A few days ago I posted about turning on the Pipelining feature in Firefox. In many cases, I’ve seen a dramatic performance improvement. However, now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I’ve run into some sites that it simply breaks, including the Wall Street Journal site.
One of my comments suggested that I try the Tweak Network Settings Firefox Extension. It’s great – it exposes the same options but also gives you and easy off button (“Default”) and on button (“Power”) through a menu option in the Tools menu within Firefox. Interestingly, when I used the “Power” settings (which are slightly different then the ones I had listed in the previous post), the Wall Street Journal site automagically works again.
At lunch today (sushi) with Amy and my two nephews, the song “Fish Heads” suddenly inserted itself in my head. No one at the table remembered it, but the waitress did and we struggled through the chorus together. I whipped out my trusty T-Mobile Sidekick and googled “Fish Head Song.” Voila – lyrics:
Chorus
Fish heads fish heads
Roly poly fish heads
Fish heads fish heads
Eat them up
Yum
(Repeat Chorus)
In the morning laughing happy fish heads
In the evening floating in the soup
(Chorus)
Ask a fish head anything you want to
They won’t answer they can’t talk
(Chorus)
I took a fish head out to see a movie
Didn’t have to pay to get it in
(Chorus)
They can’t play baseball they don’t wear sweaters
They’re not good dancers they don’t play drums
(Chorus)
Roly poly fish heads are never seen
Drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants
with Oriental women
Yeah.
(Chorus)
(Repeat Chorus 2X)
(Repeat Chorus a capella)
Yeah
This was from Barnes & Barnes’ debut album (yeah – huge success those Barnes & Barnes guys). Dr. Demento (remember him all you 40 year olds – well – he’s still around) claims it was the all time most requested song on his show. Yum. Yeah.
Sorry for the multiple posts – I was trying a new posting editor and it was an unhappy experience.
Women’s Business Centers Are Effective Drivers of Entrepreneurship
As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m always on the lookout for real evidence that there is causal impact between various programs aimed specifically at women in helping with IT and entrepreneurship and long term competitiveness and economic development. The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College just released a study that shows that Women’s Business Centers (WBC’s) are driving entrepreneurship among economically disadvantaged women. WBC’s were created in 1988 through the federal Women’s Business Ownership Act – there’s some good stuff in the report summarizing the current state of play of WBC’s.
This study was done in conjuction with several organizations (including the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which I have a long standing respect for an a historical relationship with) and – if you are interested in this sort of stuff – worth taking a look at.
Royal Farros is has now joined the swelling ranks of Microsoft bloggers. Microsoft bought Royal’s company (MessageCast – which we were investors in) a month ago. Royal has been a long time friend and collegue – he was my partner Heidi Roizen’s business partner in their first business (T/Maker – thanks for the clip art Royal) and then we backed his previous company iPrint.
Royal is endlessly delightful, insightful, and often – as Amy (my partially Irish wife) would say – full of the ole St. Nick. He was on the receiving end this year as Heidi pulled one of the greatest ever April Fools Day jokes on Royal this year – it’ll be echoing in the halls for many years to come. Let’s just say that since the MessageCast deal closed in mid-April there was a linkage between the April Fools Day joke and Royal’s soon to be future (and now current) employment at Microsoft.
MessageCast (and Royal) totally get blogging and RSS – so look for some good stuff from him about what he and Microsoft are up to. Plus – Royal’s got the mind of a maturing Jedi Knight when it comes to the software industry, as witnessed by the following recent post on his blog from a speech he just gave at an OMMA panel:
For years, I would say, “I’m Royal Farros and my company, MessageCast, does real-time alerting.” I found myself blurting out my standard opening… but stumbled as I remember I’m now Microsoft. I recovered by saying: “I used to say that we did real-time alerting… but now that we’re Microsoft, I guess we pretty much do just about everything in the entire world!” That’s another thing you can’t say everyday, eh?
Royal – dude – can you send me one of those cool Microsoft Office T-Shirts?
It’s the end of the quarter and many of the entrepreneurs I know are crunching hard to get their quarter end deals done. I was riding in the car with the CEO of one of my companies who is in a particularly challenging negotiation on a large deal. We were in a Jaguar that he’d rented from Hertz and he made sure to point out the sign in the car that said “Hertz #1 Gold Club: We appreciate your business! Please enjoy our complimentary upgrade.” I smiled – told him I knew he was cheap and wasn’t worried – and waited for him to say something like “yeah – but the point is that the Hertz Gold Club membership was free also.”
As we talked through the huge deal he’s working on, he described the negotiating dynamic he’s been dealing with. The end customer badly wants the deal to get done. The deal is “stuck in procurement” and the CEO is negotiating with the “procurement officer” (not the end customer). The conversation goes something like this:
Procurement Dude: “I think our relationship has become strained.”
CEO: “Strained? I’d say it’s hostile.”
Procurement Dude: “Well – you’ve got us over a barrel.”
CEO: “You’ve got to be kidding. That’s like saying the mouse has the elephant by the toenail.”
That got a laugh (apparently from the Procurement Dude as well as me). It’s still a battle, but at least we got a good line out of it so far. I expect that anyone that’s ever done a multimillion deal with a Fortune 1000 company has a similar story. Since we are a private company, we’re perfectly happy to wait until next month to finish the deal when the end customer even more badly wants our stuff. In the mean time, the end customer has to cool his heels while Mr. Procurement plays hard ass for a few more weeks.
