Email Center Pro - New Video Introduction Launched

I work with a great group of people at Palo Alto Software developing a collaborative email application called Email Center Pro. Today, we unveiled a new video that introduces the service - it's featured on emailcenterpro.com. We love the video,it's fantastic, we've watched it dozens of times - it does a great job of communicating the problem Email Center Pro solves. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Credit: Principals - Jason Gallic (Email Center Pro Marketing Manager) worked with Christian Martel Atelier Transfert Design to produce the movie.

History of the Internet

Facebook Users = Country

How many users do you have? That's a question you hear a lot in the Tech Industry. Most people are really skilled at creatively inflating the number because users = money, success, influence, and more. If you're talking valuation in the Tech Industry it usually looks something like valuation = users * inflated user value.

Scanning my feed stream today I happened across a post by Mark Zuckerberg. If you don't know who Mark is - well, just stop reading this and go back to work. Mark wins the award, IMO, for best answer to the "How many users do you have?" question.

"Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria." -- Mark

Here's why I think Mark wins the award:

• He says "actively" and then backs it up with "almost half of them are using Facebook every day" - most people stretch the definition of "active" or don't even bother using it
• He gives the number of users real meaning and context by creating a country for them which happens to be larger than Japan, and Russia
• and it helps to have 150 million users
  

Goals for 2009

I think it's important to set goals in life. For me personally, writing my goals down makes it a bit harder for me to conveniently forget about them.

Personal Goals for 2009:

• Read at least 6 books. I read a lot, I read all day, that makes it harder for me to read for pleasure.
• Fish the Deschutes river.
• Take my kids on at least 2 multi-day camping trips. Yellowstone here we come.
  
• Run the Peterson Ridge Rumble.
• Take the entire family on a real vacation.
• Make the time for more "date nights" with my fantastic wife.
  
• Weatherize our basement.
• Shoot more video of the kids.
• Expand on my existing skills as a photographer and publish more of my work. I'd like to get something published in JPG Magazine. Win a 5D Mark II. Updated 01/02/09: Unfortunately, JPG Magazine is shutting down on the 5th. Instead, I think I'll focus on publishing more to Flickr and being more active in the Flickr community.
  
• Build a camping box for my UZJ100.
• Give some of my time (it's precious to me) to a worthy cause. Eugene/Springfield Habit for Humanity is at the top of the list.
  

• Work my ass off to make sure the company I work for pulls through this recession.
  

  NOTE: There's a deeper list of business goals here that I can't share for obvious confidentiality reasons.
  

• Continue developing my online professional identity by:
• blogging more here on this blog with a better focus on developing technologies and software development
• developing my LinkedIn membership
  
• building professional relationships with professionals in my field
  
• Continue to build on my education by taking advantage of continuing education programs.  For example, I attended Stanford's Executive Education program in 2008.

Email Center Pro - Collaborative Email

I spent quite a bit of my time in 2008 working on a collaborative email solution for the SMB market called Email Center Pro.

Email Center Pro is a web-based service that makes it easy for business people to collaborate on and manage "shared" email addresses like customerservice@ and info@. I like to say that Email Center Pro turns "shared" email addresses from "money takers" into "money makers" by improving response time and response quality.

We officially launched Email Center Pro in April of 2008 and since then we've been using feedback from our customers to rapidly evolve the service. Some of the new features we've added over the last eight months have been documented on the Dead Simple Software blog. I'm a big fan of our recent improvements to the way we display conversation history.

I'm really proud of of the way we've evolved the service this year and I think our subscribers appreciate the work we've been putting into the service. I'm looking forward to the continuing evolution of Email Center Pro in 2009.

FriendFeed and Twitter ROI for Robert Scoble?

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch thinks Robert Scoble needs a FriendFeed intervention. Michael believes Scoble's reputation as a "blogger" is suffering because he's spending too much time on FriendFeed and Twitter and not enough time on his blog. On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

Scoble responds to the attempted intervention on his blog and on FriendFeed.

What do I think? I applaud Scoble for risking his reputation as a blogger to put the wider social network and micro-blogging to the test. I think Scoble has increased his influence in 2008 by establishing himself (and his brand) on FriendFeed and Twitter. I don't think it will take much effort on his part to get his Web 1.0 blog numbers back up again - if that's what he wants to do. I think Arrington is probably jealous that Scoble (essentially a one man shop) has him beat on the FriendFeed and Twitter metrics. Arrington is probably looking at 2009 wondering how he can catch up ; )

Keep up the good work Robert! I think your investment in FriendFeed and Twitter will pay off.

Azure Services Platform

Jason's 120% Solution

Can the Hummer Club save the Hummer?

I drive a 100 Series Toyota Land Cruiser so I can't poke fun at the Hummer crowd for driving vehicles with poor fuel economy. Fuel economy aside, there are plenty of other reasons to poke fun at the Hummer crowd. Colbert does a pretty good job in the video I've included below.

GM is currently reviewing the Hummer brand and it's likely that it will become a casualty of the economic crisis. I for one won't miss the Hummer. To be clear, I don't have a problem with the HMMWVs used by the military that started all of this - a Hummer isn't the same thing as a HMMWV and a HMMWV doesn't belong on public roads.

Origins of Bootstrapping

The term bootstrapping comes from the German legend of Baron von Munchhausen pulling himself out of the sea by pulling on his own bootstraps. That’s essentially what you’ll have to do, too.