The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘moon’

Last year, Omega released a special edition timepiece to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo astronauts voyage to the moon.

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A Historical Recreation of a Copy

It has been suggested that the album is dead. That’s a bit hasty, I think; such an established musical tool can only be detonated when both the patron and the artist turn the key. What people are seeing is that the patrons (i.e.

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In a world of tracks, Pink Floyd fights for the album

It has been suggested that the album is dead. That’s a bit hasty, I think; such an established musical tool can only be detonated when both the patron and the artist turn the key

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In a world of tracks, Pink Floyd fights for the album

Just so you know, I’m not making light of warfare — it’s just that virtual training like this, while valuable, does remind one simultaneously of Modern Warfare and Ender’s Game . Of course, as this article notes , the current generation of potential soldiers has grown up in a digital age and expects a little Xbox with their ammo box.

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360-degree virtual combat room is like Iraq: The Arcade Game

This is an anonymous guest post from a well known startup executive:

When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools.

As Mark Suster recently noted, employees will never see a big payday at most startups unless the company shoots for the moon. This is probably why investors’ case for a company to sell early focuses exclusively on the founder: in most early-stage acquisitions, the liquidation preferences and deal-sweeteners only work for investors and founders.

Back when some companies sold at $50 million and others went public at $250 million, we could all agree that this was just how the cookie crumbled. But now that we live in a world where early-stage acquisitions are the only outcome to which most startups aspire, we have to re-allocate this smaller cookie.

The elephant in the room is that that founders and CEOs take almost all of it for themselves. I’ve looked at three or four deals recently as an adviser; in every case, the founder or CEO was taking more than half the company for himself, and leaving 10% for everyone else. Why aren’t we surprised when three months later that company can’t hire enough engineers?

Even when the company succeeds, the big-shot with the big payday may regret it. The difference between $10 million and $20 million in practical terms — whom you can date, where you can go, what you drive — is zero. But if you give an extra $10 million to the folks who fought shoulder to shoulder with you, everyone will feel better about what you accomplished together. You want your startup to end like Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and their butler sipping drinks on the beach.

This has always been true, but now that more startups are being bought, it has become less common. Consider the proceeds of a $50-million acquisition for a 100-person company that has raised $14 million with a typical liquidation preference:

• Because of the liquidation preference, the investors get $14 million right off the top. The remaining $36 million is divided according to equity ownership.
• Investors own 50%, and get $18 million, split between two firms
• The two founders own 33%, and split $12 million
• The 3-person executive team, including a CEO if one was hired, owns 10%, and splits $3.6 million. The team gets another $3 million as a severance payment or an earn-out, to sweeten the acquisition offer.
• The remaining 95 employees split 7%, each earning $27,000. Unlike the founders, the employees have to wait until their grants vest, working at a company no longer of their choosing for two years.

Now consider what would happen if the same company raises another $10 million, expands the employee option pool to hire more executives and to support 300 people. It is worth $250 million at the time of a public offering.

• There is no liquidation preference, severance payment or earn out. Everyone is paid according to the number of shares he owns.
• Investors by now own 60%, or $167 million, split between three firms
• The two founders own 20%, and split $50 million
• The executive team still gets 10%, but now splits it among 5 people. Each executive gets $5 million.
• The remaining 290 employees own 10%, with the first 100 employees hired getting the lion’s share, of say $200,000 each.

The point is not that this is a better outcome for all. Any fool would take the higher price if he knew he could get it, but you don’t know when or whether you ever will. The point is that employees at least stand a chance at a nice gain when a company is built to last, whereas founders benefit disproportionately from a quick flip.

So in a world of more quick flips, we need to increase the size of options pools, eliminate liquidation preferences – which just get picked up in subsequent rounds of financing by new investors, who screw the old ones — and provide better acceleration for everyone.

Otherwise, nobody will want to work for a startup. But the reverse is happening. VCs want their pound of flesh, and entrepreneurs do too. In fact, the 20% of company ownership that was once considered the standard allocation for executives and other employees is now more likely to be at 10%.

If we’re all a little less greedy now, we’ll build bigger companies later and everyone will make more money, and feel better about it too.

