Category Archives: General

SIXTEEN people showed up last night at La Barca.  Wowza!  This was definitely the biggest geek dinner so far.  Not to imply that the geeks last night were bigger geeks than at previous nights.  Oh, and I don’t mean bigger like fatter, everyone looked okay.  And even if they didn’t, that’s really more of a modern society issue than anything else, you know.  When you really dive deeper, it’s all Paris Hilton’s fault.  I’m off-topic again, aren’t I?

The following people were in attendance:

• “Sling Media’s future technology scout and general visionary” Dave Mathews
• “Yahoo!’s queen of the mobile world” (unofficial title) Melanie Westlake
• “Consumer technology PR expert” aka “The unemployed guy with the hat” Mehrshad Mansouri
• “Founder of ZapTix and 8 other ventures (at the same time)” Christian Perry
• “Guy I didn’t get to talk too very much but seems really nice so you should probably ask Dave Mathews more about him but I think he knows something about e-commerce infrastructure” Jason Vagner (no blog, no site, no nothin)
• “Tech consultant, digital photo enthusiast, and excellent beta tester” Mark Rahmani
• “VP of Products for Ingenio and pioneer/expert in the VoIP space” Ron Hirson (link is to a presentation of his which is a great read)
• “The Digital Media Banking Biker” (unofficial title) Jeff Hagan (not the racecar driver, so don’t even bother with the googling)
• “Streaming Video expert and now VC/EIR at Venrock” Seth Kenvin
• “Internet Marketing and Social Media guru” Daniel Riveong
• “Still don’t know what he does” Nicholas Menaker (just kidding, but it’s too good to drop it)
• “He may not have invented the Internet, but he sure keeps it running” Doug Hagan
• “Mac Guru/Podcaster and viral marketing consultant” Sam Levin
• “The guy who knows how to grow your company from zilch to wow” David Gottesman
• “Supersmart product management and marketing guy” Noah Kagan

We started the evening with a somber moment, and raised our glasses in memory of James Kim (click here to make a donation to the Kim family).  We decided our gadget geeking out would be in his honor and wish nothing but peace to his family.

The “around-the-horn” topic was “how many LCD screens do you own?”  Answers ranged from 0 (by Doug who claimed that everything he had was either company property or his wife’s) to 26 (Nicholas who included a half dozen mobile phones, two harmonies, many laptops, etc – Sam was the runner-up with 25, 10 of which were iPods).  This averaged to 10.2 LCDs per person, and the devices included: LCD TVs, laptops, LCD monitors, cell phones, digital cameras, digital video cameras, Harmony remotes, Sonos controllers, GPS units, and some toy from the 70s (unconfirmed). 

Sam Levin brought an in-glasses display (aka “personal media viewer”) from MyVU for us to check out with his iPod.  Quite a few players have tried the “replicate a 52-inch screen in your glasses” before.  Most induce nausea (including the one from Eyetop I tried a couple of years ago).  These seem a lot better, but after about 4-5 minutes I started to experience a little bit of disorientation.  Definitely not a “find me a bucket” sensation, but still slightly off-normal.  Looking forward to Sam’s full review on the unit.  We collectively agreed with the opinion that the unit must allow users to use their own headphones.  Don’t care how that works, but it’s a requirement.

Lastly, we took up the challenge of “can a roomful of smart people come up with a new viable business idea over dinner?”  Now the beers and margarita’s were flowing, but so was the brainstorming.  I don’t think we came to any absolute winners, but there were absolutely some good ideas that might be able to expand into real businesses.  We broke into three groups, and here are the results (in group voting order):

1. “The Long Tail of Ticketmaster” – create a site that allows any small venue to allow for online ticket sales (project codename Bonut). 
2. “Nannywhere.com” – introduce a NetNanny/Safe Surfing technology that allows sites to be unlocked via email, SMS, IM, phone, or anything else.  Unfortunately it was brought to our attention that the existing services do most of this already, minus the SMS/IM part.  Oh well.
3. “The DMV of the Internet” aka “Dagle.com” (pronounced DAY-gle) – a service that allows for absolute identities online. It’s called Dagle.  Dagle sorta sounds like Google, right?  Look at the bunny!

After this, we couldn’t really talk about anything without someone saying Dagle a lot.  Too silly.  Hope everyone had a great time, I sure did (except for when I did the math wrong at the end of the night and forked over too much for the bill – oops).  A few of us headed next door to Mas Sake for a final beverage of the evening (pictured above), but, this being San Francisco and not New York, the chairs were up on the tables and bar by 11pm, and that, my friends, was that.  More photos are online here.

Yesterday I spoke on a panel at the GNoTE conference, and I have to say, I had a great time.  For the past few years, one aspect of my role has included evangelism (or as Guy Kawasaki referred to it, “secular evangelism”).  While evangelism became more widely known through Guy’s actions, the reality is there are still only a handful of people who formally have this role.  Which makes it quite rare to spend half a day in a room full of them, including Guy himself.

