Time: Google Giveth and Taketh Away

I am a big advocate of Google Docs. The collaboration, sharing and simplicity of “one document” are brilliant - at least to me. So brilliant that I have been coercing anyone I interact with to use the tool. Bragging about all the things thag Google gives you . So I was happy to get this email from a potential convert I have been working on :

“Brendan,

After working with Google over the past week there is one thing that is clear that Google gives you ….

TIME

Time to think about you life,

Time to think about planning your evening,

Time to email your Investees with complaints about Google…

 

Time

Time

Time

 

All while Google is thinking about calculating a formula….

 

I’ve written this email while Google is thinking…. About importing a value from another sheet…. So I’m not sure the “import Range” function is going to be the way to go.

 

It finally worked!

 

I’ll have to give this more thought tomorrow.”

Oh well, I have to admit it is true that when working with complex spreadsheets Google has some work to do.

VendAsta Raises 3M for MyFrontSteps

Last week we closed our first round of VC financing for MyFrontSteps and I have been too busy to blog!  The release hit the press Thursday and we were very fortunate to have it picked up by many publishers.

 

Here is an example on the the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch .  Inman news did their own version of the release here. 

Our local news paper the Star Phoenix also ran a story on VendAsta.  I have also done interviews for CBC radio and the Dow Jones Venture Wire.  No links for those yet.  

 

Thanks very much to the many people that helped along the way, you know who you are. 

Saskatoon’s Fledgling Tech Community

I have been meaning to post about Saskatoon and the tech sector for some time but Ginger Koolick beat me too it with this great post aptly titled “Tech Community in Saskaboom, SK“ .  I have been involved in the tech community in Saskatoon for some time.  I founded Delron in 1989, CompuSmart in 1995, moved on to Point2 in  2000 and now in 2008 am a  founder of VendAsta and MyFrontSteps.

 

At Point2 over 90% of our customers and almost all of our business development work was done south of the border.   Having traveled extensively on business in the United States, I can tell you first hand that Saskatoon has a lot going for it. Saskatoon is a great place to live. It is a place you can afford (and want) to  raise a family.  Most of us can drive to work in the span of one or two songs. You can’t really even call that a commute. I have been to San Fransisco, New York, Atlanta, Phoenix and the like, and I can tell you that I appreciate the two extra hours a day I can spend with my family rather than strangers on a train or a jammed freeway.

 

However, the greatest thing Saskatoon has going for it, plain and simple,  is it’s great people.  Intelligent hard working people.   It is true that a lot of young people leave Saskatoon but those that remain are here for a reason. From the perspective of a business owner this is great news. Like the priest in California Dreaming you know they are going to stay.  That said, their personal motivation for staying need not be a ball and chain that prevents them from enjoying the same benefits of those living in the Valley.

 

What do I mean by that you might ask?   Well, I find it surprising how large a factor physical location plays in business development given how “connected’ the world has become.  When visiting other tech meccas it always amazes me how exciting and symbiotic their ecosystems are. Having a nucleus of companies and people sharing common work, interests and goals makes for  an exciting ecosystem.  The energy from the individual entities is stored by the ecosystem and resonates within; truly making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.  This is just starting to happen in Saskatoon .  We have only just begun to feel and understand the value this ecosystem can bring to all involved.  How fast and far we advance with this idea is up to us. If you are in the the industry don’t be afraid to share and interact with others.  Guys like my Neighbour, Ryan Lejbak a founder and owner of Zu have it got it right - you get by giving. He is making a great start by driving things like the Saskatoon Bar Camp.  If we work together we can build a thriving tech community right here in Saskatoon. 

 

MyFrontSteps at Inman

Things are starting to come together at MyFrontSteps. We have been selected as a participant on a panel to discuss new real estate technology.  The panel is appropriately titled: Changing the industry: 5 ideas at a time .  In this venue we will be talking about  our StepRep product for home service providers. However, we have been around in the industry long enough to know that “a new tool” for real estate professionals, while exciting, won’t be game changing proposition unless you can bring the consumer along , and en mass at that.

