January 2006 Archives

27 years ago our Director of ops was “Sprouted.” We talk to Peter Gohman as we celebrate his birthday.

Our friend Jason Lynes is giving us some crap about our photo shoot. That’s cool. We can take it. :-)

Anyway, Jason’s blog is pretty cool, so I recommend you give it a look.

With only seven days remaining until the launch at DEMO the folks at Sproutit.com are in high hopes.

There has been a lot of chatter over the weekend among various bloggers about the need to “disrupt” the Venture Capital market. Some respected people (see here and here) seem to think its time for a new model of funding based around creating a publicly held firm that would select its investments based on what companies its public shareholders found most interesting.

Unfortunately, this proposal ignores some basic realities about business and funding. So, in the fashion of the great Guy Kawasaki, here are my top five reasons why the current VC model still works:

1. Good investments are about more than demand. Companies fail for lots of reasons—bad management, conflicts, poor execution, out-of-control costs. To avoid investing in these kinds of failures, you need to do some up-close, intensive due diligence. Simply having public shareholders vote will not get this for you.
2. The cost to build these new companies are not really that much lower. The cost to build and launch a new web-based service has dropped 10 fold in the last few years. But the cost to build a new business around it has not. Even if you can market cheaper on the web, you now have to operate as a global organization from day one, so it balances out. At some point, to become a large business with some impact, you will need some outside capital. (BOCTAOE)
3. Users are fickle. Public investors are fickle. Over the long haul, the free market may be a good indicator of the future, but at any one point in time it’s not. Just ask anyone who is invested in GE or other old line businesses that are depressed right now because Google is so hot.
4. Investments require a fixed amount of time. The basic economic problem with venture investment (with any investment fund, actually) is the conflict between time and money. You get funded and then you only have a fixed amount of time between everyone in your company to find investments and then keep an eye on them. If you get too much money, you spend less time on each investment and, inevitably, have more losers. The kind of huge money that would come from a public fund would only make this problem worse.
5. The VC problem just might fix itself. As I’ve argued before, I think many new companies, especially internet startups, should build their product first and get a few customers before they expect any VC-level investment. This way, VC’s can see some demand, they can see the management team execute, and they can better judge the company’s chances for success. Could it be that the lower capital requirements of internet startups that seem to make so many people think VC is broken is actually the thing that could help fix it?

Anyway, we are putting our money where my mouth is. Peter, Chris, and I funded our entire business to this point on savings and credit cards, even moving to the Czech Republic for a year to cut costs, so we could bring a product to the market without taking on much outside capital. (We’ve only let one friend invest.)

And now we have a product. Next week, we will get our first customers.

We are talking to VCs right now because we know that in a few months, just about the time we plan to move back to the States, we will probably need their capital to help our business grow. If we do decide to take a deal, we will have customers and a product to show, just like we promised, and the venture capital we receive will go towards helping us expand, just like it is supposed to.

Venture capital isn’t broken. It just needs to be adapted a bit to take advantage of this new model of low-cost startup, higher-cost early expansion.

Bonus Link: See Jeff Nolan’s great comments here.

Here’s a little background behind what started us going on Sproutit.com and Mailroom:

At my last job, I helped run a small business called Nisus Software. We sold a word processor for writers on the Mac platform. It’s a small market, but Nisus had some really dedicated users and with all the complaining I used to do about Word, it was fun to finally build a word processor that really worked the way a good word processor should.

But I digress. The simple fact is, we received a lot of email. In fact, two of our eight people – Dave and Mark – spent most of their day just answering email. I also spent a few hours a day answering email as well.

After a while, I got really frustrated with this. Dave, Mark and I loved working in a small business because there are so many exciting things you get to do; planning new products, improving the support site, launching new marketing ploys. But instead, we spent our days answering email.

As much as we all loved interacting with our customers, email is mind numbing and, quite frankly, it kept us from doing other things that were more fun.

