Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Big In Japan Open Sources Their Ruby On Rails Tools

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 17, 2006
in Open Source, Software and Startups
. 0 Comments

The kind folks over at Big In Japan have graciously decided to Open Source the code they used to build their demo web sites. It’s all Ruby on Rails code, and it’s being released with a GPL license. The code trees being made available include:

Very cool. I just love the Open Source community.

I have actually been writing some code of late, and it’s great to have some reference code to check out. Not sure if I’m going to go with Ruby on Rails yet, however.

And, for the record. I have no idea if this is big in Japan.

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Is My Toyota Prius Hybrid Worth It?

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 17, 2006
in Gadgets, Personal and Technology
. 3 Comments

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Lifehacker asks if a hybrid is worth the money. They reference an excellent article written by OmniNerd, which is worth a read by anyone considering the purchase of a hybrid vehicle.

Since I recently purchased a 2007 Toyota Prius hybrid, I thought I’d comment.

First, the OmniNerd article is very well written and researched. Many thanks to the author. The conclusion is basically that the cost of hybrids is higher than the return you will achieve through the reduction of gas consumption. I think this conclusion doesn’t surprise most people, but it’s great to back it up with some good math.

OmniNerd also points out that hybrid batteries will need to be replaced in 8-10 years. They did not add this cost to the total cost of ownership of a hybrid vehicle in their calculations. If they did, the hybrids would have looked even worse. However, they do note that hybrids appear to be holding their value better than a comparable non-hybrid.

For me, the cost of the vehicle is a sunk cost — I save until I can buy a car, then pay cash. I’m a delayed gratification kind of guy. As such, the OmniNerd calculations of the loan payments versus a paid-off 1999 Honda don’t really factor into my mind. For those that are financing, the monthly payments certainly would.

For me, I feel like I have an extra $25 in my wallet every time that I visit the pump now. I like that feeling. I’m 6-weeks into ownership of the Prius with 2,400 miles on the beast already. Overall mileage for me is currently 47.7 MPG. Your mileage may vary.

OmniNerd neglects to mention the lower emissions as a value of the hybrids — one that is harder to put a price on. The stats on the windshield showed the Prius to have one-fifth to one-tenth fewer emissions than non-hybrids. I like that feeling, too. Whenever I sit at a 3-minute stop light with the engine completely off and think about the 50 other cars around me chugging gas and spewing emissions while we wait our turn, then multiply that number times the hundreds of thousands of red lights across the world at that very moment, it certainly makes me think.

Who has done that math?

It’s gotta add up.

Oh, and OmniNerd has no way to calculate the value I receive by using the carpool lanes because I drive a low-emissions high-mileage vehicle. Lower stress, longer life.

So, yeah, I paid more up-front than a comparable non-hybrid car. No argument about that. But, I was happy to do so for all the other benefits.

Finally, Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive really is a masterful piece of engineering. Hybrids will become a natural part of most cars in the next 5-10 years. Battery technology will also improve in that time (I look forward to the introduction of Lithium-Ion batteries, naturally), and you will see common MPG ratings of 80+ MPG within 5 years (perhaps much sooner).

So, back to the math. If we all doubled our mileage, our oil consumption would drop in half. That’s easy math. Triple it and it drops to one-third. You get the idea. Progress continues, and I welcome it. I’m happy to support the innovators.

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Google Reader: Actually Quite Good

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 16, 2006
in Software and Startups
. 3 Comments

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I’ve been using NetNewsWire for as long as I’ve been reading RSS feeds. I like it. A lot. It’s a very well done piece of software. However, it has pretty much stopped any new, active, or interesting development since Ranchero Software (the makers of NetNewsWire) was acquired by NewsGator.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There is an Alpha version of the 3.0 release available that I have been using for the last couple of months. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really have anything new. I was looking forward to the expanded view, but the performance was so poor that I quickly turned that option off.

The other problem I was having with NetNewsWire is that the overall performance and memory consumption had greatly increased. You see, I had been using NetNewsWire as the search engine to look through my 311 feeds for articles that I was interested in. As such, I never deleted an article from the cache. I always had about 10,000 articles that were unread and tens of thousands of articles that had been read. I don’t think NetNewsWire really could scale to the sheer number of articles effectively, without consuming memory and making my laptop swap.

I looked at Google Reader when it was first announced, but it was complete junk.

Google updated it, so I decided to give it another try.

Congrats to the Google Reader team. It’s actually quite good! It just may stick for me.

I particularly like the “Expanded View” and quickly stepping through articles with the “j” keyboard shortcut.

Now, if I could only get a couple more features…

  • The ability to have “smart tags” that search through articles and the articles that match the search criteria end up in the “tags” folder automatically. I use this to automatically spot the companies that I care about that are hits in my collection of RSS feeds.
  • The ability to search through all the articles in all of my RSS feeds, going back to the beginning of the feed. Google is a search company, right? Why isn’t there a “search” field on the Google Reader page?