Guy opened the event with a great keynote, “The Art of Evangelism,” which I’ll not-so-briefly summarize.  He gave a bit of his background, then went straight on to talk about other events he’s attended.  He mentioned why he liked the “Top 10” format so much, because (a) most speakers suck, and (b) you never know how long they’re going to go on for.  With Guy’s Top 10, you know where you stand, even if he sucks.  Which he probably doesn’t do very often. BTW: he used the term suck, this is purely an homage.  He then proceeded to give this session’s Top 10:

1. Make Meaning – it’s very hard to evangelize crap
2. Make a Mantra – your typical team of stellar MBAs will lock up the whole management team in a room for a 2-day offsite hosted by Moonbeam who has you practice falling and trusting each other and at the end of the day you have a bunch of meaningless mumbo-jumbo.  A mantra is quick, easy, and to the point.
3. Roll the DICEE – I don’t actually remember what all the letters stood for, but it came down to making good products and having emotional reactions to them
4. Niche Thyself – forget trying to appeal to everybody on Earth, build great products for specific markets and own those markets
5. Let 1000 Flowers Blossom – Mao was wrong in general, but right in the aspects of listening to the people.  Focus on your customers, not your not-customers.
6. Make it Personal – what does your product/service/good/etc mean to people at individual levels?
7. Find True Influencers – the CxO’s of an organization are not necessarily the key decision-makers on a given purchase or agreement.
8. Enable Test Drives – if its good, “try before you buy” should work!
9. Look for Agnostics, not Athiests – this was one of my favorites, rather than try to convert the unconvertable, focus on those who are potential converts.  For example, Apple found it easier to sell Macs to Apple II owners or even non-PC owners than it was to convert those who liked MS-DOS.
10. Provide a Slippery Slope – in other words, get your darn foot in the door with your targets, rather than trying to get invited over for dinner!
11. (yes, there were 11) Don’t let the Bozos get you down – there’s always a naysayer, can’t live your life by them

I had to step out during the next speaker, but then my panel followed.  Our moderator Jean did a great job keeping the discussion moving forward.  Our topics ranged from “How do you really spend your time?” (email, travel, phone calls, blogging, IMs, travel, speaking, training others, travel, email) to “What is the single hardest thing you had to do as an evangelist?” (dealing with two particularly hostile topics regarding the Slingbox this past year) to “How do you measure the value and effect of evangelism?” (sales numbers specifically reflected the success of non-traditional marketing programs).  Great panel overall, although I particularly enjoyed listening to Jeff Barr from Amazon.

The event also provided for some great networking time.  I got to chat with Rafe Needleman (who showed his class by giving an update on James Kim during his time), Anil Dash, and Jeremy Zawodny (hehe).  I’d have liked to stay for their entire panel, but had to run a little early unfortunately (sorry guys).

More coverage from: Mario Sundar, Ed Kohler (check out the video interviews on his site!), and the GNoTE blog.

Drive down to Santa Clara? 90 minutes each way
Venti coffee to make the drive palatable? $3.50 (depending on your area)
Event cost? $40
Opportunity to find a roomful of your peers when you work in a tiny tiny field?  Priceless.

This coming Monday I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled “The Evangelist in You” along with a few other “technology evangelists.”  For a little background on what a technology evangelist might be, read this post from Guy Kawasaki (who is keynoting the event), who’s basically the father of evangelism.  By the way, if you’ve gotten this far and you’re looking for Jim Bakker references, or wondering why I’m not talking more about the lord on high, you are in the wrong place.

The event is run by the Global Network of Technology Evangelists (GNoTE), and I’m apparently the last guy on the panels to blog about it – sorry, been busy this week.  While I’ve met a few of the other panelists before (Guy, Buzz Bruggeman, Rafe Needleman, and Jeff Sandquist), I’m looking forward to meeting a few who I know by blog and reputation alone (including Anil Dash, Frederic Lucas, and even Jeremy Zawodny, the #1 Jeremy on the Internet and therefore my archnemesis). 

I’m excited to do this event with this esteemed crew.  Hopefully I bring a different voice to the table, as, with the exception of Guy, I think I’m the only other person there who has done evangelism for a consumer product (the Slingbox).  I believe it’ll be a great event to attend, especially for anyone out there who thinks they have an “evangelist inside” and want to hear our tales.

Registration is $70 (cheaper for members, but really, if you are a member, you probably already know about the event, right?).  Click here to sign up.

The Vista Business launch is upon us, and Vista Consumer is coming some time next year.  A new version of Office is also right around the corner, and IE7 was released fairly recently.  The bidecadial (yup, made it up) Microsoft Update is under way.

But not everyone is planning to rush out and upgrade (even if they can do it for free).  Most people have PC’s that can’t handle the requirements.  While we’ll probably see everything from Vista TV commercials to Vista the breakfast cereal next year, lots of consumers just won’t want to fork over the cash for the instant upgrade.  That said, I do believe that, just like when XP came out, within a couple of years Vista will become the dominant OS. 

Until then, however, I think there are some very simple updates to XP, IE, and Office 2003 that could drastically improve the overall computing experience.  In no particular order…

1. Internet Explorer should automatically fix incorrect domain extensions.  Ever go to Google.ocm?  Or Yahoo.co.k?  Why doesn’t IE just auto-fix (or at least auto-suggest) the entry?
   
