Congrats to Gil and Tacoda

I read this morning that AOL announced that it’s entered into an agreement to buy Tacoda. A special congrats to my friend Gil Beyda, EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development there.

I first worked with Gil back in my Salon.com days when he was CTO of RealMedia. We became the first company to implement the Linux version of the RealMedia Open AdStream software, which was running on large sites like USA Today and Playboy.com back then. I was intimately familiar with the commercial ad serving market at the time, having been the technical product manager for CNN’s rollout of NetGravity shortly after NetGravity hit the market (aside: check out this history of ad serving on Wikipedia). When I came to Salon, I wanted something that ran on Linux/Apache. As I recall, I met Gil and asked, “Does Open AdStream run on Linux/Apache?” and he said, “Sure, we can compile for Linux and we have an Apache module that handles the ad serving piece.” After some more due diligence, we chose Open AdStream and Gil and his team provided phenomenal support throughout (his chief engineer cheerfully answered my phone calls at 3am in the days leading up to the launch). When you’re an online media company supported 100% by advertising, choosing an ad server is a big decision and working with Gil and his team was probably the most pleasant experience I’ve ever had with an outside company on a critical project.

(For you kids out there, migrating to Linux was a big deal back then! We put out a press release announcing the fact and we were featured in Slashdot, PC World, and Wired’s Webmonkey. I also did a talk at 1999 OSCON about it along with Jeffrey Radice.)

I ran into Gil at OSCON last year and we had a nice dinner where we talked absolutely none about technology and focused instead on family, travel, and my recent engagement. Gil is one of the good guys and I’m glad to see him do well. Congrats, Gil!

Going paperless: is it (finally) time?

For years now, I’ve held onto the dream of going paperless — a dream that was usually shattered with an afternoon of clumsy scanning on a substandard consumer scanner and a few paper cuts. Every couple of years, I check back in on the state of the art and think about giving it another try. In the past, I’ve mainly been scared away by a very simple barrier: the lack of a reasonably-priced scanner with a document feeder that works consistently. I definitely didn’t want to spend my limited spare time placing documents on a flatbed scanner.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing my latest round of research on going paperless and nearly every success story I’ve seen has one scanner at the center of it: the Fujitsu ScanSnap (if you’re using a Mac, the specific model is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M). By all accounts, the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner is the iPhone of document scanners (or, judging from the near-universal praise for the ScanSnap — which has been around for a while — the iPhone is the ScanSnap of phones?) No scanner seems to come close for going paperless.

The ScanSnap can scan up to 18 pages per minute (double-sided, so that’s really 36 pages) and the feeder tray can hold 50 pages. Judging from what I’ve read about the scanner, you can clear out your filing cabinet in fairly short order with this little workhorse. It’s definitely not cheap (~$450), but it does come with a full version of Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard (the latest version of the ScanSnap for Windows users, the S510, comes with Acrobat 8, but I couldn’t find an update to their Mac scanner).

Some other random notes from my research:

People who use the ScanSnap with the Mac seem to highly recommend DEVONthink Pro Office, a piece of software with the tagline “meet your second brain.” I’ve run across many mentions of DEVONthink in my occasional GTD spasms, so it might be time to check it out seriously. Wally Grotophorst, a librarian at George Mason University, writes a bit about the magic of DEVONthink and the ScanSnap. According to Wally, DEVONthink has a nice “see also” function as you’re browsing your documents, so if you’re looking at one of your scanned documents (which DEVONthink fully indexes for search), the software will recommend related documents. Compare this to flipping through a filing cabinet.

Other people seem to really like Yep, which is billed as “iPhoto or iTunes for documents.” Yep supports tagging of documents (it can determine the tags algorithmically from the content of your scanned documents) and even has a built-in tag cloud. While a tag cloud with terms like “insurance” and “taxes” isn’t as sexy as a Flickr tag cloud, it’s certainly more useful. Chris Gulker has a nice mini-review of Yep — check it out.

