Hope does not spring eternal for presidential democrats?

I'm a card carrying democrat. I was disgusted by George Bush's win in 2004. Who voted for him? And now that people are waking up to just how bad he and his administration actually are (damage already done!), I was feeling like sanity was returning to America.

Then, I read this article in Time magazine with the following quote:

"So why, in poll after poll, including the new TIME poll, does that advantage seem to disappear whenever voters are asked to pick a president in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups among front-runners with solid name recognition. In our poll, Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain, 42-48%, and to Rudy Giuliani 41-50%. Even though Clinton maintains a 7% edge over Obama among Democratic respondents, Obama fares better in the general election match-ups. It's so close that it's a statistical dead-heat, but Obama still loses: 43-45% to McCain, 44-45% to Giuliani.

Unfortunately, these results make sense to me. It looks more and more like the presidential candidate for the democrats will either be Clinton or Obama.   Is either one electable? Sure they could both beat George Bush or DIck Cheney -- but can they beat Giuliani, McCain, or Romney?  According to  Time -- the answer is no.  What's a democrat to do? 

Google is so web 1.0

From Bambi Francisco of Marketwatch:

The topic of Google came up after Perkins predicted that there would be a Web 2.0 shakeout in the next 12 months, pointing to YouTube's $1.65 billion sale to Google last summer as a symptom of a potential sign of irrational exuberance about to break out.

If spending is any measure of irrationality over an opportunity, he has a point. Some $844.4 million was invested in 167 Web 2.0 deals around the world last year, more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as in 2005, according to Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young. The U.S. dominated Web 2.0 investing, accounting for $682 million and 126 deals.

The Rodriguez family dynasty in boston: 2 acquisitions, 1 family, 1 month

One of my partners at abuzz recently sold his recent venture to Hitachi ventures for a cool $120,000,000.  Read about it here.  I knew at the time that Andres was a super talented guy and now he's gone out and proven it big time. Way to go Andres -- my only question for you is not how you did it but rather...how in g-ds name did I not participate in the A round of financing on this deal!
Then just this past week I was reading techcrunch and read this post about tabblo being acquired by HP. At first I wasn't sure whether this was Antonio's photo company or not but -- I followed the links and sure enough ...it was. Truly impressive guys -- 2 companies sold to massive companies that begin with the letter H in one month. My hats off to you and the beginnings of a true Boston dynasty. Hope I can celebrate with you soon.

202.5 fatblogging entry

I weighed myself after getting squashed in squash today. I lost bad. 5 games to zero. I lost 1 game 9 to zero. It was painful. Just felt like every step was slow...BUT, I weighed myself afterward and I hit the scale at 202.5 which is the lowest I've weighed on that scale since I started weighing myself about 1 month ago.  I give myself a B for increasing exercising and decreasing calorie intake. I can do better particularly on the intake side -- my self admitted weakness. I still occasionally snack at night. But 202.5 is positive progress. I'll take it and feel good about it.

Organizational change

I'm quite happy with some of the organizational changes that have taken place at Judy's Book over the last couple months.  The things that make me happy:

  1. Product -- we're making real progress on releasing what I think with be the best local deals site on the web.  The first phase of this release is now in beta and there's more coming in early April.
  2. Organization -- we're acting like a real company. People are playing there positions and we're executing much better than ever before. This is due in part to an alignment of management focus as well as a reorganization that created more structured departments than we had before.

Let's keep rolling...

Individual contributors who want to be managers

I've had 2 conversations in the past month with people who are strong individual contributors in their current role and want to be managers.  One conversation was with a sales person and the other was a developer. I've seen this story before. Excellent sales person hits numbers. The person thinks management doesn't do a good job and that they could do it better. They get promoted because they're the best sales person and move to the management job. It turns out they lack the skills it takes to be the best manager. They lack the organization, the communication, or the leadership skills it takes to succeed as a manager. Moreover, they're less happy with the job than they thought they'd be. They didn't know that managing people can be a real pain in the ass. It's hard work. Yes, it's glamorized and everyone thinks they want to be the boss. But let me tell you -- being the boss is not for everyone. Not everyone is good at it. In this case, my career advice to both the sales person and the developer was you'd be better off, happier, and more successful (money wise) if you stay in your individual contributor role and expand your skills.  Just my 2 cents.

Operations folks

Operations and test folks are your typical unsung corporate heroes. They do not get the appreciation or acknowledgment they deserve for keeping systems and websites running 24 hours, 7 days a week. Our guys -- Kurt, Dave, and Jeffro, do a great job in general and in particular this week have4 been stepping up beyond the call of duty responding to pages at 4AM and making sure the site stays up. Thanks guys.

Shaving on the road or at the office

Just realized I was scruffy and in need of some grooming. Looked for my Edge shaving cream and couldn't find it nor could I borrow any. I managed to find Ivory's vanilla liquid soap and decided to use that and a public toilet's sink. Just finished and feel transformed. There's nothing like a clean shave to freshen you up -- even if it's with liquid soap. Remember that all you road warriors. 
I could have and probably should have titled this post -- making do with what you've got.

