Tag Archive for ‘Atlanta’

Tag Archive for 'Atlanta'

Angel Lounge Recap

Published on February 2, 2008 in Angels and Events. 2 Comments

I’ve been wrapped up in things lately and haven’t given as much attention to this blog as I did during the first 30 days (of course, this is only day 41 of this blog). So I was happy to see that Scott Burkett wrote a nice wrap up piece from the recent Angel Lounge event. It was a great event (thanks Scott, Mike, and Charlie!) and it was interesting to see who was at the table. Even more interesting was the fact that I was the youngest guy (I think) in the room. It makes me smile when that happens since it happens less and less nowadays.

I do want to comment on one part of Scott’s post though. In soapbox mode, Scott says (emphasis is mine)

There was a brief discussion about some past efforts to try and do the same thing we’re shooting for - and that those efforts were not terribly successful. I will simply say this. “We” are not “they”. Whatever happened before us is largely irrelevant to me. Granted, we want to examine the reasons as to why those efforts were not effective, and we have. But as I tell the folks that I work with professionally, I will almost always choose to look through the windshield, and not in the rear-view mirror.

But then, after soapbox mode, Scott says (again, emphasis is mine)

We will bring Atlanta/Georgia back to where it needs to be. It will take time, but we will do it.

Dangit Scott, you got trapped into the mindset you were just railing against. The things you and other folks (and myself) are doing aren’t to get back to where things need to be and they definitely aren’t about being “like” the Valley, or Boston, or wherever. What we’re all doing (at least I think and hope) is to make things better in Atlanta. There are so many reasons that entrepreneurs should want to stay and start companies in Atlanta. Heck, I think there are reasons that entrepreneurs should want to move to Atlanta from wherever and start companies.

So let’s not worry about trying to get Atlanta back to what it should have been or could have been or was. Let’s figure out how we build a vibrant community that reflects the way we all want things to be so that we can all build and finance great companies right here.

Learn To Play Songs With iVideosongs

Published on February 1, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

Here is another story of an Atlanta company that I’ve never heard of. Seriously, there is a lot of stuff going on in Atlanta. I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone at iVideosongs yet but I thought I’d piece together some information for Bilgistic readers.

iVideosongs is an Alpharetta, Georgia based startup which recently had a presentation at the DEMO show. The service provides a video based medium for individuals to learn how to play popular songs. Most of the lessons that iVideosongs has are centered around an acoustic guitar. There do seem to be some lessons for the drums, electric guitar, piano, and even a few for the banjo! From what I can tell though, there really isn’t a reason why this couldn’t be expanded to other instruments. Although as a cello player (I haven’t touched one in years though), I’m not sure if video instruction would work for me. But it sure would be interesting to be taught (even if only by video) a song by someone like Yo-Yo Ma or Itzhak Perlman (for the violin, not cello). I can definitely see the value for musicians who are a lot more serious about playing music than I am.

The big question though is are musicians going to be willing to pay for video instruction from a site like this. Pricing seems to be around the $5-10 range. Is that a price point that makes this attractive to folks? Only if these tutorials are that much better than buying sheet music (which, I think, are cheaper than this price point - but I haven’t bought sheet music in decades, so I don’t know). But based on some of the comments from the iVideosongs blog (assuming at least a portion aren’t friends/family of the company founders), these guys might be onto something.

This is especially true since I don’t know of anyone offhand doing this although the DEMO site mentions competitors Now Play It and Workshop Live. Note that Now Play It is apparently England based since their prices range from £1.99 to £3.99. On the other hand, Workshop Live is based in Pittsfield, MA and appear to have just done a new funding round (which hasn’t apparently been announced).

Watch the video below (if you’re reading this in a feedreader, you may need to link to the site to see the video) for the presentation that iVideosongs CEO Tim Huffman did at DEMO. Pretty well executed and having John Oates (of Hall & Oates fame) for the wrap up was definitely a winner.

SoCon 08 Filling Up

Published on January 28, 2008 in Events. 0 Comments

SoCon 08 is filling up and about to breach the 200 mark. You just have a few more days to register. If you’re going to go, better go and register right away!

Deadpool: Wamily

Published on January 26, 2008 in Startups. 5 Comments

I’ve been looking around at companies to cover and I keep hitting companies that are gone or appear to be gone. The one I hit today was Wamily (which was even covered by Mashable). As their site says:

That’s all, folks.

Wamily is offline indefinitely while we re-think and re-work some things. It was great while it lasted, but alas, starting a social networking startup is harder than we thought.

I don’t know if people who went through the trouble of using Wamily got any warning of the plug pulling. I do know the site was functioning a few weeks ago when I went to check it.

I think this highlights that it is really difficult to build a pure social networking site (kinda like the Wamily folks said; I like to state the obvious sometimes). If, as a user, I have to worry about a site going away then am I really going to trust a new site with my data (of course, this then evolves into an argument for data portability). This is one of the reasons I’ve resisted joining new social networks as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a member of quite a few including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, and probably many others that I can’t remember at this point. The other problem with social networking sites is that you usually have to re-enter all of your data when you join a new site (again, an argument for data portability or rather social network data portability). This makes me really think about the potential value of a new site versus data entry pain (not to mention invite annoyance to my contacts). Usually sites can’t make it over my personal hurdle of value versus pain.

Personally, I think it’s time to move on from working on the newest whiz-bang social network with a twist and focus on something else. Yeah, the current social networks don’t do everything that everyone wants them to do but neither do most other online services. This isn’t to say that a great social networking platform couldn’t be created that kills off all the others. Remember what happened to Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves, and others (anyone remember HotBot, Altavista, and Lycos?) when they stagnated and Google came out of nowhere and reinvented (in some sense) the search business. When Google emerged, everyone thought that search was dead. So it isn’t that it can’t happen, it’s just really hard for it to happen.

I’d love to hear the gory details of what happened at Wamily and why the folks there think it happened the way it did. This would probably make a really good presentation for one of the events in town. I know, it sounds like rubbernecking at a car wreck but you can often learn a lot more from a failure than you can from a success. If anyone hears of this getting set up, let me know. I’d love to attend.

Dave, Dave, Dave of the JungleDisk

Published on January 25, 2008 in Jobs, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).

As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.

The Background

JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here) directly to Amazon. This fabulous pricing structure was met with user complaints. Why? Because users thought Dave wasn’t charging enough and wouldn’t be able to build a sustainable business with this model. When was the last time you heard users complain that you were charging too little?!?

The Technology

Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.

The Competition

With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).

Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.

The Future

JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.

Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.

Disclosure

I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site. Sorry about that.

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