I’ve been using Firefox for a while and love it. I’m waiting patiently for my beta of IE 7.0 to see how they’ve done, but for now I’m addicted to Firefox. My partner Greg Galanos (another software nerd – he used to run Metrowerks) sent me the tweaks to turn on pipelining in Firefox. The performance improvement is awesome. If you are a Firefox user on a high speed line (don’t try this on dialup), try the following:
Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in “about:config”
Look for the following lines:
- network.http.pipelining = false
- network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 4
- network.http.proxy.pipelining = false
Change them to (by click/double-click the line):
- network.http.pipelining = true
- network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30
- network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply to the request before making another request
Then you need to create one new option:
- Right click anywhere on the page and select New-> Integer.
- Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay”
- Set its value to “0”.
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic.
I’ve been thinking about “Innovation” a lot lately. A big part of the NCWIT theme is that having women in computer science is critical to the innovation process. I recently read my doctoral advisor Eric von Hippel’s new book Democratizing Innovation and re-engaged with Eric around the research he’s doing about user-driven innovation, especially in software around open source communities. This morning, I finished reviewing proposals for the MIT Deshpande Center’s next grant cycle.
Now – I know that reading grant proposals on a Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning is a particularly nerdy thing to do. I did manage to tear myself away from the computer and go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Amy which had little to do with innovation, but was fun. However, the proposals I reviewed (a subset of the overall proposal set) included:
- Handheld Ultrasound Imaging Device
- Laser cutting for faster, cheaper, better fiber optic connectors
- Invisibly Modulated White LEDs for Economical and Embellished Lighting
- Continuous Cycle Novel Dessert Freezing Process
- Substrate Noise Analysis Program for Mixed-Signal Verification
- Ultra-low-power Wireless Medical Tags
While this isn’t stuff that I’d fund (I’m a software guy after all), it stimulates an important part of my brain. The depth and intensity of the early stages of the innovation process are similar across any domain set and it’s powerful, fascinating, and inspiring to think about. It’s also very enlightening to take a step back and think about the core R&D process and subsequent evolution from innovation to commercialization, using MIT-based research as a starting point. I continue to be really impressed with how the Deshpande Center is approaching this.
My RSS world continues to be busy as both Technorati and Feedburner had lots of action this week.
Technorati released the beta of their new site. Dave Sifry has a post up about the features as does Niall Kennedy, who includes some fun old Technorati designs from 11/02, 6/04, and 7/04. Awesome progress guys (as of today: 11.2m weblogs watched and 1.2 billion links tracked.)
On Monday, the Feedburner guys put out an analysis of their existing aggregated podcast metrics. Feedburner now manages feeds for 6,000 podcasts and are seeing solid growth in the number of per-podcast subscribers (average of 33 – up from 15 in February; average of 65 if you eliminate the podcasts with less than 4 subs).
On Thursday, Feedburner announced their SmartFeed Mobile Server. This allows commercial publishers to publish once to all their feed subscribers across a wide variety of mobile devices. It augments Feedburner’s SmartFeed service that deploys the right format of your feed to various user-agents (so – it’s “subscriber aware, rather than “publisher driven”). I’ve heard lots of folks complain lately that feeds are starting to look goofy in different devices (e.g. I love stuff on the web, but my Trio sucks). If you are a feed publisher, Feedburner’s services address this issue automagically for you.
On Friday, Feedburner responded to feedback from several notable RSS folks that Feedburner was inappropriately creating “lock in” when someone had Feedburner start managing their feed. Specifically, if you changed your mind for some reason and didn’t want Feedburner to manage your feed, there was no simple way to get your subscribers redirected to another feed. While the Feedburner guys had not heard this request from very many of the customers, it became clear about a week ago that this was something we should address as part of “being a good citizen.” Eric Lunt cranked on it and rolled it out in less then a week of determining the importance of it. The Feedburner gang is clear that “it’s your feed” as evidenced both by this functionality as well as Eric declaring “[While] we think we have the best feed management service, we think that providing publishers with the ability to do whatever they want is always the right answer, and most importantly, we think your subscribers are your subscribers, not ours or anybody else’s.”
And – for those of you that like tagging, podcasting, and the ability to quickly roll new functionality by combining different services, Fred Wilson figured out how to use del.icio.us and Feedburner to create his own podcast/playlist from the music he’s been listening to. Eric took it one step further and inserted an elevator pitch (Fred is a VC after all) into the stream, so Fred created a feed for “fred’selevatorpitch”.
Who said VCs aren’t nerds.
I recently got a question from a local entrepreneur about “current board comp for an outside director” for an early stage company. My friend is considering joining the board of a startup, and his guidance to me in answering the question was “the company is obviously pre-revenue, so cash protection is key at this phase. Presumably options are the main tool.”
I encounter this regularly, as we often ask experienced entrepreneurs and/or executives to join the board of our early stage companies as outside directors. In addition, when I was an angel investor, I often joined the board of companies and was on the receiving end of these option grants.
Following is my response with my guidelines.
- Allow any board member to buy into the last VC round.
- Option grant vesting annually over four years that is equivalent to what a director/VP (not SVP/COO) level employee would get. This is typically 0.5% – 1% depending on the stage of the company (so 0.125% to 0.25% per year).
- Full acceleration on change of control (single trigger) – FYI – this is the ONLY time I’ll give single trigger (except in certain founder cases).
- 90 day exercise period if you leave the board. Sometimes I’ll extend this to a year, but I like this to be the same that employees get.
- No cash renumeration.
- Travel expenses covered.
Obviously situations vary, but I think these are good rules of thumb. FYI – as a VC investor, I never ask (nor will I support giving) another VC investor a similar option package for serving on a board – we’ve already got our ownership stake and being a board member is part of our responsibility to the company.