I’ve seen the future…

…and the future is really blazin’ fast connections.

We used to have 4 T1’s ganged together somehow in our office, giving us around 6 Mb/sec. Shared by 75 people, and responsible for not only internet but also telephone traffic, you can imagine it wasn’t exactly fast.

At home I have a Comcast cable modem, and I get something like 8 Mb/sec, which until today I thought was pretty fast.

But this morning, when I got to the office, our IT folks had completed our office network cutover to a 100 Mb/sec fiber connection to the internet…and oh. my. gosh. I downloaded a 20MB file just for fun, and it was done by the time I could look at my watch to find the second hand and figure out how long it took. Download progress meters aren’t any fun any more, as they go from 0 to 100% with hardly any stops in between…

I was chatting with one of said IT guys about it, as they’ve been using the new connection for a few days before they cut over the whole office…he said it takes something like 15 or 20 minutes to download a DVD from MSDN subscriber downloads, and he said “it’s almost easier than looking through the case to find the physical DVD.” Lol!

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Cold calling (from the callee’s perspective)

My office phone rings a LOT. And at least 50% of the time, the person calling is cold-calling me, hoping to sell whatever product or service they offer. And since the more enterprising of these folks at least glance at my blog before calling me, I thought I’d write some tips for them here.

Be aware I have no idea how to actually do a cold call. There is likely no one in the world worse at that than me. So everything I write here is from the perspective of the callee, not the caller. I’m sure this will read like “10 steps to fewer sales” for experienced sales folks. :-)

Imagine this, which seems to happen most of the time:

Greg: “Hello, this is Greg…”

Sales guy Bob: “Hello, Greg, this is Bob WannaSellYa. How are you doing today?”

11 words, and this already puts me in a bad spot, and instantly annoys me. First, I have no idea who Bob WannaSellYa is or what company he’s with. So I’m either annoyed that he wants to know how I’m doing even though I don’t know him, or I’m horrified that I might have met him yesterday and forgot his name. Could go either way. If you have some connection to me – if say someone I know gave you my contact info – then say so right away, and I’ll pay much more attention. Otherwise, my usual response to this:

Greg: “Fine.”

And I’m sorry to admit, it’s not a polite “fine” – it’s more of an annoyed, who-the-f%@!-are-you “fine”.

I don’t want to be mean, I really don’t. It’s not my nature. But I have a lot to do today, and talking to you wasn’t on my list. So please, do what you can to get to the point quickly.

Ok, so now Bob knows I’m doing fine, and if he’s really listening, he knows I’m already somewhat annoyed about the call. Now comes the meat of the conversation, I guess. I’ll give a hint at this point – if I don’t know who you are, then don’t pile on any more small talk; asking me about the weather in Denver will not help your chances. But assuming we’re past that:

Bob: “Great, glad to hear it. Greg, I’m with AcmeServices here in Dallas, TX, and we’ve got 90 of the Fortune 100 as clients. Do you currently host your own information systems?”

Greg: “I’m sorry, who did you say you were with?”

Bob: “AcmeServices.”

Greg: “And what do you do?”

You see, I’ve probably never heard of AcmeServices, I don’t know what you do, and I’m not likely to have a conversation with you about what I might or might not be hosting until I know what you’re after. Are you a managed service provider? An edge network provider? A consultant? A hosting company? Give me one or two sentences about what exactly you do, and maybe even how you think it might fit with what I do. Even if you get the second part wrong, I’ll know two things:

1. I’ll have a general idea what you do.

2. I’ll know that you spent at least 5 minutes looking at what I do, so I don’t have to explain that we sell enterprise software AND operate an online hosted system.

Based on #1, I’ll be able to triage the call. Either tell you a) I’m not interested, b) I’m not the one to talk to but perhaps point you to someone else, or c) I’m indeed the guy and let’s spend a few minutes talking. And if you also did #2, we’ll be able to jump right in if there’s something here.

And if I know enough about what you’re saying to tell you I’m not interested, then you’re just not going to be able to talk me into it right then on the phone. It’s never happened. If I don’t really know, then I’ll say so and you can tell me more. If, for example, you sell solid-state storage, and I use regular disk storage, then I’ll pepper you with a bunch of questions to help me understand whether I might be interested…but if I’m not interested from the get-go, then you can save us both some time, and you can save me from feeling like I’m being rude by trying to end the call.