So I started looking for ways to spend less time on email. I looked at Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and a bunch of others, but none of them really fit the bill. Some of them cost too much, others would have actually made email more work than it already was. Many were both expensive and more work.

“What a waste,” I thought. And then I went back to answering more email.

Now, go forward a year and some change to when Peter, Chris and I were looking to start Sproutit.com. We talked to over 30 different small businesses not unlike Nisus. To our surprise we found that this email thing was not an uncommon problem. In fact, more than 90% of the companies we talked to brought this up as an issue.

With those kinds of results, we knew we had found our calling. And that is how the idea for Mailroom was born.

Anyway, the point of this story is that there are a lot of fun, exciting, and glamorous things about running your own small business. Email is not one of them.

We didn’t create Mailroom to save you time on email. We created Mailroom so you could spend more time doing what you love.

We had our technical call with the people at DEMO today. He actually seemed surprised at how prepared we are. He said we get right into demoing the product, which he likes, and our cues for the camera were clear. We’ve watched the videos and even talked to other DEMO attendees. Apparently this is not the normal state of things for many presenters.

DEMO is going to cost us about $30,000 in all. I suppose for many bigger companies, this is not that much money. It’s actually not that out of line with other trade shows. But for us its a lot. It nearly doubles the total amount we have spent on Sproutit.com so far just with this one event.

I suppose for a big company, this doesn’t seem like much so preparing for DEMO is not so important to them. But we paid a lot for those 6 minutes and we plan to get something out of it.

Bonus Note: If you haven’t been listening to our podcasts, you should. We have a segment called the Daily Demo where you can hear actual parts of our speech. You can listen to them right on the web here)

It is friday. What else do I need to say. Dinner for 8, practice for DEMO, and keep on keepin’ on.

What an eventful week. We finally deployed our new web design to our server with some great early feedback. We just sent back our photos for processing, we moved our main website to a speedy server provided by avlux and we lined up a few press items about Mailroom.

Our first official press begins next Wednesday.

Also, Internet Explorer. So far, Mailroom has not worked at all on Internet Explorer mostly due to its terrible support for web standards. But I’m happy to report that after working all day on it, I think we’ve basically got IE support going. We’ll probably put something up on the servers for our testers to see tomorrow.

Laptops, UN, very small fish, and bad laws from potato land. And, the Daily DEMO of course.

On February 10, I’ll stop by New York City on my way back from Phoenix to be on the round table panel at the Small Business Technology Summit. Other representatives will be there from Intuit, Amazon and others as well as Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion who first pointed me to the conference.

If you’re in the area and you still want to sign up, head on over to their website to check it out.

On February 10, I’ll stop by New York City on my way back from Phoenix to be on the round table panel at the Small Business Technology Summit. Other representatives will be there from Intuit, Amazon and others as well as Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion who first pointed me to the conference.

If you’re in the area and you still want to sign up, head on over to their website to check it out.

Maybe this won’t seem as cool to the rest of you, but we are stoked that our alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University, put a link to our story on their homepage. We were all part of the School of Business. I will actually be speaking to some classes after our launch at DEMO on Feb. 6.

Cooking. Small business analogies. Oh, and a great meal.

Last Saturday we visited our friend Tomas’ photo studio and took some head shots for upcoming press. The final production shots are still in the works, but so far everyone’s favorite is this one:

(From left to right: Chris, Charles, and Peter)

UPDATE: Our pictures were taken by our friends at Mainspring Studios a great photography, advertising, and film production house based here in Prague.

The Date has been set. This Friday we go into final lock down for new features before DEMO. Next week, we should start inviting some more people to start trying Mailroom for themselves.

Peter, Chris, and I spent some time last night talking about the First Fifteen for Mailroom. I think we’ve come up with some interesting ideas, but I am anxious to have users actually try it and tell us what they think.

