Monthly Archives: December 2007

end of year rant

Posted by Todd Sawicki on December 31, 2007 View Comments

A friend of mine, Kevin Merritt, blogged recently that folks should blog about the startups they like to help them out.  In this case, I’m going to blog about things that are driving me nuts, batty, bonkers or just plain up a wall.  I want to get these things off my chest before the end of the year so I can start fresh.

- Firefox for Mac (v 2.0.x) is awful.  Just awful.  It has to be the slowest browser on any platform on the planet.  It crashes all the time, hogs a ton of memory and seriously makes me yearn for IE7 on WinXP so much so that I am finding myself using it more and more in Parallels on my Mac.   Until Camano and Safari support the toolbars and plug-ins that Firefox and IE support, using those alternatives is a non-starter in my world.  Maybe Firefox 3 will be better, it certainly can’t be any worse.

- MacOffice 2004 and Entourage actually are slower then Firefox.  Just pitiful cousins to their Windows counterparts.  Why in heaven’s name did Microsoft not just knock them off literally instead of attempting to re-make them in some seemingly half-ass way for the Mac? Excel 2004 and Entourage drive me especially batty.

- Mac laptops need 2 mouse buttons.  Steve Jobs it’s going to be 2008 already.  Get over it.  You’re damn company’s OS supports a right mouse click natively and has for years.  Get over yourself already.  In fact – the single mouse button at this point almost makes the laptop in many situations.

-  I can’t believe how hard it is to find a Wii.  Seriously the lack of supply in this day and age of endless contract manufacturing in China is mind-boggling.  I have read some estimates that Nintendo left a couple of billion – yes billion – dollars on the table this Christmas season due to lack of supply.  This is almost as stupid as Yahoo was for not having a yield based SEM platform for years until Panama came out some 4.5 years after Google introduced the concept thus leaving tens of billions on the table.

- The GMail interface still drives me nuts.  Seriously when will Google realize some people actually don’t like a threaded view (in fact I hate it).  Classic example of one size fits none.

- When will folks pay attention to Amazon.com’s privacy practices?  After the over-rated digerati uprising over Facebook’s beacon platform, I can’t figure out how Amazon gets such a free pass.  Seriously have you read all the data on and – yes – outside of their domains on their users?  Have you noticed you many dozens – yes dozens – of pages their privacy policy is?

- Why is Twitter so damn buggy and down all the time?  Recently the Twitter to FB status sync has been broken dozens of times while my Twitter feed misses friends updates.  Twitter’s help desk acknowledges its a known bug.  Fix it please.  The point of twitter is to keep in touch with many friends and not be left guessing what’s going on in their lives.

- TSA and Airport security.  What a joke and waste of time.  Either do it right ala the Israelis (now that’s security) or give it up.

- Laptop battery life or why don’t all airlines have power plugs at their seats yet?  I thought they actually wanted higher paying business customers on their flights?  And why laptops don’t last 8 hours yet on a single charge in normal use modes is amazing to me – we’ve been stuck at >2 hours for 10 years.

- Untargeted online ads.  Seriously in this day and age there’s no reason to be ads by the tonnage anymore.  And the way I’m tracked online, I’m sure somone (likely google) has figured out what my grandkids names are going to be.  I don’t need to see any more dating ads (i’m happily married).

That’s it for now.  <phew> I feel better already.

the future of social net advertising: making fun of emarketer

Posted by Todd Sawicki on December 17, 2007 View Comments

Cross post: Full post over at the Lookery corp blog here.

Summary: eMarketer came out with some essentially nutty projections for the future of social net advertising.  As much as I wish and I hope eMarketer is right given my involvement with Lookery and the world market for that advertising grows to $4.1 billion by 2011, their numbers don’t quite add up when you take a closer look.  Yes, $4.1 billion a year for likely the most dominant category of online user engagement doesn’t seem like much when compared to the $20 billion search will pull in, but that doesn’t justify potentially silly modeling by eMarketer.  As you’ll see in the post eMarketer builds its model on some pretty wild and crazy RPM assumptions (that term is explained as well) that would require essentially turning every pixel on your social net profile into ad inventory.  Not going to happen.

That being said – I bet there will be a hundred VC pitches in the next few weeks who will gladly pimp these projections as justification for their ad supported social net startup.  Too bad no one will question their validity.

seattle 2.0 latest startup rankings released

Posted by Todd Sawicki on December 8, 2007 View Comments

Marcelo Calbucci runs Seattle 2.0 a blog that has quickly emerged as the running index of Seattle 2.0 web startups. Marcelo’s site is the first comprehensive list of Seattle based-startups and he deserves a lot of credit for his most watched creation: the Seattle Startup Index. If you’ve ever wondered which startups are based in Seattle – now you know. Marcelo – I must apologize for taking so long to give your site some much deserved props – keep up the good work.

