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Boulder’s Lumin poised for growth

April 24, 2006

It’s free, it’s quirky, it’s green, and it’s in Boulder. Could be anything right?

I hadn’t heard much lately about Lumin Innovative Products. Last year, they placed their LightWave solar powered WI-FI access points along Boulders Pearl Street mall. I originally read about this on WI-FI planet.

Today, I talked with one of Lumin’s founders, Sally Lyon. You can tell Sally’s jazzed about what she’s doing. The company is just 5 people, and Sally told me that they’re really just ramping up still to deal with the demand they’re seeing. After the Pearl Street project, they started getting calls from all over the world.

The scope of the leads that poured in after the Pearl Street project was “beyond our comprehension,” according to Sally.

In Mexico, resort chains are still scrambling to rebuild infrastructure in the wake of hurricane Rita. In Africa, they want to build solar powered networks where there is not much infrastructure to allow communication channels that enable medical aid. In Sri Lanka (the first country to have a solar powered infrastructure initiative) they are looking to rebuild critical infrastructure after the tsunami. They all want to use solar power to help avoid the loss of services in the future, or to enhance infrastructure in remote locations.

Sally said “You and I take our email and communications infrastructure for granted. In developing countries or in disaster relief situations LightWave is a perfect fit.”

Lumin feels that it’s poised for organic growth and to date has only taken on friends and family investment. In order to accelerate their plans and begin to reach some of their current leads, Lumin would welcome contacts for discussions with active investors who can bring deep experience or connections in their space.

I told Sally that I will definitely get outside this summer and test it out some. From the looks of it out my window, today is not a good day to go and test.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 2 Comments 

AuctionSHARK smells blood in the shopping comparison market

April 18, 2006

Denver based AuctionSHARK is exploring the idea of aggregating real time auction listings, classifieds, and e-Commerce sites. The result is pretty neat - my search for “Barbie Dolls“* turned up 44,000+ results from 21 sites in under 2 seconds. Cool!

Very cool, but will people use it? They use shopping.com and shopzilla, so why not? Now you get real-time eBay results too, at least.

To me, eBay makes its own “perfect market” for most popular items. I can buy things used or new there. I trust the market on eBay (after all it is already The Perfect Store). Can I really learn more and save substantial dollars by scowering Best Buy, WalMart, and the like? Probably not, but if you add in Craigslist, I can save something else pretty substantial - Time. Now I can see that there is just as good of a deal here locally that I can go and get NOW.

AuctionSHARK’s current search result leaves a little bit to be desired with that end result in mind. First of all, it doesn’t yet support classified sites like Craigslist, but the founders say that it soon will. I’m wondering if they can really make that work, since nobody can seem to figure out how to monetize online classifieds. The affiliate model here will yield 0% of $0. And it will bastardize AuctionSHARK’s real referral dollars if they start sending people off to free sites that don’t give them a kickback. I suspect that maybe this is why the Craigslist support really hasn’t been implemented yet.

Beyond that, I find the search result to be cluttered and non-obvious. I’m sure they’ll tweak this based on such feedback. Additionally, many of the features (including getting results from certain sites) seem to require a login to operate properly although I’m not sure why they’d want to impose this restriction.

The other thing AuctionSHARK is harping on is their tools for auction site users. They want to focus on the auction buyer instead of the auction seller. They plan to let you monitor your wishlist, create wanted alerts, etc. Cool ideas, but they aren’t there yet.

Check out AuctionSHARK and use it next time you’re considering using eBay or an e-Commerce site and let me know what you think.

* (I too find it strange that “Barbie Dolls” was the first thing that popped into my head, but this is not the time or place to discuss this other than parenthetically)

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Boulder’s Solidware Technologies - Making bugs go Splat!

April 14, 2006

I spent some time recently with Sue Kunz of Solidware Technologies. Sue and her co-founder Char Devich were both high-level managers with Sun, and left in order to start Solidware in October of 2004. I’ve heard Sue described as “a firecracker” and someone “you don’t want to bet against”, so I was curious to meet her and see what she was up to.

Solidware is developing a very interesting software quality engineering platform called Splat (cool name). Current SQA tools such as Worksoft, Segue and Mercury perform traditional functional (black box) testing while those such as Agitar, Klocwork, Fortify, and Coverity address structural (white box) testing. Some systems, such as IBM Rational address both types.

With Splat, Solidware is attempting to introduce a new software quality paradigm called “analytical testing.” This type of testing is commonplace in other engineering disciplines, but doesn’t happen today in software.

I took a look at a pre-beta version of Splat 2.0 and fed it about 80,000 lines of my own Java code. I figured that if my code can’t break it then nobody’s can. Splat crunched my code for a minute or so and then spit out a beautiful interactive flash view of my code. Here’s a sample screen shot so you get the idea.


Splat lets you quickly visualize your code to identify “hot spots” (in red) that carry unusual proportions of risk. You can keep diving down into the riskier areas of code, and Splat continues to help you visually isolate your risk. The Splat analytics engine uses some 40+ metrics with cool names like “cyclomatic complexity” to figure this stuff out.

The code I used to put Splat through it’s paces was developed by a team of 4 people. It consisted of one rock star (no, not me!), and 3 other developers. I found it interesting that in general Splat found the riskiest code to be the code developed by the best developer.

When I discussed this result with the Solidware team, they told me that this is actually fairly typical. The superstar of the team is typically doing the hardest and most complex work relating to the architecture of the system or the trickiest aspects of the implementation. I had to think back to my computer science classes (wow, that was a long time ago) to recall that risk is not bad. Unmanaged risk and risks not fully understood are bad.

Splat also helped me see that one of the three remaining developers on the project had been writing unnecessarily complex code. Upon reflection, I realized that we were getting a disproportionate number of bug reports and logged errors from the parts of the system that Splat identified.

All of this was a neat validation for me that the product really seems to work. If this thing was integrated into my IDE and was analyzing my code in real time as I was developing it, I would use it. I hope that’s where Solidware takes it.

You can play around with the Splat 1.0 prototype right now, but it only works with C code and takes some effort to get it going. It’s easier to check out the animated demo. The upcoming 2.0 version handles Java and appears to me to be a major jump forward in many ways for the product.

What do you think? Is analytical testing the way of the future?

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Pearl Street Boulder - Startup central?

April 14, 2006

It it my imagination, or are startups popping up everywhere on Boulder’s Pearl Street mall lately? I love it, out with the Gap and in with Google!

We know that companies are leaving Boulder 5 times faster than they’re moving here. But these are the big guys. The little guys like the climate, the attitude, and the feel. I mean, take a look around here.

Chris Basham recently relocated his startup OTO Software and summed it up by saying “There’s just a different feeling here.” Chris isn’t a hippie or anything (he’ll laugh at that one), but he still makes the commute from downtown Denver every day to get that Pearl Street vibe.

The 29th street project should mean even more retail will migrate east of Pearl Street. Personally, I’m cool with it.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups | 1 Comment