Adam McFarland

When I woke up today and combed through my morning email I was shocked to see that yesterday Google announced that they would be releasing a browser today.  Usually these things leak out sooner, but I hadn’t heard anything other than the same type of vague rumors that you hear about a gPhone or gOS.

Google Chrome, as it’s called, was released today at noon and can be downloaded for XP/Vista (Linux and Mac soon to follow).  After reading the comic and watching the video, I was excited to download it and take it for a spin. While all of the features sounded nice, I didn’t know what to expect.  Just because they say that they “started a browser from scratch” and that it’s designed for “today’s web applications and not the web pages of 1998″ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than IE7, Firefox 3, Safari, Opera, etc.

After playing with it for 10 minutes I feel confident in saying:  it is better than all of them.  Noticably better.  It is now my default browser.

Here are my thoughts:

• It is sooooooo much faster than other browsers that it isn’t funny.  Google spent a lot of time highlighting the new javascript rendering and crash control, and for good reason. Pages load a lot faster than in FF3 or IE7, and the “crash control” isolates each tab so if one crashes your entire browser session doesn’t.  They even have a task manager where you can see which tabs are using the most resources, very similar to the Windows task manager.  I tried apps like Gmail and Google Reader and they absolutely flew relative to the other browsers I had open.
• New tabs aren’t blank.  Instead they show thumbnails of your most visited sites, a list of your most recent bookmarks, a search box to search bookmarks, and a list of your most recent searches.
• Gone is the search box in the upper right.  Everything is in one bar - your history, your searching, and your web addresses.  The first drop down for anything you type is “search on Google”.  Subtle yet awesome.
• Less clutter - I’d say I have an extra 5% viewing space than I do in FF3.  Despite that, it’s still super simple to find everything.  Nothing I can think of that other browsers have is inherintly missing.  It just works.
• It appears to render exactly like Firefox, which is what I figured it would do (since portions are modeled on Mozilla’s engine).  This is good news for developers.
• Speaking of which, the developer tools are solid.  I still prefer Firebug in Firefox, but that might be just because it’s what I know and am familiar with.  The javascript debugging appears to be better than other tools I’ve used, although I don’t do a ton of JS debugging right now.
• Did I mention it’s REALLY FAST?

Download it and see for yourself.  It installs in seconds and imports everything from Firefox or IE so you can pick up right where you left off.

I have yet to really consider how much of a mainstream impact this could have and how it could change the future of the web.  For the time being I’m just enjoying a new browsing experience (I’m typing this post in it right now).  In the past I’ve been critical of all of the half-assed crap that Google releases and slaps “beta” on, but this is different.  It is very refined.  Microsoft should definitely be worried.  Google is creeping more and more into our everyday lives where Microsoft used to be.  Can’t wait to see how this unfolds.

P.S. The spacing on this post was messed up when I first hit submit. Guess it isn’t perfect yet.

P.S.S. I had some trouble in phpMyAdmin (which is how we access our MySQL databases).  Chrome wasn’t executing queries.  It’s no longer my default browser.  That lasted all of 30 minutes.  Oh well, I still stand by everything I said above.  For most browsing it is still fantastic.  I’m sure they’ll work out the minor kinks soon.

Back when we moved into our warehouse we were shocked to find out that there was no high speed internet available in our building.  When we contacted local high speed providers, we quickly realized that adding a line to the building would cost a ton (like either $4,000 down plus $140/mo, or $300/mo with a 5 year commitment).  So our somewhat risky solution was to get a Sprint Mobile Broadband card and use it in conjunction with the Linksys WRT54G3G router below.

We didn’t know how good of cell phone reception we’d get.  We didn’t know if the router would cover the entire warehouse.  We didn’t know if the speeds would be adequate.  We could have totally fallen flat on our face with this risk…but we didn’t.   I wanted to make sure I wrote a follow-up post so that everyone knew how well this has worked for us. This solution for internet service has absolutely been one of the better decisions we’ve made.  In fact, I plan on using this same setup at home (being able to “take your connection with you” by just pulling the card out of the router and putting it in your lapper is sooo cool).

