Vidal's Site

This morning I suffered a major reversal in family court. I was removed as President of iambic, Inc. a company that I started in late 1993. Now, I have something else in common with Steve Jobs to talk with him about when I meet him! And while I of course do not agree with the court's decision, it gives me the opportunity to pursue new ideas and start my second company. I am excited about having this blank sheet of paper and the time. I will worry for my staff and customers back at iambic, but I am sure that looking back on this many years from now we will say that it all worked out for the best. Stay tuned for more details on my entrepreneurial journey.

I added some recommended books and DVDs to the site using the free Amazon Media Manager (AMM) for Wordpress. Check them out. This plugin is pretty slick, and I was impressed with the quick reply I got from the developer. I am impressed with plugins I am finding. Unfortunately, I had to turn images off for now as this was adversely impacting performance.

Using this plugin also caused me to register into both the Amazon Associates program and Amazon Web Services (AWS) programs which are very interesting themselves.

I attended Carnegie Mellon's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) Adopting and Using Open Source Software Conference 2005 in Redwood Shores, California on September 7, 2005. Open Source is an area that is going to impact every area of software tremendously, and it is trend that every company needs to leverage going forward. It's impressive that CMU has a center and conference on it. If you are not really familiar with open source, I think it is a good conference to checkout next year.
Here is just one small intereting take-away I got from the conference. I learned there are now initiatives like the Business Readiness Rating to rate software in an open and standardized way. As anyone who tries to use open source software quickly discovers, one of the hurdles is evaluating all the different alternatives. Obviously, you cannot use purchase price as a factor or a proxy of value. Now, of course, do things like openbrr need to be limited to just open source software?

We now live in a society where gambling is totally socially acceptable. Poker is on TV all the time. To learn more about this industry, and seek inspiration for my next venture, I attended the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2005 at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is a huge show with over 25,000 attendees. It mainly focuses on casinos and casino equipment like slot machines, roulette wheels, and table games. Pretty much any equipment imaginable to run a casino was on display. Some of it is pretty cool like the computerized roulette wheels and blackjack tables. No marketing angle to keep people in the casinos was left unexploited...I mean unrepresented.

I was particularly interested to see how computer technology is being used, and to look at online gaming aka "igaming." The area for igaming was relatively small since most igaming is still illegal in the USA. I saw at least 2 tablet PC manufacturers displaying handhelds that could be used by casino staff. There was a really amazing application from NICE in NJ which is the subject of my next post. I have posted 29 photos from the show floor on flickr.

If you have been counting cards and know that the odds are favorable to hit rather than stand (the normal play), you better think twice because the systems from NICE are watching, and you could be booted from the casino for making too smart a play. Look carefully at the photo on the right. The system from NICE is analyzing a blackjack game using video recognition technologies. It can identify the cards that you have, and it tracks how the game is going and how everyone is playing and betting. If you cheat or play too well, the NICE system will send an alarm to the casino staff e.g., "there is a card counter in seat 3 and table 20," and you will be out of luck.

Here is a tip from the guys at NICE, while most people think that an 18 is a good blackjack hand it turns out to lose more than 60% of the time based on their actual observations of millions of blackjack games. I have not checked their math. The only thing that NiceVision is missing is pattern recognition on the players’ faces, and they expect to have this soon.

Such amazing and ubiquitous video recognition has only been made possible recently through advances in computer hardware and software. The implications of such technology are staggering. Currently, systems like NiceVision are being used to at airports to scan for unattended baggage. But there is nothing to prevent this technology from being used in stores to identify you as a shopper and learn your patterns. I won't be surprised to walk into, for example, a Safeway that I have never been to before one day in 2015 and hear, "Welcome, Vidal. How have you been? You look well. We haven't seen you in a while...." How will the automated supermarket of the future know who I am? Because I walked into another Safeway five years ago in another state and the cameras captured and remembered everything. Everyone will be famous. How nice.

Today, I attended the Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo!'s main campus in Sunnyvale. This is an impressive facility. Just going through the massive parking structures it occured to me how good it is to be Yahoo! I don't know why I haven't been there before....

