NewsGator announced the NewsGator Enterprise Server this week. Ross Carlson (my superstud IT guy) installed Beta 2 this week – I think it’s awesome. When I first invested in NewsGator a year ago, I bought into Greg Reinacker’s vision of RSS as a platform technology and NewsGator as the platform company for providing RSS reader capability. At the time, there was a some emerging buzz around RSS, but over the past year it has picked up incredible speed and is now working its way into mainstream and enterprise computing.
NewsGator Enterprise Server is another component of a product roadmap that Greg laid out in February which includes the web (NewsGator Online), Microsoft Outlook (NewsGator Outlook Edition), Desktop (NewsGator FeedDemon Edition – via our acquisition of Nick Bradbury’s company and superb product), Mobile (yeah … Mobile Edition), Private Label Edition (e.g VNU France and Denver Post News Hound), Microsoft Media Center (NewsGator Media Center Edition), and now Microsoft Exchange and the enterprise (via NewsGator Enterprise Server).
NewsGator Enterprise Server features include:
- Optional integration with Microsoft Exchange, enabling users to read RSS feeds in Outlook, Outlook Web Access, Pocket Outlook, Entourage and other Exchange-integrated applications without installing any desktop client software.
- Optional integration with MS Active Directory allows for single sign-on and group administration and management.
- Based on the same engine that powers the award-winning NewsGator Online Services, already proven to be highly scalable.
- Consolidates and reduces bandwidth consumption by periodically scanning each feed only once, regardless of how many users are subscribed.
- Centralized deployment and management that requires no client software installation or plug-ins.
- Designed to be installed in hours, rather than days (Ross projected an under 30 minute install).
In addition, NewsGator is paying attention and addressing a bunch of prospective RSS-related security issues. Brian Livingston – editor of Windows Secrets – has a great article up on this where he highlights the potential security issues with podcasts and how NewsGator’s FeedStation product handles the issues effectively.
NewsGator has some material available on the web site, including a product overview, business white paper, technical white paper, and data sheet. The projected release date for NewsGator Enterprise Server is current 9/30/05. However, given the stability of Beta 2, I expect to see a release candidate shortly. If you have interest in being in the beta program and/or being an early adopter, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll get you connected with the right folks at NewsGator.
I grew up in Dallas and – when I went to school in Boston – I was proud (at least for a while) of being from “Big-D”. However, Amy cut me down to size when we hooked up. She grew up in Alaska and told me that if you cut Alaska in two, Texas would be the third largest state.
In the “I’m going to go hide under my bed now” category, Ben Casnocha pointed me to the British Royal Black Squadron’s rendition of “Is This The Way To Armadillo (sic)”.
I’ve been working with Ryan McIntyre at Mobius for five years. Ryan was one of the founders of Excite and sits on the boards of companies such as Technorati, Postini, Sling Media, and Akustica. In addition to Ryan’s wicked sense of humor (he taught his son how to say the word for “izmel-wielder at a Mexican Bris”) and great musical talent, he’s recently taken up being interviewed.
John Furrier – who’s been making the rounds with a bunch of great VC and entrepreneur interviews on his infoTalk Podcast – did Ryan last week. And – a few weeks ago – he showed up on Microsoft’s The ISV Show with Blake Krikorian talking about “the convergence of broadband and media in the home” (and Sling Media).
Party on dude.
It’s Friday and our new movie choices appeared this morning at our little theater down the block. Tonight we went to the 8:30 showing of Wedding Crashers – remarkably the theater was completely full for the first time this summer (we were the oldest people there – I think all the teenagers in town showed up.)
Now – I’ll basically do anything I can to avoid going to a wedding (Amy and I eloped), even ones I’m invited to – so it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go to a movie with the word wedding in the title. Amy tricked me into seeing it by saying that there were venture capitalists in the movie so I had to go see it (yes – Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn pose as VCs in one scene – very very scary.)
Wilson was – as usual – cute, cuddly, warm, funny, and confused. Vaughn was hilarious. I’ve always loved this 6’5” dude, but he was absolutely at the top of his game in this movie. Maple syrup has several good moments, as do eye drops, sappy pickup lines, a very twisted virgin / first time / psycho girl theme that sucks in Vaughn, stage 5 clingers, “a little place on the shore,” plaid pants, the “touch” football game, a quail hunt (and other assorted WASP icons), and the uncontested scariest man in film – Christopher Walken – as dad. Will Ferrell – who nauseates me – had a few funny moments with his mother (and – if I treated my mom that way – she’d simply kill me.)
Well worth two hours of your life.
After watching my Roomba’s play with each other I was hopeful that I’d come across something that inspired and excited me as much as a robotic vacuum cleaner for this month’s toy of the month. While my friend Jeff Hyman, Dyson’s VP of Marketing, sent me (actually, he sent Amy) the most amazing vacuum cleaner I’ve ever encountered (the Dyson DC15), I felt there must be some unwritten rule that I couldn’t choose a vacuum cleaner as toy of the month two months in a row (or someone might make fun of me), so I’ll reserve the detailed post on the Dyson DC15 for later, but you can be comfortable knowing that we set it up, plugged it in, and then proceeded to chase the Roomba’s around the room with it.