Before I get into specifics, keep in mind that we are about 30 minutes outside of Albany in an area that resembles farm land more than the inner city…meaning we don’t get the worlds best cell phone coverage.  Also keep in mind that the warehouse is a steel framed building, which certainly isn’t helping reception either.  After almost five months of use, here are my thoughts:

• Connection speeds are fast - generally within the range that the broadband card states (600 kbps - 1.4 Mbps download and average upload speeds of 350 - 500 kbps).  Now if you’re uploading movies you aren’t going to like an upload speed of 350 kbps, but for our daily activities these speeds are more than enough.  The router certainly doesn’t prohibit you from getting the maximum available connection speed.
• Connection is strong.  Everywhere in the 5,300 sq-ft warehouse you get a full five-bar connection.  It’s nice to know you can move around and not lose a signal.  Again, being in a steel framed building you just never know what you’re getting.
• Downtime is minimal.  In five months, I’d say we’ve only had one day where we lost connection for a significant amount of time.  It was about 2 hours one morning.  Otherwise, just clicking a button on the router to disconnect / reconnect always solves the problem in less than a minute.  My home internet service is down more often than this is.
• There’s no slowdown when all four of use are connected at once.  These broadband cards aren’t necessarily made for this, so I was worried that the connection would lag or we’d get kicked off if there was too much combined uploading or downloading going on.  I’ve never noticed a difference whether there were five computers using it (our lappers + the shipping desktop) or just one.

In sum:  if you have a Sprint Mobile Broadband card you’d be nuts not to pick one of these up.  For us, trimming a $300/month expense down to a $60/month expense was huge.  Every penny adds up, and that $240 is money we can use to market our sites, pay other warehouse expenses, or pay our salaries.

Hulu has done it again: the TV section has introduced me to another show I never would have known about otherwise. The show is called Start-Up Junkies. On TV it can be found on the HD only channel MOJO, which to be honest I’m not even sure if I get or not…let me run out and check…yup, channel 1855 for anyone subscribed to Time Warner HD service here in Albany. Huh, never had any clue it was there.

The show follows the startup adventurs of Earth Class Mail, a company that receives, sorts, and scans your snail mail for you to view online or on your phone. It is a fascinating watch for anyone interested in startup life, particularly anyone interested in a large startup that requires quite a bit of Angel/VC investment. I highly recommend watching all of the episodes over on Hulu. There are only eight twenty-minute episodes as of this writing, so it’ll take less than three hours. I just finished watching them all and recorded my personal thoughts as I was watching. My notes are below the graphic, but I think it would be more beneficial to watch without my bias in mind, make your own observations, then come back to the rest of this post (and comment of course). I am interested to see if people pick up on the same things that I do.