I have been looking at new media, social networks and Web 2.0 stuff over the past 2 weeks, and I came to see what I could learn from Yahoo! about flickr. There were several hundred people in attendance including the founders of flickr and many, many Yahoo! employees. Many of these employees were recent hires. The free food and alcohol was nice too. I posted a set of photos on my flickr account, and there are probably another 10,000 photos being uploaded as I post this. By definition everyone had a digital camera with them. From talking with the Yahoo! employees I learned about the flickr business, Yahoo! 360 Beta and other stuff. Just as an example, the Yahoo! team had massive screen where they scrolled in real-time all the photos uploaded to flickr. The rate was 5 new pictures per millisecond on the upload, and 8 times that on the download. There are apparently over 1.3M flickr subscribers and the number is growing 10% per month at least. This is a big hit.

I got to spend a few minutes with Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo! I saw him speak a few months back when he came to Churchill Club where Jerry basically put all the other speakers to shame with the impressive collection of gadgets, phones, etc. that he carries. I spoke with Jerry about our common interests in gadgets, and I congratulated him for putting Walter Mossberg and all the other speakers to shame. We commented about how most all the stuff he brought out only six months ago (2GB thumb drive, pocket sized XP PC, etc.) are now pretty much obsolete. I told Jerry about my interests to start another company in new media and web 2.0, and he sincerely wished me luck. Jerry was very gratious to hang around to spend time talking with people at the fiesta. This guy is very cool.

To further my research into new media (blogs, podcasts, etc.) and move it from a theoretical to a practical level, today I have decided to start a company focused on that. The working name of this company is “New Media Engineering� (http://www.newmediaengineering.com). The website, logos, and t-shirts are still under development. Why doesn't a new media company have a new media website already? It will. At a very high level, New Media Engineering will construct and develop new commercial Internet properties, for itself and in conjunction with partners, while researching proprietary software that adds unique value to these sites not found elsewhere. I know this is not a lot of detail, but at this point, this is all I will say. I am in discussion with several people on the creation of new properties. New Media Engineering is the first venture I am starting under my new VDG Companies organization.

AOL Buys Weblogs to Boost Blog Presence - Yahoo! News According to this article, AOL paid $25M all cash for Weblogs, Inc. This is pretty amazing, and shows how blogging is heating up. I happen to know that about half of their traffic comes from engadget.com, so figure that one site engadget turns out to be worth about $12M.

The last few months I have been listening to a variety of podcasts. Some of them start out strong and then totally fade out of my attention, e.g. 43 folders. Even though there are plentiful tools to self publish easily on the Internet (like this Wordpress blogging tool I am using), it is really hard to create compelling audio or video content. And I think it is way harder than text based content. There is one podcast that I have been listening to every week. It's consistently good and inspiring even after almost 30 episodes. Venture Voice -- Entertaining Entrepreneurship. The interviews on this show, and the entrepreneurs they cover, are absolutely worth listening to. There are some other podcasts I like too, and I will list them here in the future. If you have a favorite podcast that is consistently worth listening to, let me know.

For over the past year, I have been a Blackberry user, and last month I got a new 8700c. One of the really great things about this device is Cingular's new EDGE network which makes browsing the web in real-time finally possible. I've used it on many occassions to great effect including....

This weekend I went shopping with my daughter at the mall. She wanted to show me the Onyx ultimate hair straightener from herstyler.com.

It's a great product, which retails for $175. The salesman at the kiosk was very helpful and mentioned that we could buy it right now on sale for only $119 plus tax! My daughter really wanted it too. All might have been good for him except that I pulled out my 8700c and started cruising the web to get info on the product. I pulled up the company's website. I googled the product, and most interestingly, I found one on eBay closing in 1 hour for only $32.99. I told my daughter, let's take a walk as I entered a bid using the Blackberry's web browser. When we got home 1 hour later, I had won. My daughter remarked to me, "It's so interesting that we went shopping at the mall, and ended up buying on the Internet." Indeed. This is the future, and not such great news for retail shops. More details to follow.

While I was researching some facts for by business plan, I stumbled upon the following from the U.S. Census Economic Bureau. It turns out that in the from the last US Ecomonic Census in 2002, Legal Services is almost a $200 billion dollar industry while Sofware Publishing is only about $90 billion, and Internet Service Providers and Web Search Portals about $20 billion. I found this quite disturbing, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

I'm now located in Los Altos. I subleased some office space here two weeks ago at a friend's law office. I'm really enjoying this location and being out of the house. It's given me the ability to focus better and get stuff done on my consumer Internet start-up. I'm here temporarily as I get things further off the ground and eventually move into my own office space again. Anyway, there are a lot of really good places to have lunch around here so if you are in the area let me know!