The key thing we realized is that a lot of people are going to want to log into Mailroom and just kick the tires a little bit. We want to help them feel productive in those first 5-10 minutes so they will want to go the rest of the way and start using Mailroom for real email.

When we begin letting inviting new users to try Mailroom next week, we will be watching how they spend their first 15 minutes very closely to make sure we’ve got that part right.

By the way, if you are interested in trying Mailroom, be sure you have signed up on our front page. We’ll be sending invitations to that email list first starting sometime next week.

With the Ukrainian folks taking gas, the World Cup on its way, and DEMO right around the corner, the three amigos at Sproutit.com are still working hard.

A few weeks ago we announced that we were planning some new things for the Big Act. Among them, we started a new podcast called Living the Dream. Unfortunately, finding these podcasts has been a little difficult because we were publishing them on another site.

Starting today, Living The Dream podcasts will appear here on The Big Act right alongside our normal daily posts. You can also find the podcasts listed on their own page by clicking on the Listen to Podcasts link above.

Chris has been doing these everyday for the last week now and they are really incredible. They are funny, revealing, and mercifully short. You can also hear parts of the presentation we have planned for DEMO every single day.

So pop over and listen to a few of the podcasts we have done. And if you have an iPod with iTunes, be sure to subscribe to the podcast feed to get Living the Dream delivered to your iPod everyday.

A bit of everything on top. Camels, bathtubs with donkeys, prickly pear fines, and free water. Also, we are changing the location of this podcast to our blog, The BiG AcT by the end of the day. So, re-subscribe to that new link.

A local reporter for Expats.cz has just written an article about the cost of living in Prague. Primarily he wanted to educate people who are considering coming to live in Prague as opposed to those of us already living here. While you can no longer find a 30 cent beer like you could 5 years ago, most regular day items are still cheap. Luxuries are a bit more. Take a look for yourself here at that article.

It used to be that the label “Beta” was an effective means of managing user expectations. You could label your product beta and still release it to get useful feedback from customers without them expecting it to work bug and error free.

Not so anymore. Most of the products Google provides are beta. Anymore, it is not uncommon to introduce your new web app as “beta” and leave it there for months or years, even when it really should be labeled as done. As a result, users increasingly expect beta software to have a level of quality and features that we used to expect from release software.

When you first launch some software, you want to keep everyone’s expectations low. There will inevitably be some rough edges, even if the product really does work as advertised. Is it even possible to do that anymore by calling your new product “beta”?

I believe most people decide to whether or not they will buy your consumer software within 15 minutes of using it. They may wait longer than that to actually give you there money, but the decision is basically made.

First impressions count.

Here are my three guidelines for getting the first impression right:

1. Looks Matter. At first glance, your user interface must be pleasant to look at. Better yet, make it unusually beautiful, although that is difficult to do.
2. Keep the user engaged. Give them something to do. They need an obvious starting point, then an obvious next step, and so on. Don’t give them a tutorial. Keep them using the product, but guide them, at least for the first 15 minutes. Above all…
3. Get to work right away. You can spend a few minutes asking setup questions, but keep it short. Put the user into the main application as fast as possible. And then, make sure they get something useful done within the first 5 minutes of using it.

If people feel productive and comfortable in your app right away, they will be more interested in your product. It’s that simple.

We will spend much of our time on Mailroom in the next few weeks refining the first 15 minute experience. It’s one of the trickiest parts of this kind of application. But, we have to get it right because: first impressions count!

Big Brother in prison, NY cell phones, radio station static, and the escape of Google. Not to mention the ‘Daily DEMO!’

I am not talking about the coveted position by many college aged young men. You know, the one where you dress up in funny pants and a really big head and don’t say a word (a.k.a. Goofy).

There have been many reports about Steve Jobs becoming the majority shareholder in a potential sale of PIXAR to Disney. Here is a quote by Arik Hesseldahl in his recent posting from BusinessWeek’s Byte of the Apple.

