Tonight’s e-mail brought a reminder from Gaurav about the Seattle Tech Startups meeting next Wednesday, March 10th, at the Douglas Forum at the Executive Education Center at the UW Business School.

Michael Miller from Cloundant (YC S08) will be on hand to discuss CouchDB and their commercial offering. We’ll also have Eric Peters from Frugal Mechanic (Founders Co-op) to talk about Cassandra. We’re going to have one more speaker and would ideally like it to be someone who can discuss MongoDB. The sponsor behind MongoDB, 10Gen, is helping us find a speaker in Seattle in time for the meeting, but if you know someone who could fit the bill, please drop us a note.

The topic is relevant, timely, and should be of interest to a lot of geeky Seattleites.  I’ve played around in the last year with non-relational cloud offerings from Microsoft and Amazon and also had a geek crush for a long time on Google’s BigTable technology.  While I’m not convinced of the universal applicability of non-relational databases, I think that they definitely have a place in the massively-scalable technology environment.  And the tooling and support infrastructure has grown leaps and bounds in the last year or two, to the point where working with them is no longer a huge pain.

Hope to see you there!

Today after work I ran around Discovery Park – just about 3 miles door-to-door, but the magic is all within a quarter-mile stretch along the bluff, where you can look out 180 degrees, from West Seattle to Indianola.  There must have been about a dozen people just standing and staring out to Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, watching the sun about to set and letting the beauty soak in.

A metaphor for my day?  I had a good Monday by any reckoning.  I guess I’m getting much better at compartmentalizing and/or taking conscious control over my perspective and thoughts, because I felt good today.  The great weekend was part of it – I had a really good weekend – but the day just seemed to slip in, all stealthy, and infect me with feel-good vibes.

This is even though I didn’t win the Super Bowl pool at work.  I ended up getting crappy numbers in the draw – twos and sixes and such.  Who can win with numbers like that???

For the second time in the last week, I’ve been approached out of the blue to have a meeting re: Crowdify.  Strange, but very welcome.  If I can find some time I’m going to release version 2 of the website any day now.  Then – sales.  Sell, sell, sell.   Position the service as something that will solve tangible problems that brand managers and marketers have.  Emphasize the uniqueness of the data, and back it up with case studies from representative brands.  I think 2010 is going to be a big year.

What else?  Looking forward to a couple meetups and tech/networking events.  Tomorrow and Wednesday is the Agile Open Northwest conference, this time held at the Seattle Center, and I’ll be able to attend about half the sessions.  I’m going to present – on what, I’m not sure, but I have until tomorrow morning to text one of my team with the topic so they can put it up on the board tomorrow.  Tomorrow night is Founder Dating, but I’m definitely sure I won’t be able to attend.  I’m not even sure I’ll be able to get away for soccer tomorrow night.

Had a nice lunch today with an old friend and savored some delicious sushi.  I tried some fatty amberjack that was OMG-melt-in-your-mouth wonderful.  Catching up is always nice, and I always come away from a good lunch like that thinking I need to do a better job of keeping up with people.

Not sure if I’ll be able to attend this weeks’ Seattle Tech Startups meeting.  The topic – TechStars – is one that is probably going to draw a big crowd, and I’m sure the conversations at the Big Time after the meeting will continue late.  I’m meeting a friend in Bellevue earlier that evening and am not sure if I’ll be back in time.

Here’s to good friends; old, new, and yet-to-be.

Hope you’re having a good evening.

The next STS topic has been announced: “discuss trends and opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in 2010.”

The speakers are great:

We’re excited to share that we’ve lined up three great speakers to share their views on this topic: Chris DeVore (Founders’ Co-op), Michael Schutzler (BlueSeven Partners), and Bill Bryant (Draper Fisher Jurvetson). All of them are investors, advisors and board members to startups, and bring unique perspectives to the table. Visit the website for details on the speakers and their topics.

Bill Bryant in particular has been among the most active contributors to the STS discussion group since I joined it a couple years ago.  Can’t wait to hear what these guys have to say about 2010.  I’m hoping to pull some insights and motivation from them as I work hard to get the next revision of Crowdify out the door.

