Angels don’t belong in hell

September 24, 2010 at 11:11 am · Filed under Attention, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0

Robert Scoble makes some good points about Angel Gate in his post The secret hell of tech industry angel investors.

I mostly agree with what he says, except I think his underlying premise is wrong:

It’s good for entrepreneurs and good for users to have angel investors caught in hell. When they feel they have to spend more money to stay in the game, that’s good for all of the rest of us (press, users, entrepreneurs).

First, there really is a place for the classic angel – that is, the Ron Conway kind that is in it to help entrepreneurs succeed.  I don’t think it helps anybody if these angels are “in hell.”  The angels that Robert talks about are really VC in my book and frankly I don’t think they belong “in hell” either.  Now some do, of course . . .

Second, more money thrown at entrepreneurs is not in and of itself a good thing. On some level it gets more people building companies, but does it really get more people innovating?  Before the “dot bomb” hit, the same thing was happening in VC.  Everyone and their brother formed a venture company and all sorts of things were funded that were patently ridiculous.  That was a part of why the crash happened.

Tags: AngelGate

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Google Apps becomes 1st class citizen

September 18, 2010 at 7:36 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0

Thursday I logged into my Google Apps for Domains “manage this domain” page.  I was surprised to find an option to migrate my account to work more like a standard Google account.  I’ve complained about this in the past and am glad they’ve resolved it.

24 hours later and my GAFD account worked as a logon – and more importantly, my account was integrated – with just about everything.  14 hours after that and I even have my Google Voice account and phone number ported into my GAFD account.

Awesome.

A couple of points:

1. Once you migrate your accounts, it will appear that you need separate browsers for your accounts.  You don’t, you just need to read the following and do what it says for each of your accounts:  http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=182343
2. If you want to move your Google Voice account, fill out this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.  They say it could take two weeks, but for me it was 14 hours.

GAFD being more integrated is actually a great help because I’m now managing one fewer contact list.  Now I’m just hoping for a Google desktop app that can take calls.

Tags: GAFD, Google, GV, skype

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Thank you, Google! Chrome starts supporting WSR!

September 13, 2010 at 4:49 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

Some time ago I posted that I was abandoning Chrome until it supports Windows Speech Recognition (WSR). 

I did go back to Chrome after some time as I became more embroiled in the different Google Apps services, but I have always found it irritating that speech recognition wasn’t supported.

Every once in awhile I try it again and found today an important improvement.

WSR does work in GMail now, albeit just with the “dictation scratchpad”, but that is a big improvement.  It doesn’t quite work in Google Docs, but I’m hopeful they’ll get that working soon.

Thanks, Google!

BTW: I actually don’t know if this is Google’s doing or the result of a Windows patch . . . I hope it is the former, otherwise this is likely the end-state.

Tags: Chrome, GMail, Google, Microsoft, WSR

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Silverlight to be announced for the iPhone soon?

September 9, 2010 at 7:59 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Interesting announcement this morning from Apple: that non Apple dev tools can be used to create iOS apps:

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Nothing in the release mentions the browser.  In fact the part that says “apps do not download any code” seems to imply not allowing RIA at all.  This part is a bigger pain point for users.

But if the Silverlight runtime (full .NET?) or Flash can be used to built full applications, that is pretty cool.

904 days ago I posted Counting the days till Silverlight announced for iPhone.  That sure was more than I expected, but how many more days now?

Tags: Apple, Flash, iOS, iPhone, Silverlight

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