This month’s toy is something I used 15 times (each time I went for a run) – a set of Nike SB HJ020 Lightweight Sport Headphones. I’ve fallen in love with running with my iPod Shuffle (ah – the podcast revolution has finally caught up with me) but the stupid white trendy headphones that Apple supplies kept falling out of my ears. On a whim, I bought a pair of Nike sport headphones; they are simply awesome. I know I’m in headphone heaven if – after a two hour run – I’ve forgotten they are in my ears. If you are a serious runner or biker and you like to listen to music while you do your thing, you must try these.
A few blog readers sent me some toys to play with (a nice surprise – thanks!) The first one was a Flash Flight – a “light-up” frisbee. Very cool, and sure to mystify my dogs when I return to Boulder. The company that makes them is Niteize (based in Boulder) – they make a bunch of neat flashlight, lights, frisbees, and light up products. The other was a set of Plantronics DP-500 headphones – they’ll get a good workout next month on Skype and I’ll report back later. If you feel compelled to send – or recommend – a toy to me – I’m all ears (with headphones inserted at appropriate times.)
In an effort to experience VoIP at its fullest, I got rid of my landline in Alaska and have been using Vonage all summer. Today – it dawned on me that the experience was very similar to that of using a cell phone 10 years ago. While Vonage has a high novelty factor and provides additional functionality (in this case stuff like a “portable 303 phone number” and voice mail to my email), its performance is erratic. Sometime it works great, sometimes it sounds like I’m talking to space aliens from planet mumble, and a few times a day I simply get disconnected (remember the cell phone dropped call phenomenon – of course, if you live in the bay area, you still experience it every time you drive down 280.)
I’ve got Skype / Skypeout set up and have used it a little, but not nearly as much as Vonage. I’ll spend more time on Skype the balance of the summer and see if it’s any different.
Last night, after we’d exhausted some other scintillating topic, Dave Jilk – who’s been visiting us this week – and I pondered who the top online retailers were last year – specifically who was at the top of the brick and mortar list (ok – we called them “multi-channel retailers” now that the Internet bubble has burst.) I mentioned that I thought Wal-Mart was at the top – he laughed and said – no way, Sears is bigger online than Wal-Mart.
A little web searching later and we found the 2004 Top 400 List Of Online Retailers. The overall article and list is fascinating and there are plenty of unexpected stats on it, including the notion that more than a third of all households in the US made at least one online purchase last year and the total US Internet retail sales was $87.5 billion for 2004 (up 25% over 2003 and 62% over 2002).
The top online retailers are (all numbers are in $billions):
- Amazon: 6.9
- Dell: 3.2
- Office Depot: 3.1
- Staples: 3.0
- HP: 2.7
- Sears: 1.7
- Sony: 1.6
- CDW: 1.5
- Newegg.com: 1.0
Dave was right about Sears thrashing Wal-Mart, which weighed in at #12 (and – more interestingly – only 1% of all Wal-Mart sales, vs. Sears 5% of sales via the web). However, on the brick and mortar front, Office Depot and Staples dominated.
Fred Wilson has a great weekly series called VC Cliche of the Week – this week’s post is on meeting the numbers. It’s worth a slow and thoughtful read.
I have one constructive thought to add. I’ve been involved in over 100 startups at this point and have seen many more. I can only remember a few instances where the company exceeded its revenue numbers in its first year of product ship. Many companies make their expense, EBITDA, and cash forecasts by adjusting spending, but that’s fundamentally different than making the top line and the bottom line numbers early in the life of the business (again – let’s focus on year 1 of product ship – not after the company has had several years of products in the market.) I’ve found that for year 1, the correlation between the sales plan and reality is completely random.
As a result, I generally take a different approach to year 1 of sales / revenue. Rather than hold a company to a revenue plan in year 1, I try to focus on the cash spend in year 1 (Fred highlights cash flow as the “ultimate measure” – and focusing on managing the negative cash flow is equally effective as managing the positive cash flow.) An early stage company needs to spend a certain amount to make progress, but managing the expense line should be straightforward. As revenue comes in (especially high gross margin revenue), it becomes easy to step up the spending, especially on variable cost (more demand generation) or highly leveraged items (more sales people) that impact future sales.
This tends to be a continual, iterative process – I’ve had cases where revenue starts accelerating later in the year, at which point the spending increase starts. If you use the fiscal year as the measurement, the annual revenue number is missed, but Q3 or Q4 revenue may be greater than plan. I’ve also had cases where the revenue mix results from various product “types” (or “editions”, or “versions”, or “vertical markets”) are radically different than the forecast (which often drives the allocation of variable spend.) Of course, if you wait too long to start investing incremental dollars you “might” miss an opportunity, although I rarely find that to be the case with an early stage company that is spending “pre-revenue” or “early revenue” at an appropriate level.
It’s a complicated dynamic and reinforces a couple of things. First, management and the board need to have similar expectations about what “making the numbers mean” in year 1 and have to deal effectively with any changes in the top line plan. This is especially true around expectations of the sales organization (and corresponding comp). Next, the CEO needs to have “controlled confidence” – there comes a point at which one can confidently say “let’s go for it.” Reporting and communication have to be timely (e.g. financials within 15 days of the end of the month, monthly board meetings/calls after the financials come out.) And finally – as Fred points out – management should be honest about the actual numbers at all times – there is never any value in lying or gaming things.