Moonwatcher

Going to SEED Instead of MacWorld

Last night I was trying to figure out which days of MacWorld Expo I was going to attend and started to get the feeling I wasn't going to have the experience I was looking for. I'd rather spend $2,000 on a MacBook Nano than a MWSF Platinum Pass, and unless I get to go to and get a very good seat at the Stevenote, I don't want to go.

Luckily, there's another event that week that I think will be even more interesting: SEED, "a one-day conference on design, entrepreneurship & inspiration, by 37signals, Segura Inc. & Coudal Partners".

Sure, Chicago in January isn't exactly my idea of a boondoggle, but I think the content will be fascinating, and, unlike the MWSF Keynote, not something I can see in streaming QuickTime two days later later that day.

I've been a fan of 37signals and Getting Real for a long time, and have put into practice many of their philosophies in the course of my work at Spanning Sync. I also hope to bring my good friend and occasional collaborator BJ Heinley.

Hope to see you there!

Update: I guess I'm that guy.

Subscribe to HD Trailers with iTunes

Your HDTV is hungry for high-def content. Feed it with iTunes.

Microsoft is on the right track with Software + Services

I tend to agree with much of what Don Dodge has to say about web-based office suites:

Software plus Services as opposed to Software as a Service. Microsoft is giving customers the best of both worlds; powerful desktop software, complimented by web based services. It may not make headlines with the Web 2.0 crowd, but it is the best path for customers who want the best of both worlds.

But then again, when all you have is software, every problem looks like a "Software plus something" problem.

The Funniest Email Header I Read Today

When I read this I immediately thought, "You have been contacted by Google Legal. Do not reply. Resistance is futile."

Google Apps to Leverage Contacts, but What About Third Parties?

I few months ago I asked What if Google Were a Social Network? and gave a quick (and likely incomplete) list of the various components they already have in place to compete with Facebook:

• A personal front page (iGoogle)
• A web application framework (Gadgets)
• A lot of knowledge about my "networks" (relationships), namely
  1. my domain (via GAFYD)
  2. my groups (via Google Groups)
  3. my address book(s) (Gmail/Apps contacts)
  4. my "buddies" (via Gtalk)
  5. the events/meetings I'm attending (Calendar)
  6. subscribed calendars (Calendar)
  7. my stocks (Finance)
• Communications conduits (Gmail, Groups, Gtalk)
• Photos (Picasa)
• Videos (YouTube, Google Video)
• Blogs (Blogger)
• Classifieds (Base)
• A payment system (Checkout)
• An ad system (AdSense)

Now Steve Rubel carries the idea further with his post Reader Integrates Google's Stealth Social Net: The Address Book:

The trusty address book in your Gmail account (assuming you have one) is actually much more than just a simple database of names and contact info. It's Google's stealth social network. The reason is that the search engine is increasingly utilizing the Gmail contact list as a pseudo web service to power its other applications. It's brilliant because, in the process, Google will turn every service from one that is static to something social.

Address Book entries—contacts—are the fundamental links in a social network. It will be interesting to see how Google lets third-party developers access that information.

Update: I wonder if everyone understands the ramifications of this discussion forum post by Googler Lane LiaBraaten:

I think you'll see Blogger become an OpenSocial container, but I don't know what the time line looks like.

Amazon SimpleDB

I just got an email from Amazon Web Services saying that in the next few weeks they'll open a "limited beta" of an intriguing new service called Amazon SimpleDB:

Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database—real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data—without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning.

Amazon is doing amazing things with their web application infrastructure (S3, EC2, and SQS) but the major failing of their platform to date has been "the database problem", that is, that there hasn't been an easy way to reliably host a typical relational database on their platform.

If SimpleDB can address that failing, and do so reliably, it could finally make Amazon's platform an attractive place to host Spanning Sync's server infrastructure. I'll certainly be doing some serious investigation.

Mark Fletcher weighs in on the announcement:

If [Amazon SimpleDB] offers high performance and high reliability, as they claim, then this could be a very big deal. In combination with the other services, it would eliminate the vast majority of scaling issues facing an Internet service. It's only in limited beta right now, but once it goes live (and works as advertised), I think I'd be hard pressed to not recommend that a new startup host their entire site using Amazon. This further reduces the cost structure associated with an Internet startup (both in terms of money and in terms of talent needed) and lowers the barrier to entry for new services. Like I said, a very big deal.

A very big deal indeed.

Moving In

In August 2006, Larry Hendricks and I began development work on what would later be named Spanning Sync, a service that syncs Apple iCal with Google Calendar. In March 2007 we started selling v1.0. That was nine months and 11,636 paid subscribers ago.