(aside: if you do sell solid-state storage, please do call me, because I do have some questions. :-)

Let me try to boil all this down to a few tips, if I might:

  • Get to the point quickly; small talk is awkward when we don’t know each other.
  • If we have some mutual acquaintance or connection, say so quickly, and I won’t blow you off. Better yet, ask them to introduce you to me via email.
  • If I don’t answer your voice mail, you don’t need to leave 8 more messages – I got the first one. I probably just don’t need what you’re selling at the moment. It’s no offense.
  • Don’t ever say we’ve chatted personally in the past when we haven’t. I have a bad memory, but I remember things like this. This is a sure-fire way to make sure I will never return your voicemail or email. You’d be surprised how much this happens.
  • Email is a much better way to get ahold of me, frankly, than the phone. If you’re obviously selling something, then I might not respond, but I do at least read the first sentence or two of every email I get. If I don’t need something now, but think I might in the future, I’ll save your email, and remember you later (I usually don’t reply until I’m ready to actually dig in). But – if your email reads like spam, as opposed to a personal note, it’s much less likely that I’ll save it or respond.

Anyway, I’m sure I just offended most of the sales people who read my blog, and perhaps others as well…and like I said, I have no idea what kinds of things actually work and what doesn’t. I just know what I personally respond to. So if you want to sell me stuff, this will probably help!

34 Comments

NewsGator subscriber counts

I’ve noticed a few posts around the web (here’s the latest) expressing a bit of confusion about how NewsGator (and NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go!) subscriber counts are reported. So here’s the skinny.

When FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator Inbox are running in stand-alone mode, that is with sync NOT enabled, they will retrieve feeds directly from the source using their own user-agent. When you look in your Feedburner (or other) stats, you’ll see these show up as NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, etc.

When NewsGator Online retrieves your feed, it reports total subscriber count as part of the user-agent. It’s retrieving your feed once on behalf of lots of users.

Now here’s the part that causes confusion. When FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator Inbox ARE in sync mode (which is the default mode unless turned off), they will retrieve the content from NewsGator Online’s feed store; they will NOT retrieve content from the source. When you look at your Feedburner stats (or whatever you’re using to determine RSS reader distribution), these subscribers will be reported as NewsGator Online users.

Related to this, you will never see NewsGator Go! in your stats – this is because Go! only works in sync mode, and always retrieves content through NewsGator Online…and thus subscriber counts are reported as part of the online counts.

If a single user uses (say) FeedDemon, Inbox, Go!, and NewsGator Online all synced together, they’ll be reported to you as a single subscriber – not as 4 subscribers.

Folks have asked us if we could split out the statistics, to more “accurately” report statistics for the individual client applications. This is actually harder than it sounds, due to the seamless nature of our sync platform. Our system knows if a user is using, say, NetNewsWire and Go! both; however, it’s usually unknown which of those applications a user is going to use to read a specific piece of content in advance. We could report one user for both apps, but this would overstate our subscriber counts. So essentially we compromise, and report them all as NewsGator Online – which is sometimes confusing, but accurately counts users, rather than applications.

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Facebook’s crazy terms of use

Sigh.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Picasa Web Albums, discussing their terms of service and explaining why I couldn’t use it. Basically, those terms said that Google could help themselves to your photos if they wish, and if they wanted to put them on a Google billboard in Times Square, that would be just fine with you, thanks.

Well, Facebook is also helping themselves to your content. From their terms of use:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This is just nuts. Basically, they’re welcome to take your stuff, make a copy, and use it for a multi-million dollar ad campaign if they want. Or, they could license YOUR photo to someone else to do the same.

Unbelievable.

If you’re thinking “hey, I don’t care” – read the part about you having the right to grant this license to Facebook. It’s possible you don’t – read my previous post about Picasa for details.

So other than my profile pic, which I suppose they can use for whatever they like, I’ve removed all of my photos from my Facebook profile. My profile is now pretty bare – not a lot of exciting stuff there. I’ll just point people to other places where I actually share some of the things I’ve done without worrying about some company helping themselves to whatever rights they want.

Facebook, you convince your partners to help you help yourself to my private information. You blatantly help yourself to whatever rights you want to everything I put on your site. What’s next? I shudder to imagine.

[via CBC News]

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NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free!

We’ve got a lot of big news today at NewsGator.

First, we’ve got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own – tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

I haven’t been this excited about our consumer products and strategy since we bought FeedDemon and NetNewsWire a couple of years ago.

