Disqus - Latest Comments for Mike Koss

Re: 3 Rules of Gnomedex 8.0

Mike Koss — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:01:44 -0000

It was a great conference. I'll disagree that there were no hallway conversations, though. I saw lots of networking in the hallways - I skipped out on a couple of sessions because I was finding it even more interesting to meet and talk with some of the other attendees. Great meeting you over dinner, BTW.

Re: Elon Musk steps in as CEO at Tesla, lays off staff

Mike Koss — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:34:16 -0000

Tesla should get a piece of the $25B that the Detroit auto makers have been asking for in their bailout (http://g02.me/1e). Regardless of current gas prices, I'm convinced we need to move to the flexibility of electric vehicles - and our government should help with investing in the infrastructure/technology transition.

Re: Faves.com still alive, but on life support

Mike Koss — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:59:00 -0000

The math of advertising to the general Internet audience is pretty bleak. At $1 to $2 CPM, 2 Million Page views brings in under $4,000 per month - not a sustainable business if you have full time employees. Faves would have needed 10x the traffic volume to sustain an active full-time development team.

Re: Bill Gates attends Swedish nuptials of pal Charles Simonyi

Mike Koss — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:49:00 -0000

I think Charles deserves the "father of Office" title. He lead the application development group from the earliest days and was involved in DOS (yes), Mac, and Windows versions before moving into his true passion - software engineering tools (http://go2.me/8g).

Certainly, he did not write the most code in the GUI projects - but he was a contributing developer and manager through the late 80's.

Re: Count Me In's Terry Drayton speaks out: 'This is not my legacy'

Mike Koss — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:27:00 -0000

Amazing story, John. Mr. Drayton is amazingly candid on this whole affair. Points I don't understand:

- If Drayton didn't know how much money he owed at any time, he didn't know if his company was generating profits or not (obviously, it was not). How do you operate for 8 years like that?

- Why would any investor come in now to pay off old debts?

- Why would any customer ever send any money to them again, not knowing if they will ever get it out?

- If the reality is that this business is over - have they done everything they can to shut down operations to preserve any capital to pay off creditors.

I can appreciate the character trait to persevere and not give up. But that trait become a flaw when, in the face of overwhelming evidence, he continues to pursue an unsalvageable situation.

Re: Microsoft.com as search brand?

Mike Koss — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:45:00 -0000

I think Microsoft botched their brand decision when then switched to "live".

First problem - people don't know if it's pronounced "live" (rhymes with hive) or "live" (rhymes with sieve).

Second problem - it's a common word AND it doesn't mean anything in the search context. You either create a totally new word (as Google did) or choose a brand that conveys your brand message. "Live" does not do either.

Third problem - MS is NOT spending enough to build the brand.

MS's best online brand name was "START.COM". They are pissing this away by just redirecting to "live.com". They used to run their personal home page (ala netvibes/iGoogle) on it - I can't even find the personalized home page anymore (though this article - http://go2.me/GS - says the new brand name is "Windows Live Personalized Experience" - typical MS marketing screwup).

I think the best solution for MS is to put all their search iron behind the "Start.com" brand - and really market this page as the best way to "enter" the internet. "Live" has just gotten too polluted with all the myriad of (poorly executed) services MS is dumping there.

Re: Microsoft Songsmith video: Charming or painful? Or both?

Mike Koss — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:31:00 -0000

Good God. Do the actors get hazard pay to make up for the shame and ridicule they will have to endure for being in this video?

Re: Microsoft Songsmith video: Charming or painful? Or both?

Mike Koss — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:15:00 -0000

The girl actually had a nice voice. Everyone else - not so much.

Re: NWEN names Rebecca Lovell as new executive director

Mike Koss — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:16:00 -0000

Awesome hire! Alliance of Angels will miss her.

Re: NWEN names Rebecca Lovell as new executive director

Mike Koss — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:51:00 -0000

@Keith

Rebecca was not recently at a startup, per se - she was Program Manager at the Alliance of Angels. In that role, she met with dozens of startup enterpreneurs each month and helped coach them through the application process to effectively pitch their companies to the AoA membership.

I've heard nothing but rave reviews from entrepreneurs who've interacted with her for her helpfulness and insight.

She's in a unique position to take the "pulse" of the Seattle startup scene with lots of great contacts to entrepreneurs and investors alike.

