had to lie on the ground while waiting for his driver to pick him up. He reportedly had an injection of Toradol after the match to help reduce inflammation. I am watching him now, playing again this morning and am utterly amazed at his tenacity and ability to play through the pain at an incredible level. I told my wife after the last match that he would certainly need to withdraw ... but here he is, back again.

Good for you Andre. You are truly an inspiration!

Mac Blogger Dashboard Widget

I just came across this useful little blogger Mac Widget.  I use a number of widgets that came with the default Mac install and have since found several others of use.  I particularly like the portfolio widget that shows stock quotes on a 20 minute delay basis.  I'm also currently using Yahoo Widgets as well, so you might say I'm a bit widget happy.  

This is my first test of the blogger widget though.  It seems to work fairly well and the only additions I would recommend right off would be some simple formatting and link creation tools within the widget.  Other than that it is simple and straight forward to use.  Happy blogging!

50 million and counting

David Sifry of technorati just released some new blog stats from Technorati on the growth of blogs. I won't go into the details, you'll have to read for yourself here, and they are quite amazing. The central piece of information is that blogs are doubling on average every 200 days, which, if continued at that blistering pace, would put us at over 100 million post the new year (supposedly the same number of Bon Jovi fans in the universe, hmmmmm :).

It would be interesting to track these numbers against releases of new blog services. For instance I now have 6 blogs, 4 of which I post on. The most recent is a Vox blog from typepad which is currently an invite only beta right now, but as soon as it gets released more generally how many people will switch over and leave their old blog orphaned (but still counting towards the technorati doubling)?

Is the doubling number artificially inflated by people abandoning older blog platforms for the new shiny blog platform?

Match Point review

Woody Allen is truly a sublime film maker. The movie is set in current day london, tracking two people who have managed to enter the privileged class through some chance encounters. I won't ruin the movie for you but suffice it to say that Woody Allen has created a nihilistic masterpiece that describes the overbearing role of chance in creating both positive and negative outcomes in life. He also throws in plenty of allen-aphorisms like, "they fell in love immediately, their neurosis perfectly entertwined"

3rd party software proviso

As you build out the next killer app, (perhaps we should bring that description up to date. How about "killer service") it is extremely likely that you will use off the shelf (ots) software. It is in fact unthinkable in this day and age of mash ups, social networks, and open source that you would build everything from scratch, any more than Toyota would build all the parts it needs for its cars.

Given the possibility of the sale of your company here are three major things to consider when licensing 3rd party software whether open source or no.

Distribution
If you plan to redistribute your application, i.e. sell it to a customer and have it reside in their place of business you must have the right to distribute the third party software. If the software library you are using is not open source your contract with them must give you the right to distribute their library along with your software. Depending on the nature of the business this may range from an OEM agreement in which you pay royalties to the third party software manufacturer to a royalty free arrangement where you just pay for development licenses. In either case (and those in between) it must be handled in the agreement. If the library is open source then your obligation is dependent upon the particular open source license the software was created under. The most popular open source licenses today are GPL, LPGL, BSD, and MIT. GPL is by far the most prevalent accounting for nearly 68% of the projects listed on Source Forge (according to Wikipedia). In GPL and LPGL you must distribute the source code with your software as well as placing the GPL copyleft notice at the top. GPL is the least permissive of open source licenses and claims that software that uses GPL software is also GPL. The LPGL (lesser GPL) is more permissive and is commonly found in libraries whereas GPL is commonly found in applications. LPGL allows distribution of the library as a linkable (harkening back to the world of linked languages, such as C) component. I believe you still must distribute the library source code with the product, but do not need to distribute the source for your proprietary part of the product. The most permissive of all are the BSD and MIT licenses which allow you free and unrestricted use to the software, although I think they require the author headers be maintained in any distributed source. BSD and MIT are starting to become more prevalent as I see more and more new libraries and tools pop up that were created under these licenses.

If you are running your software as a service with a thin client interface (html or flash, also the newer Yahoo Widgets would fall into this category as well) and the core of your software resides on your own servers you will still need to have some agreement in place with software vendors. They may only charge you for dev licenses but could also charge on a use model (number of users, number of servers, etc.). The open source arena is easier to deal with here because you're not actually distributing your software, instead only using it internally and exposing outward some set of functionality. No mess.

Transferability
If you are a startup and you believe there is a good chance that you might be bought someday then the software that you license as part of your overall product or service must be transferable or assignable to the purchasing entity. Open source transferability follows the same conventions as distribution, so there are no additional considerations here (unless of course, you've open sourced your software as a result of embedding GPL and your buyer wants to make this software proprietary. In this case you will need to swap out the GPL code for your own or more permissive open source code). For non open source libraries and applications you will often see something like the following in a software vendor's license agreement:

Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Software_Company_X grants to Licensee a personal, nonexclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable and non-sublicenseable, limited license to use the software identified in the product schedules attached to this Agreement

This will not work for you. The provision you will want to carve out will say something like:

Licensee may assign this Agreement in its entirety in the event of a merger, acquisition or sale of all or substantially all of its assets, without Software_Company_X’s prior written consent; provided, however that for any proposed assignment Licensee may not assign or transfer this Agreement to any competitor of Software_Company_X that develops and/or sells similar technology and is listed on Exhibit A.

Companies will want the competitive carve out. Just lock it down to a limited set listed in an exhibit, otherwise the word competitive is open to interpretation.

Intellectual Property Ownership
If the intellectual property you create is built upon 3rd party software this is considered a derivative work. Again, GPL will not work for you. This is somewhat tricky overall depending on how important the role of the 3rd party software is in the creation of the IP. The best you can do here is to carve out a provision in the software license agreement that clearly defines your rights as follows.

Subject to Software_Company_X’s IP Rights in the Product and any derivatives thereto, title and ownership of all proprietary rights, including any copyright, patent, trade secret, trademark or other intellectual property rights, in and to any software created by Licensee will at all times remain the property of Licensee.

After this, pricing negotiation is easy ;)

Blue Ocean Strategy Maps

I recently read the book Blue Ocean Strategy and while the book is more focused on figuring out how to change an existing business to explore new opportunities (blue oceans, instead of red oceans where there is already much competition bloodying one another) I really liked the strategy maps concept.

Here is a blurb about Strategy Maps that I copied from the Tech Talk blog whom I think copied it from elsewhere:

Blue Ocean Strategy offers both a process and a set of supporting tools that practitioners can use to navigate. It begins with a �strategy canvas� that visually maps the current industry environment in two dimensions. The horizontal dimension includes the range of factors on which an industry currently competes and those factors in which it invests. The vertical dimension shows levels of performance against each factor, measured qualitatively. A strategy canvas is a conceptual tool remarkable in both its simplicity and its usefulness. It can be used to understand the current strategy of a company and its competitors, to communicate the strategy, and to imagine business directions. To do the latter, Professors Kim and Mauborgne recommend that a company create several alternative, radically different strategies, each aimed at delivering superior value to potential � not existing � customers by:

• Reducing cost by eliminating some factors that the industry takes for granted and reducing other factors below the industry standard
• Enhancing differentiation by raising some factors well above the industry standard and creating additional factors that the industry has never offered.
  

I think the strategy map concept might be even clearer as a spider diagram, especially if you only map yourself to a single competitor. The strength however is in the ability to quickly discern where the key opportunities lay and how you might change the playing field to your strategic advantage.

I used the strategy map with fairly powerful results recently in a board level strategy meeting.