Keiretsu Forum...

So if you were an ex-CEO of Levi's... or an heir to the Schwab fortune... or have found your way into a few million dollars in the dot com boom... where would you go to find some interesting private investments? Today I spent my morning at the Keiretsu Forum -- self described as being about Great Association with Quality Deal Flow and watched the moneyed of Silicon Valley give the thumbs up or thumbs down on 5 early stage companies.

By their own admission, the section most members visit on their website is the "event calendar" -- including ski trips, golf outings, and trips to Hawaii... but the presentations today were all business with both self-made millionares and inheritors weighing in on the pros and cons of businesses that ran the gamut -- life sciences, software, financial services, even a new packaging concept.

It was a refreshing reminder of the dynamic form of capitalism alive in our country. A "swarm" of investors that self-organize and fund companies. The "K-Forum," as everyone calls it there, just creates a venue for the investors to see qualified deals. Investors make their own individual decisions to jump in.

Joining is easy -- have $1 million in liquid assets (that makes you an accredited investor) and give Randy Williams, K-Forum Founder, $1,000 a year. Oh, and there is a 2-3 month waiting list...

Lest you think that the $1 million rule is a way of keeping the club exclusive -- this is actually an SEC rule intended to protect less sophisticated investors from bad investments.

Reed Hundt on VoIP

An excellent interview by Paul Kapustka for Networking Pipeline -- Reed Hundt former chairman of the FCC...

Here is one thoughtful quote from Reed on regulation of VoIP:

So that's a huge regulatory issue. If the regulators say, "well, we sort of want to regulate VoIP," my view is: Be suspicious, be wary, be alarmed, be worried. Because what they should say is, we have no more business interfering with the flow of bits that are voice than we do with the bits that are the picture you sent to somebody to see if you can persuade her to go have a drink with you because you were connected by Match.com. That's personal, and the voice call also ought to be personal.

So many people saying such sensible things about VoIP regulation (or non-regulation)... Where are the big, bad phone companies to insure that their investments are protected?

I am a VoIP believer

I have to admit that I have been hanging back from the VoIP banquet table because of my misplaced concern about voice quality. Well this week I set up phone numbers for myself through VoicePulse in both New Haven and in New York City... and they work great!! I am now a Believer and am jumping in with both feet.

One other lurking concern was about the possibility of government regulation. I was heartened by these comments by FCC head Michael Powell:

"It is not a telephone service; it is a voice application, completely indistinguishable from any other kind of application that can run on an IP network. If you're going to say to me that voice over IP is something that needs regulation, then you're going to have to explain to me why e-mail isn't also, or streaming video or instant messaging is not also..."

Remarkably intelligent comments coming from a government official!

The full article is available on News.com

All this euphoria makes me want to become a VoIP long distance telephone company. Heck, I think we should ALL become long distance telephone companies! I was tired of doing business with SBC anyway...

Microsoft wins again...

Why use a platform independent technology to deliver your application to customers and then tie your implementation exclusively to a single platform? This is exactly what Siebel has done with their CRM OnDemand product.

Despite having built the application to run in a web browser, the technology that should allow vendors to break their dependence on Microsoft, the Siebel folks have tied their implementation to an MS Windows specific implementation of Internet Explorer. That's right, even using Microsoft's version of Internet Explorer for Mac OS X you cannot run Siebel's CRM OnDemand application.

And forget about any non-IE browsers.

Understandably, 95% of the world uses Microsoft, so vendors should support their Windows customers. But it isn't that hard to make a browser based application work on non-Windows platforms. And if you don't care about supporting non-Windows customers, why use a browser based application anyway? A much better user experience is available by building a native Windows application.

Siebel is not alone. I have found that more and more web sites that I visit are Mac unfriendly. Recently I upgraded to IE 5.2.3 (the most recent release for Mac) and discovered that Macromedia's Flash Player has stopped working. Whether deliberate or not, Microsoft is succeeding in balkanizing the Internet -- diverging their browser (even on their OS) from the marketplace. Given the economics, most companies will chose to invest in Windows specific solutions. The Microsoft monopoly wins again.

Fair Disclosure -- Prior relationship to Salesforce.com

I have received some questions regarding my relationships to either Salesforce or Siebel and in the interest of pursuing a blogger code of ethics, let me be clear -- I have known Marc Benioff for some time, while at Borland I was the principal contact between Borland and Salesforce.com, and I did attend a 49ers game in the Salesforce.com corporate box. I have never received any such invitations from Siebel.

I personally do not believe that this clouds my reporting here on this blog, but now you can decide for yourself given my disclosure.

By the way, I did finally get a password and logon to Siebel CRM OnDemand -- after sending an email reminder to them yesterday. However I am not able to logon due to a Javascript error that I get when accessing their system. I have contacted their customer support organization and am awaiting their reply.

And when I signed up for the Salesforce.com trial (which worked flawlessly and immediately) it was through their website - not through my relationships to executives at their company.

Are We Losing the Robot Race?

Pik which, when launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union, excited our nation to respond with a technology crash program of its own, we have no equivalent Space Race response to the frequent announcements from Japan of its growing prowess in robot manufacturing.