2. Outlook should help resolve duplicate contacts.  If I have Mike Smith in my address book and get an email from mikesmith@randomdomainname.com, rather than create a new entry, Outlook should inform me there’s a similar one already there.  I shouldn’t need Plaxo to do this.  Furthermore, there should be a little maintenance tool to help me clean up entries.
3. Alarms and reminders must require attention. This one really annoys me – you should not be able to minimize the Reminders window.  Ever!  The worst is when you do minimize it, and then the alerts pile up and you don’t even notice it in the taskbar. Outlook should force the user to either Dismiss, Edit, or Snooze, and not let you do anything else until one is chosen. 
4. Office applications need constant Autosave.  Why every 10 minutes, or 6 minutes, or 3 minutes?  Why not save the entire editing history, and add in a visible timeline to the editing window?  Forget saving multiple revisions, just have one copy of the document, and allow me to go back in time if I need to see a prior version.  For an extra bonus point, save all the branches too – it’s not as if we’re running out of hard drive space these days.
5. Add useful information to the task manager.  When you view the task manager, there are tons of processes showing nothing but a process name.  Why aren’t companies required to provide useful information about their processes here?  How about adding in fields like: company, URL for more info, and a real name.
6. Office “lite” or “quickload”.  I understand that there are a lot of power users out there, people who live and die inside Excel and PowerPoint.  How about lite versions of each Office application with a barebone set of features, such as viewing and editing.  Note that I’m not talking about what you install, I’m talking about having an entire second version of the applications that launch extremely fast.
7. Use consistent keyboard behaviors.  Any idea what F3, F4, and Control-F all have in common?  Depending on the application, they are all shortcuts to Find, and all in Microsoft Office and Windows.  I’m not even discussing external software providers here, this is all Microsoft turf!
8. Provide a Horizontal template for Word.  I understand that Word is primarily a word processing application, but with all the fancy tools for drawing and tables and whatnot you can pretty much use it to build any type of document.  As long as it scrolls vertically.  How about a horizontal template that allows users to build documents that scroll left-to-right.  Would be great for creating workflows, family trees, org charts, and storyboarding.
9. Smarter cut and paste.  Only Word and Excel provide “Paste Special” and even then they are tedious to access.  If I copy a table from a Web site into Excel, what are the odds I really wanted to include the table formatting?  Shouldn’t that be the Paste Special?
10. Don’t make CANCEL the first option in ANY dialog. Ever start a huge download, then while rapidly switching through visible windows, click the space bar or hit enter?  Bye bye download window.  Bad bad bad.
    
11. Fix Paint or give a simple photo editing tool.  I can’t back these stats up, but I’d wager that more than 80% of “image handling” on a Windows PC is related to photo editing.  I’d then double-down by saying more than 80% of photo editing is one of: crop, rotate, resize, remove red-eye.  The only one you can do in Paint today is rotate.
12. Consolidate Messengers. Windows Messenger.  MSN Messenger.  Windows Live Messenger.  C’mon.
13. Clean up temp files automatically.  I have too many .tmp and ~ocument.doc files laying around.  Find them, fix them, get rid of them.
14. Allow simple HTML exports.  Word, PowerPoint and Excel all include Save As… HTML options.  All create these huge bloated files that cannot be easily integrated into other Web pages.  If I’ve got a simple table in Excel, odds are much higher that I want it in a different Web page, so there should be a way to bring out the HTML with none of the MS-special style sheets.
15. Don’t put email from my contacts in my spam box.  I don’t care if the subject line is “Mortgage loans on casinos with viagra and free software,” if it comes from a contact, it’s email. 

They might not all apply to you. They might be harder to build than I can possibly imagine.  But they’d all improve the computing experience, and I shouldn’t have to upgrade to Vista to get them.

Savard won 8 Stanley Cups as a player with the Canadiens from 1966-81. He recorded 100 goals and 312 assists with Montreal. He also won 2 more as GM of the Habs in 86 and 93. Congrats Serge!

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Was doing a little self-Googling today, and noticed the following:

• Googling “Jeremy Toeman” (results) has this blog first, followed by a variety of stuff related to me in some way or another.
• Googling “Toeman” (results) gets my actress relative Claire first (darn IMDB), followed by me, and then my great-aunt Zerka later in the page.  If I do “Toeman -claire” (results) it’s mostly me
• Googling “Jeremy” (results) gets, well, everyone but me.  Amazingly (to me), Jeremy Zawodny’s blog ranks higher than actor Jeremy Irons and porn star Ron Jeremy.  Then there’s a few other famous and not-so-famous people.  But nowhere in the first ten pages do I show up.

I don’t think I can pull off the same thing as Robert Scoble has (google Robert, he’s first!), but I am a bit surprised I’m not even in the first page.

Hopefully this post will help that.  I’ve learned a lot over the past few years about getting into the top results on Google, and am curious to see the impact of a single post named “Jeremy.”