• Startups take after their founders. CEO Ron Weiner loves to talk about how this is a “billion dollar idea” and how he would be lying if he said he wasn’t in it for the money. Consequently it seems like when they ask employees why they are involved in such a risky career you get two answers: the money and the love of startup life. Nothing wrong with that per-se, but Earth Class Mail can literally change the world. It can improve lives in major, major ways. Just would have been nice for one of them to say that they wanted to be a part of something that makes the world a better place. Maybe I’m naive, but I thought all entrepreneurs had a little of that “change the world” attitude in them.
• They changed their company name and their domain to Earth Class Mail (formerly known as Document Command and Remote Control Mail). First off, changing your name that many times is crazy. Second, they didn’t initiate the DNS changes until the night before a major convention. They are flipping out that the domain hasn’t propagated, they can’t demo the site, and that the press release has already gone out. They make a big deal about how stressful it is. They celebrate like they won the Super Bowl when it finally does propagate. Everyone knows it takes up to 48 hrs to propagate fully - you caused that stress yourself. Stop acting like this major unforeseen error occurred and by the grace of God everything worked at the exact second you needed it to. You f*cked up, why doesn’t that get mentioned?
• Phil, a sales executive who is by all accounts very important to the team, is totally left in the dark about the financial situation. It seems as if Ron and Chief Marketing Officer Natalee are totally secretive about when funding is coming and how much. He says “when I started, I was under the understanding that funding was a month a way and that it was all locked and loaded and ready to close. I guess there are some hiccups there that I’m not quite aware of”. Not the way I’d run a company. Transparency - especially to critical employees - is key.
• Going to that RV rally was absolutely stupid. They didn’t have permission. They didn’t have a plan. The people really aren’t their target market. What an absolute total waste of time for three important people to kill a day doing that.
• Let’s be real here: all startups are stressful for their own reasons, but 99% of the stress this company is enduring is related to Angel and VC funding. It seems like all of their resources are poured into securing tens of millions of dollars. I understand why, but it’s also the #1 reason why I plan on always self-funding my ventures. How is the company supposed to grow when everyone - marketing, sales, accounting, executives - spends all day long scrambling to prepare numbers or presentations for VC pitches?
• Natalee “Our lawyers wrote the website and engineers built it so now we have to create a marketing website”. Oh boy. That’s how a web company fails. How can all these smart people allow such a thing? You’re trying to raise millions of dollars and you HAVEN’T built a site with the customer in mind?
• I disagree with Ron when he says you need to acquire customers “not like the company you are, but like the company you intend to be”. Fortune 500 client “Cheetah” essentially re-writes their business plan and puts immense stress on the entire team. You can grow too fast, and as I’m watching this it seems like taking on this client could do that to ECM. If it destroys your systems by forcing them to scale before they are ready to do so, it’s a bad move.
• Maybe I’m overstepping my boundaries here, but when Natalee gets into a car accident and is sidelined with whiplash all she does is bitch and whine about how “unfair” it is and how she should be in meetings. She doesn’t seem thankful that she’s OK at all. No one likes getting in a car accident, but there are far worse things in life than getting hit up with whiplash and being sidelined for a few days. She comes across as a five year old who throws a tantrum because their work at a startup is more important than everything else in the world. All the fellow employees also just blab about how much her getting injured has cost the company. No one at all seems grateful that she’s OK or mentions that an injury like that puts things back in perspective and makes them realize that her health is more important than her day-to-day tasks. A bit saddening.
• I HATE when people say “9 out of 10 startups fail”. They say it at the beginning of each episode, and each time I cringe just a little bit more. It’s a total myth. “Using Census Bureau microdata of firms started from 1989 to 1992 and tracked through 1996, Headd found, among other things, that about half of new employer firms survive beyond four years, and about one-third of closed businesses were a success at closure.”
• Watching the marketing team review their PPC results is interesting. They have outsourced their campaigns and seem to only review them monthly. They get frustrated at the results, but don’t have enough time or know-how to dig deeper as to why they aren’t optimal. Sounds like every single company I’ve ever known. PPC is one of those things that seems simple, but is absurdly complex. It requires a lot of keyword research, time to write ads, and a whole lot of split-testing. When you’re relying on PPC results as much as Earth Class Mail seems to be, reviewing and tweaking the campaign needs to be a daily task (whether done internally or outsourced). I learned this the hard way.
• They also mention how frustrating PPC can be in the beginning: you don’t know what works, but you have a fixed budget to figure out what works. If something seems to be working, you can pour more money into it, however you don’t get an opportunity to test for something that could potentially work even better.
• If I ever start a VC backed company, I will need a partner with experience raising money. Ron seems to be VERY good at schmoozing VC’s and Angel’s. I would need a mentor to follow around and learn from before I could ever get to that point. I know the bootstrapping world, not this stuff. It’s basically a full time job for Ron to constantly secure more funding.
• Mid-stream they switch from developing on an open-source platform (maybe LAMP or Ruby on Rails?) to .NET because they are an official partner with Microsoft at a conference. Ballsy. They must have some hella good programmers.
• I thought Ron was a bit of a douche in the beginning, but he’s really grown on me. He knows his shit. He loves what he does. He will do ANYTHING for his company to succeed. Hard not to get on board with a guy like that. Hell, seems like he handles the stress better than I would (or better than the rest of his team does for that matter).
• They’re meeting with Venture Debt Bankers to get more funding without giving up more stock. Pretty interesting - I didn’t know this was possible. Apparently they come in after the VC’s have done their due diligence and will give you a business loan. It seems like the assumption is that they know the VC firms and how much work they put into researching the company, so they feel like they are backing more solid companies than just any company off the street. One interesting thing: they prefer the money be spent on capital equipment like buildings and machinery as opposed to marketing or software because if the business fails they can recoup some of their investment. They even state that you get lower rates when you use the money for those things.
• Honestly, there are SO many business processes and contributing factors to success in a company like this that I would find it tough be be CEO or even a VP. As of now I can’t really see myself being involved in something of this magnitude with this many people involved. Just doesn’t seem like much fun. I think I’ll always be a small startup guy with relatively simple business solutions that meet one specific niche need.
• Ah, they did develop on PHP. Holy f*&@! that’s a lot of work to re-build everything from scratch and deploy it on .NET!
• Love the Red Bull’s on all of the developer’s desks. They are really pushing these programmers hard, almost to the point where you wonder if they can possibly be productive.
• Wow, looks like all of the crazy gambles have paid off so far. Ron is the shit - dude pushes everything to the limit and definitely wins more than he loses.
• The last two minutes are nuts - almost every member of the senior staff leaves for one reason or another. Makes you wonder if they just pushed this thing too hard too fast.

In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured I’d always be an iTunes Store guy.