Wednesday, January 13th, at 7 PM at the Douglas Forum in the Bank of America Executive Education Center at the UW.

See you there!

Tuesday night I went up to the UW Business School for the monthly Seattle Tech Startups meeting.  This was one of the occasional “showcase” meetings, wherein they invite a few startups to demo their product or service in front of the crowd and take questions.

First up was Mark Briggs, of Serra Media.  Mark’s got some really interesting stuff going on in the hyperlocal journalism space.  This is an area of interest of mine – it’s the junction of community, technology, and writing – and Mark rightly notes that Seattle is at the forefront of the hyperlocal movement.  Last fall I saw a great presentation given by Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog, and my friend Mónica Guzmán of the Seattle P-I’s Big Blog is also very much a player in hyperlocal.

I don’t think the product is very technologically advanced – there’s probably not a lot of “secret sauce” behind his product – but he and his team out there, pushing the boundaries of the next wave of journalism, selling, getting publishers, retailers, and advertisers together, engaging them, and driving the vision.  I applaud him and hope to get to know him better via future events.

Bluyah was next – they have a sort of “ETL platform on steroids” and the CEO, Richard Luck, gave a presentation outlining their value prop and roadmap.  I personally think they have a hard row to hoe, because my own experience with ETL and reporting at large organizations is that it rarely becomes so much of a sharp pain point that they would want to outsource the guts of the process.  ETL and reporting challenges feel more like getting your arm sawed off with a wooden spoon – it takes forever to realize you’re fucked.  But I wish Richard luck (pun!).

Next up was Justin Wilcox of Fotozio, who gave an entertaining, blunt, no-holds-barred presentation on his experience developing and selling PicTranslator, an iPhone application that lets you do near-instant translations of foreign-language signs.  He’s got a launch party scheduled for tomorrow night at the Ballard Art Church which I’m attending.  I really liked listening to Justin – it was very eye-opening hearing about his real-world experience in the iPhone application world.

I missed the last presentation, choosing to head out a little early while they were having technical issues.  Any readers out there who were at the STS meeting care to leave a comment about the last company?

August’s Seattle Tech Startups meeting topic is “monetization”, which is your fancy geek-speak for “selling stuff to people.”   As usual, it will be held at the Douglas Form at the Executive Education Center, 4th floor, and there’s typically a good turnout, so get there early!

The speakers are Chris Hopf of http://pricingwire.com/, whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting, and Tony Wright, who is one of my favorite STS types for all the time and attention he devotes to the STS mailing list.  Oh, and his avatar used to be this bitching pose of him with a pipe, which was at once trendy and anachronistic.  He took it down and replaced it with a more vanilla “Hey!  I run an up-and-coming tech company!” avatar, which was like a TOTAL sellout.  Nevertheless, he’s a really great guy, an engaging speaker, and well worth the 90 minutes of your time.

Oh, and they have a community drink-a-thon over at the Big Time Brewery after every STS meeting, so, if you’re so inclined, you can network over some of the University District’s finest ales.

See you there!

Tomorrow night (June 10th), Jeff Lawson of Twilio will be giving a talk on Cloud Computing at the monthly Seattle Tech Startups meeting. Apparently Jeff gave a similar talk at the June 4th Amazon AWS Start-Up Tour which was very well received, according to comments I read on the STS mailing list.

The STS Wiki has details on when and where, if you’re interested in going. Should be a great talk, following up on last month’s great discussion!

UPDATE:Here are Vanessa Fox’s slides and here is Scott Porad’s slide deck.

Last night at STS Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue gave a great talk on SEO – she really, *really* knows her stuff and is one of the acknowledged worldwide experts on the topic. Scott Porad of Pet Holdings (I Can Has Cheezburger, and other sites) then talked about User-Generated Content and wove together a lot of great thoughts into a very interesting presentation.

Mike Koss of StartPad has posted both videos here for your viewing pleasure. Highly recommended!

