Pattern Finder

Konfabulator => Yahoo!

On Monday Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo!  As I noted in my June 16th post, Konfabulator is a pretty neat widget thing that brings information (weather forecasts, Web cam views, TV schedules, time...) and controls (battery usage indicator, CPU usage indicator, volume...) to the desktop.

From an industry analyst point-of-view, the significance of the announcement is that Yahoo! gets it.  For a long time, both consumers and the industry have thought of content as paper-based.  (After all, we do call it a Web "page.")  Reading a book has long been treated as a separate activity from working at a desk.  Put another way, we have a long history of thinking that searching for and reading information is a separate activity from thinking and acting.

However, because systems can watch what we're doing, they can understand the context of the activity and supply the necessary information.  This is the paradigm shift from information as a static page to information as a dynamic service.

Konfabulator will help Yahoo! distribute snippets of its content to people where and when they need it.  It will make the consumption of Yahoo! content more pervasive, especially among those people who can't be bothered to go to the Yahoo! portal.  In short, (1) Yahoo! gets it, and (2) they were smart enought to snap up Konfabulator before Google or Microsoft.

Moving Digital House

Well, I'm finally back from a move that took me about 30 hours to complete.  No, I didn't move house; I moved computer.  I finally got around to upgrading my office PC to a Dell Dimension 9100 -- a nice, fast, and amazingly quiet PC.  I kept my monitor, a Samsung SyncMaster 955DF, which meant it kept crashing until I installed the driver, but other than that it worked out of the box.

I know that 30 hours seems like a long time, but when you're installing/moving 50 GB of files, it takes awhile.  First, of course, I had to de-install some of the junk that Dell installed, such as WordPerfect and various obnoxious multimedia programs that spend all their time telling you you need to upgrade.  Then comes the installation of Microsoft Office, Streets and Trips, FrontPage, Palm, Adobe Reader, etc.

After that, comes the moving over of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and then a whole slew of music and picture files.  I used Detto's Intellimover to do that.  While the Program/Settings Mover was relatively snappy, the File Transfer utility that comes with it was not -- and had a penchant to hang every 20 minutes or so.  After that I had to reboot each PC (time consuming since I had only one monitor and had to switch back and forth), restart the File Transfer program, and drag-and-drop the unmoved files.  Unattended file tranfer it wasn't.  So while I wouldn't recommend the utility, burning the files to CD and copying that way probably would have taken even more time.

Then came connecting the new PC to Comcast and re-installing the wireless router.  This morning I finally sync'ed my Palm.

All I can say is thank God I'm a geek.  Keeping the sequence of activities straight, files to be moved, etc., would have driven a normal person up a wall.  Most any other appliance (microwave, refrigerator, iron) you just buy it and plug it in.  Microsoft/Intel came up with Plug and Play.  Why can't they come up with Move and Play?  (True, XP does come with the File Settings and Transfer Wizard -- but the documentation is abysmal.  It's along the lines of, "...and then magic happens."  Sorry.  When I've moving valuable data, I want more than a black box.)

Omniture Raises Money -- Again

Omniture announced today that it had raised its third round of financing, led by BA Venture Partners.  It received $40 million, an eyebrow-raising chunk of change even in the dot.com days.

This has clearly been in the works for some time -- first, because it takes a lot of dancing for VCs to disgorge that amount of money, and two, I've been getting calls from VCs about Omniture for quite a while.  Not surprisingly, VCs -- who are spreadsheet jockeys more than they are market analysts -- pick the brains of industry analysts when they're thinking of investing in a sector.

Although they're coy when they call, the dialog always follows a specific pattern.  First, they want a general overview of the sector -- e.g., its history, who the major players are, where the market forces will take things in the next several years.  After that, they want a SWOT analysis of the vendor they're thinking of funding.  They wouldn't be caught dead either (1) asking for a SWOT analysis or (2) mentioning the supplier, so they make sure they (1) don't use the terms Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, or Threats and (2) ask about other companies, but if you're paying attention it's always clear.  For example, they'll ask, "So what makes Company X dominant?" or "In what areas are they susceptible?" -- sounds like a Strength and Weakness question to me.  When talking to VCs I keep a special log on the number of questions and how long we talked about a specific supplier.  For example, I looked back over my notes and I talked to a VC on March 14 about Web analytics.  Three people on the line asked 11 questions about Omniture -- the number they asked about other vendors combined.  And we spent 20 minutes discusssing Omniture while competitors got about 5 minutes each.  So while I'm sure that the VCs were convinced they didn't give away a thing, the discussion had "Omniture funding" written all over it to me.

Omniture is going to use the money to "accelerate customer training initiatives, invest in technological development and increase marketing and distribution efforts."  The latter two are typical VC funding boilerplate, while the first initiative is a bit different.  Not that I think it's wrong.  I told Omniture 18 months ago at a briefing in Boston that they needed to emphasize training/best practices, and it's nice to see the company following through.

FrontPage Has Gone Belly Up Again

Well, today FrontPage 2002 fell over, as the English would say.  I use Microsoft FrontPage because it's cheap and relatively straightforward, but every several months it decides to throw fits and therefore makes me throw fits.  Sometimes the page pointers get corrupted and I have to rebuild the site structure.  Today it refused to open the copy of Ballardvale.com on my local PC.  Translation:  I couldn't update my Ballardvale.com Web site.

I spent a fruitless hour or so looking for the answer on Microsoft.com; since I couldn't figure out the cause of the problem, I went for the workaround: downloading a copy of the site from the Web server to a clean Web on my PC.  After little tweaking here and there -- it had forgotten the color of the sidebars, for example -- I was back in business.  When all was said and done, about four hours down the drain.

Having been a programmer for nine years and a support engineer for three -- yes, some analysts have worked in the trenches -- I'm not easily intimidated by systems.  I can usually figure out the problem -- or at the very least, figure out a workaround.

But as a small business owner, I'm the exception.  There's a whole bunch of business people out there who just want to get the job done, and something like this would bring them to their knees.  They'd either say, "Screw it" and let the Web site age, or they'd spend good money for someone to fix the problem.

So while analysts and vendors may go on and on about "the frictionless Internet economy," when there is friction, things grind to a halt pretty quickly.  Based on my experience, we still have a long way to go.  At least when I throw my electric light switch on, the lights actually go on.

Management Changes at Tacoda

Charles C. Smith, Vice President of U.S. Publisher Sales at Tacoda, is no longer with the company, at least according to the Management Team page, from which he vanished last week.  He'd been with Tacoda since April 2002, and was promoted to VP of Publisher Sales last June.

Tacoda has a long history of publishing press releases regarding promotions (Verity is another company inclined to do so), so we'll probably see an announcement regarding his replacement within the next several months.