BTW - here's here LinkedIn profile: http://go2.me/YF

Re: Laid-off Microsofties offered free office space, Linux servers

Mike Koss — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:18:00 -0000

@gardenmentor and @Darren

The StarPad offer is intended to be open to all - not just MSFT and not just full time employees. If you're out of work, and want to start a software project or company, we'd love to offer you 30-days free co-working space.

If you want to meet others interesting in working together, I'd also suggests Roy Leban's Startup Brainstorming (free) event on Feb 5th.

http://go2.me/aC

Re: Lessons in startup failure

Mike Koss — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:11:00 -0000

Sorry I couldn't be there tonight. As an investor (and current CEO) in Faves.com, I understand how hard it can be for a founder to admit defeat. I certainly appreciate Mohit and Mikhail's willingness to stand in front of their peers to talk about their (our) mistakes.

One of the principle lessons I've taken away from the experience is to have a sense of proportionality in building a business. In hind sight, we "swung for the fences" - but we didn't really know if we had a good business opportunity. I now coach entrepreneurs to stay as small as possible while still "proving" out your idea - it's easier to adjust and make changes before you've invested millions in development and operations.

I now think running many more cheap "experiments" has a higher reward to risk ratio than going after a single "big idea".

I've heard many times about companies that didn't have the luxury to spend money, and were forced to do everything really cheaply, benefited in the long run by building profitable businesses by keeping expenses to a minimum while growing their business organically.

Re: Former Microsoft employee disputes spying allegations

Mike Koss — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:33:00 -0000

Even if Mr. Mullor improperly accessed Microsoft internal documents in the defense of his patent, this kind of bullying by large companies against independent inventors is not uncommon.

While Microsoft has every right to ask current employees to assign all "related" inventions to the company while under their employ, I find it very unfair for the company to require employees to assign prior patent rights to the company as a condition of employment w/o fair compensation.

Washington State has a law specifically addressing this situation (RCW 49.44.140 - see http://go2.me/fF). I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me it explicitly prevents companies from making these kinds of mandatory patent licenses a pre-condition of employment.

It seems to me that Mr. Mullor has a very strong case; fighting a company as large as Microsoft is daunting in the extreme. But I, for one, hope that the courts uphold the rights of individual inventors to seek just compensation for their intellectual property without fear of discrimination in employment agreements.

Re: Lessons in startup failure

Mike Koss — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:25:00 -0000

@anon - Faves.com's CPM's have historically fluctuated between $1 and $2. I just reviewed the last 3 months and found that we did not reach $2 on any day in that period - the average is closer to the middle of that range.

Regardless - traffic volume of 1M uniques per month at these ballpark CPM's is not sufficient to sustain a full time business. I would suggest entrepreneurs target at least 10M monthly uniques as a minimum before embarking on an ad supported business.

Note that there are probably fewer than 1,000 web sites in the world that command that level of traffic.

Re: Former Microsofties look to fuel new startups at 8ninths

Mike Koss — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:07:00 -0000

Founders Co-op seems like the other incubator you could have mentioned here:

http://www.founderscoop.com/

Re: Google pulls plug on popular text messaging iPhone application

Mike Koss — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:25:00 -0000

The fees associated with SMS messaging are all out of proportion to the costs of providing the service. We have the upside down situation where phones are coming out with unlimited data plans, but we still pay $0.10 to receive a 140 character text messages.

We had a company at StartPad last summer (now moved to the Bay area), Chatterous, who is providing a similar service of unifying chat across platforms, including SMS.

http://www.chatterous.com/

They had to lease a short-code from another provider; but there are ways to pay for SMS access without piggy-backing on Google's SMS integration.

Re: Swype swipes new capital

Mike Koss — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:05:00 -0000

Thanks for posting the TC50 video - looks like a very good technology. But what about the patent that seems to pre-date Swype? Do they have a license? Do they not think they are infringing?

http://go2.me/36M

Re: Twitter expert joins venture firm

Mike Koss — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:28:00 -0000

I love the idea of VC's acting as "patrons" for talented people like Damon. Madrona is doing a great service to the startup community by helping promising entrepreneurs bootstrap their new ideas before they've taken the plunge as founders.