After being a more-or-less regular attendee throughout 2008, I didn’t attend Tuesday night’s Seattle Tech Startups (STS) meeting.  Part of the reason is that the topic was taxes, which isn’t really my cup of tea.  As I was thinking of whether or not to go, however, it occurs to me that STS monthly meetings are more than just listening to the topic at hand; these monthly meetups offer entrepreneurs and tech types a chance to meet and catch up with other like-minded people.  Sometimes the post-STS discussions have been more valuable than the actual presentations.

STS is a good thing for the Seattle startup community – but it could get better.  We all can.

What would take STS – a popular, competently managed, local community interest group – from where it is now to where it could be in the most wild Tom Peters fantasy land? Here are my marketing and promotional suggestions.

1. Use the e-mail list. You have lots of e-mail addresses from past attendees and presenters.  Yet this month I didn’t get an e-mail inviting me to the meeting.  The only notice was sent to the STS subscriber mailing list.  Opt-in e-mail addresses are an asset and people want to hear what’s coming up.  Leverage this.
2. Blog. Yes, there’s the wiki,  but to my mind it’s underutilized and underperforming.  A STS-branded blog, updated a few times a month, would be a big step in building the brand.
3. Set up a Twitter account. Obvious?  Apparently not.  STS needs a Twitter account since so many of the active participants are on Twitter.  It’s a great vehicle for building community.
4. Set up a YouTube channel. Every month there are one or more videos produced at an STS meeting.  Here’s an example of the talk I gave last April. They’ve been uploaded to Google Video, but STS should take advantage of the broader audience at YouTube and establish their own branded channel. People can subscribe to the channel, participate in discussions, etc. etc.
5. Spice up the communications. The e-mail meeting notices to the STS list are pretty dry.  Add pictures of the presenters.  Get some pro-bono time from a local designer to spice things up a bit visually.  Use the power of HTML.
6. Set up a Flickr group. Someone should take pictures of each meeting (and afterparty at the Big Time) and upload them to an STS-branded Flickr group.  Lots of essentiall free social media benefit for very little cost.
7. Aggressively engage the community. After the last meeting invite, someone (I forget who) made a sort of funny, sarcastic comment back to the STS list to the effect of “If you wanted people to come to the meeting, why did you choose ‘taxes’ as the topic?” Har har, yes, taxes are boring.  However, an opportunity was missed to step in and not only answer the commenter but also get in front of hundreds of interested subscribers with a thoughtful, informative reply.
8. Monthly Profiles. There are a lot of very interesting people in the local startup community.  Pick one person a month, have them write a short bio with a picture, ask them respond to a few written questions, get a couple testimonials from others in the industry, and blog it / send it out to the e-mail distribution list.  Easy win.
9. Make STS an online destination. The title of “primary online startup information resource in Seattle right now” isn’t held by STS.  If anything, that honor goes to Marcelo Calbucci’s Seattle 2.0 portal.  STS should be the leader in that unique junction of tech, business, startups, and Seattle.
10. Solicit monthly sponsors. Even an non-paying sponsor gets you something – a sense of greater community involvement; karma; the possibility that they will sponsor other future events; and you get helpful information on that sponsor’s offerings in front of the community.
11. Cross-promote events. Work with the other local startup organizations like NWEN, WTIA, MIT Forum, etc. to cross-promote events.  Help each other out and everyone wins.
12. Facilitate networking. STS principals are in a unique position of having the capability to meet just about everybody in the local startup scene.  Use that information to acquaint people with each other who should be connected.  Facilitated introductions are SUPREMELY good ways to get people to fall in love with you.
13. Note milestones. Every month there are a few milestones announced at the STS meeting.  Compile these and blast them out to the STS list and the blog.  You’ll make some people happy, encourage even more announcements, and increase the wealth of the whole community.

OK, that was thirteen items, not twelve.   Have any ideas of your own to add?  Are any of these ideas unworkable?  Let us know in the comments section!