Death

I had an acquaintance friend pass away over the weekend.  She was 26 years young and was on a vacation with her husband in Palm Springs. She was involved in a bike accident and died. I went to the vigil last night.
Life is friggin weird and fragile. You just never know what lies around the corner.  Live hard now. Tell your family and friends you love them today...you may not be able to tomorrow.

Trying to shut down alexaholic is stupid

I read Mike Arrington's post about Amazon's recent attempt to shut down alexaholic -- in my opinion, this is stupid.  Alexaholics success is a result of Alexa's failure to service their own customers expediently and sufficiently. Alexa could easily put Alexaholic out of business if they improved their service (period). The improvements are relatively simple too. Just allow a user to compare different web sites traffic grids against each other. For goodness sakes, this is clearly amongst the primary use cases at Alexa.
If Alexa didn't want to do this, my guess is Alexa could have bought  Alexaholic too. While on first blush this may have seemed stupid, I don't think it's nearly as stupid as trying to use legal methods to shut  Alexaholic down. That's really stupid....and unlike Amazon in my opinion. In my opinion, they've been a company that has typically embraced web services and innovation more generally.   Why are they doing this? It seems that Amazon prefers legislation to innovation.  I don't get it.

Spammers at work

This marketers vs. technology battle plays out at digg, reddit, and my new favorite website, mybloglog.
I got this spam in my message box at mybloglog....
From Samuel Komo,

After going through your profile , I decided to contact you for the relationship and bussines assistance .

Well, to introducing myeslf, I am Samuel Komo ,  TWENTY ONE years,  I  am a citizen of Cote D'ivoire former Ivory Coast in West Africa.

I am writing to solicit your noble assistance for the transfering and investment of  Nine Million, United Stat Dollars US D.
This doesn't mean the marketers are winning

We had to fight spammers last week at Judy's Book. Someone had co-opted our "invite a friend" feature and was using it to send 30,000 messages or more a day. We were able to shut them down...but not without a disruption of our development calendar and a fair amount of work. 
The battle rages on...

Eat your vegetables

Eat Your Veggies

• THE SURVEY: One-third of Americans eat fruit twice a day, and 27 percent eat vegetables three times a day, according to a government survey.

• THE GOAL: By 2010, U.S. health officials want 75 percent of Americans to eat two fruits a day and 50 percent to eat three vegetables a day.

• WHAT AMERICANS EAT INSTEAD: Future surveys will try to figure that out, but experts think it's mostly protein and convenient "fabricated foods."

Good data from a Greg Sterling post

Below is an excerpt from a Greg Sterling post. The numbers surrounding what influences consumer behaviour are quite relevant for Judy's Book.

Consumers said that they were most motivated to begin an online search after viewing advertisements in magazines (47.2%), newspapers (42.3%), on TV (42.8%) and from reading articles (43.7%). Women were more likely than men to be motivated by coupons (41.8% vs. 29.0%) and in-store promotions (29.0% vs. 24.5%) while men were more driven to start an online search based on a face-to-face conversation (36.1% vs. 29.5%).

After searching, online consumers said they are most likely to communicate with others about their search through face-to-face discussion (68.9%), though email (53.1%), telephone (50.9%), and cell phone (30%) communication were also popular choices. Young adults 18-24 are also taking advantage of an influx of new media, communicating about service, products and brands by instant messaging (37.5%), text messaging (23.7%) and through online communities like MySpace and Facebook (20.6%).

Post worth reading

I came across Dick Costolo's post....with this quote:

On a psychological level, I think a lot of people confuse fear of failure with not having enough confidence in the ultimate success of their idea. They thus conclude that they aren't confident enough in their idea or their strategy because it seems to have holes and flaws for which they don't have answers. This is a tremendous mistake. While I won't pretend to speak for the entrepreneurs I mentioned above, I bet if you asked them if they were confident on day 1 that they had a winner with each of their previous successes, they would look at you sideways and say "of course not". Speaking for myself, I can say that my cofounders and I try to find a market opportunity that seems like it will need to be addressed and for which we think we have some angle and then we just pull out shovels and start digging and figure other things out as we go.

The entire post is worth reading.

2007 Digital Outlook report from Avenue A


Vertical spending, originally uploaded by a sack of seattle.

This report is worth looking . I like this graph -- it supports my thinking on verticals.

This quote is directly from the report:
"The breakout of spend within the vertical category saw a significant shift in 2006, with News, Reference, Business, and Entertainment all up considerably over 2005. While communities and social networks have sometimes been seen as a service looking for a revenue model, spending in that category was up 69% year-over-year and 216% since 2004. As a result of that increase, the Community category tied with Entertainment as the vertical with the largest share of billings.