Re: Perkins Coie sues Naveen Jain

Mike Koss — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:34:00 -0000

Naveen has had such a checkered past, this seems like small potatoes. I don't see how someone can't get the kind of reputation for being "not entirely honest" and still command an executive position at a major company. Do his investors not care about his past record. Does he deserve his reputation or not?

The articles in the Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly have been especially damning (links here):

http://go2.me/39S

I don't know Naveen personally, nor did I invest in his companies. But it sure doesn't look good when a founder makes out with $100's of millions while the majority of his investors lost all of their money.

The real story is "what is the state of business ethics" in Seattle? Is the only way to be a success to act like a crook, cheat, or liar?

Re: Amazon creates its own URL shortener for products

Mike Koss — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:47:00 -0000

@Anony,

While Amazon has had the domain quite a while, I think they are just recently making sure that their site can be used w/o bugs when accessed via the AMZN.com domain - no doubt, because of the growth of Twitter and micro-blogging.

I would look to see them promoting this more heavily and making it ever more convenient to use the shorter domain in Tweets.

Re: Porad: A 'lazy, messy, backwards' way of creating a startup

Mike Koss — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:44:00 -0000

Scott's talk was great. He's a real "developer's developer". Operationally, ICHC is doing a lot of things the "right" way. Despite taking some time to write unit tests for your code, I think that this is even more important for small teams (or single-man projects), because you just don't have the resources to have a testing team crawling over your code each release.

His laundry list of dev and monitoring tools was really great - and is a great aspirational list for how I would like to operate my services.

Re: Porad: A 'lazy, messy, backwards' way of creating a startup

Mike Koss — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:28:00 -0000

BTW, we'll be posting a high quality video and copy of Scott's slides over here:

http://startpad.org/countdown/cheezburgers-and-...

Re: Startup launches Twitter puzzles

Mike Koss — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:20:00 -0000

As Puzzazz's #1 fan (I have 246 solves under my belt), I think this is a great addition to his series of Daily word puzzles.

Here's a tip for twitter users - you can answer the Twitter puzzles using two different formats:

"your-answer @puzzazz" - this reply will be visible to all your followers

"@puzzazz your-answer" - only your followers that are also following puzzazz will see it

So, if your friends think your tweets are getting too spammy - you can use the second option to keep from annoying them (I have no problem sending 1 tweet per day about puzzazz, but multiple guesses might be a bit much).

Re: Complaint by Microsoft veteran spotlights Internet billing issues

Mike Koss — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:42:00 -0000

It was sad to see that my issue couldn't be resolved without a complaint to the state AG. But, I'm happy to see that Microsoft is now paying more attention to consumer rights based on this complaint.

Perhaps if more people would complain when companies take advantage of their trust, we'd get some laws in place to protect our rights.

- If you can signup online, I should be able to cancel online (w/o being put in call-center "hell").
- I should be able to remove my credit card information from any web site that stores it.

Thanks, Todd, for shedding some light on this issue.

Re: New stats confirm Bing upswing

Mike Koss — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:09:00 -0000

The StatCounter ranking is based on the number of visits to StatCounter-partner sites that are originating from search engines. So it counts search click-throughs (not number of searches). Based on their 4B page views per month, this seems a pretty good sample (though skewed to StatCounter site users - probably smaller web sites).

By way of comparison, I just checked the stats from Faves.com (with 350,000 visits from search last month).

Google - 71%
Yahoo - 22%
Microsoft - 6%

This is counting three sources from Microsoft:

MSN - 3%
Live - 2%
Bing - 1%

I'm presuming that the Live number will drop to zero next month as Microsoft is redirecting all Live.com traffic to Bing.com now.

I wonder what is behind the disparity of a 15% comScore share and the 3% click-through statistic from StatCounter?

Re: Managing information overload

Mike Koss — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:41:00 -0000

I needed this big time - 11,936 messages in my inbox (8,958 unread). Gulp!

Re: Microsoft's Ballmer calls Google dual OS strategy perplexing

Mike Koss — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:38:00 -0000

Steve is just being silly - spreading FUD.

I talked with some of the Googlers at their Seattle Meetup last night. I got the following very insightful analysis:

- Google Chrome has had the goal of building a web-application "platform" from the beginning of the project. The browser release was just the first stage.

- Their early announcement had nothing to do with timing against any Microsoft announcements - it was due to a published NYT article forcing them to disclose their project.