But I can hear you asking already…”why, Greg, why would you do such a thing?”

What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients. Anyone who wants a rich experience for consuming content, or anyone who uses multiple computers or devices and wants a best-of-breed experience on each can now use our clients. Using a Mac at home, along with an iPhone? NetNewsWire and our iPhone reader will sync up. Have a PC at the office? FeedDemon will sync with your other two applications. And they’ll all sync with NewsGator Online. It all just works.

There are two reasons we want our clients to become ubiquitous. Well, three if you count “we want to be nice.” But two other reasons. :-)

First, we’ve found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products – especially since these client apps can sync with NGES directly. So, the more the merrier – we’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to use our apps can do so, without having to climb over the hump of having to dig out their credit card.

And second, we want to collect “attention” data (actually I like to call this activity data, but everyone else in the world calls it attention) and use it to make everyone’s experience better. If there is a specific feed you love, and you’re constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that’s interesting…and if there are a lot of people doing this, it’s probably a good indicator about the “relevancy” of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that’s a good thing – both for us and for you.

We’ve taken some small steps along these lines so far in the client applications – watch over the next few months as these capabilities really start to come into their own, and roll out both in the online reader and continue to evolve in the clients.

We’ve talked about APML in the past, and said we’d implement APML export in the clients. We’re going to take that a step further – and implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data. That data will be a rollup of all of your activity across all of our clients that you use. We’re also going to make aggregate data available via API. You should start to see all of this start rolling out within the next couple of months.

So anyway – this is great news! I’m personally really excited about this, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you. There are a lot of details I didn’t cover here…so here are a couple of links with more info.

Press release

Q&A – details as to upgrades, refunds, etc.

79 Comments

Macs seem to sell themselves (and users help)

As I mentioned in my post last week about switching to a Mac, I’ve had a number of posts in the back of my mind, many of them observations that I’ve made since taking the plunge.

Today’s is about how the Mac seems to sell itself. And all of us Mac users tend to help. :-)

I’ve got two examples from my own recent experience (I’ve actually got more, but I’ll keep it down to two here).

I was over at my sister’s house for Thanksgiving, and her and her husband had a couple of friends over to join us. One of them brought along his Macbook Pro. My brother-in-law mentioned that he had just installed a new printer, and it was on his wireless LAN, but some configuration thing must have been messed up because none of his (windows) computers could see it.

His friend, just for grins, opened his Mac and went to the printer setup area, and within seconds it discovered the printer on the network, and installed it. He printed a web page…and while my brother-in-law was in the next room picking up the print, his friend called over to him “it looks like your cyan ink cartridge is low!”

Pretty funny…but the important point here is it just worked, without any CDs or complicate configuration. You know what he asked for for Christmas? Gift cards for the Apple store, so he can buy a new Mac.

The second example is a coworker, who has a nice video camera, and has played with some movie editing, but has not been able to successfully burn a video DVD from Windows (it always ends up with problems on his DVD player). He’s going home tonight with a DVD created with iDVD – and he said if it actually works, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll get a Mac for himself.

I think Apple is in the middle of a bit of a perfect storm at the moment. People I’ve talked to, while not necessarily disillusioned, are not generally impressed with (or excited about) Vista. It seems there is no “wow” factor making the average Joe want to take that step, unless he’s buying a new machine where it comes already installed. And even then, I’ve got some friends (Tom is one of them) who have new laptops with Vista, and are trying to figure out how to switch back to Windows XP. So while usage remains obviously strong, I think loyalty to Windows is waning.

At the same time, it seems that – especially at home – the Mac has plenty of software available for it. Mention just about any common task that we all do with our computers, and while there might not be as many Mac apps as Windows apps, there are typically enough to choose from. And I think this may be the case even in the office, but that will be the subject of another post.

And finally, the Mac has the reputation of being easy to use and trouble-free.

I think all of these things have come together to form quite a force. When I mention to people that perhaps they should consider a Mac, and they hear that even I use one :-), probably 80% of them at least consider it. And that, I believe, is a pretty big shift from where things were say 5 years ago.

8 Comments

NewsGator closes new $12M financing

As you might have already read this morning (depending on whether my post makes it out first!), NewsGator has closed a $12M financing round, bringing our total capital raised to $30M.