 

So what, you might ask, do we have for the consumer?  Well, were not really saying just yet but we have been experimenting with Common Craft style videos.  Here is an early try at a high level partial explanation of MyFrontSteps  Like I said, this is one of our very early videos so please be kind.

Graphing Social Patterns East Recap

I was working on a post to recap GSP East conference.  However, I just noticed that Frank Mashraqi of Fotolog posted a great recap.  So I am just going to link to it here.

Getting to Graphing Social Patterns East

Finally made it to GSP (Graphing Social Patterns) East in Washington. Jeff and I were supposed to arrive Sunday night. The hot weather sparked a thunderstorm in Toronto so we couldn’t land and had to to on to Ottawa. The Ottawa airport was overwhelmed with incoming flights so they couldn’t take us off the plane, Instead they parked us (in a plane parking lot as Jeff described it). We sat there for a couple of hours, refueled and got back to TO in time for, well in time for nothing actually. When we got off the plane nobody said anything to us, it was as if nothing had happened. It was about 10 PM and an Air Canada employee at the gate told us that they “shut down customer service because it got too busy with the cancellations and rerouting.” Wow. He must have noticed the tired angry incredulous look on my face because, with a sigh, he handed me a tiny white slip of paper. A coupon for a hotel, or a meal or credit or something maybe? No a small piece of paper with two phone numbers. One to rebook my flight and one for area hotels. It seems there is/was no way to rebook your ticket at the airport. You need to call an 800 number and wait on hold for over 15 minutes (at least they warn you) and then talk to someone. Air Canada had already booked me on a new flight but it didn’t get into Ronald Regan until 10 am and the conference started at 8 am today. I finally changed our flights to get into Dulles at 7:45am. Okay, but Dulles is a 29 miles from the conference and Ronald Regan is 5 miles. I did it, but Air Canada, if your listening, it sucks. Oh and the hotel that Air Canada gets you at a discount - when you get there they don’t want to let you stay for the $75 quoted, but for $145 - no problem at all.

We got to sleep at 1:30 Toronto time and had to get up at 4 am to get the shuttle to the airport. We waited in the Air Canada line and finally got to the front only to have the attendant inform us that our flight was operated by United. “Go down to isle J”. Long line at isle J. Why couldn’t the person on the phone last night tell me that we needed to go the United gate. Air Canada, I don’t know if you listening. but this sucks.

So now we have a very short time to get through customs and security. Customs goes smoothly but we we get to security the guy says to me, and I kid you not, “I have been waiting for you”. We get some kind of rub down search that you might pay money for in other circumstances. But we made it to our plane, Washington and the conference.

It’s 102 degrees here so I spent the lunch break at the small pool here at the Regency Hyatt. Another Canadian, well a Newfie so almost Canadian (joking) , showed up. Nice guy working on cool stuff.

Back to the conference!

News from the News People

Some interesting news from the news people at Inman.  Jessica is moving on and Joel and Glenn are moving up.  All of us at VendAsta are going to miss Jessica.We have gotten to know and appreciate her over the years.  Jessica we wish you well in your new adventure. I hope we still have the pleasure of crossing paths. 

 

Congrats to Joel and Glenn.   Joel certainly has a a keen insight into the future of real estate marketing.  He is especially apt at identifying and dissecting the latest and greatest.  Joel you will make a great VP Content. 

 

I have had the pleasure of being interviewed and meeting Glenn over the course of the years.  He is a super nice guy with a mild demeanor, but don’t let that fool you.  Glenn does his homework and has a way of capturing the essence of the story and getting all the facts.  Glenn you will make a great managing editor.

