I live about 42 miles from the Mercury Interactive software campus and it will get further when we move to the HP offices in Cupertino in June. It takes me about 45 minutes to get to the office in the morning and about 1 hour and 15 minutes to get home in the evening. For most folks, this commute would be suicide but its not so bad for me. I grew up in Connecticut and an 1.5 hour commute into New York City was common. It leaves me time to catch up on audio books, podcasts and the news. Most importantly, I use to the time plan my day in the morning and unwind my brain in the evening. I have come up with my best ideas during this time.

One of the bad habits that I’ve picked up on this commute is trying to type out mental action items on my Blackberry. Yes, I know, this is stupid and I could get into an accident. Well, Jott.com to the rescue! Jott.com allows users to call a number and record the thought. The message will be transcribed and it can be sent to yourself or to any contact you have uploaded to their system. I love the idea because its ultra simple, easy to use and actually useful! It goes to show you that the most simple problems can turn into valuable business ideas.

However, as i write this, my message is stuck “Waiting for transcription”. Oh well, I guess even good ideas get stuck with poor execution.

“Dude, check my twitter out. I’ve just updated it and it says that I’m telling you about Twitter. Now, I just updated it again that I’m done.”

Twitter is the latest buzzword around this “Web 2.0” stuff and I don’t understand it. It allows users to “Micro-Blog”. A “Micro-blog” is a message less than 140 characters that gets posted to Twitter for all to see. Some examples of messages I’m seeing right now include,

• “Reviewing kids’ report cards and ITBS test results.”
• “Ready to call it a day”
• “Watching Rocky IV. Man, this was a cheeseball movie.”

Other interesting features include, email notification of messages, twitting from an instant messaging client and twitting from a mobile phone. Either I must be getting old or I have enough other “Web 2.0” products to waste me free time. Or, the likely reason is that I’m not the target demographic. I can see pockets of friends or early teenagers getting into this. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can continue through the hype or if we look back on “Web 2.0” and laugh that folks invested in this.

Today, Yahoo has announced that it will provide its Yahoo mail accounts unlimited storage. The media is reporting this move in preparation for the release of the iPhone while others say that its simply a move against the Google. Either way, I’m now starting a competition to find the largest Yahoo email boxes out there. I thought I emailed quite a bit and I have barely filled 10% of my allocated 2.8 Gmail space. Please email me (rmascardo@mascardo.com) screen shots of your Yahoo mail capacity and I’ll post the largest one! I want to see some large attachments flying around now! Let’s see some “All You Can Eat”ing!

I stumbled upon an interesting article from earlier this year while surfing the web for venture capital links. There were a few points that I found very interesting.

• “Hardly a week goes by without a reminder of the ongoing vendor consolidation. Larger software companies have emerged as a new tier of active consolidators, including IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Computer Associates International and Sun Microsystems. As these larger companies bulk up–either by acquisition or internal development–smaller software companies are finding fewer niches to fill.”
  

HP Software is a prime example of this enterprise consolidation. The acquisition of Mercury Interactive back in late last year truly made HP Software a serious player. The internal product managers touted the breath of offering that only a few others could compete with.

• “A critical requirement for start-ups is that they’ve identified an area where pain is extreme, so extreme that a company is willing to deal with a start-up and willing to pay money for it,” said David Skok, a partner at venture capital firm Matrix Partners. “No question, it’s tough.”

This is probably one of the reasons its so hard to enter the enterprise software space. Enterprises won’t talk to you unless you fill a burning hole so big that they will deal with a startup. Plus, once you get in, you better bend over backwards to make things work. This seems so different compared to opening a consumer focused Web 2.0 company. What kind of burning pain did MySpace fill?

• “The amount of money required to start a hosted-software venture may be higher than a traditional software company. Salesforce.com, for example, required about $65 million in venture funding before it went public, according to Trinity Ventures. Rangaswami noted that payments to hosted-software companies tend to be spread out over time, rather than pay out upfront. Matrix Partners’ Skok said companies that sell on-premise software–rather than hosted software–need about $30 million to $35 million, in general, to get started, which is consistent with years past.”

Really? I guess I can see the additional cost in hardware, bandwidth and delayed revenue stream. However, aren’t coding cycles longer, support costs high and implementation costs higher with “Shrink Wrap” products? Plus, isn’t the distinction between “hosted software” verses “shrink wrap” software blurring? I know that many of the Mercury products were being offered in both models. Why not offer both? I do believe that much of software is going towards software-as-a-service but large enterprise software may be the last to go that way (despite taunts by Google to move into this direction).

Just as I post about Meebo, I realized I turned my back on Trillian by Cerulean Studios. Trillian was of the first centralized instant messanging tools that supported all of the major IM standards. I’ve been a committed user of the tool for several years now. It seems that they have a new project called Trillian Astra which seems to be their super charged answer to companies like Meebo. Some of the cool features include:

• Web Based Client
• Integration with MySpace IM and Google Talk
• Realtime status available on the web
• New Message windows

Even cooler is the video below that describes the web based UI that can be kept open after you close the browser. Maybe they’ll see my blog post and give me a tester account. It’s very cool stuff.

