The Progress Bar

Ever since I had custom business cards printed up for a conference last summer I’ve wanted to continue the trend, avoiding the home-printed look. I found my solution in Moo. Moo lets you make 100 different MiniCards for just $19.99.

The cards can feature graphics from your Flickr photos, SecondLife, popular social networking images or by uploading your own photos to moo.com.

Turnaround was 9 days and as you can see, the full-bleed printing on the backside of the cards, which are about 1/2 the height of traditional business cards, look pretty good. The front side of the card has my vitals.

Creating 100 cards from 100 different photos for twenty bucks is amazing. I’m already picking out my next batch of photos. Check out Flickr for ways people are creating unique cards.

The BostonWebInnovators (website, blog, wiki) event continues to impress. Last night’s event was held in a larger hall, approximately 250 entrepreneurs, VC, developers and media were in attendance. It was great to see so many startups and their support ecosystem in one place. The room exuded a heady, pre-bubble vibe, which no doubt raised eyebrows of some of us that were around for the first Boston internet boom, circa 1994.

I am starting to make connections and see more familiar faces at these events, which is good considering I have done little local networking the past few years. My clients are all in San Francisco, Florida or Europe and my marketing all happens through my blogs.

By way of introduction to new readers, I started my consulting biz, Digicraft, in 1994. I built a lot of websites for IBM, Modem Media clients, and then helped build an interactive unit for a boutique advertising agency in New York. I remember going to SIG (pre-Digitas days) and seeing their web shop, all of about five people. Working in Silicon Alley in 95-98 was amazing, and burning out and taking off to Bali to live on the beach before moving back to Boston was the best time of my life, at least so far.
My resume is in the sidebar, I’ll let that speak for me if you’re interested. Basically lot’s of early-adopter stuff that most people in the room last night are probably too new to remember. andwidth, social nets, open API’s and cheap hardware are fueling the current wave of web innovation. I’m excited to be excited again, and not looking back on past accomplishments, but ahead to the future.

Polling the audience about their pick for the Main Dish presenter most likely to succeed was interesting. It was somewhat perplexing to hear so many people champion web-based writing application Virtual Ubiquity. I’ve spent some time with Writely and Zoho and reacted favorably to VU’s feature set, which addressed some of the most annoying issues with MS Word. However, It’s a hotly contested space, and the demo didn’t address addressable market, revenue models, etc. All I heard is that high-school students are going to use it, they are going after the .edu market? It’s a demo, but I do expect to hear about why I should care about your company.

I personally cheered for MyDesingin the loudest. I don’t think people grokked the complexity of what they have accomplished technically. Easily importing fixtures, windows and associated stats and prices from external websites can be a screen-scraping nightmare, and the demo went off smoothly. Just the right amount of CAD-iness and ease of use. The social aspect of sharing designs with other users was a nice touch. Why build from scratch when you can search, filter on attributes and start off with a template that’s close to where you want to be in the end?

MyDesign had me thinking about Yahoo Pipes. I’ve been having a lot of fun mashing up different website and services there. MyDesign is after a big market with lots of cash moving through it and a chance to reduce the friction between couples during the remodeling process, two thumbs up. If they get Lowe’s or Home Depot to market the system, watch out.
Cardvio reminded me of Moo Card. My Moo Cards were supposed to arrive in time for WebInno, but they didn’t. Once a year I go to a card store and buy a ton of cards for every possible occasion. I stick them in a drawer and when iCal birthday alerts pop up I write a note with a pen, and fire it off. Cardvio is a nice execution and will no doubt be popular in the corporate thank-you note market.

The networking at events like these is ok, if not a bit daunting for the uninitiated. Color-coded badges are eschewed, instead, grab a drink and start staring at name tags while perusing Side Dishes.

I participate in a lot of alpha demos from companies before they hit TechCrunch, so my bar for what is cool/useful is set pretty high. I saw a demo for a blog comment system on steroids yesterday that would have had the crowd doing the wave. Do presenters have to be Boston companies?

I would like to be a presenter, except I’m not going to pitch a company. I would like to do a short bit on what I would like to see presented at future Webinno events and finish up by building a social web app in the alloted six minutes with Pipes, KickApps and Brightcove. That would blow minds and get people thinking in new directions. Or not.

Event organizer David Beisel announced the formation of dinner groups, which are a welcome addition. One week I’d like to sit in on a VC dinner, next week hang with devlopers and the week after see what people are saying about the social media.

As a consultant, I want to know what’s going on around town. These days, I would like to spend some time talking with VC about working with their portfolio companies or performing due diligence on potential investments. I’ve done this in the past and enjoyed the experience.

