My iPhone Hung Up

I was just informed by my salesperson at Cingular that they have been forbidden from honoring any wait lists. It’s first-come-first-served.

I told him I have neither the patience nor time to queue up with the iSheep.

While Apple isn’t playing Cingular as obnoxiously as they played Motorola, they’re still playin’ ‘em pretty darn good . All the Cingular sales folks must be gleeful about informing good customers they can’t have their phones.

My iPhone is Calling

Assuming Apple makes its shipping deadline, a week from tomorrow I should be playing with my very own iPhone. I plan to post frequently here regarding my experience with the beastie. I’m #1 on my dealer’s list (yes, I’m a geek).

I have extremely mixed expectations about the device. I am currently a Treo 750 user and haven’t lived without a keyboard on my phone for many years now. I’m also really unimpressed with the purported data speed on the iPhone.

I haven’t bled six colors since the early 90s. No Apple apologists here. So stay tuned if you’d like an un-biased viewpoint.

“Super Geek”

In the vein of turning my wife into a geek, I found this geek test via a post of Brad’s. I scored a 45.16765%, which makes me just barely a “Super Geek”. Guess I should get out more .

The Girl’s A Geek! :-)

My wife knew I was a geek within days of meeting me. Maybe she knew within hours – or even minutes! Day by day, month by month, and year by year, I’ve slowly been turning her into a geek too.

Today was a big step forward for her. I was lounging this morning with my laptop and my coffee, enjoying the view outdoors when suddenly she shows up with her laptop – for the first time ever removed from her desk (AFAIK) – to geek out too.

The geeks win!

It’s gonna be a BIG RING year!

I’m just astonished at how well virtually all manner of green-stuff is growing this spring. This is our seventh spring in our home, and this level of growth is definitely unprecedented in that period. The tree trunks are gonna have some SERIOUSLY big rings this year!

We’re very much looking forward to the roses – they’re doing stupendously, and the winter didn’t beat them up at all. Our rose garden has a combination of wild and cultivated roses, and the wild roses started blooming last week – probably a good month earlier than they bloomed last year!

This is a picture of “the last rose” in the garden, taken 10/15/06. Oddly enough, the same bush produced the first rose of 2007, though I didn’t get a snap. The centers are more white in the spring and get yellower in the fall (wish I remembered the name of the varietal).

Am I On The Wrong Coast?

At the end of last year, Dharmesh Shah wrote a depressing post about east-coast versus west-coast entrepreneurship, especially fundraising. It, and its many thoughtful comments, are well worth a read.

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Jim Matheson of Flagship, though earlier this year he and I amused ourselves trading a bunch of emails about the French Foreign Legion (don’t ask). Jim had an interesting article at Mass High Tech this week, which rekindled my thinking about Dharmesh’s blog post.

This particular section of Jim’s article made my stomach turn:

During one heated discussion on the funding market, it was said to me very matter-of-factly, “The Boston establishment is about preserving wealth, not creating it … and it’s been this way for a long, long time.”

While I hope that this is an untrue statement, my gut tells me it may be very accurate.

Jim asserts that in Boston…

[t]here are … sufficient VCs who are well versed in the Web 2.0 space and ready to fund highly capable teams with viable business models.

The key word in this sentence is ‘ready’ in the phrase “ready to fund”. When I saw this, my neurons immediately started playing back the hilarious Seinfeld piece of Jerry at the car rental counter screaming “Anbody can take a reservation…”. The gap between “ready to fund” and “funding” is non-trivial, to say the least.

There is a capital gap in New England. Early stage companies in Boston have to work harder than their Valley counterparts to close seed and A stage funding here. As Dharmesh points out, this is a major time-sink, comparatively speaking. I don’t know what the stats are, but I would bet that in the Valley, the proportion of total venture dollars being put to work versus total seed and A stage dollars being put to work – actually put to work, not “being poised to be put to work” – is much much higher than in Boston.

I don’t know jack about Xobni, but in reading their blog, I could make two observations about their move west. First, if Vinod Khosla wants to write me a seven-figure check, I’ll be on the next flight to SFO. Second, it apparently took Xobni five months to raise a ~$4M round, and I’ll bet that included their cycles through the Boston VCs. If you cut out their Boston wheel-spinning, that’s a relatively time-efficient round of fundraising. The question isn’t “why did Xobni leave” the (much less pleasant) question is “why would they possibly stay”?

The Boston startup ecosystem is hardly in shambles, but it does need attention.

With props to Seth for the pointer to Jim’s article.

SharePoint is SOOOOO Frustrating…

I’m a groupware nutcase. I’ve been using groupware in some form or another since I was first introduced to Lotus Notes roughly fifteen years ago. I have been hearing positive things about SharePoint, so we decided to give it a try.

The good news is, SharePoint is close. They are not that far from a useful system.

The bad news is that I have to assume Microsoft is not eating its own dog food. All sorts of obvious things are messy. For example, you have to write HTML code – they didn’t whip up (or license, or buy) a WYSIWYG or pseudo-WYSIWYG editor. This is insanely-annoying with the wiki tool, and only super-annoying with the discussion threads. You can’t roll-up tasks and calendars from sub-sections of your SharePoint site. The discussion threads are weak, with unimpressive organization/display options and no unread marks. I won’t go on, lest my blood pressure exit safe ranges.

We’ve invested a bunch of time trying to make SharePoint usable. We’re still trying, but I’m concerned we’ve wasted our time .