- Since CPU-cycles EQUAL Power Consumption, removing intermediate layers between the browser and the underlying OS means not just improved performance, but better battery life. Google thinks they turn a 7 hour netbook life into a 12+ hour netbook life.

I'm really looking forward to have a more "bare metal" browser-device, and all the performance gains such a system entails.

Re: An epic legal tussle: Fail Blog vs. Guinness World Records

Mike Koss — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:45:00 -0000

It also looks like Guinness took down the page on their site as well. It's no where to be found in Google, their own site search, or typing in the URL from the screenshot - appropriately adorned here:

http://www.quip-art.com/3K

Re: Add a funny image or tag line to any Web site with Quip-Art

Mike Koss — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:09:00 -0000

I *am* having fun with this. Here's my latest quip riffing on the news yesterday:

http://www.quip-art.com/56

Re: Add a funny image or tag line to any Web site with Quip-Art

Mike Koss — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:02:00 -0000

I've just written more detailed hints on making high-quality image overlays for Quip-Art. I'm hoping to attract artists or designers with more talent than myself to make some great overlays (and get links back from Quip-Art in return):

Hints are posted on the Quip-Art blog:

http://www.quip-art.com/5Y

Thanks!,
Mike

Re: Entertonement brings audio messages to Twitter with Chir.ps

Mike Koss — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:51:00 -0000

I just recorded an audio comment here:

http://chir.ps/9V

I love the *idea* of sending recorded audio clips over twitter. In practice, I'll admit to feeling a little self conscious actually doing it. Typing lets us refine our expression very easily until we are satisfied. An audio recording is more like a "live performance" - which most of us are not used to.

Anyway, I think the Chir.ps team has done a great job with their initial launch. I hope this does take off as I think it could be really interesting to *hear* from other people on Twitter.

Re: Innovation: The lessons of Bob

Mike Koss — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:05:00 -0000

Monica,

Really great post. I hope you'll indulge me sharing some of my own thoughts on Bob's demise.

I was on the Excel team while Bob was being developed. I would say I was one that didn't "get it" from the beginning - but I think that's what makes startups and innovation so difficult; the idea of creating a more consumer approachable user interface seems like a laudable goal. The thesis that the "environmental UI" is something that could really have made a difference seems plausible.

And I'm certain there was positive feedback along the way. Customers were coming into usability tests and saying they "loved it" - or the project would have been killed long before. But were they representative of how the product purchase decisions would really be made?

There are probably many reasons why Bob did not succeed:

- Slow performance for a rich GUI on underpowered machines.
- Too much fluff and not enough substance.
- Did not appeal to the early adopters that were then driving sales in the PC software market.

I think the lesson here is that:

Success = Idea + Execution + Timing

It seems that Bob did not adequately test the market adoption potential before sinking millions into the product development. And then the team shipped a product before it was ready. That's pretty much a death sentence, and very hard to recover from.

Bob did live on in the User Assistant feature of Office - a poorly received feature that was later killed. I recall product review meetings with Bill Gates about this; from the beginning he called the Assistant "The F***ing Clown" - but he let the team move forward anyway (in the source code, functions for the User Assistant were prefixed with the letters FC; which was euphemistically rebranded as "The Friendly Character").

Re: Innovation: The lessons of Bob

Mike Koss — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:05:00 -0000

Re: A 54 hour coding marathon

Mike Koss — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:06:00 -0000

Microsoft has been really generous with BizSpark - both the program itself, and in their sponsorship of events like StartupWeekend. Sure, they have a long-term commercial motive - but so does TechFlash, and so do most of the participants.

I don't think TechFlash coverage of the event has anything to do with their receiving sponsorship from BizSpark.

I'm thankful that Microsoft is out there helping to pay for some of the costs for StartupWeekend - w/o that they wouldn't happen at all or the participants would have to pay 10x the current registration fee to support it.

(BTW, I'm speaking at the event - but I'm not being paid by anyone to do so).

Re: iPhone app wins top honors at Microsoft sponsored event

Mike Koss — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:52:00 -0000

Also note that FriendMosaic got a $2,000 order from the BizSpark team during their presentation:

http://www.quip-art.com/TY

Re: iPhone app wins top honors at Microsoft sponsored event

Mike Koss — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:52:00 -0000

Also note that FriendMosaic got a $2,000 order from the BizSpark team during their presentation:

http://www.quip-art.com/TY