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Calling all you biz-e people

August 21, 2007

biz-e.pngI read somewhere that on average it takes two days and seven emails to coordinate a meeting between three people. I’ve experienced that myself, so I believe it.

Biz-e is a free meeting scheduling solution that is highly integrated into Outlook. It competes with web-based systems such as Colorado’s own SetAMeeting. There’s also Timebridge, Tungle, Diarised, TimeToMeet.info, and ipolipo - this space is not new.

Each of these solutions manage the workflow of coordinating a meeting between several people. Biz-e is particularly nice because it reserves all of the possible meeting slots for each the meeting, frees unselected spots automatically after a meeting is finalized, and lets people who don’t have Biz-e installed respond to scheduling requests via the web. And it lives naturally inside of Outlook, as you see here:

biz-e-cap.png

Naturally, Biz-e thinks they have a better solution than all of the other guys. They say they’re more focused on the “social engineering” aspects of coordinating a meeting rather than the technical issues. They also think the fact that it’s totally “open” (meaning that you don’t have to install biz-e to participate in the transaction) is a benefit, as well as the fact that it lives within your scheduling application rather than just on the web, which eliminates all sorts of redundant and time wasting operations. Makes sense. This video, while mildly exaggerated and a bit slow to the point, ultimately does a great job of explaining the benefits of Biz-e.

The founders are David Gold (who previously founded ProSavvy which was sold to eWork) and Tony Delollis. They met a while back when they were both executives in different Mobius funded companies.

“Necessity was certainly the mother of invention in the case of biz-e. I was scheduling a conference call with a few people about two years ago and literally took a chain of 15 emails and three days to finalize a time. Then, when we thought we had a time it had taken so long to get to it that one of the participants had scheduled over that time option and now had a conflict. There had to be a better way and I set out to figure that out.” - David Gold, Founder

I took a hard look at Timebridge, and it’s an impressive and well-funded effort that at first glance appears to be serious competition for Biz-e. However, it would seem to me that Timebridge is going to be looking for a very large exit given the amount of money they’ve raised. $8.5M is overkill for just a scheduling application - so I’m going to guess they’ll point their ship at something much more broad pretty quickly.

Biz-e plans to add support for other calendering solutions (currently only Outlook is supported). I haven’t been able to test this extensively myself because there is no Mac support yet, but everyone I’ve talked to who has seems to be raving about it (and no, it’s not just the founders).

Biz-e has been funded by a small group of angel investors and is nearing a close of a new round of investment from additional individual investors. They also have interest from institutional investors and would “be happy to speak with accredited investors.”

You can download Biz-e for free and take it for a spin. Please comment and let us know what you think.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Getting into angel investing

August 19, 2007

In January, I went to a Kaufman Foundation event called the Power of Angel Investing. It was focused on state workers, but it was still fun and informative for me. I played the role of “coach” to the team acting as investors (poor saps).

Now the Kaufmann Foundation, CTEK and the Bard Center are hosting another event on September 12th aimed at prospective and current angel investors. Registration is just $250.00 - a good deal if you want to get deeper into angel investing. They’ll only take the first 25 people who register. This event is great education for those interested in angel investing, as well as a great way for current angel investors to learn more about it. Get all the details here.

CTEK Angels Live is another cool event to learn more about angel investing or about presenting to angel investors. This year it’s on September 25th. Here’s my coverage of the event last year. This one is a great bargain - CTEK is a non-profit and just asks for a minimum $10 donation.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Intense Debate - Exposing comment “Dark Matter”

August 6, 2007

Wanna help get rid of the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere? There are billions of blog comments on the internet, and we’re basically blind to it. What are your friends saying on the blogs? How about the people you respect? Right, you have no idea.

About a week ago, I started using a blog comment replacement plug-in from one of the TechStars teams called Intense Debate on this blog and on the TechStars blog. If you comment on this or any relatively new post on either site, you’ll notice that the comment system is not the typically crappy one you see on other blogs. That’s Intense Debate - here’s how it looks.

idcommentsnap.png

Intense Debate is super simple to install, and supports WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad blogs. Right now they’re still in a closed beta, but you can request early access. One of my major concerns was that I’d lose my existing blog comments, but Intense Debate does a great job of preserving them when you upgrade. On my older posts, you’ll notice the plain old WordPress comments are still intact.