There are plenty of collaborative document editors out there, but when it comes to getting input about a new document or PowerPoint deck, many businesses still rely on the tried-and-true method of printing them out, handing them around the office, and asking people to scribble their notes directly onto their printed copies. If that situation sounds familiar, you’ll probably want to check out Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today. Crocodoc makes it easy to share and mark up virtual documents the same way you would on a piece of paper, and it only takes a few seconds to start using it.

Crocodoc is an extremely straightforward service, and you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it — just upload a document, and a second later you’ll be in the Crocodoc editor. Markup tools include Sticky Notes, a highligher, text strikeout, and the ability to leave your own comments (a ‘pen’ tool is on the way). Editing a document should be very familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. If you’d like to try marking up a sample document, you can use this demo.

By default, the service assigns each uploaded a document a unique, “unguessable” URL, which you can use to share the document with friends, who can mark it up and add their own comments. But there’s one catch to the free version of the service: if you lose the document URL, that marked up document is lost for good (remember, you didn’t create an account to sign up).

Fortunately Crocodoc also offers a ‘Pro’ version, which lets you create an account that includes an archive of your previously uploaded documents. It also allows you to password protect your uploaded docs (as opposed to just relying on the hard-to-guess URL for security), and to use SSL encryption. Pro Accounts cost $8/month or $36/year. And for companies that are wary of uploading sensitive files, Crocodoc offers intranet deployments, which means that these customers can run it inside their firewalls on their own servers.

My only gripe about Crocodoc is the limited number of collaboration options  — you can share your documents with as many people as you want, but everyone will be editing the same one, which seems like it would get messy fast. This will be fixed in the near future, when Crocodoc starts allowing you to review edits on a per-user basis.

Crocodoc’s still quite basic, but that might be exactly what its customers are looking for.  And they may well be willing to spend $36 a year if it means they’ll have to print out fewer stacks of paper.

Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.

Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page.

Talent aside, what sounds interesting about Knowmore is their approach to the social noise problem. Rather than focusing on complex technologies that only seems to make social data more complicated (“why is this being shown,” etc…), Knowmore is building its product around user experience and human-centric design. The person who helped steer the early design of the product itself was Chad Pugh, the visual designer of Vimeo (though he’s not full time with the team).

As you can see on their splash page, Knowmore’s slogan is the “dashboard for the social web.” As you might expect, the idea is to port in your data from a variety of social networks, and let Knowmore serve it up to you in a way that cuts through the noise. As Mike wrote earlier this month, “social today feels like search a decade ago: lots of noise and lots of spam.” That’s exactly the problem Knowmore is going after.

They believe Facebook and Twitter cannot tackle these problems because they are communication pipes at their core. Knowmore is aiming to be a consumption platform instead.

So will it work? That’s impossible to know without seeing the product in action (the tentative launch date is Q2 2010). But the pedigree of the talent behind this startup and a simple execution of the core idea certainly makes it one worth watching.

Short Version: Hey ladies! Your Droid is here. The Motorola Devour (it’s actually DEVOUR but I refuse to shout at you) is a social media Android phone with enough style to beat down a million Droids. But is it just one more brick in the Android wall?

If your Gmail account is down or consistently throwing random errors your way, like my account is right now, note that it isn’t just you. According to the Apps Status Dashboard, a “significant subset of users” started running into trouble at around 9:45 AM Pacific Time.

At 11:34 PM, Google posted an update, saying that Google Mail service had been restored for some users, and that it expected a resolution for all users “within the next 4 hours” (estimate).

This is the first status update that was posted:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Google Mail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by February 25, 2010 8:44:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Affected users are experiencing difficulties or delays receiving mail fetched via POP from external mail providers to Gmail. These messages are not lost and should still be stored at the users’ external POP service.

And the second:

Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 4 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

It’s rare that Google speaks of a significant number of users when problems arise – usually they say a ’small subset’ – but a Twitter search actually shows a surprisingly low number of tweets about any issues people are having with their Gmail accounts.

We should note this isn’t the first time Google has had issues with Gmail, and just yesterday Google App Engine went down for an extended period of time.

Are you noticing anything out of the ordinary with the popular cloud service?

When it was announced that this administration was redefining space-related goals (and, many seemed not to notice, increasing NASA funding by $6bn) there were mixed reactions. We’d already spent a bundle on moon mission stuff, but it was over budget and behind schedule

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Buzz Aldrin: this “new direction” for space programs sounds great