Disney plus Pixar I get. Even the idea of Jobs stepping in for George Mitchell as Disney Chairman, I get. Disney seems like it could use a little bit of a shake-up that a Jobs Chairmanship might include.

At first, I was terribly skeptical about the rumors. I kept asking why. I did find a good bottom line reason that helps the whole idea make a lot more sense.

Thankfully, Apple seems well above the fray in all this talk of potential mergers. Clearly Disney’s substantial video and music library would fit very nicely into Apple’s longer-term digital media strategy. Disney movies and ABC TV shows, will sell by the millions on the iTunes store. Indeed Disney and Apple are and should remain great partners. But that’s as close as I would ever want them to be.

I must admit, after getting my new 60 GB iPod (black), I have really become a fan of the videos that are offered on the iTunes store. I even added our first videocast from Living the Dream to my iPod.

Sunkist jelly candies, goulash, slipping old ladies and a preview of our DEMO demo.

So Yahoo today missed Wall Street expectation and, once again, everyone is proclaiming the end of Bubble 2.0. Om Malik calls Yahoo’s miss a canary in a coal mine.

Come on. An asset bubble happens when everyone gets so excited they forget about rational investments and start buying hoping to sell to some greater fool. By that time, the roar of the bubble is so strong, the dissenters cannot be heard.

The canary you should watch is Om Malik and other bloggers. When they stop worrying that Bubble 2.0 is about to burst, that is when you should look to sell.

More canaries:

• Supr.c.ilio.us
• Ivan Martchev
• Jeffery Zeldman

The Red Coats are coming!!!!

Ahhh, they are here. Little Britain, technophobes, blackberries, and the “Queen� all on today’s show.

Well, we finally had our DSL turned back on. That was one painful holiday. Note to anyone else who decides to do this: when you show up, get Tiscali right away. Do not do Cesky. Better yet, only go someplace you can get cable.

But now that we have it, I must say this is really freaking fast.

Having grow up as a performer both on and off the stage, I always had a knack for getting up in front of large and small crowds and delivering entertaining messages. Guy Kawasaki hits home with his tips for delivering a great speech. I would like to add a note to one of his ideas. His 11th entry is ‘practice and speak all the time.’ One way to get started is by offering toasts at your meals with friends and especially co-workers. Even create a competition amongst you and your colleagues for using prose, rhythm, rhyme and great articulation (not to mention something relevant to the occasion).

Give that a try. I would love to hear stories about some of your practice toasts.

A sample toast

May your glasses be charged as you prepare for your day and let your sales volume increase in the very same way.

Cheers!

Today the script for our demo presentation is due. I wrote earlier about wanting to take risks and Brenden suggested we try taking some email directly from the audience. I think we are going to do that, but now I have to fit that into the 6 minutes.

Just a reminder to check out our podcast. We will be refining it over the next week and will try and blend it in with the BiG AcT so that you only need to worry about one feed for keeping up to date with our escapades at Sproutit.com.

For DEMO, we have to turn in our script for our 6 minutes of fame. Not as easy as it sounds. There is so much that can be said about Mailroom, yet only 6 minutes. They’ll actually turn off our microphone if we go over. So, what is the theme of it all?

Sort. Prioritize. Suggest.

That is easy and to the point, but I suppose we will have to fill in the gaps.

Walnuts, Indonesia, Time machines and the Supreme Ruler of the Universe all from today’s interview with Sproutit.com’s Director of Operations, Peter Gohman.

An interview with Chairman and CFO, Chris Bauman, co-founder of Sproutit.com. More about DEMO and some personal information about Chris.

Chris and I got back yesterday from Prague. I managed to go to bed at like 7:30 which is great since I got plenty of sleep (for once).

As I mentioned a while back, our internet was turned off just before Christmas because we were switching from Cesky Telecom to Tiscali, who could supposedly provide us service twice as fast with no data limits (which is important when you have a VOIP phone.)