On the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list, there’s been a discussion recently about the pros and cons of various development platforms.  Eventually it devolved, as many of these discussions do, into a general throwing up of hands and a recommendation by several people to avoid development stack debates, because it inevitably leads nowhere.

I’m not so sure I agree with the proscription.

It seems to me that there are few things in play:

1. Very few developers know more than a few stacks well enough to assess whether or not they are REALLY better or worse for certain tasks.  For example, I don’t have enough Python or Ruby experience to be able to pass on anything other than secondhand knowledge (and my own guesses) about their true capabilities relative to, say, .NET.
2. There are intrinsic and extrinsic factors that can be evaluated for each stack.  Intrinsic factors are things like readability, breadth and depth of built-in libraries, expressiveness, flexibility, etc.  Extrinsic factors are things like cost, availability of developers, vendor support, etc.
3. The notion that each common stack is as good as the other is bunk, in my opinion.  Maybe it’s my latent objectivist streak, but just as C# is objectively more productive than assembler for web development, you could pit any two languages, and – given perfect information – come up with a rank-ordered list for any required scenario.

Someone on the STS list asked the reasonable question: “where do I go to get information about the various choices?”  I agree with the commenter who thought listservs like STS are a great place to go in theory.  It’s mostly working professionals, in or near the startup experience, and refreshing lacks the anonymous yahoos that flame away on Google Groups tech lists.

I’ve been hearing Robert Scoble yak for months, nay, years, about the “walled garden” metaphor in social networking. This is where a vendor, say, Facebook, locks in users by restricting their ability to move their social graph to other, possibly competing services.

It appears that the trend is slowly moving in the direction of portability, which is a win for average Janes and Joes, not to mention the Scobles and Calacanises of the world who have about 1.0*10^12 friends apiece and who are singularly responsible for recent Twitter downtime, among other horrible crimes.
There’s a larger issue, which is almost the reverse of the walled garden issue, and that is, how valuable are silo networks in the first place? The item that got me thinking was a post by Ken Ross on the Seattle Tech Startups list about his new venture called ExpertCEO:

We’re writing to invite CEO’s, COO’s and Presidents to join ExpertCEO, a private on-line community where senior executives can confidentially exchange ideas with peers, locate trusted resources, ask questions of experts across a range of disciplines, and quickly solve real-world business problems. The site combines social networking technology with concepts proven by CEO membership organizations like Vistage and YPO

I was immediately brought back to 1992, when I was the store manager for a Mailboxes, Etc. franchise, and a guy who had a mailbox there invited me to join a similar organization. His gig was to go around to different cities, set up an irresistable buzz among the wanna-be CEOs, collect his membership dues, then hand over the managerial reins to some clueless schlub and go on to the next town.

The thing was, I was 20 years old at the time and had no executive experience of any sort. I was a struggling student who happened, by dint of responsible behavior, to land this slightly less crappy job than most of the other students. But when he invited me to join his super-CEO group, I was thinking something along the lines of “I wouldn’t want to join any organization that would want to have me as a member.” I went to one introductory meeting and it was a roomful of mostly clueless, mostly preening young guys who had big ambition but not much in the way of real mentoring, or anyone they could ask to see “is this thing really worth my time?”

I’ve been fortunate since to have a couple older mentors who have taught me a lot – often through osmosis – and so now, when I see the ExpertCEO pitch, I immediately reject it. But let’s assume for the moment that this guy, Ken Ross, is a decent guy who really thinks that this idea has legs. He might be thinking along the lines of the job-hunting site for “people making over 100K a year”, TheLadders.com

Does it have legs? Do “communities of interest” have a place?

I get a lot of value out of my self-selected network(s): Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I also get a lot of value out of special-interest groups I belong to (formally or informally), such as the Seattle Tech Startups group itself. What’s worth paying for, and what’s not? Is Twitter worth paying for? Is Biznik? Is ExpertCEO?

Recently on STS there was a long series of discussions about whether it was useful for startup founders to subscribe (pay for) membership in the various Angel and VC funding organizations, like NWEN, Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu, etc. There were strong sentiments on both sides of that argument.

What do you think?