Several people who have come to my new office have admired this product I found while surfing OfficeDepot.com. I think it is great. I love whiteboards, and I needed a couple, but I didn’t want to put holes in the wall of the office that I am subleasing. Voila with 3M Post-it Super Sticky Whiteboard Sheets you can create an instant whiteboard! Just unroll them and post on the wall wherever you want a whiteboard. Available in sizes up to 48" x 30". The only downside is that they are not magnetic and they don’t have trays where you can leaves the pens at the boards.

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who quit her steady, high paying job to be an independent consultant and coach based the methodology and teachings of Marshall Goldsmith. Wow, I thought, I had never heard of Marshall Goldsmith, apparently one of the world’s authorities in "helping successful leaders get even better", and I am big into self improvement and coaching. My friend is a serious person, so I thought this must be powerful stuff.

I am blown away. I just spent two hours looking at some free documents on his site http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com and watching a few videos. There is a wealth of information there which will add tons of weight to my already massive reading list. This guy has 20 books. I found the following interview “Be Happy Now� published on June 8th, 2006 really great. It is only 10 pages. If anyone else has done his training I’d love to hear about it. And if you need a coach in this area, I got someone I can recommend.

I was talking with my friend Ellen today who just launched a new website this March called “Bits du Jour.� This is a one day discount site where you can get incredible deals on software. It is similar to the popular woot.com, except that Bits du Jour is focused on software. Bits du Jour got mentioned last week in the Wall Street Journal. Ellen has done a great job on bringing up this site. I love the look of it. If you want some great deals, or have downloadable products to sell, check it out!

I am looking to hire a Rails developer for a new project. Please contact me if you are available, or know someone who is. Thanks.

I am attending Mashup Camp 2 today and tomorrow at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View. This is a really amazing event with almost 300 developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, etc. What really strikes me is how this is in effect a free, open source-style conference similar in spirit to open source software. There are no pre-planned sessions. The participants come up with the sessions the day of the event. The facilities, wi-fi, and the food are completely provided by the sponsors and donations. The event free to attend which amazing compared to high-tech conferences like SuperNova and Web 2.0 which cost many thousands of dollars to get into. These "camps" like FooCamp and BarCamp have been going on for a while, but this is the first one I have attended. I'm impressed, and in fact, there should be more events like these for things other than Web 2.0 technology. If these camps take off, it is bad news for commercial conferences and I don't think I am going to be paying to go to too many more of them.

As of yesterday, I have started fundraising for my new startup. It's interesting so far the conversations I have had with people since just putting this word out, and what I am learning. A really freaky coincidence happened to me today too which maybe is some sort of omen or just randomness. A client of mine needed me to deliver something urgently to them at a top VC firm on Sand Hill Road where they were making a pitch. If I wrote the name of the firm, and if you follow Silicon Valley news, you would probably recognize it. I don't get asked often to come to these places, so I spent some time in the lobby of the firm looking at the memoribilia they displayed of their successful investments and it was cool.

A friend of mine asked me to write about how I am starting my new software company with (almost) no money. The answer is very carefully, remotely and with some open source. Here are some resources I am using on almost a daily basis: craigslist, rentacoder, and elance. I am not saying these sites are full of great programmers. In fact, I have had plenty of horror stories in the past with off shore resources I found on those places. But when you have little money, you don't have much choice but to try. And I have a few friends who claim to have had success finding resources on these sites. I would love to hear any success stories people have had and best practices on these sites. This process reminds me of the show "Junkyard Wars." I did manage to connect with one really good logo designer recently on eLance, so if you need a good logo I have just the place for you.

I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com. Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks! For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.

Today I became a Facebook developer and released my first Facebook application. My application is called “Trump Quotes” http://apps.facebook.com/trumpquotes. It is a collection of quotes by Donald Trump that you can paste to your Facebook profile and spread around the social graph. It’s nothing earth shattering, but a start. I wanted to get a feel as to how these apps work. The documentation on how to make a Facebook app is not so great at the moment so it actually took quite of a bit of experimentation to figure this all out. The app is build using Ruby on Rails, RFacebook, FBML and Mysql. If you are on Facebook, please connect with me if you have not already, and add Trump Quotes if you want.

Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:

• Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
• Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
• Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
• Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
• And more...