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• There is no remnant, there is only optimized and non-optimized
• Can Ad Networks and Premier Inventory Co-exist?
• Managing Product Overload and Your Sales Force
• Daisy Chains For Fun and Profit
• Types of Powerpoint Presentations – A 4 part series that was magnificent!

2010 is next!

A quick post for all the dad’s and/or husbands in need of help out there.

My kids wanted to better understand division rivalries in the NFL, but they can’t read (3/4 years old). So I built a handy, dandy graphical chart that you can share with your children.

A Handy Dandy NFL Division Rivalries Chart

It is hosted on github, so feel free to fork it and make this chart more useful. My kids have studied this chart every day for weeks. Within days your kids can also know their divisional rivals.

Enjoy.

A review of Gist, Rapportive, and Etacts

Everybody wants their email to be better. I recently tested a variety of email plugins that focus on bringing social data into gmail. The short answer is: Use Etacts. Here is what I saw:

Three companies are the market leaders in the space:

• Rapportive
• Etacts
• Gist

Rapportive has raised $1m from an impressive group of angels: Dharmesh Shah, Jason Calcanis, Paul Buchheit, Dave McClure, David Cancel, CRV, etc..

Etacts has raised $650k from Y Combinator and Ron Conway.

Gist has raised $10m+ from Foundry and Vulcan Capital.

Interestingly, I think this explains why Gist has seemingly much better marketing, but it fails to explain why Gist’s product seemed not as good.

Disclaimer: I was looking for a specific kind of added value. It could be that these products do other things that I just fail to appreciate. Most specifically: I am not interested in spending any time on other web sites, I just want my gmail to be better. Caveat emptor.

Gist

Anyway, here was the Gist UI in my gmail inbox.

I was looking at an email thread with my lawyer, so it shows his latest tweet and my latest tweet. Links to our facebook and twitter.

It also put the whole thing in an iframe out to the side. It felt like it loaded a lot slower than other things. While I bet owning an iframe is a lot easier from a backend support perspective – you don’t break when they change gmail, it felt a lot more web 1.0 than the other solutions.

Rapportive

Rapportive was well implemented, but had no features. It successfully found that I am LinkedIn to Mike, but didn’t include tweets. All it really lets me do is easily click through to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook and record a note about a person – kind of CRM-ish.

Both Etacts and Rapportive integrate neatly into the gmail pane so I barely notice they are there unless I want data.

Etacts

Etacts is the easy winner, hands down. It identifies that we are LinkedIn and shows me shared connections. It shows me several of his last tweets, and it shows me other related threads. Finally, they offer me the “Remind me to contact” feature (a note feature similar to Rapportive was below the fold here), which I am actually intrigued by – I should stay in contact with people better than I do.

I participated in the Baltimore Hackathon this past week and had a ridiculously awesome time. How great: we won!

When I got there and did my chat about my project, only two people self-identified as PHP developers – both college students that seemed uninterested in the small scope of my project compared to other ambitious plans to build entire web apps. Then, right as I despaired at attracting sufficiently skilled talent to be able to bang this out, Pete Bessman jumped in and said that he loved the idea and wanted to work on it. What did Pete love? As he said repeatedly, “The reach to grasp ratio on this project is very good.” Pete and I hunkered down in the quietest corner of the Hackathon (hence I think there are fewer pictures of Pete and I working than any other project at the Hackathon, I suspect) and got to work. While Pete started working on the basic infrastructure of the app, I dissected some WP plug-ins to understand how WP handled things like namespaces. I found the first few API calls that Pete needed to implement and I wrote the algorithm we would use for testing headlines. Pete then implemented everything lickety-split. By the end of the first night, I had realized two things:

Huge thanks to all involved – having events like this to help people like me scratch an itch is awesome. Also, I got a much bigger job done: As I told Chris Brandenburg when I saw him the first night and he asked what I was doing there, I said: “Scouting for talent”. His response: “Yeah, me too.” Pete Bessman has a job for life. He is awesome. Thanks to all my friends at Millenial. I would like to think that when Millenial doubled the prize money, that was really Chris hooking me up as he anticipated my victory. Thanks Chris!

Obviously, I should thank my wife as well.  She watched the kids Friday and Saturday while I indulged my inner geek. It is very tough for old guys like me to do things like this, but supportive significant others are critical for career success and we saw further evidence here.

I spent the weekend at the Baltimore Hackathon (more on that later) and learned a valuable lesson that I would offer up to almost any company whose business consists at least partly of marketing APIs: Hijack a Hackathon.

Tropo was a sponsor of the Baltimore Hackathon and their strategy was simple: They didn’t just show up with T-shirts (although there were plenty of T-shirts), they showed up with a bunch of developers and some sweet random prizes (A Kindle! OMG!). They then announced that the project at the end of the Hackathon that best used their APIs would win the random prizes. Virtually every hacker in the building went from “I want to make something great” to “I want to make something great using Tropo.” If Facebook had shown up with a Macbook Air, they would have had 50 developers cranking away on the Facebook API. Instead, Tropo had talent and dominated the hackathon.

The Tropo engineers were around all weekend ready to help developers hack on their stuff and answer questions. And they liked being a part of a Hackathon, so it was probably a job satisfaction win for Tropo.

It was a stroke of genius. People needed focus and people love prizes. By showing up with sweet prizes in exchange for attention, Tropo gained several advantages:

1. This whooped “sponsoring” cold: They actually have developers that are not just aware of their API, but they have experience with it. The next time people at the Hackathon have a situation that calls for Tropo-like tools, they will certainly think of Tropo. Further, assuming the product was good, they will be favorably inclined relative to competitors like Twilio.
2. If they had sponsored their own Hackathon, probably nobody shows up. By hijacking the Baltimore Hackathon, they maximize spreading the mindshare.
3. They can cherry-pick talent. This was like an extended interview for some people. Tropo engineers got to see a bunch of geeks at work. That could turn into job offers.

The next time I have a product with APIs, I am definitely going to fly around the country hijacking hackathons as part of our marketing strategy.

Everyone loves a good ecosystem slide.  In fact, in the ad space, virtually everyone has seen the GCA Savvian slide re-used in 100 different contexts:

When Terence Kawaja left GCA Savvian to form Luma Partners, he promptly put out another one.  In fact, he gave a pretty laminated version to AdExchanger while I was standing right next to John and when I asked for one, I got blown off!  True story.  Anyway, this is the ecosystem in 2010 according to Luma:

I have good news, and a revelation for people in the online advertising space.  I have traveled into the future and brought back Luma Partners slide from 2012.  And lo, the slide was presented:

Or was this from a secret internal Google presentation last week?  Only TechCrunch knows for sure!

Yeah, that malware notice Google flashed was kind of the real deal.  Our illustrious hosting provider got hacked.

http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2010/08/08/malicious-ads-and-bars-on-rackspace-mediatemple/

Sorry about that.  We have taken efforts to ensure that we cannot be hacked in this fashion again, regardless of what happens to Media Temple.

Cogmap is out and about.  If you want to meet Brent, I will around soon enough.

Here is where I will be.

NYC: January 19th and 27th, February 3rd

Annapolis: January 26th

Philadelphia: January 22nd

San Francisco: March 7 – 13th

My email: brent at this domain.

If you want to hang, but these days don’t work, let me know.  Going to be really hitting the road for the next month or two I suspect.

Baltimore Business Journal votes Cogmap one of “10 Startups to Watch in 2010“!

Thanks Baltimore Business Journal!  We love you right back!

Fixed some minor bugs and moved Cogmap over to PHP 5.0.  Shoot me an email if you see anything buggy!  brent @ cogmap dot you know what.