Today our new service was supposed to begin but that did not happen. Instead they told us we might have to wait even longer.

I love Prague and I am glad we are here. It’s really an amazing thing. But try getting DSL service in the Czech Republic quickly. oy.

At least we have good cafes with free wifi who stay open late!

Our very first podcast. Today’s episode features Charles Jolley, CEO of Sproutit.com and is recorded from our flight on Lufthansa from 37,000 feet as week trek from New York back to Prague.

Here it is folks! Our very first podcast. We have called it, Living the Dream.. We will be giving you updates on how we are progressing as we move closer to DEMO and our Launch on February 6. This is going to be a daily podcast hosted primarily by myself as we give you the inside scoop on the day-to-day developments here at Sproutit.com. Also, 2 to 3 times a week, I will also be delivering a Videocast or Video Podcast showing you what is happening here in Prague and abroad.

We are glad to share this with you as we are ‘Living the Dream.’.

It is 4:10am Prague time, 10:10pm New York time.

I am trying to sleep. Chris is doing post production on the very first Sproutit “Living the Dream” podcast. I announced a few days ago that Sproutit would be starting a video blog. Now we have decided to combine it with an audio podcast as well. Every day we will post a new podcast. Once or twice a week the podcast will contain a video stream as well.

I’m pretty excited about our podcast. Chris has a real talent for producing these kinds of audio and video recordings. The first episode is an interview with me on the airplane back from New York. We talk a bit about why we are in New York, why we are in Prague, and more. I’m sure future episodes will be much better though. We’ll post here when we have more.

PS: We are using the new iLife ‘06 to do all of our podcast production. GarageBand with its new podcast tools are really cool for anyone that is interested.

I recently went through all the materials for the DEMO conference, including their instructions on what makes a good demo. One thing they pointed out is that people are there to see new technology. They like it when you take a risk on stage to show something new or different.

Risky sounds fun. We’ve been think “what is the biggest risk we could take on stage at DEMO?” (Aside from say, crowd surfing or taking off our clothes.)

Tomorrow at 6pm we fly back to Prague. It will be nice to be home in my own bed for a while. This week has been packed and a bit exhausting but very productive. In a few weeks we will all get back on a plane one more time and head to LA on our way to DEMO. Between now and then we have to finish our product and plan our demo.

Chris and I will probably focus on the script tomorrow on the plane when we are not trying to sleep.

Ina Fried of c|net wrote about the end of Windows Media Player for the Mac.

Instead of continuing to develop their media player, Microsoft ceded to Telestream and their conversion product, Flip4Mac. Should we take this as Microsoft realizing that Quicktime is a better product that produces better results? I would like to think so. Or, have they just backed a new competitor to Quicktime with a new and untarnished reputation to put up against Apple the Goliath? While competition is great in this arena, I think this will be used for Mac users to create quality media products for the guys on the other side (lost Windows users).

We decided to make a big change to Mailroom today. It’s a little risky to add something this close to DEMO, but its the right thing to do.

Basically, Mailroom used to let you sort email into mailboxes (or folders), just like you do with Outlook. But we found that not very many people were using this feature and it was quite important for Mailroom to properly sort incoming mail.

So instead, Mailroom will let you tag your incoming email.

If you’ve used del.icio.us or Flickr, you probably know what tagging is. They are a very useful way for a group to keep things organized.

But there’s more. Mailroom will learn how you and your team tag your emails and then do it for you. It’s like Riya but for email. Can you imagine never having to organize your emails again?

Adding tagging is going to take a little more time than we originally planned. It means that when we let our first few users in next week, Mailroom will support neither tagging or mailboxes. But by the end of next week it should all be there, and the benefits will definitely be worth the wait!

Let’s say you’ve got only 6 minutes to tell the world what you and your product do. You need to be different enough to make eyebrows raise, yet still be believable enough that no one thinks you are a crackpot.