Yesterday we got an office.

Is there anybody out there? Yes.

One of our Spanning Sync customers posted a very moving message to our discussion group earlier today, and I've been thinking about it ever since. It's about how something as mundane as software—calendar sync software at that—can have a positive impact on real people's lives.

Here's the message in its entirety, reproduced with permission:

This is not a support issue, just a post commending this product.

I can't even describe accurately how much Spanning Sync has changed my life, literally. It's been phenomenal, and if anyone is reading this group considering purchase of this product, I can't recommend it enough.

In September of this year, my mom passed away. She was going in for a quadruple bypass, and didn't survive the surgery. Before she went in, she begged me to move in to her home if the worst happened, and take care of my father and grandmother who are both elderly. Pop had a heart attack and double bypass two years ago, and grandma has Alzheimer's.

Needless to say, I agreed.

Now, I'm a father of five, and an IT Manager with an incredibly busy schedule. On top of this, I now have the responsibility of making sure my dad gets to his doctor's appointments on time, and that Grandma is getting to her variety of appointments including Social Security, doctors, and grief counseling. It's simply overwhelming.

There really is no way for me to keep track of everything. If I'm driving down the road when Pop makes an appointment, I have no way to write that down and get it into my calendar later if he calls me with the information. At 86 years old, if he doesn't call me right away, he will forget it, and either way, we're missing an appointment. In steps Spanning Sync. My Pop is a pretty good computer user. He has a Gmail account.

I have set up a couple of calendars for him where he can input his appointments. Those calendars are shared with me. They are synced from Google to my iCal with Spanning Sync, and from there synced to my iPhone.

At any time he can input a new appointment, and within 10 minutes it's synced back to one of my computers... I own 6 different Macs between work and home. Those all get synced together thanks to Spanning Sync, and each night, they sync to my iPhone.

Thanks to this product, my Pop and I can share calendars seamlessly between his PC and my Macs, and at any time I have his appointment schedule at easy access. We set reminders to go off one hour before each appointment, so even if he forgot to tell me about one and I didn't notice it, my iPhone will let me know and I can make a quick adjustment to get him where he needs to be on time. Without this product, I have no idea how I would be able to manage taking care of this many people. In fact, I flatly believe I wouldn't be able to at all.

But with Spanning Sync in my corner, everything gets handled quickly and easily, and I'm always on the same page with the people in my care.

I have expanded this system to include shared calendars with my wife for when bills are due, birthdays, important household tasks, and even the kids school calendars. My whole family remains in sync with my iCal being the hub of it all.

You guys have really saved me the pain of a nervous breakdown. It's not often you can really say a piece of software has changed your life entirely, and for the better, but this one really has, and it's been worth every penny.

It's not often someone tells you your software changed his life. I'm humbled and incredibly honored.

Too often in conversation about computers, software, services, and business, the fact is lost that everyone involved is a real person with a real life and real problems. Reading this reminded me that even though I spend much of my day staring into a computer, there are real people on the other end of the network. Knowing that something I helped create made today a little more manageable for one of those people made my day a whole lot better.

Gmail IMAP for iPhone and Mail.app

One of my mini-projects for this week is enabling IMAP on my Gmail and Google Apps accounts and getting it all properly set up on my Macs and my iPhone. I'll be following the steps outlined in Derek Punsalan's How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail:

The latest news on the street is that Google is slowly rolling out a much anticipated feature - IMAP support. If you point your browser to Gmail Help documentation outlining the steps necessary to get your mail clients setup for IMAP, you%u2019ll soon realize the the directions are the bare minimum. It is recommended that you follow the directions from start to finish, but the actual configuration does not stop there.

Fingers crossed.

Tapscott Joins Papermaster to Tackle Enterprise 2.0

I was traveling this week or I would have posted this sooner, but BSG Alliance has acquired New Paradigm Group, which sounds like a lot of corporate consulting doublespeak, so here's the real-world translation: rock star entrepreneur Steve Papermaster's company just bought Wikinomics author Don Tapscott's company, and Tapscott along with it.

This is particularly exciting news for me for two reasons. First, BSG in based in Austin and this move increases the Enterprise 2.0 mass of my home town, which can only be a good thing. Second, because fellow Enterprise Irregular Susan Scrupski is part of BSG and Don Tapscott's joining her company will certainly make her success more assured.

This is quite a coup for BSG. I look forward to seeing the fruits of this deal and hope that Don Tapscott makes it down to Austin every now and then.