The latest news, that Sony has built a full-size humanoid jogging robot is just the latest in a series of firsts from Japanese mega-conglomerates. For some time now Honda's Asimo and Sony's Qrios have been entertaining conference attendees with dance routines.

Many have argued that humanoid shaped robots are not particularly useful by comparison to industrial robots where most US researchers have focused. Solving the complicated problems of making a machine move like a human being doesn't help with any of the heavy industrial problems for which most robots are utilized.

This narrow view of robots ignores the basic premise that Honda and Sony are successfully focused on -- that everything in our world is designed to accomodate a human frame and human hands. If robots are going to play a useful role in an everyday human world, they will have to move and look something like human beings.

Robot manufacturing will be one of the 21st centuries biggest industries. As the world's largest economy we ignore this market at our own peril.

Siebel CRM OnDemand update

Its nice to have a blog that people read. Thank you to whomever let IBM/Siebel know that I was frustrated -- suddenly a "CRM OnDemand Solution Specialist" contacted me from IBM. She was very friendly and she has set me up with a trial account that begins on Monday. It appears to be a manual process...

Suggestions to those of you at Siebel and IBM who may be reading this:

1) Automate your process for issuing a trial account -- when I register to try your software, your service should be "on demand"

2) Have your salesperson contact me to offer to help after I have a trial account not as a barrier to my getting a trial account. Use that contact as an opportunity to find out something about how I intend to use the product.

3) I got the impression that you hope that people who sign up for the "trial" will begin actually using the service and entering real data. Why would I do that? If, like Salesforce, you had a lightweight version for free I might, and then you might hook me and I'd want to upgrade to a pay version. But as it is I know that my trial will end in 30 days so I will play with your product so that I can learn about how it compares to your competitor but I will not be so foolish as to really use the product and then have my data go away in 30 days.

I look forward to receiving my userid and password on Monday...

Salesforce.com has nothing to worry about

CRM Daily ran an interesting article recently, predicting that Salesforce.com is going to feel increasing pressure from SAP and Siebel, who recently acquired Salesforce competitor Upshot. In Will the Siebel-IBM OnDemand Initiative Crush Salesforce.com CRMDaily writer Kimberly Hill pulls together a tired group of analyst quotes in the old Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) method, suggesting that having such big companies in the race will spell doom for little upstart Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com needn't worry

As a potential customer of an online SFA system I recently visited both Salesforce.com and Siebel to find out more about their products.

At Salesforce.com I was able to immediately sign up for and start using a free version of their product. A Salesforce.com salesperson called me that day to ask if I had any questions or problems and what the size of my ultimate implementation would be (should he spend any more time trying to sell me... which I respect).

At Siebel the experience was VERY different. After being promised a free trial with registration (not free use as at Salesforce, just a free trial for 30 days) I filled out the form and then was greeted with a message -- "thanks, a Siebel salesperson will call you to set up your free trial." It has been two days and I have received no call.

Big Software and small business don't mix

Sure, Siebel and SAP and IBM would all like to sell to the small and medium sized business market. After all, SMBs employ over 50% of all workers in the US. But their techniques simply don't work. A big company will dedicate a team to evaluating SFA offerings, spend months coming up with a recommendation, and spend millions implementing a product. I on the other hand want to make a decision tomorrow and start using the product the minute after I make that decision. Salesforce.com has the right stuff for small business. Siebel isn't even in the game.

Will I ever trust analysts again?

Before I believe anything more that the Aberdeen Group has to say I want them to fully disclose their sources of financing. How much are Siebel and IBM paying for this hit piece on Salesforce.com? Why is it that journalists still believe such people?

Kapustka is back!

After a short sabbatical away from journalism, fans of tech journalist Paul Kapustka will be happy to learn that he is behind a new "newslog" at CMP Media. networkingpipeline is part of CMP's effort to create focused content in narrow vertical tech niches and Paul's efforts should lend some street cred to this effort. One does have to wonder where they got the picture however... But it is great to have you back Paul!

Spoke as Napster of Social Networking

A friendly VC suggested this meme -- will Spoke be the Napster of Social Networking? And that isn't Napster as in good -- viral, inventive, breakthrough, industry changing... that would be Napster as in bad -- accused of breaking laws, shut down, investors sued...

If you haven't investigated social networking yet you should take a look at the two services that are making waves -- LinkedIn and Spoke

Did you know that you are probably already in Spoke? Only 50,000 users and already 7 million people are linked to each other. They do this by taking their member's email mailboxes and indexing everyone that the member has ever sent or received mail from. Then they cross-index with anyone else already in their system and add a variety of other Internet sourced information about each person to build a profile of the member's contacts.

Imagine the ultimate result -- an automatically generated profile of you which includes your photo, your home address, phone numbers, email addresses, jobs you've worked at, your blog, other people's opinions of you... in short any piece of information out there about you. A people Google on steroids.

Feel that your privacy has been encroached on yet?

So with spoke gathering information and building dossiers on millions of people that have no connection to the service, isn't it just a matter of time before someone sues?