What do you do?

We will be pondering this over the next few days coming up with a slam-bang 6 minutes. Any suggestions?

They say everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. We received an email today informing us that will get 6 minutes at DEMO at 9:38am on February 8. Talk about a hard deadline.

“When you’re small, they’ll dismiss you. When you’re growing, they’ll criticize you. When you’re large, they’ll resent you.” – Rick Warren

Hopefully you will also run into those who recognize your promise while you’re small, support it while you’re growing, and appreciate your contribution when you’re large, but Rick Warren does hit down with a dose of reality. The trick is to not to disregard those who dismiss, criticize, and resent your ambitions, but to win them over in the early stages by showing them how much potential your endeavors will have in improving the lives of your target audience (in the case of Sproutit—small businesses) and how that can have a positive impact for all of us.

Here in NY, 3 times a day, we ask ourselves, “What kind of food do you feel like eating?” Typically we can’t think of anything in particular, so we choose to just roam a block or two looking for ideas. I would venture that we have tried foods from more nationalities than the entire time we have been in Prague. I would also like to point out that we have had much better coffee here in NY vs Prague, too.

Our web traffic yesterday was as low as Christmas Day, a major holiday. We had 0 new email signups, a first since we opened our website.

Coincidentally, Macworld happened yesterday and Steve announced new PowerBooks (which I literally drooled over).

Is Steve Jobs bigger than Christmas?

We have been thinking for a while of bringing a small business video blog series online for all the world to see. Well, it has finally arrived. Our first episode will show you a bit of our city. In coming episodes, you will begin to see a behind the scenes look at who and what makes up Sproutit.com.

Here is the link to our VideoBlog.

The file format is .m4v so it is designed to work in iTunes.

Have fun and see you next time!

Just a few pictures and shots of were we work while we live our dream.

Yesterday, up at 5am to catch a 6:55 train to Boston. A great meeting in Cambridge and another dinner meeting at a restaurant so fine its known only by its address. (No 9.) Then back on the train at 9:45pm.

This morning, up at 8am for a 10 o’clock meeting in midtown followed by another meeting near Union Square followed by an afternoon of returning phone calls and arranging some additional presentations.

This week Chris and I will present Sproutit.com, demo Mailroom, talk strategy, several times everyday. In the mean time, I check in when I can with Scott who is rolling out the last changes to Mailroom, including a new UI design.

I will probably spend most of the flight home writing up our script for DEMO. (I’ll be writing more about that later this week.)

All this and the final push is only beginning. I love this job.

Another day of travels for Charles and I as we head up towards Boston on Amtrak. We had a tip-off that instead of taking Amtrak up the coast, that we should take a look at Jet Blue and fly up to Boston from New York. Here are some of the factors that we took into consideration.

Cost: Winner – Amtrak Originally, looking at just the ticket cost, the difference between two round trip fares was only $10. In favor of Jet Blue. But, we were able to score some discounts on Amtrak making it even. What really blew the cost out of the water was the fare for a van to the airport. Just in NY, it is $65 RT on SuperShuttle. To get to Penn Station, a $2 metro ride in the subway.

Time: Winner – Jet Blue We figure the time to take Amtrak was about an hour longer. How so? The train ride is 4 hrs 7 min. The flight 40 minutes + 1 hr van ride + 1 hr arrival at JFK prior to flight.

Productivity: Winner – Amtrak While there was no WiFi available in either option (at least for coach), the ability to get work done was strongly in favor of Amtrak. 4 hours of uninterrupted time to focus on CSS, cash flow, biz plan review, and keeping up to date with the WSJ (paper version).

And, since most of our dealings today are in the afternoon and evening, we were able to get a late train back to NY that allowed another hour and a half of time to enjoy our meetings and engagements.

I say often that for Mailroom to really make an impression, we need it to pop. The UI needs to be really slick. It needs to push the boundaries.

