I got an email from Vonage today that they had completed 911 Dialing activation for my Vonage line. That’s good, I guess. However, even though my phone number is a (303) number (Colorado), they had my Alaska address on the 911 alert. I have no idea how they picked this address since both my Billing Address and Shipping Address on Vonage are Colorado addresses (not my home address – a PO Box.)
Fortunately, I read the email and was able to change my 911 address. It would be a real bummer if someone was trying to axe murder me at my house in Colorado, I dialed 911, and the police showed up in Homer.
I searched around my entire Vonage account for any place where my Alaska address had been entered and couldn’t find it anywhere. I did use my Vonage phone last summer in Alaska so it’s conceivable that the address is in their system somewhere, but it’s not on any of my account pages.
Sounds like a database issue to me. I love databases.
I just got another email – after receiving my confirmation that the 911 address was changed, that “Unfortunately, due to the follow error, we were not able to accurately verify the address you provided for 911 Dialing. There was an unidentified problem with the information you provided. Please re-enter your address.”
Ok – re-entering my address now. Oh – and if someone at Vonage happens to notice, your error message has an error – how about changing “… due to the follow error …” to “… due to the following error…”
Jeff Bussgang – a GP at IDG Ventures in Boston – has a good post up on the dynamics – from both an entrepreneurs perspective and a VC perspective – on syndicating deals.
I invested in Judy’s Book around Thanksgiving and wrote a long post about why I made the investment. Earlier this week, Judy’s Book rolled out a major release which we’ve been fondly referring to “the facelift.” The front end is significantly changed (and improved based on user feedback) as are a bunch of things under the hood. In addition – like many good “early versions” – there were a lot of architectural changes made to make it much easier to rapidly roll out new functionality now that we have a pretty good sense of where we are going.
For the techies in the audience, we’re now supporting WOPM (“write once publish many”) where you can create a review in Judy’s Book and have it published automagically on your blog (TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type are currently supported). Oh – and these are formatted using the hReview microformat (hmmm – wonder where we are going with that? – remember – I said we made architectural changes to make it easier to roll out new functionality.) There are plenty of RSS feeds easily discoverable to see what people are writing about in each city in the US, or – if you just want to see what a particular person is writing about, you can subscribe to their feed also. Members get their own pages with a user-definable URL – think “platform” for this if you want a sense of where things are going.
For the non-techies (and techies) in the audience, give it a whirl and give us feedback. We are providing some financial incentives over the next three weeks – $100 gift certificate each day to the person that writes the most new reviews that day – so don’t be bashful.
StillSecure – a company that I’ve been an investor in since 2000 – had a great week. Raj Bhargava – the CEO – and I are close friends who have worked on five companies together going back a decade to NetGenesis – a company Raj co-founded that I was the first angel investor in with Will Herman.
StillSecure plays in the highly competitive security software market. They’ve got a family of three products that are nicely integrated – VAM (Vulnerability Management), Safe Access (Network access control / endpoint security), and Strata Guard (IDS/IPS). All three products are well regarded and have been reviewed heavily. On Tuesday night, we found out that StillSecure’s Safe Access was chosen over six other finalists for the SC Magazine Readers Choice Award for Best Endpoint Security Product.
This followed an OEM deal with Senforce and a deep integration with IdentiPHI’s endpoint management solution. Finally, StillSecure released their Endpoint Security Index. The data in the Endpoint Security Index will change regularly and measures how various endpoint security policies protect networks from various endpoint-based threats.
Congrats guys – nice week.
What’s not to like about the following lead in for an article:
What Toyota did for cars and Dell did for computers is what Rally Software hopes to do for application development.
Rally Software released their new versions of their software life-cycle management solutions for agile development on February 13th. We had a board meeting yesterday and the first slide of the meeting was a recently received very large check from a customer. Nothing like setting the tone nicely!
I always get a kick out of someone finding a Google easter egg in the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search option. Today’s was particularly amusing, especially given some of the recent tangles Google has been having with various governments around the world.
Try the following:
I wonder how long that link is going to stay live. As with my earlier post on the The Cynical State of The Union Address, if you like our president or are a fan of our current administration, don’t both with this – it’ll just piss you off.
Some days I feel like I’m juggling a lot of stuff – today is one of them. My partner Greg sent me a very timely email of a video of Chris Bliss juggling. The guy is absolutely remarkable, plus you get a good Beatles song out of it. I need to hire this guy to help me juggle.
If you aren’t happy with our president, you’ll get a good laugh out of this. If you are happy with the president, the current information, and the coverage you get on Fox News, please don’t look at it – it’ll just piss you off.
Valentines Day is one of those holidays that guys consistently screw up. One year it’s great; one year it’s not. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a wonderfully long history of it, which just makes me think the people at Hallmark love this holiday. Several years ago, a guy name Tom Birdsey created a comparable holiday for men. Since I’m a vegetarian, it’s only partly relevant for me. So – this morning – after 9 inches of snow last night, I emerged from the shower, got dressed, and wandered down stairs to clean the snow off my car so I could drive into the office. Amy was out there cleaning it off – when I shouted out the door “thanks – you’re awesome” – she responded with “happy steak and bj day.” Amy – you rock.