As the founder, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what we’ve accomplished, since that fateful day when I signed the series A paperwork. At that time, there were 2 full-time employees including me, NewsGator Inbox was called “NewsGator for Outlook” (wait, is NewsGator a company or a product?), and NewsGator Online was a subscription-only service (I like to think of it back then as the best kept secret in the industry).

And now? Yowsa. For starters, we’ve grown to about 75 amazing people, who have all really helped shape the company into what it is today (thanks guys!).

Our consumer product suite has grown, from not only NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator Online, but also with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Go! for both Windows Mobile and Backberries, and quite a few other point products. And they all communicate with each other via the sync system we’ve put in place via NewsGator Online’s back-end platform (which processes around 7 million new articles per day).

We developed NewsGator Enterprise Server, our enterprise-class server system for aggregating and distributing content within the enterprise. It also implements our sync system, so all of our popular desktop and mobile clients also work in the enterprise. The server also integrates very tightly with Microsoft SharePoint, via our NewsGator Social Sites product. RSS is really the underlying plumbing for enterprise 2.0 – and NGES leads the market in providing this infrastructure. And this technology is real – over 100 of the Fortune 2000 have implemented NGES, and they’re thinking of new ways to use it every day.

And on top of that, using our core online platform, we’ve built up a part of our business called Syndication Services, providing content-related services to third parties such as media companies. We’re one of the leading widget platforms on the web, providing widgets to media companies and others that live on just about any site (including, of course, OpenSocial sites), delivering hundreds of millions of widget views every month. And our commercial web service APIs service tens of millions of API requests every day.

Whew! That sounds like a lot, from humble beginnings. :-) But the bottom line is, we want our consumer applications to be as ubiquitous as possible, while we continue to sell our software and services to businesses…and this new round of capital helps us expand our market and solidify our leadership.

So what’s next? Well, that’s a topic for another post…but rest assured, we’re working on some pretty amazing stuff (if I do say so myself!), and we’ve got a lot of news coming up soon. Stay tuned!

11 Comments

Using a Mac…why oh why?

As some have noticed, and others have gloated about :-), I’ve been using a Mac (specifically a Macbook Pro) as my primary machine for about a month now. I’ve been a died-in-the-wool Windows guy every since Windows 3.0, and scoffed at all of the people playing with their silly Macs. Well, I guess they showed me, because now I’m using one. I’m even writing this post in MarsEdit.

Don’t get me wrong – I still like my friends in Redmond…but this experience has opened my eyes to some extent to how the “other half” lives.

I thought as a Windows user for so long, I might have a different perspective on the Mac…so I’m going to write a few posts (well, at least one – lol) talking about the whys and hows of my experience. So let’s get to it…and this post will be about “why oh why did I switch to the Mac?”

It all started with Windows Vista, actually. As a Windows guy, I was all excited when it was released, and installed it on my work laptop as soon as I could. Hmm…didn’t seem to get much faster, and I didn’t have a cool enough video card to run Aero, but hey, it was shiny and new. And the power management worked way better than XP ever did.

But then I got home, shrink-wrapped copies of Vista Ultimate in hand, and contemplated upgrading my home machine (which was running XP). This machine was the one I use for my photography, and it’s running Lightroom, Photoshop, and some other apps. Vista wasn’t such an obvious choice here, specifically for three reasons:

1. There were no Vista drivers yet for my Epson R2400, which I use for proofing and some print jobs. Eh? When is the last time a currently-available Epson printer didn’t have drivers for the latest version of Windows? Hmm.

2. The Spyder color calibration device I was using didn’t have Vista drivers either, and the manufacturer wasn’t planning to support it. I was less upset about this, because I was thinking about replacing this device anyway.

3. Color management on Vista – and this is the biggie – is apparently totally broken. From an article on Digital Outback Photo:

As you use Vista, you are occasionally interrupted by the OS as it confirms you have the admin-level privileges required or confirms certain actions. As a user-interface effect, Vista dims the screen slightly while offering the user a password dialog. Unfortunately, this dimming of the display clobbers the calibration curves in the graphics card and they are not replaced.

Are you kidding me? This is a total show-stopper. Combine this with the fact that it’s never 100% clear in Windows if your display profiles have been loaded (since only color-aware apps use them), and it seems it’s a total crapshoot.

Hmm. My photographer friends with Macs never seem to complain about their color management. Something about “I don’t know, I calibrate it and it just works.”

So I filed that away, and decided I’d just live with XP for a while.