Desktop Linux

In a recent news.com article, C Net reports the "news" -- IBM warms to desktop Linux Amazingly the article is actually about how one IBM exec is giving a speech at the Desktop Linux Conference. This is news? What is particularly sad about the article is that IBM seems to be still locked into the mind set of using Linux as a replacement for 3270 terminals. Someone needs to show IBM Mac OS X -- ok its not Linux, but it IS a complete Unix environment with fantastic (better than Microsoft) look and feel. It will take some effort to make Linux as easy to use as the Mac, but it is clearly possible.

If IBM really wanted to create a competitor to Microsoft it would cost less money than they are currently spending to give Java development tools away for free (eclipse). So the real question is -- why don't they want to compete with Microsoft?

Moving on

For a variety of personal and professional reasons, the time has come (after 3 1/2 years) for me to move on from Borland. I am working on some start up ideas which I will share via this blog as they develop. In the meantime, my Borland email address no longer works, but you can still reach me at the afterink email listed here (over to the left...).

One of the greatest beneficiaries (second to my daughter anyway) of my departure from Borland may be this blog. Both because I expect that I'll have a little more time for blogging but more importantly because I am no longer an officer of a public company. I had always worried about posting too much about what I was doing or what I was thinking about -- I wanted to be careful to avoid violating (or being perceived as having violated) the SEC's "Regulation FD" -- that's FD as in Fair Disclosure.

For the same reason, I won't be posting anything about Borland even now that I have departed. You may see some views on the industries that I worked in, but I'll avoid commenting on anything too direct in order to avoid the appearance that I have disclosed something confidential about the business.

We all make hard decisions in our careers and leaving Borland was definitely a hard one for me. I have had the pleasure of working with some terrific people over the past few years, and of being a part of one of the few really important software companies. Thanks to all of you reading this who have been a part of that time, hopefully we will meet again under new circumstances.

Another day, another blog...

Hardly a day goes by anymore when I don't hear that another friend has started a blog. Today it was Ed Sim with his Beyond VC self described as "A venture capitalist's viewpoint on technology, the markets, and life in a connected world..." Ed's a smart guy and I expect this to be interesting reading on a regular basis... Maybe he'll figure out how to be more regular than me! :-)

Who believes in the growth number?

I am taking an informal survey (email me) on the GDP number -- do you believe it? If so, do you believe that the tax cut is the reason or do you have a different theory? If not, what do you think it really was? 7.2% !? Here is what I want to know -- how do home refinancings figure into this number? Could it be that the real reason that GDP seems so high is low interest rates?

Funny dad moment...

You know you're a dad when you find yourself in line at the supermarket buying diapers, beer, and dog food. I imagined the store staff calling the department of health and human services to follow me home... I wonder how often those three items are purchased together. I bet it is not uncommon for dads to run out of those three items at the same time in the first few weeks... speaking of which -- Paloma Elena Shelton is now 16 days old. Sorry I didn't write sooner to let you know out there in Blog land!

Email up and running

Now that I am home, expecting the birth of my daughter, I am really going to try and get going again on this blog (so many previous promises though!). I now have email up and running for the blog -- tshelton@afterink.com if you want to write to me.

Internet Innovation continues...

I have just been playing around with a new service called Linkedin which allows you to build an online network of friends and colleagues for job hunting, sharing ideas, investigating investments... It is similar to a service (now defunct) called sixdegrees -- but much more useful. I am certainly happy to see people continuing to try out new ideas -- the Internet revolution isn't over. It has just slowed down a bit.

During the bubble we just got too far away from innovation and too interested in get-rich-quick. Hopefully the innovation is coming back.

Will Software be free?

I had the opportunity to participate in an industry roundtable at JavaOne. An interesting article has recently been published, summarizing the conversation. You can read the entire article here. In this article, I was quoted as having said:

"But Shelton countered that the reality is that "people are downloading free things from developers' sites, not from open-source vendors." In fact, he predicted that "software will be free" in five to 10 years."

It is a problem to summarize a conversation -- you always end up simplifying the points that people have made.

The funny thing is -- my prediction as stated has already come true -- there is software that is free today. But my real point was that the software that costs money today will be free in five to ten years. Free can happen in lots of different ways -- open source, bundling, or through making the software so trivial to develop that anyone can build their own.

The challenge for software companies to remain relevant is to constantly innovate on top of the layer that is becoming free.

Keeping up with the blog

OK, I am going to make another attempt -- after having been gently criticized by a close friend for letting this blog grow stale. I have a different idea about what a blog can be though than some of the really prolific posters. It doesn't make sense to me to be posting every personal thing that happens to me -- the new place for spicy noodles that I discovered, the links to every other person's interesting comment... unless it is apropos to a comment I am making. I will attempt to keep this blog information rich. Critics welcome -- email to tshelton@borland.com

Yahoo News Group

I am asked by "thejunglejaguar" -- a frequent Yahoo newsgroup poster -- to "blog it out" in answer to his question "...whether I should really be invested in Borland."

No Borland exec will ever give you investment advice.

Why not try asking questions I can answer?