That is, until I started seriously playing around with Grooveshark. One of the best parts about Music-Alerts drawing some attention is that I’ve received praise from - and consequently struck up conversations with - some young startups in the music industry. One such new acquaintance is Andrew Wise of the upstart company Grooveshark, which was started by three University of Florida students. It’s so unique and has so many features, that I’ll just cut to the chase and list off what it does:

• There are two components - your online profile and the file-sharing software (like old Napster or Limewire) that accesses your MP3 files.
• You can listen to streaming music for free on the site as much as you want.
• You can create playlists, add friends, receive suggestions, etc (all the social networking stuff).
• When you want to download a track, you add funds to your account and buy it DRM free for $0.99. Royalties are paid to the labels, to Grooveshark, and to the person who you’re downloading the song from. Hence the slogan “everybody gets paid”.

After being invited to be a BETA tester, I just went in minutes ago and set up my profile and added $5 to my account. I then proceeded to search for a song, download it, and import it into iTunes (gotta be able to transfer it to the iPod). It worked awesome. Bottom line - as long as Grooveshark is able to strike up deals with all the labels and be legal, it’s now where I’m starting my music search. It’s a cross between a social network, p2p file sharing system, and streaming music service. For the same price as a song on iTunes, I get it DRM free and I get the advantages of a social network that knows my music habits (incidentally, if I have a feature request it would be to import my iTunes library XML file so it already knows what music I like).

The only real question is about the legalities. What are the origins of the music I’m downloading, and if 90+% of the music on the site is bootleg, how will record companies feel about it? On one hand, they might like the fact that they’re actually making money from it when they otherwise wouldn’t be. On the other hand, they might not like the fact that other people are getting a cut for uploading it. Only time will tell. I’m certainly rooting for it to work.

P.S. - the Music-Alerts Facebook App is REAL buggy. I know about it, I just hate debugging under the constraints of Facebook. I’ll fix it…eventually. My bad

Remember MyLiveSearch, the company that Google supposedly has had their eye on since its inception?  They’ve taken a lot of crap the past few months for delaying launch and for garnering a ton of hype without anyone actually seeing what they’re working on.  They promised “real-time indexing” of the web as you search.  Naturally with a claim like that we’re all pretty curious and a bit skeptical at the same time.

Well supposedly today they are supposed to launch so I figured I’d give my $.02 on whether or not I thought it was worth using.  I’ve been a beta tester for a little less than a week now, and I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing:

What they claim to be:  “The world’s first true live search engine.  Searching the internet will never be the same.”

What they actually are:  A browser plug-in that starts with search results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN (your choice) and then indexes the pages on the domain of the top results “live” using your computer to expand upon and re-order the results.

What I like:  It’s an interesting way to look at the web.  For example, a Google Search for “Custom McFarlane” returns 2 results from SportsLizard and 3 results from articles linking to SportsLizard that I wrote.  Clearly we dominate that niche.

A search on MyLiveSearch starts with SportsLizard at the top, but ends with eBay dominating the rankings because there are hundreds of custom McFarlane figures being sold on eBay. SportsLizard is the second site that appears, but it takes a bunch of scrolling (or some refining of the results) to find SL.  As MyLiveSearch crawls the sites “live” it re-orders them based upon what they find.

You’ll notice that it does a poor job of sorting which pages are most important.  Clearly the Custom McFarlane home page is most relevant to the query, but it shows other SL pages ahead of it when I narrow the results to only show pages from our site.  MyLiveSearch also shows you who indexed the site and when - so they start with a page Google indexed a few days ago and then index and sort the rest “live”.

I personally think they did a bad job on this query, ranking eBay ahead of us because of the quantity of content.  However, it’s still pretty cool to watch and I can at least relate to where they are coming from and appreciate their attempt at innovation.   There are a handful of features that allow you to focus results more on news results (i.e. Google News) and group the results by site, but nothing that really does much for me.  Overall for other queries I got solid results, but nothing I’d say that was that much better than Google.

What I don’t like about it:  In order:  installing a plug-in to run a search sucks, having to login to perform a search sucks, the time to run a search is annoying (I had searches take up to a minute to complete…eh), and the false promise that you actually index the web live doesn’t sit well with me.  I suppose you are technically indexing live, but it would be a lot more convincing if the live indexing was being done on a central server and not on my CPU.

Bottom line:  MyLiveSearch is  creative and different, but not so creative and so different that Google couldn’t copy it in a few days.  I’m pretty sure that if you gave me a few months I could program something similar…and I’m not even that great of a programmer.   In the end, the login and plugin crush any chance I have of using it with any regularity.  Fun to toy with, but Google still rules.