Too many web apps try to make their software work like a web page. Or, they try to make their web pages work like a desktop application. But we need to make it just right.

Mailroom is a web-based application. It needs to both feel at home in a web browser and feel responsive like an application. It needs to be both functional and have an aesthetic you can stare at all day. It needs to leave an impression. It needs to pop.

That is why I have spent all weekend working on a new UI design for Mailroom inspired by some help from Bart Biezen. Together, we’ve been through about 10 different designs. It’s not done quite yet, but I think the one we’ve got now looks pretty good. I think it’s going to pop.

I want to roll out our new design to our testers in the next week or so along with a bunch of new features. I want to see if it pops for them!

Hi, my name is Peter and I’m the director of operations for Sproutit. My informal titles are CEE (Chief of Everything Else) and SROTU Bwahaha (Supreme Ruler Of The Universe Bwahaha). The second title came from Charles after a big dinner and some holiday cheer with our English lawyer friend.

My job here is to make sure the customer has the best possible experience. That includes customer service, QA, beta testing and hosting solutions. Thankfully, I have an excellent team that works with me to deliver top notch service. My most crucial task is to make sure everyone knows the plan.

So if you can imagine how key communication is to my position you’ll understand how crazy my first bump in the road to DEMO was.

Along with our DEMO announcement this week, we have also decided to make a few change to our blog, The Big Act.

This is a very exciting time for us. A lot of new startups dream of launching their product with the attention 400 of the more important people in tech, not to mention all the press it generates. Now we get to live that dream and we would like to bring you along for the ride.

Starting today, we are going to focus The Big Act on documenting all the excitement, anxieties, and challenges we face as we prepare for our Big Launch. Expect shorter, more frequent posts, more inside info and more personal stories. It should be a lot of fun.

Of course, anyone can blog their DEMO story. We want to go further. We want you to experience first hand the same things we are experiencing.

So why not video?

Later next week, we will launch a companion video blog called Big Act Shorts. We will plan to post a video blog entry a few times a week with highlights, thoughts and discussion about our preparations for DEMO.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: I’ve been known to write posts discussing the strategy of various tech companies now and then. In fact, these have been some of our most popular posts. I am going to continue this series of posts, with more frequency, over on my personal blog okito.net.

If you were interested by past posts about Why Microsoft Can’t Win Search, What the 37 Signals Did Right, and others, then head on over to okito.net for more strategy fun.

Our DEMO Story on The Big Act, a new video blog, and a new strategy blog all in one day. That’s a lot of announcements, but we’re just getting started. We have a lot more planned for the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

That is a classic line from the advertising campaign of Dunkin’ Donuts that was used from 1982 till 1997. We stopped by one of their stores a couple of blocks from our flat in the East Village.

Just before we arrived, Charles and I were talking about the plethora of Starbucks stores that we had seen in just a few blocks in the Village. Charles happen to mention that Dunkin’ Donuts was in competition with Starbucks in trying to be their coffee rival. Remembering where one was from my last trip to NY in September, we headed that way. To our great surprise, not only did we find a place for donuts and good coffee, but FREE WIFI.

While DD is trying to compete with SB on coffee, it will be a long battle to substitute the word ‘donut’ with ‘coffee’ when they hear Dunkin’ Donuts. But, keeping score on this trip, with free wifi and better donuts…. Dunkin’ Donuts 2, Starbucks 0.

A few months ago, I wrote about a big demo we did of our new product, Mailroom. Today I can finally tell you what that was all about:

On February 6, Sproutit.com will debut its first product at the prestigious DEMO conference in Phoenix, AZ. (See the press release here.)

In case you’ve never heard of DEMO, this conference is an dream opportunity for a small start up such as ours. The conference is very exclusive. All the top journalists and business people in tech will attend DEMO looking for the next big thing. As a presenter, we will have 6 minutes to demonstrate our product to them. If the audience likes us, DEMO could open doors that would otherwise take us months or years to develop.