But then I found myself with a shiny new iPhone, which I got for free at the Office 2.0 conference (and subsequently fell in love with, much to my surprise). Suddenly I started seeing Macs everywhere – conferences, coffee shops, you name it. I’d ask people about them – and every person I can remember said they loved it. I’d turn on my Vaio, and wait a couple of minutes for Vista to boot, and all the while admire their fancy Macbook Pro awaking nearly instantly from sleep (because I’ve rarely seen anyone actually turn off their Mac).

Then I stumbled across the page on the Apple web site where they have all of the Mac vs. PC ads, and (I can’t believe I actually did this) I watched the whole series of them. And you know what? They were fun. And Mac is clearly much cooler than PC.

So I thought, what the heck, and pulled the trigger. I knew lots of people who could help me if need be, and I figured worst case, we’ll use the machine for testing and such at NewsGator. So the evening Leopard was released, I cruised over to my local Apple store, and went home with a shiny new Macbook Pro, and a Leopard t-shirt.

And the moment I was sure I made the right decision? Right after I calibrated my monitor, created a profile, and selected it in OS X – and the whole screen updated immediately to reflect the new profile. Ahh…confidence.

Since then, I’ve observed a great many things…and I’ve got a few blog posts in the back of my mind about these:

  • Macs sell themselves, and Mac users sell even more
  • It’s totally possible (even advantageous) to use a Mac at work
  • Mac apps are different
  • Apple stores are different

I’m writing this in MarsEdit. I’ll preview it on the web in Safari. I’ll then get back to my email in Apple Mail. And you know what? I don’t miss Windows. At least not yet.

37 Comments

One more comment on Beacon

Sigh…I thought I could let this go, but I just can’t seem to. :-)

As I wrote a few days ago, Facebook’s Beacon collects data from third-party sites, and associates actions on those sites (such as buying something) with your profile data on Facebook. They’ve now allowed you to opt-out of having this information stored on Facebook’s servers, but the data is still sent to them regardless (even if you’re logged out).

Upon further reflection, I think MUCH more blame falls on the Beacon partners than I originally thought. The one Beacon partner that I’ve interacted with (that I know of) since all this has been happening is Kiva. I made a loan there, and the little Beacon popup came up and asked if I wanted to publish that to my Facebook feed. At the time I said yes, and silently wondered what exactly just happened.

What happened was this – Kiva sent, without my permission, data about a financial transaction I just made to Facebook. They sent it in a way that allowed Facebook cookies to be sent as well, which included my email address. Basically, without my permission, they told Facebook that Greg Reinacker just loaned money to Julia Vilca Chura.

That’s a dangerous precedent. And if we look at Kiva’s privacy policy, here’s the relevant piece (emphasis mine):

4) Kiva will not disclose your personally identifiable lending activity to any third party without consent. Kiva reserves the right to record and display anonymous lending activity on the Website and display the general regions where our lenders are located.

I think the transmission of my lending activity to facebook, knowingly with identifying information in the form of a facebook cookie, is pretty blatantly a violation of this privacy policy. Even if Facebook “promises not to store it” – I don’t care. I don’t want you to send it.

I don’t know for sure – but I’m guessing other Beacon partners don’t disclose this in their privacy policies either. If any of you have checked, please post a comment about it.

And by the way – I hate to pick on Kiva, because I think they’re accomplishing something that’s really great, and I encourage you to check them out. But I hope they will fix this in one way or another – and for the time being, I think that means disabling Beacon unless they have my explicit consent.

UPDATE: Liz from Kiva responded via email:

We appreciate the concerns that you mention below, so a short while ago, we suppressed the feature so that it is entirely opt-in on the thanks page. Now, after making a loan, a lender must actively click “Post” to display information about his/her loan to a Facebook Newsfeed. We do not share any loan data until the user clicks a Facebook link after lending, and unless the lender clicks the link, no loan data is shared. Please find a screenshot of the thanks page attached to this email.

As you note in our privacy policy, we assert that “Kiva will not disclose your personally identifiable lending activity to any third party without consent.” So, when we saw how the Facebook feature worked, and that it was opt-out rather than opt-in, we quickly suppressed the feature so that there was no possibility that Kiva was sharing lending activity without pro-active consent.

Kiva screenshot

Perfect- kudos to Kiva for stepping up, realizing that Facebook’s “changes” have been wholly insufficient, and making the changes necessary to protect their users’ privacy. We can only hope that the other Beacon partners will do the same.

2 Comments