Startup Experiences, Technology, and other ramblings

Credit: Meg Pickard

In early 2007, I was beginning to get ready to depart the warm blanket of my former employer to dive into freezing start-up waters.  There was still a huge amount of Web 2.0 startup-excitement here in California, and I was a amazed at the number of “companies” trying to be successful on what amounted to a small feature vs. a sustainable business.  I saw an endless stream of them come through Adobe at the time hoping that our conversations would end up in acquisition.  Instead, it ended up being a great education for me and highlighting what became a pretty common blueprint for these web 2.0 companies:

• Identify a feature, and build a service around it
• Call yourself a company, and then raise a bunch of money to drive users and usage
• Hope to be acquired before anyone realized you didn’t have a sustainable business model

I am almost as guilty as the people on the list above, since I tried to develop a business using that same model.  Fortunately, along the way, I had the opportunity to pitch the idea (a CRM-related concept) to the godfather of CRM himself, Tom Siebel.  About one minute into my pitch, my hopes and dreams for this “next-big-thing” in CRM were destroyed when the conversation went something like this:

“Michael, I get it.  It’s a good idea, and there’s a need for it.  However, if I saw that in the market, I’d put a few engineers on it and give it away for free as part of my CRM suite.”

The painful but correct translation:  “It’s a feature, not a business.”  That pretty much ended the discussion on that topic, but since I had his attention for the next couple of minutes, we ended up talking about the various kinds of businesses one could go after when starting something new, and why I really wanted to jump into the startup experience.  I was able to quickly conclude that I wasn’t interested in a feature-business (my internal monologue after that first minute of pitch was clear), nor a business predicated on being acquired, so that left me with one clear idea:  build a sustainable business based on stand-alone profitability.

In a future post, I’ll talk about my experience in trying to identify what that “sustainable business” was going to be, and how I arrived with my co-founder at the idea for ConnectSolutions.

With two small kids at home, there’s a lot of talk/demanding of “sharing” stuff, and in many cases, meltdowns occur as the concept is still a bit foreign to a four and two year old. Fortunately, when it comes to Adobe, they have the concept down and are proving it through a new Beta launch of a document sharing service code-named “Share.”

Before I review this, let me come clean: Before the days of ConnectSolutions (ok, not that long ago), I had the opportunity to work with an incredible team at Adobe on a variety of hosted services geared towards “knowledge workers.” This team was responsible for Acrobat Connect, but also a series of stealth projects that will truly change the landscape for small and medium size businesses and their knowledge workers. Well, after what I’m sure was many long days over the past several weeks, I had the priviledge of kicking the virtual tires…

Share is a hosted solution that allows individuals to upload, organize, and of course, share documents with others. Sign-up is very simple (and free!), and provides users with instant access to a significant amount of storage. This storage is accessible from anywhere, which is important for anyone who travels, or of course, anyone who tends to work from home, café, etc…

As we’ve come to expect from Adobe, the service is front-ended with a beautiful, engaging user experience. Uploading documents is very simple, with the ability to upload multiple documents at once. With a single-page UI, you can select your documents to upload, identify permissions associated with viewing/reviewing the documents, and then upload. I’d like to see a desktop application to accomplish this through drag-and-drop though…

Once you’ve uploaded a document, the magic begins. You’re provided with a very slick interface to your document repository, which includes thumbnails of the actual documents and basic information about them. Even better, a simple double-click over a document delivers an embedded preview right in your browser. No waiting for an external application to load (this includes no Acrobat Reader for PDF files), just instant satisfaction. Right now, it appears this capability is limited to PDF and image files, but other document types are apparently coming. When it comes to sharing, you have a variety of options including email, URL, and embedding documents in external web sites, blogs, etc… This is extremely useful in providing dynamic access to relevant content, in an engaging way.

While I’m very excited about this initial Beta, I will put my bias down briefly for one critique: A large part of my document sharing workflow includes allowing others (team members, partners, customers, lawyers, etc…) to review these documents, and make edits or changes directly in them. My preference is to retain control over who sees a document, but then allow them to engage and modify a document as they see fit. Ideally, this happens directly in the document, and doesn’t require me going back into the original and duplicating the changes. Given that need, I believe Share has a great opportunity to allow direct commenting and review, and even editing, of the documents that traverse through its service.

In summary, I’m very excited about the potential here with “Share” and the work the Adobe team is putting into this solution area. Congrats to the team for pulling this off so quickly and allowing us to benefit from the work involved!

(WWASD?)!!!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, but it is not because I’ve been lazy.  I’ve recently left Adobe to start a new business, and as a result, have been burning the midnight-oil to get that off the ground.  The new business is focused on providing managed services, with an initial focus on web conferencing.  If you’ve followed this blog, then you won’t be too surprised to hear that the web conferencing software of choice is Acrobat Connect.

You can read more about the new company here:  www.connectsolutions.com

I’ll be setting up a blog over there shortly that will focus on web conferencing & Acrobat Connect related topics, so I encourage you to subscribe to it if you are interested in that space.

A post on TechCrunch today walked readers through feature comparisons of Adobe’s Acrobat Connect and Vyew.  It wasn’t made clear who provided the feature review (suggestion for the future TechCrunch…), but there are several inaccuracies I wanted to highlight:

• Anytime Collaboration – Acrobat Connect has supported asynchronous and synchronous collaboration since 2003
• 100% Browser Based – Vyew requires Adobe Flash, just like Acrobat Connect.
• Multiple On-demand Sessions – Acrobat Connect (and formally Breeze, and formally Presedia) has supported on-demand viewing of documents since 2000.
• Screen Capturing – Acrobat Connect supports the ability to take a snapshot of a shared screen, and even then layer whiteboarding tools and comments over that screenshot.
• Custom Session URLs – Acrobat Connect has supported custom URLs since 2005.
• External Publishing – Acrobat Connect has supported both taking presentations and content offline (for use on CDs), publishing to external websites, or simply referencing from external websites since 2003.
• Custom Color Themes – Acrobat Connect has supported customization of theme colors and logos since 2005.

All that said, I think Vyew is doing some interesting things with a relatively bootstrapped team, and I look forward to continuing to watch their progress.  However, I didn’t want to let these inaccuracies go un-addressed.
The original article is here:

Vyew3A20Free20Live20Web20Conferencing

Royal Pingdom » FedEx still faster than the internet

Interesting article on handling large-sets of data transfer, which in today’s networked world, still results in “FedexNet” being faster than the internet.