I’m sure I’ll find other features that I’d like once I spend more time in Google Reader. I’ll keep you posted.

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Gizmondo & Ferrari Destroyer Does (Little) Time

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 16, 2006
in Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

I previously covered the excellent Wired story about Bo Stefan Eriksson and the crazy happenings over at Gizmondo. The court results are in. Stefan is doing 3.5 years for embezzlement and drunk driving. Seems pretty lenient, if you ask me. You would think the DUI alone would result in more jail time - it certainly would if it happened in his home country of Sweden. Oh yeah. He was fined $5,000. Deputy District Attorney Tamara Hall says that “justice has prevailed”.

Josh Goldman at CrunchGear comments:

An LA court sentenced him to 3 1/2 years in jail after entering a guilty plea to charges of embezzlement and drunk driving, which was sparked by his spectacular crash of a Ferrari Enzo into a telephone pole. His multi-million dollar home was seized as well, and he’ll be getting a swift boot out of the country after his time is served.

The BBC article is here. And, Emma Boyes at GameSpot UK sums it up nicely as well.

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VC is Local… And Global… And Local

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 16, 2006
in Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

I love the Venture Capital model that Draper Fisher Jurvetson has put in place for building a very distributed partnership that can act locally while being completely global. As a result, they get some serious cross-pollination effects that give their firm a competitive advantage.

This is keiretsu for the new millenium.

VC firms that cannot figure out how to effectively embrace the global aspects of the technology markets will not be able to compete.

Matt McCall of DFJ Portage Venture Parnters wrote a great article on this topic:

We have firms using Russian & Estonian programmers, selling product to Asia and competing with European competitors. New technology models in mobile are popping up in Asia & Europe years before the US and next generation silicon is emerging from China before our Valley brethren can get out of the starting blocks. Interestingly enough, both of the CEO’s above had heard of FeedBurner, located in Chicago, and had several RSS efforts they wanted to potentially work with them on.

Seeing all of these firms interacting and talking is a big rush for me. It reminds me that our world is much more than simply building the best Midwest technology firms but rather about building the best global technology firms. The spoils accrue to the #1 or #2 firms and the rest get table scraps. Without this global perspective, it becomes very difficult to understand this global market.

Major agreement.

Hats off to DFJ for thinking out of the box / out of the US, and for putting a VC firm structure in place that supports the “think globally, invest locally” philosophy.

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Wireless Electricity: Now That’s A Market

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 16, 2006
in Technology and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

Some time ago, I wrote about the obvious need for wireless electricity — even if it’s as simple as the power I use to recharge my devices. I say “obvious”, because you don’t have to be a genius to know that wires hold us captive. Removing wires gives us freedom and mobility. Freedom and mobility are good. Duh. Trickle-charging my devices while I roam would go a long way to extending the life of my battery, methinks.

Anna Salleh for ABC Science Online has the story:

Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present his team’s work at the American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco this week. [...]

Prof Soljacic says he has found a way of transmitting energy so that only the devices that it is recharging will pick it up, so it will not affect humans.

Instead of using traditional radiation, he wants to use the part of the electromagnetic field that is ‘non-radiative’.

He says devices can be tuned to the frequency of this field and thus act as a sink for all the energy the transmitter gives out.

Prof Soljacic says this would prevent energy radiating out to areas it does not need to go to, providing an efficient and safe method of wireless energy transfer.

“The team calculates that an object the size of a laptop could be recharged within a few metres of the power source,” he says. “Placing one source in each room could provide coverage throughout your home.”

Prof Soljacic also thinks the technology could be used to power freely roaming robots in a factory.

Yeah, baby.

I’ll let somebody else test that first. In the mean time, where’d I put that extension cord? Tesla must be so proud.

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STIRR Founder Mixer 1.8

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 16, 2006
in Open Source, Software, Startups and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

I attended the STIRR Founder Mixer 1.8 tonight in Palo Alto. Charles River Ventures sponsored the event and introduced their QuickStart program to the packed house. Then, the four invited companies got to present a 60-second elevator pitch about their business, and answer a question or two from the host. All the presenters did an excellent job.

For my part, I was attending as an “Advisor Capitalist” — someone who invests in an early stage company only if he/she feels that they can actually add value to the company by working with the founders directly. That value can come in the form of fund raising assistance, business planning, technology review, architectural considerations, partnering strategy, pricing analysis, competition, corporate structuring, or organizational plan/issues.

