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SocialText lands Series B

After a fairly news-free period in the world of wikis, there is something potentially big: SocialText raised their second round of funding. See Ross' tease here. Congratulations to the SocialText guys -- that's very good news, and a further validation of the whole wiki market. I still think it's going to be huge.

Ross won't reveal any of the key details until the end of May, but he's turned it into a kind of game. The first person to guess (and blog) the actual details of the round prior to the official announcement wins five licenses of SocialText.net for a year. I've no time to research this now, but I'll see what I can come up after the big party this weekend.

I do have a few initial impressions, though. Of course, the first question on everyone's mind is, "how much?" (The who could be equally important, but face it -- everyone starts with the amount.) Relevant history: SocialText closed an Angel round ($300k) in June of 2003 and it's A round ($500k) in August 2004. JotSpot raised $5.2mm in October 2004. None of the other wiki makers are venture-funded, as far as I know.

The JotSpot round is an interesting comparison, but I'm leery of using it as benchmark for SocialText's valuation. A couple things could have inflated the JotSpot number: first, the reputation of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer as the founders of Excite undoubtedly pushed their valuation up. And secondly, Kraus and Spencer were themselves investors in the round and (as far as I can tell from the press release) their investment is included in that $5.2mm. So it's not exactly a level playing field on which to compare.

Anyway, I'm not prepared to hazard a firm guess yet. I don't think it's going to be game-changing. But hopefully it'll give SocialText more breathing room than their last round did. I'll give it some more thought and research over the weekend.

April 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Drink and be merry

Oh, yeah. I'm having a party this Saturday -- if you're in the neighborhood and want to come, drop me a line.

April 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No, they're not gonna see this coming

Just wanted to point you to the just-released trailer for Serenity -- Joss Whedon's Firefly movie. Firefly was, for a brief shining moment, was the most brilliant, best written, most affecting, best acted, most creative show on television. I was fairly well crushed when Fox canceled it. So I've held on to pretty high hopes for the movie. But what I saw in the trailer was more than I ever imagined. It looks huge. And there are so many great snatches of dialog. Oh, I hope the movie delivers.

If you never got to see Firefly when it was on TV, you should go pick up the DVD and give it a try. You won't be sorry.

April 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Atlassian's 20% Day

After writing about Google's 20% time commitment to personal projects, I wanted to be sure to point this out. Mike from Atlassian reports on what happened when he gave the same idea a try at his company. (I suppose instituting radical new policies is easier when you're the founder.)

They called it FedEx day (motto for the day: "We Deliver"), and out of it came some really kick-ass feature additions for Atlassian's products, several of which will ship in the very next versions. [Which must be getting close by now.... right, mate?]

Since Mike gave his developers free reign, they added more than just features. There were also improvements made in tech support automation, in infrastructural code (like exception handling), in distribution methods, and in diagnostics. Several of the developers developers took the opportunity to make their jobs easier.

You might argue that they should have focused their efforts on providing immediate user-value. But think about how these investments will pay off in the long run: every minute a developer is able to shave off dealing with tech support is another minute spent coding. And those saved minutes, over a year, will add up to far more features than anyone could have added in a single day.

It those kinds of investments that are not immediately noticeable on the bottom line, but are perfectly suited to programmers' discretionary time. Too often, developers are too busy just trying to stay ahead of customer demands to spend time on making themselves more productive. We have a developer on our team who spends a great deal of his time on non-feature related code, and our whole team has seen enormous productivity boost because of his improvements.

April 25, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Open Company example: SlimDevices

I had another great experience with an Open Company this weekend. I now have another example to add to my lists of companies who truly get it.

I've been a more-or-less happy owner of two SlimDevices' Squeezeboxes for a couple of years. The Squeezebox is a small audio component that can wirelessly access a music library stored on your computer. I use them to stream MP3s to different rooms in my apartment. I chose the Squeezebox because, at the time, it was the only product on the market that was able to stream the same music synchronized to multiple rooms. It's a great solution for whole-house audio, and much easier and cheaper than trying to run wires through the walls.

There are other products on the market now which offer synchronized streaming (in particular, local Santa Barbara company Sonos), but I still think Squeezebox is the right choice. I may go into greater detail about that in a later post. But for now, let me say that I think the Sonos player is brilliantly engineered product with a phenomenal interface. But the price difference is significant. And the Squeezebox has the advantages of openness, as you'll see below.

Continue reading "Open Company example: SlimDevices"

April 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I knew my English degree would pay off eventually

Jason Fried (of 37Signals) says:

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer.

I couldn't agree more. Ms. Quin, my 12th-grade English teacher, would be so proud. And this maxim applies especially to programmers. It's not enough to do brilliant work -- you have to be able to explain it to the rest of the team, or it's almost useless.

April 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Open Company idea goes multi-lingual

Gino Tocchetti has translated the Open Company Test into Italian. How cool is that? Thanks, Gino!

April 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Open Company Rolemodels

Nike no stranger to controversy. But this quote from a FT article today is a nice summary of lessons learned by a company who has for too long followed the "hide and hope the problem goes away" strategy of communication.

"We felt the risks of any future lawsuit were far outweighed by benefits of transparency," says Hannah Jones, Nike's vice-president of corporate responsibility. "Because if we've learned anything as a company, it's that closing down and not talking about the challenges and opportunities doesn't get you far."

Nike is learning the hard way to be a more Open Company. Even though they make shoes instead of software, the same core principles apply. It's worthwhile to remember that Nike doesn't do anything that's not in the best interest of the bottom line.

This may be, of course, nothing more than corporate happy-speak on Nike's part -- a snowjob to keep their critics quiet. But I remain hopeful.

Link via WorldChanging.

April 18, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Remixing with Greasemonkey

John Udell has another great post today, this one about Greasemonkey. I knew Greasemonkey was a cool little app, but I failed to grok how important it actually is until reading John's post today. He points to a guy who added a persistant search feature to Gmail.

This guy saw that Gmail was missing a feature that he liked from his other email clients. And despite the fact that Gmail is in no way open-source, he said: "I can fix that." And so he did, and gave his work back to the community.

This is a brilliant example of the remix culture, played out in software. In the new world, your product is going to be opensource, whether you like it or not. You'd be smarter to harness that energy (like Amazon) instead of fighting it (like RIAA).

April 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

So very uncool

PVRBlog reports that TiVo's CFO announced that there are no plans for a Mac version of TiVoToGo.

That's it. I'm done. I'm going to start seriously looking into MythTV or EyeTV or SnapStream or anything else that may be out there.

I'm going to find something without any obnoxious DRM restrictions. But I need to get started now, because I have to find something before July 1st.

April 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack