Today I picked up the keys to a little house in Boulder and started moving in. I was initially very confused by all the white stuff falling from the sky (we don't get that in Los Angeles) but I'm slowly adjusting. The day has mostly been a blur of unpacking and floor-mopping, but the neighborhood deer paid me a charming welcome visit, ambling slowly through our front yard. I was very surprised, we're well into the town (near Norris and 21st), but according to the locals this isn't uncommon.

A trip to the local Safeway produced another unexpected delight:

Unlike any mainstream California supermarket they have an entire section devoted to British food! Maltesers have pride of place (we've proven by extensive experimentation in our D&D group that Whoppers are far inferior), the gap in the Dark Chocolate Digestives (terrible name, divine cookies) is from me snatching a packet, and they even have cans of the appalling but amusingly named Spotted Dick dessert. There's Heinz Baked Beans, the only brand for authentic Beans on Toast (the name is the recipe!), pickled onions (horrid and stinky), and most dangerous of all, Liquorice Allsorts. I see some serious dental bills in my future with this sort of temptation…

I'm working on a short description of where my business is at, and I'm publishing what I have so far, in the hope I'll get ideas on improving it. The audience is potential investors and other partners, and the goal is to just to start a dialog, so I'm keeping it short and snappy. Let me know in the comments what you'd think if this landed in your inbox.

Mailana Inc
"You guys should talk"

Mailana produces actionable information from your
electronic conversations. It analyzes email and IMs to answer questions
like "Which of my friends know this person?", "Who in my circle knows
about this subject?" and "How can I connect with somebody at this
organization?"

The public Twitter demo has won praise from people like Tim O'Reilly, Brad Feld, Brian Solis of TechCrunch and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.

The system also runs against Microsoft Exchange,
downloading and analyzing the email messages for a team, department or
an entire organization. The information is then used to create
suggested profiles for each employee, forming the basis for a much more
detailed internal version of LinkedIn. Exposed through Outlook and
Internet Explorer add-ins, this stops companies reinventing wheels and
unlocks wasted potential resources within the business.

Mailana Inc was founded in July 2008 by Pete Warden,
previously a Senior Engineer at Apple. Its goal is to improve the world
by getting the right people talking to each other. With a fully working
code-base that's been deployed in real companies, it's currently
looking for partners to help as it moves from a science project into a
commercial proposition.

contact: pete@mailana.com

blog: http://petewarden.typepad.com/

I was chatting with Ian Goldsmid about what information sales people need about their networks, and he pointed me towards InsideView. They take the cornucopia of information available online about people and companies, and distill it into a very focused set of tools to help you sell, a little like Gist without the email connection. Imagine seeing that the sales lead you're contacting used to work at Cisco, so you can talk about their successful use of your product. You can also look at which of your existing customers know a prospect, maybe their testimonial would help make that sale.

Looking through their blog and other material (like this interview with their CEO Umberto Milletti) I was struck by a few things. First, there's obviously a big market demand from sales folks for better tools. Their Salesforce integration gets a 4.8/5.0 rating from customers, with 73 reviews containing comments like "Awesome tool!" and "Great for prospecting". With over 200 organizations using it in-house, with a cost starting at $1200 annually per seat, they're obviously delivering a lot of value!

Second, Umberto reports a lot of success with Salesforce's AppExchange as a distribution channel. I find that very interesting, because I'm convinced that most startups live or die on their distribution model. It doesn't matter how good your product is if there's no efficient way to get it to people who will benefit from it. I will be poking into the details of the Salesforce platform, but so far it seems very promising. The sales world is a domain I don't know much about, but it is obviously a natural market for tools like Mailana that offer rich ways of exploring social networks.

Photo by viernullvier

…is asking for help. Or to be more specific, exposing my ignorance and uncertainty when I ask for help. I've no problem asking for programming advice because I'm confident in my engineering knowledge. The business world is something else. I started my own company because I wanted to stretch myself in a completely new area, and I'm learning as I go. The trouble is, I have to project confidence to persuade people I'm on a mission worth supporting. How can I do that and ask for help when I need it?

So far I'm solving that by opening up to a few confidants and staying on-message with the rest of the world. My dilemma is there's lot of people can offer help but also need to see me showing confidence in my approach.