Piclens is Super Cool and Super Smart Too

Looks like I am not the only one that likesPiclens (see my Trulia Snapshot review ).  YouTube’s head of monetization Shashi Seth has left YouTube-owner Google to become the chief revenue officer at Cooliris to head up monetization of Piclens.  I think it is super smart on the part of Cooliris and Kleiner Perkensto start thinking about monetization early on in the game. Look for this same strategy from a really super cool bunch of guys from the North.

Dream Like A Child

Every once in a while I have a random rambling thought.  I think I will start publishing them, here is a recent one.

 

I have five children ranging in age from brand new to 17 so I have a lot of exposure to the young mind.  The vivid conviction with which little kids hold their, dreams, hopes and desires is amazing.  In their minds, they feel that when they grow up they can be or do anything.  It is certainly sad to see those dreams fade and change, for some, as they grow up.  Life, it seems, inexorably conspires to beat the little kid out of us with insidious persistence.  Sadly for most, somewhere along the line the kid inside  becomes silent. People become satisfied with the mediocrity of their station and call it reality.  Fortunately dreams, like children, are resilient.  I think that everyone has remnants deep inside of the kid they once were.  Don’t let life beat the little kid out of you.  

Trulia Begins to Give Consumers What They Want

I really like Trulia Snapshots.  Congrats Pete and Sami and the Trulia team for a nice job.  Those of you who follow my blog (and Jeff’s) will know that we have been yammering for years to anyone who would listen about the importance of rich data to consumer in home search or, as it turns out, any kind of search.           

 There is a lot of great stuff about Trulia Snapshots.  The navigation is super slick and the Apple/iphone like bounce effects are cool. I really love the price slider. Trulia does a nice job of “getting” what people are looking for with respect pricing and photos. although in some areas is would be nice to restrict or expand the price interval in some instances.  It is also tedious, in some search areas, to get to a median price where most people are probably looking. when you can only start at most expensive or least expensive and you have to “page” throught the more expensive, less expensive to get to the price range you want.  Too bad you can’t simply drag further right on the screen.                                

 The Ajaxy / javascripty stuff they have done is really cool.  Things like the flip between aerial and road views are a nice touch.  In general their Microsoft Virtual Earth implementation is sound.  That said, I wonder why I can pan the map to a new location or zoom in or out for that matter.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good.  There is no way to get homes to display in my new context.  The only way I can see to  actually get homes to display in an area is to be able to type the name of the place in the search box.  In my opinion this really needs to be addressed.                            

 Its pretty easy to allow users to recenter the search on the map someplace and recalculate the homes from the geo co-ordinates.  Even better, trulia should allow users to draw a polygon and restrict their search to a certain area.                                 

 I really like the photo browsing experience.  I think Trulia has done an okay job of focusing on a listing once it is clicked.  I sure wish I could look at more of the photos without interrupting my browsing experience.  I understand all the business reasons why Trulia makes the consumer click through and pop windows to various sites to see more.  I just don’t think it is in the best interests of the consumer.   As a consumer I want to be able to quickly browse many photos of a property to narrow my search to the few listings I really want to spend time researching.                           

 If I were Trulia I would worry less about driving lookey loos (people that click in and then immediately out back to search results) to agents and brokers sites and more about sending a trulia (couldn’t resist)  interested consumer.  To this end, if I were Trulia, I would provide home seekers with a truly immersive visual experience.  How would one do this you might ask?  Well, if they could find a way to allow consumers to “map” their price, geographic and possibly time boundaries they could then let them browse photos of homes.  Absent some refinement this is what they are doing today.  The next step is to stop interrupting the consumer’s search with new windows and new sites with disparate look at feels.  They ought to allow the consumer to browse the photos much like Piclens allows people to browse Flickr albums, Facebook albums, google image searches and even YouTube videos.  If you haven’t checked it out you need to.  You will be blown away.  How easy is this to do?  Super simple.  All Trulia would need to do is add an media rss image feed the page (like the companies above have) that dynamically changes with the search results.  Then Trulia Snapshot would truly rock!