Though I don’t want to regurgitate the entire list – it is interesting to see how companies are doing that I have either worked with as a consultant/advisor or have friends there. Here are some thoughts (in order of their appearance on the list):

  • Zillow (3) – my friend Vanessa Fox just left after a brief stay at Zillow – good luck at Ignition. Zillow falls into a strange class of startup given how much money they raised – they have so much cash and so many people (well over 100) that they seemingly skipped the whole startup phase and went right to mid-life crisis. Also amazing how much traffic Zillow has compared to Redfin (23).
  • Widgetbucks aka Mpire (8) – Mpire started in the comparison shopping space a couple of years ago but recently with the launch of its Widgetbucks platform has embraced the distributed e-commerce model. I had lunch with my fellow Loudeye alum Greg Harrison, Mpire’s CTO and Co-founder, last week and was blown away by the success of their widgetbucks platform. Without giving away specifics – its growing like weeds and offering publishers some really cool monetization options behind the banner.
  • JamGlue (18) – This social music community built around JamGlue’s very cool music mashup tools has been growing very strongly and steadily since I started working with Divya Bhat and the gang earlier this year.  They are a very resourceful group and am more then pleased to see them become more and more successful.
  • Judy’s Book (22) – The story has already been told by Andy Sack and am surprised to see it end this way.  As anyone who is familiar with the Seattle startup seen – Andy is not only an active entrepreneur but investor as well.  He’s clearly one of the folks at the center of the Seattle 2.0 orbits and deservedly so.
  • blist (73) – Kevin Merritt, founder & CEO of blist, has begun peeling off the layers of secrecy surrounding the company’s product.  Having seen a demo recently from Kevin, I was more then impressed.  Kevin’s goal of creating a database as easy to use as excel but that actually is a relational database seems to be coming true.  For the first time I really got it – ie. why excel isn’t a relational database and at the same time seeing how you can show that within an excel gui metaphor.  Awesome work by the team and trust me – this is going to be a home run.  I can’t wait to get my live account – as a hardcore excel user with a db phobia – blist will be right in my wheel house – I already 3 or 4 blists in my head that I need to put in a blist.  Also I have no bones endorsing blist for any aspiring engineer looking to break into the startup scene – Yep blist is hiring.  If you want an intro to Kevin regarding a job – just ping me via the comments.  Happy to pass your name along.
  • Others Online (81) – I joined the company’s advisory board earlier this fall and though Others Online looks like a different take on MyBlogLog (a company whose founders are also friends down in SF) – its really building a very interesting service that goes wayyyyy beyond a simple personal introduction widget (which you’ll see on the right sidebar of this blog).  Jordan Mitchell’s, founder and CEO of OO, background in contextual advertising makes for an interesting cross section with the rise of social media.  Another Loudeye alum, Doug Schulze, just signed onboard with Others Online as well.  Look for a fuller story about what OO is up to in the new year.
  • TeachStreet (104) – Founded by Dave Schappell – TeachStreet is well on its way to becoming what could be the ultimate directory for lessons, coaching, tutors, and continued learning.  A former Amazonian who I’ve gotten to know this past year thanks to an intro from Dave McClure of 500 Hats fame (yes a Bay Area guy had to make a Seattle intro at least the intro happened locally), has put together a killer team and are on pace to roll out a killer service for its category.  Given who and what Dave is personally – I just can’t imagine TeachStreet not being successful.

Now where is my current company Lookery on that list?  It’s not – while I am Seattle – HQ is in SF with development out of Boston.  At the very least, hopefully Lookery will be able to help these Seattle web 2.0 startups monetize their traffic.  So if I come asking your startup for a desk to work at for a little while – now you know why ;)

facebook bites the pr bullet on beacon, but it lives on because in the end users don’t appear to be bothered

Posted by Todd Sawicki on December 5, 2007 View Comments

Whether his words or his team’s, Zuckerberg eats some crow today via the corporate facebook blog and apologizes for essentially some poor product decisions in Beacon. Responding to some critics, Facebook will offer a global opt-out for Beacon. As I posted previously, Beacon already offered a partner by partner opt-out. Using the same dashboard Facebook added the option via a checkbox at the bottom of the list of partners. As Dave McClure and I grokked this morning and now blogs – given how few users will opt-out why Facebook didn’t launch with this feature is a fair question and they are right to apologize to the offended users.


Jay Meattle over at the Compete.com blog posts an interesting chart showing traffic to the Facebook privacy page. What’s interesting is how Jay notes the spike when Facebook announced it was opening up profiles to search crawlers allowing profiles to appear in Google, et al. search results compared to recently given the public criticism of Beacon. As I predicted – users aren’t concerned and will embrace Beacon’s goals of sharing more of what’s going in a user’s world.

here comes another bubble

Posted by Todd Sawicki on December 4, 2007 View Comments

Funniest video ever (at least to startup tech geeks).

Here Comes Another Bubble
here comes another bubble

Set to the tune of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.