Now, just being invited to present at DEMO is a big honor. Only 70 companies are invited to present, though hundreds apply. Only the best of the best are invited. Among those who launched their products at DEMO are such names as Palm, Handspring, E*Trade, and Java.

To really make the most of this opportunity though, we have to rock the demo. We get 6 minutes. No do-overs. If we go over, they kill our mic.

What would you do if you had the attention of the top press and business people in your market for 6 minutes?

That is the question we have to answer over the next few weeks. We will do our best to bring you along for the ride as we put together our answer and then deliver it at DEMO in February. In fact, we have some news concerning our blog coming in the next 24 hours, so stay tuned!

Avid Mac users will boast about the greatness of Apple vs. any other computer manufacturer. I do. Heck, I used to work for Apple, so I am definitely biased.

But every now and then, you come across a “Bad Apple.” Our Mac Mini was one of them. Fortunately for us, it died before we came to NY, so we packed it with us and brought it to the Apple Store SOHO. Without an appointment, my best chance of getting it repaired in time for our flight back to Prague was to bring it in between 6 and 7 AM!!!. This was tough to do after yesterday’s flight, but I made it. In fact, mini should be brought back to life by the end of the day.

Continue to boast about Apple? You bet I will!

KCRW Music is the coolest internet radio station. They always play the best new music and now I can listen to them while flying over the Atlantic. It brings tears to my eyes.

There is a tradition that was started by my friends when I studied in Vienna a couple of years ago. The 2 Euro Bet. It is a bet using the infamous 2 euro coin. It is an infantile type of bet, much like that on the preschool playground. “I double dog dare you!” A famous quote from the Christmas Story movie that resounds so true to all of us.

Well, there was an offer of a two euro bet today. Try sitting in business class on our transatlantic flight without getting caught. So, I sat down, followed by Charles. No one seemed to mind. They even came and got my coat and hung it up for me. That is where I made the mistake that cost us. How? In order to account for the coat properly, they ask for your boarding pass to put with the coat. He took it and wondered off. No problem, so we thought. 15 minutes later and 5 minutes before take-off, he returned with my coat, off the hanger, and said very politely that we were seated in the wrong class. Not the wrong seat, but the wrong class.

Oh, well. Stuck in the back with the chickens. But, we have Wi-Fi!

Oh, and HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!!

I’m on the flight right now to NYC from Frankfurt and using the internet. I’ve read about the airlines planning to set this up for some time, but its the first time I’ve actually had a chance to use it.

This is why I think the age of internet-based software has come. You used to have to worry about getting access to web-based tools when there was no internet. Now you can get it everywhere, even on airplanes.

UPDATE: Fred Wilson just used airplane wifi also while flying his family to Thailand.

While I wasn’t able to find a place in town to watch the big game (Rose Bowl), I woke up, checked my email, and saw that my beloved Texas Longhorns won the game. Why is this worth blogging about? Two reasons:

1. I am a Texan in a foreign land
2. I am a Longhorn – and they didn’t bring the title home when I was a student with Ricky Williams

And, being the arrogant Texan that I am, I will probably bring up this topic again for the next few weeks or even months.

HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!!

While the price of a liter of gas has remained relatively stable here in Europe (about $1.25/liter or $5/gallon), gas prices in the US have gone through the roof. That being said, is that a good enough reason in flights across the Atlantic to have increased by 20% since last year?

Well, I had to buy some tickets for flights back to the states recently. I’ll let you know where we are flying in a few days. But, I will say that the cost of the tickets across the big pond are still worth the cost considering that we live in Prague. No regrets.

Blogging is going to remain a bit light for us at the Big Act for a few more days. As I’ve said before we have a big announcement coming Jan 6. At that time, we will also be doing some new things with this blog that we will be preparing for over the next few days.