My reactions on the presenting companies below…


Frucall allows you to call 1-888-DO-FRUCALL on your mobile phone while you are shopping to find out the best online price for an item. You enter the barcode number of the item of interest, listen to the response, choose to buy from Frucall immediately, get product information verbally, or bookmark the item for later review from your PC. I see where they are going, but I don’t think that consumers want to buy items from their mobile phone for mail-order delivery while in a retail store shopping for an instant gratification purchase. Perhaps that’s just me. I tried the service with the bar code from my iLife ‘06 package, but couldn’t get a match. Also, it’s hard for people to know which numbers constitute the whole bar code. And, the ad at the beginning was pretty long. This might be easier with an SMS message of the bar code…


Kongregate is a casual games site that allows you to play (Flash-only?) games online for bragging rights. I love the market. Couldn’t try the service, as it is not open for use quite yet. They describe themselves as “online hub for players and game developers to meet up, play games, and operate together as a community”. I also like the fact that “Kongregate shares microtransaction and advertising revenue with contributing developers, who retain the full rights to their games.” Well done. The challenge, of course, is to build the player and developer user base concurrently.


Krugle is the place you go to find code and find answers. Krugle is a well-funded startup with funding from folks like Emergence Capital Partners, Omidyar Networks, First Round Capital,
and Rustic Canyon Partners. Krugle also has a seasoned CEO on board in Steve Larsen. I’m a big fan of Krugle. I wrote CVS and contributed it to the Open Source community back in 1989, so I love any tool that helps developers build great software more efficiently. Krugle does that.



What Expedia is for Hotels, Liftopia is for Ski Resorts. OK. Full disclosure. I did live in Colorado for 16 years and I am a snow boarder. But, that’s not why I like Liftopia. I think these guys are onto an under-served market. Their CEO really seems to “get it”. Their site is nicely done. Unfortunately, they don’t have too many resorts on board yet, but some good, hard business development work will get them there. I expect to see some good things from these guys.

All in all, a very enjoyable STIRR event. Just a bit too loud.

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Microsoft Zune in One Word: Yawn

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 15, 2006
in Gadgets, Mobile, Technology and Venture Capital
. 1 Comment

‘Nuff said.

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Zimbra Collaboration Suite 4.0

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 12, 2006
in Gadgets, Mac OS X, Mobile, Open Source, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

Previously, I’ve talked about how my Nokia E61 smartphone does not seem to work correctly with the IMAP IDLE support offered by my Dreamhost email server. I contacted Dreamhost support about this, and they tell me that it’s not their fault. It must be a bug in the Nokia E61 IMAP client.

The problem is that the Nokia E61 Email client, when connected to my Dreamhost email server via IMAP, refuses to download new email automatically. I have to specifically ask it to do so. Having grown tired of that, I decided to give Zimbra a try.

The problem with Zimbra is that if you are a Sole Proprietor and only need a single mailbox for your business, trying out Zimbra can be a pretty costly experiment. Lots of the Hosting Partners that support Zimbra charge big setup fees and large monthly fees for Zimbra Mobile support, which I needed for my Nokia E61 to have full access via the Nokia Mail for Exchange (ActiveSync) client.

Having found no love from the Hosting Partners in the US, I moved on to the UK. Simply Mail Solutions offered the full Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 4.0 Network Profession Edition with support for Zimbra Mobile and iSync synchronization for my Mac iCal and Address Book contacts. They offer this with $0 setup fee, the ability to purchase just one mailbox, and for the low monthly price of under $8 (US). Competitors in the US were charging setup fees more like $99 and monthly fees of over $20. Simply Mail Solutions won the business.

What was even better was that their customer support was excellent. Keith over at Simply Mail Solutions set up my account and took very good care of me.

If you are looking for Zimbra mailbox support, check these guys out. Tell them I sent you.

I will return later with my reactions to the Zimbra product.

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I Hate Spam: Mac OS X Edition

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on November 12, 2006
in Mac OS X, Software and Startups
. 1 Comment

I Hate Spam.

I get lots of SPAM email — about 75 SPAM email messages per day.

As a result, I need a good SPAM filter.

In this edition of the I Hate Spam series, I wanted to introduce you to the best darn email SPAM filter that I have found for the Mac OS X operating system. SpamSieve.

I’ve tried both SpamAssassin and DSPAM on my Dreamhost email server. They continue to let SPAM messages through, no matter what I do to “train” and configure them. I have even gone so far as to run my email through SpamAssassin first, then DSPAM second and only deliver it to my inbox if neither believes the message is SPAM. Even doubled up, SPAM continues to get through. More on this in a separate article.

However, I have found a great tool that runs on my Mac OS X laptop and does an excellent job at filing away the SPAM. Not perfect, but pretty darn close, and much better than the combination of SpamAssassin and DSPAM described above.

Don’t even bother using the built-in “Junk” folder that Apple includes with Mail.app. It, too, is Junk. Instead, get SpamSieve. It’s cheap, well integrated into Mail.app, and it just works.

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