So what's the solution? I'm going to be more open about the questions I'm struggling with, and focus on learning from other people's experience rather than just trying everything for myself. Luckily there's a golden opportunity for me to do just that on the horizon- stay tuned for more details once I can share them…

Photo by Lite

Having dinner with a friend last night, one of the topics that came up was our shared obsession with statistics. It reminded me how looking at the wrong numbers has tripped me up. As an old teacher told me "You start off measuring what you value, and end up valuing what you measure".

As a concrete example, I have no idea how much I weigh. I stopped looking at scales years ago because  watching that number fluctuate day to day made me stressed out and demotivated. What I do watch is whether I can fit into my pants! That skips the stress of worrying about a few pounds, but warns me if I'm drifting from my normal range.

Another topical example is the stock market. I don't believe in stock-picking, so I'm purely invested with a low-fee S&P 500 index fund. I desperately try to avoid seeing the day-to-day level, because my primate brain will kick into flight mode when it drops and I'll be tempted to sell. As Behavior Gap explains very well, that's why individual investors sell low and buy high, getting dramatically worse returns than institutions. Again, that rapidly fluctuating number isn't really what I care about – it's how much I'll get years from now when I sell.

Once you start tracking a number, it becomes a priority. I'm fanatical about measuring user engagement with Mailana, because improving people's experience with the service is the only way I can make progress. I have a daily list of statistics for visits, bugs reported and twitter mentions, and seeing that every morning really helps me focus on what's important. These are good metrics because I actually care about exactly what they're measuring.

Another quote I remember is "Give me your daily routine and I'll tell you what your priorities are" : what you spend most time on is what you value most. It's the same for measurements; decide what's important to you and then pick the statistics. Don't just pick what's convenient or you'll find yourself making decisions that improve the numbers but destroy your business.

One of my favorite parts of blogging is picking the images, and traditionally I've used Flickr's Creative Commons search to find some beautiful photos. For my Denver New Tech presentation I needed some historic photos, and that's one area where Flickr falls short. Most of the content comes from people's personal collections, and I really wanted an illustration of the Titanic sinking!

After doing some sniffing around, I discovered the WikiMedia commons collection. It's an amazing resource, a collection of over 4 million public domain pictures, animations and sound files. Sure enough I found just the image I was looking for:

It's dangerous though, there's so much beautiful content I could have lost days just browsing. If you want to see some wonderful work, start with their quality and featured collections, or just search on a topic. Even better, they're all licensed under either the Creative Commons or are public domain, so you can reuse them for your own projects. You really have no excuse for boring slides any more!

Photo by Cobalt123

I'm just back from my four days off the grid, and I was surprised to find quite a few DMs from friends, some saying thanks, others a little puzzled. Looking through my own DM history I was mortified to discover twitter.mailana.com's auto-DM robot had misfired and spammed about 20 of my friends with links to their profiles. I hate, hate, hate getting robot emails or DMs from people I know, and never intended to do the same thing myself. If you expect someone to spend a few minutes of their time reading (and hopefully acting on) your message, the least you can do is take the time to type something unique yourself!

I immediately updated the code so that it won't happen again, and a big apology to everyone who got those messages. Twitter works surprisingly well with few rules, I don't want to be part of the Green-Card-Lotterization of the service.

If you're interested, here's what went wrong:

– If you search for your name on Mailana, and I haven't imported your messages yet, I bump you to the top of the queue. I also offer an option to follow me on Twitter, so that I can send a DM when that import's done.

– When I originally implemented this, import was a one-time thing, and I'd already imported all my real-life friends, and their friends, so I'd only be sending DMs to new followers.

– One of my top feature requests was continuous updating. A couple of weeks ago I added that, triggering an import whenever a profile was viewed that hadn't been updated in a few days. To avoid repeated DMs I track who I've sent messages to, and never send more than one. What I hadn't thought through was that the robot had never sent DMs to my original friends, so when somebody viewed their profile and triggered an import a message would get sent.

If I was starting over I'd create a separate account for twitter.mailana.com and only send DMs and announcements through that.

Photos by Liz

For the next 4 days, me and Liz are going to be cut off from the modern world. Even though it's only 20 miles off the LA coast, Santa Cruz Island feels like another century. No cell reception, roads, or permanent inhabitants, it's a 100 square miles of wilderness and beauty.

We'll be staying with the park rangers, and spending our time digging out and cutting back overgrown trails. I know that's not everyone's idea of a fun vacation, but for me there's nothing more therapeutic than smashing through rocks with a pick-ax, and boy does that beer at the end of the day taste good!