Intense Debate gives me a ton of new features, including:

  • Threaded comments
  • Reputation tracking
  • Tracking of comments
  • Detailed statistics

One of my favorite features is that I can get an RSS feed of basically anything of interest within comments. I can track all comments made by a particular user across any Intense Debate enabled blog (here’s mine), or I can have a single feed that shows me any comments any users that I mark as friends. I can also just track comments in any sub-thread within the comments. It’s very easy - I can access these features and more for each user via a menu right inside the comments.

idpic2.png

Intense Debate solves a major problems with blog comments - namely that they just suck. Go sign up for the closed beta, and you can get it on your blog soon. And feel free - go ahead and comment here to try it out. I’m sure the founders (Jon, Isaac, and Josh) will be hanging around here to answer your questions and would love your feedback.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Me.dium launches

August 6, 2007

I started using Me.dium (which launches officially today) as part of their closed beta last October. The concept is that it helps you see the activity of your friends in real time, as I’ve described previously. Since October I must have installed, removed, disabled, and reinstalled Me.dium about 20 times. Sometimes it made my browser slow (or so it seemed) and other times it creeped me out a little. I’ve commented that I didn’t think the UI metaphor was working, and watched Me.dium struggle with figuring this out. But lately, the situation has improved quite a bit. The new UI metaphor of “extending outward from me” makes so much more sense to me, I haven’t noticed any browser slowdowns in quite some time. Best of all I’m discovering interesting stuff through Me.dium on a regular basis now.

I’ve also been watching a Me.dium has quietly played with a widget concept on Tiki Bar TV for a few months now. Today they released a generalized widget that allows you to see what other readers of the site you’re on are doing. This is a fascinating way to discover new stuff that a community of readers that you’re a part of are doing in real time. This is probably best described as a MyBlogLog style “what’s hot in my community” but in real time and more focused on the site you’re visiting now rather than all the sites you visit.

The Me.dium widget is on my right hand sidebar. It extends a little too far right now so I’ve asked for a size scalable version (which I guess would be a smaller Me.dium).

Me.dium also announced support for IE7 today. You should probably tell your not-so-hip (non Mac) friends about that, so you can have a better chance of winning one of the iPhones Me.dium is giving away this month.

Me.dium is best experienced with lots of your friends. When I had just a few at first it didn’t do much for me, but now that I have 40 or so, it’s much more useful. My Me.dium name is “DavidCohen”, or you can just sign up using my invite link if that’s easier for you.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

“That’s not a business.” Duh.

August 3, 2007

This regularly makes me laugh.

I often read stupid comments about a new company not really being a “company” but being a “feature”. They say things like “This company could never be large. Their product is so small. This is just a feature.”

These silly pundits like to write a company off as irrelevant just because they launched a product that will seemingly have a small impact or small early revenues.

When I started my first company, I had no clue what we were going to do and neither did my two co-founders. But I thought I did. I thought we were going to support somebody elses DOS-based public safety dispatch software and maybe sell a few for them. We even did a little bit of that, at first. See how little this sounds? This could never be big, you might naturally say. It’s a tiny software services company, and it can’t scale. But it turns out that never is a really long time.

One fine day, we woke up and realized that we had learned quite a bit about this world of public safety dispatch. Maybe, just maybe, we could build our own public safety software system. Fast forward a few years - It’s a five million dollar a year company.

Then… what do you know? Another fine day came along. We woke up and realized that gosh, we knew quite a bit about public safety in general. We could build a whole suite of software products for this market. Fast forward a few years - It’s a twenty five million dollar a year company. Now it’s part of a $300M/year public safety company that is pretty darn relevant.

Just because a company starts off with a product or service that doesn’t appear to be substantial, doesn’t mean you should write them off. Many companies that start out in this world never even release a product.

I notice that the great ones often start out with a baby step. They do something, and they do it very well. They quickly become the best in the world at something specific, and not necessarily something HUGE.

The baby analogy is a strong one through and through. “That baby could never run a marathon. Look how small his steps are.” But then it grows up to run a ton of marathons. Maybe even one in every state some day.

A strong team of entrepreneurs will find the right “big” idea one day. Probably sooner than you think. So don’t measure a young company exclusively by the scope of their early vision. Look at the quality of what they create, and how efficiently they create it. Study the team.

Baby steps. Baby steps.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Hello, you must be Joe King

August 2, 2007

Last week, I jumped on my scooter (go ahead, make fun of me, I don’t care) and rode across town for a quick interview about TechStars at the request of Joe King, who does the regular KGNU series called “On the Internets.”

Here’s the link to the entire enthralling 5 minute interview.

He sounds so familiar, this Joe King. Who could he be?

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Startup Weekend Cleanup

August 2, 2007

It seems that the remnants of team VoSnap are still alive, and still blogging. Here’s what happened at the stroke of midnight on that Sunday night at Startup Weekend. 90% of these people are no longer working on the project and were not heard after this one hour time lapse of “the end.” Still, an awesome experience that you should try.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |