I am actually amazed at how little money there is in politics. Do you realize that an entire Presidential campaign from start to finish costs well under a billion dollars? I know lots of people with more money than that.
— An early Google employee, now semi-retired in his early 40s.
TechCrunch pointed to the video embedded below yesterday, and I think it’s a nice piece showing off the difference between web “pages” and the web as a means of delivering information. The video makes this a distinction between HTML and XML, but that seems like a detail beyond the larger point to me — in the end people don’t care whether what they are seeing was created as a static HTML page or dynamically generated with lots of AJAXy goodness. But, the broader point about the evolving nature of the services we use to free information/content/data from form is finally becoming commonplace. I also think it’s great this was created by a professor of cultural anthropology — that in and of itself, perhaps, proves the point about the enormous power the Internet is having on our society.
I am writing this from my IM client of choice (AdiumX) using a new service called IMified. Regular readers of this blog will know that I recently got back into some coding with SLIMBot — a package that lets you create commands you can invoke via an IM interface using the ColdFusion Event Gateway services. IMified is sort of like SLIMBot on steroids — or, at least, it’s something you could build most of using SLIMBot. OK, so it’s not really that related other than that they both are about IM as a user interface. IMified has built out a system that interfaces with a number of common web-based services and other things that have remote access (like WordPress — which is the IMified service I am using to write this). At first I didn’t like IMified’s menu-based approach, but when I found out they allow custom shortcuts to common commands I was sold — this looks like it could finally be the IM service that fills the gaping void in my workflow created when IMSmarter died.
It has been a while since I wrote code professionally. I try to get my hands dirty once in a while mostly just to play with new techniques or new features, but I haven’t created any substantial code in a few years. The other night I started noodling around with the Jabber gateway in ColdFusion (a product I have used since its very earliest days over 10 years ago — my how time flies), and I hacked together something that might be of interest to others. So, I gave it a name, slapped an open source license on it (Apache License, Version 2.0 in this case), and put it “out there” for the world to see.
I call it SLIMBot — it’s a package that makes it easy to create an IM buddy (currently tested only with Google Talk, but it should work with any jabber service or the other IM services through a 3rd party XMPP gateway) that accepts “commands”. For instance, the sample commands I built are things like “weather” and “stockquote” — the one I actually find myself using on my test instance is the command “domain” that lets me check if a domain name is available and, if so, gives me a link to register it (or, if not, a link to see WHOIS information).
But, the idea is that people can use this to build out their own commands without needing to worry much about how all the bits and pieces fit together. For folks used to coding in CFML and creating components, it should be a snap.
Anyway, if you happen to be a ColdFusion developer and want to try it out you can grab the source at http://slimbot.riaforge.org. I must say it has been fun to write something that is more than a throw-away script, though I don’t think I’d want to go back to doing it every day. If I get ambitious, I want to create an IM-based “conference call” system where you can join private chats with groups of people by signing on with a code rather than needing to invite people in.
Once I get another iteration or two done I’ll set up a more public demo of it — any ideas for things you’d want an IM Bot to do for you?
I have had several conversations in the last couple weeks with entrepreneurs and VCs about whether early startups should write business plans. The topic first came up a few weeks ago when I was helping to recruit companies to participate in the local round of the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at UC Berkeley. In the VCIC entrepreneurs come pitch to teams of MBAs, and the MBA teams then emulate VCs by choosing one to invest in and creating a term sheet. To make the VCIC work you need entrepreneurs who are actively raising Series A or substantial seed financing and who are willing to come pitch and share their business plans because the competing teams need enough material to evaluate the businesses in a very short amount of time. A number of the companies I talked to about the opportunity to participate simply don’t have business plans, and when I asked some folks at VC firms they agreed that most early deals these days get done without a full business plan ever being written.
Having been through the writing of a few business plans, I was happy to see Susan Wu’s take on the topic. I definitely understand that in the early days of a company time is in extremely short supply, so the time-intensive process of creating a written plan can seem like a waste of effort. But, I agree with Susan that the act of creating the written document can be a profoundly valuable way for a new team to come together in their thinking around a new idea, even if they know things will change (most business plans are at least somewhat dated the day they are “finished”). I think the more experienced the team is and the more clear in their collectives heads the plan of action and the vision are the less the need for a lengthy tome, but for any startup team that hasn’t worked extensively together and/or is working on a concept/plan that isn’t fully baked (in other words, the vast majority of startup teams) the act of going a level or two deeper than the bullets in your pitch deck is time well spent.
I mentioned to a colleague that I was hearing from VCs that “nobody is writing business plans these days”, and he got worried. “The last time I heard that,” he said, “it was late 1999.”