I tell people I’m the perfect 5th guy for a startup. 2-3 founders are insanely driven to realize their dreams, then you have the developer(s) and hopefully a greybeard for seasoning and then there’s me. Usually it takes about half a beer to decide if we should work together, which was the case last night with one company.

Speaking of deals, right before I walked into the event last night I got a call from a client I just met yesterday afternoon via Skype who is looking to do due diligence on a certain website community they are looking to possibly acquire, today.

The endorphin rush of being in the middle of a deal, then immersing myself with 250 peers and getting turned on to some cool startups was a welcome change to my normal day. I hope the trend continues.

David Cutler, GregPC (who blogged about last nights event) and I retired to Dante downstairs to continue the conversation. My girlfriend called from Australia and I went to a quiet corner to talk. When I got back it sounded like Dave and Greg started a company. I was only gone for 10 minutes!

I made some quality new connections and in general consider WebInno a must-attend event. See you at the next event. Add me to your newsreader or you can subscribe to this blog via email, see the sidebar.

Goodbye just in time manufacturing, hello SpaceNet, a software tool for modeling interplanetary supply chains from MIT.

I’m looking forward to seeing who shows up to tonights gtg with Michael Raynor, author of the Strategy Paradox.  One participant on the wiki runs a blog called Aurgasm, which I have been listening to all afternoon. Great music. Seems like a broad spectrum of people will be attending tonight.

68-PM, Vintage Lounge, 72 Broad Street, Boston (map).

PaidContent says Internet ratings company Quantcast has secured $5.7 million in its first financing round. I am excited to hear this. I am tired of hearing about Alexa’s shortcoming’s as I am Twitter. I like the Quantcast stats pages, lots of useful information. Investors include The Founders Fund and Revolution Capital. The company is headed by Konrad Feldman, the former CEO of SearchSpace.

Creating Passionate Users is talking about building an online community. One particular point bothered me: getting people involved sooner by having them answer questions as son as they pass newbie stage instead of waiting until they are experts. There are billions of bad answers out there, clogging up forums all over the net. Someone has to come up with a solution before things get much more out hand.

Recently, I’ve been in the WordPress forums looking for answers to pretty much the same questions everyone else is asking. The problem is not the people, it’s the way the usual forum software (blog and phpbb) and their ilk operate. Tagging questions is good, marking them closed is good, but there is no good way to hide bogus answers, broken code snippets, etc. Not that we want to necessarily remove comments/tips/hints, but with the evolution of software, related plugins and so forth, it’s often the case that last week’s answer becomes next weeks problem all over again when some supporting software is upgraded.

Case in point, the original Feedburner support forum post for integrating Feedburner with various blogs was something like 10 pages long and chock full of misinformation which sent people down the wrong path for hours at a time. Now, FB has cleaned up the forum with lots of sticky posts that don’t allow comments.

The optimal solution is somewhere between closed stickies and forum comments. Start with a simple way of filtering the conversation based on a particular setup, installed plugins, etc would be a good start. So would a Corrections tag. WordPress forums mark entire entries as “needs help” but who wants to write an entire page? Too meta. Much of the information at WordPress is for version 1.5, which is ancient, but still requires lots of support. Talking about 1.5 and 2.0+ on the same page is a nightmare and leads to more wasted time.

I’m not picking on WP or FB, these are the most obvious places in my online world that I go to often and walk away scratching my head more often than not.
When it comes to conversations, blog comment systems are the worst, but thats for another day.

Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed from Tokyo to share recent research done by the company.  They surveyed a group of managers and found their attention profiles varied greatly depending on the type of media involved. These attention maps make it easy to discover, measure and analyze where attention is being focused. I signed up to try out the tool, will report back once I’ve had a chance to check it out.

A story titled “The Year Without Toilet Paper” in the NY Times caught my eye this morning. When the page loaded, I saw something quite remarkable, or so I thought I did.

The banner and skyscraper ads surrounding the article seemed to be matched to the greenish glow cast by lighting in the article’s primary photo. How cool! I sat there for a few minutes wondering how the ads could know what the colors are on the web page they’re situated in, musing about Riya or some other image processing system that could be used to discern the primary colors of a web page. Or perhaps the system was reading meta-data about the images?

Alas, when I reloaded the page, a new ad came up, surely not meant to compliment the cool greenish hue of the article’s photo. Oh well, I’m sure this level of targeted advertising is in the cards, for now the ad industry has it’s hand full with cost-per-action advertising.

Twitter went down for a while this morning. Love the maintenance message.

Michael Raynor, author of “The Strategy Paradox and “The Innovator’s Solution, will be doing a meetup in Boston next week. Hit the wiki to sign up.

• Tuesday, March 27
• 6 – 8 pm
• Vintage Lounge, 72 Broad Street in Boston

I need to find an event microformat plugin for WordPress.