I had a great breakfast meeting at the Cambridge Marriott with Michael Schrage , a research fellow at MIT yesterday morning. We had never met before and I loved the conversation – his brain was bubbling with ideas that are relevant to many of the things I’m interested in, he challenged some of my thinking, and we had a deep and awesome conversation about open source hardware, makers, and MakerBot . ...
This is a note from your Gmail tech support person (my life in a parallel universe) just trying to help with whatever frustration you are having today. Over the weekend I noticed that my iPhone (which had recently upgraded to the latest iOS (5.0.1) was now regularly giving me an error from within the native email app. A little box would pop up and tell me that my Exchange Password was incorrect. I use Gmail, but use the Exchange connector on the iPhone (as recommended by Google ). Until recently, this was working just fine. ...
Today’s “founder hint of the day” is to create an email address called founders@yourcompanyname.com and have it automatically forward to all the founders of your company. I interact with a ton of companies every day. For the ones we have a direct investment in via Foundry Group, I know each of the founder’s names (although with 40 companies, at age 45 – almost 46, there are moments where I have to sit quietly and think hard to remember them.) For the TechStars companies, especially early in each cycle, I have trouble remembering everyone’s names until I’ve met them. And for many other companies I have an indirect investment in (via a VC fund I’m an investor in) or that I’m simply interacting with, I often can’t remember all of the founders names. ...
I continue to be obsessed about email – it’s by far the most significant comm channel I use. And – it’s accelerating, not decelerating, especially as it proliferates across devices as well as other comm channels. I’ve watched as many of the companies we’ve invested in use email and CRM systems (such as Salesforce) as though they existed in separate parallel universes. I’ve listened to the endless complaints about the complete and total lack of real integration between the two. I’ve watched the workflow, even from very disciplined sales people, and shaken my head in total bafflement at the lack of integration and the perverse contortions the sales person goes through to try to make the two systems work together. And – as I’ve continued to manage the enormous flow of email I get in Gmail, I’ve been searching for more efficient (and effective) ways to deal with it, besides just ignoring it which, while efficient, wouldn’t be very effective. ...
At Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals , we only bring you shiny happy deals. If you are a Mac user and like to live in a mail client instead of a browser, Sparrow Mail is for you. I paid $10 when it came out but through the magic of daily deals am making it available for $5 for the next 24 hours (up to 1000 copies). Jason Calacanis even loves it – on G+ he says: ...
Fred Wilson had an excellent post up this morning titled Social Media’s Secret Weapon – Email . I completely agree that email is the key communications channel for social media and have written about this before in posts like 100% Click Through Rate , Email – The Original Social Graph and Email Is Still The Best Login . I’ve been investing in email related stuff for over 15 years going back to Email Publishing, my very first Boulder-based investment which I believe was the very first email service provider (ESP) and was acquired by MessageMedia which was then bought by Doubleclick. Fred and I are both investors in Return Path which he calls out in his post as the category creator and market leader in email deliverability. I love Return Path as a company and am incredibly proud of what they’ve done as a business. ...
Today Google announced that they had now raised the limit on number of contacts to 25,000 (from 10,000) for all Gmail users (including Google Apps users.) Boom – done – deployed for everyone – and announced in a short and to the point blog post. 70 days ago I wrote a post titled Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts where I bitched loudly about this problem. I have about 6400 actual contact records and the other 3600 had been autofilled by Google’s magic “create a new contact record whenever you respond to someone” feature. This is a great feature as I get 100+ emails a day from people I’ve never communicated with before who I respond to. Suddenly, I couldn’t add any new contacts at all. ...
I just received the “amusing email of the day” from Google. I feel like I’m in one step forward / one step back with Google Enterprise Support. If you read my two recent posts on this, you saw that I started by saying that it’s Time For Google To Get Serious About Enterprise Tech Support and I followed up with My Increasing Love Affair With Google Apps . A few days ago, I realized that Google was no longer allowing me to enter new contacts. When I checked Contacts in Google Apps, I saw I had exactly 10,000. That triggered some neuron in my brain to fire at which point I did a – ahem – Google search and quickly found that the Apps limit is 10,000 contacts. I complained to Ross (our IT guy) who sent Google the following email: ...
Congrats to my friends at Gist for being acquired by RIM. I met TA McCann, the CEO / founder of Gist at the first Defrag Conference when he took me for a pair of runs along the Denver Creek Path and it’s been a blast to work with him and the Gist team ever since. Also, congrats to RIM for picking up an awesome team that’s been thinking about and building software for the intersection of social and email since before talking about it was in vogue.
Gist just released their Chrome extension for Gist in Gmail. Chrome is my browser of choice for Gmail and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this release. It’s just awesome. It’s tightly integrated with both consumer and enterprise Gmail. It’s fast, light weight, and takes advantage of the huge amount of data discovery that Gist does via the cloud (rather than in-browser). It’s been really fun to watch my friends at Gist really come into their own in the past six month. With the release of Gist in Gmail on both Firefox and Chrome, along with the Gist Gadget for Google Apps , they’ve got Gmail now totally wired. ...