The co-founders of Flixster happen to be my friends and I couldn’t help but notice the post on Slashdot today about them. Flixster is a social networking site focused around movie reviews. The Slashdot post questions the ethics behind a feature Flixster has for getting friends on board. Basically, within Flixster you can input your email username/password and have Flixster gather the contacts for invitations to be sent.

I don’t get it. I do believe that other, larger, social networking sites like Facebook and Plaxo do the same thing. Why did Flixster get isolated as the bad guy? If you ask me, this post is lame. The interesting thing is does Flixster 1) benefit from the exposure, 2) become the poster child for this sort of email harvesting, 3) become the butt of vigilante Slashdot hackers, or 4) Flixster who?.

If you’re like me, you have a American Online, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ instant messaging accounts and have contacts on each that you still maintain. My contacts are grouped by the software product I was working on at the time. I find it funny that my American Online account was established so long ago, I remember picking the name because I thought it could help me impress the ladies online. Uh, yeah. “Croatoa” is such a hot name. Gosh, I was a dork.

So, how does one still use all of these accounts while working for an organization that prevents the use of these applications? (I am, of course, not at all referring to my current company Hewlett-Packard because that would be a breach of some sort of dumb IT policy.) Meebo to the rescue! Meebo is instant messaging from within the browser. There is no client to install and worries about ports needing to be open since it runs over HTTP. It’s similar to GMail chat features but across the different IM vendors and a better user experience. Definetly worth checking out.

Meebo also offers Meebome which is any easy way to embed instant messaging on websites. It’s another way to have folks instantly contact you and one step close to being justin from Justin.tv. Did I mention I think he’s an idiot?

As I write this, Justin.tv has been streaming for 4 days, 23 hours and21 minutes. Yes, some moron named Justin has strapped a TV camera on his head and is streaming it on the internet for all to see, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He even posts his cell phone the web site just in case you wanted to warn him of some hottie checking him out.

The really funny part is from a recent post on TechCrunch about how folks are pranking poor Justin.

When a bunch of geeks live their life online, it’s tempting to do things to disrupt those lives and watch the fun from the comfort of your computer. So it’s no surprise that some fairly funny pranks have already been played on four day old Justin.tv.

The best so far? Wednesday at 1:40 AM someone spoofed the caller id of the Justin.tv official cell phone number (which is listed on the Justin.tv site), called the San Francisco police department and reported a stabbing in the North Beach apartment.

Check out the hilarious clip on the TechCrunch post.

Just the other day, I recieved the following email from the Joost website.

Hi Renato Mascardo,

This is just to let you know that we haven’t forgotten your request to try Joost. We’re now speeding up the process of adding testers and we’ll shortly be inviting everyone who has signed up to try Joost.

This includes you, so expect an invite within the next couple of weeks – in the meantime, thanks for bearing with us – we appreciate it.

See you soon on Joost!

The Joost Team

Joost is the hyper-hot start by the co-founders of Skype and KaZaa (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis) trying to change the way we watch TV. They have built a peer-to-peer based system that is supposed to be even smoother to use than the Flashed based players that made YouTube so successful. I got the email right around the same time I read the article about NBC Universal getting nto the online television game.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – News Corp. and NBC Universal said on Thursday they will launch a free online video site this summer, featuring full-length movies and television shows in a challenge to Google Inc.’s YouTube.

This space is getting crowded and those getting on the bus have serious content filled luggage. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

So, for anyone with a spare Joost invitation. Please pass it along.

 

 

This past week Island Odyssey went live with its beta site. Normally, I would not have noticed but my brother-in-law happens to be the “Chief of Staff” for the company. Island Odyssey combines the Web 2.0 social networking with travel agencies. In a recent article in the Oregon Daily Herald,

Island Odyssey is a networking site similar to Facebook that also integrates a travel agency, allowing people to book and pay for trips on the same site. Users can also view their friends’ plans on the site through a feature similar to Facebook’s “news feed.”

“Island Odyssey is the first combination of a social network and a travel portal – essentially a Facebook mixed with an Expedia, so you can see where all your friends are traveling to,” said Zachary Lieberman, founder and chief officer at Island Odyssey. “We feel like we’re going to be a completely new market.”

Ya know, even though I poo poo most social networking sites just coming to market, I like the idea. I like the idea for a number of reasons.

1. It’s an innovative twist on an established business. It’s not like they are starting a social networking site for travels and their primary revenue would be advertising. They are offering a service along with the community. Moving forward, I believe social networking will become more of a feature rather than a primary business like Facebook or MySpace. With platforms like Ning being released, it will easier for these networks to establish themselves.
2. It has an innovative marketing approach by actually hiring folks on college campuses to help promote the business and accelerate growth.
3. I think there is a need in the market. I know that I had a hard time trying to book trip with my friends for any events like spring break, bachelor parties, etc.
4. Tommy Leahy is “Chief of Staff”

On the technology side, I think they need some work. They lack the features of most other social networking sites and lack the interesting features I would expect by combining social networking and travel. Plus, the random stack trace here and there doesn’t help. However, it’s only a beta.