I’ve collected a few links to ScanSnap resources tagged as scansnap in my del.icio.us feed. Needless to say, I placed my order today and hope to be posting more about my paperless experience soon (and posting more in general — what a busy 2007 this has been!)

iPhone: resistance is futile

After days of resistance, I decided I was probably going to get an iPhone, but they were all sold out in the Bay Area, so I backed off. Then yesterday, I happened to be in Seattle with some Yahoo! Seattle geeks (did I mention we are hiring up there?) and they just happened to take me to lunch at a place that was right by the Apple Store. Then one of the guys just happened to go buy one while we ordered lunch for him. When he came back, he said they were fully stocked with the 8GB model. When I saw the pretty bag with the pretty box inside, I lost all resolve.

Originally, I told myself I was going to buy a new guitar instead — something that I could use to create rather than consume. Oh, well: consumption never felt so good!

Pumped about London Hack Day / Dopplr

It’s 2:45am on a Saturday morning and all I can think about is the upcoming London Hack Day we’re doing with the BBC next weekend. I arrive in London on Monday to begin some of the pre-event preparation. I can’t sleep thinking about it. I’m turning 35 soon and I’ve flown many miles and been many places, but I still get excited like a little kid when I travel every time. Add in the fact that each Hack Day I’ve been involved in both inside and outside Yahoo! has blown my mind in a different way and you’ve got a recipe for insomnia of the most wonderful sort.

Alexandra PalaceAnd I’m not sure even I have grasped how amazing the location is. In his post “The Ultimate Party,” Ryan explains just how special the venue is:

The event is at Ally Pally (Alexander Palace), a venue with so much tech and media history it puts whole countries to shame. In 1936 Ally Pally became the headquarters of world’s first regular public ‘high definition’ television service, operated by the BBC.

. . . then quotes from the Wikipedia entry on Alexandra Palace:

The palace continued as the BBC’s main TV transmitting centre for London until 1956, interrupted only by World War II when the transmitter found an alternative use jamming German bombers’ navigation systems (it is said that only 25% of London raids were effective because of these transmissions).

After that it continued to be used for news broadcasts until 1969, and for the Open University until the early 1980s. The antenna mast still stands, and is still used for local analogue television transmission, local commercial radio and DAB broadcasts.

Ryan continues:

How incredible is it that the people working at the forefront of the next revolution/evolution of media and broadcasting will be getting together at such a historic venue.

Anyone working in media and or technology in the UK holds Ally Pally close to their heart – I’ve spoken to BBC engineers who see it as a sort of spiritual home – a mecca of media innovation.

Wow. I can’t wait to get there!

Speaking of travel, I’m on Dopplr now. What does Dopplr do? From the About page:

It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit.

Ping me if you want an invite.

The miracle on I-580

C.C. MyersIn a world where the-sky-is-falling sensationalist media is the norm, the conclusion to the saga of the collapsed freeway here in the Bay Area is downright inspiring: the contractor (C.C. Myers) finished the job early! When is the last time things came together so nicely on a highway project? Wow! The lede (as they say in the biz) in the SF Gate story is absolutely gripping:

For a man whose confidence in his construction company borders on braggadocio, C.C. Myers was noticeably nervous on the ninth night after he promised to rebuild the fire-damaged MacArthur Maze in just 25 days.

Read on for the most engaging story you’ve ever read about highway construction. On the day of the collapse, all I heard was how horrible traffic was going to be (it never was that bad) and how it was going to takes months and years to correct (obviously not). C.C. Myers showed how it’s done. No matter what field you’re in, you just have to admire the planning and execution.

If C.C. Myers doesn’t throw out the first pitch at the next A’s or Giants game, get a statue at City Hall, and a key to every city in the Bay Area, I will be disappointed. Amazing job! The Bay Area appreciates it.

Welcoming Jon Williams to the blogosphere

I just go an email from Jon Williams, a friend and CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, and he let me know that he is now blogging (feed here). Excellent! Jon is one of my favorite CTOs and an all-around good Jon Williamsguy, as evidenced by the fact that Jon was on the very short list of only two CTOs I interviewed for my short-running CTO Connection podcast at InfoWorld (check it out).

Though the podcast didn’t get off the ground before Yahoo! came calling, I wrote well over 200 weekly columns at InfoWorld, and Jon figured prominently in two of them, one about the very successful New York CTO Club that he co-founded seven years ago (still going strong), and another about having the management sense to know when to step back from a situation and let things happen without interfering.

Jon and I still keep in touch, but now we talk mostly about our guitar-playing (a subject we discussed in the podcast) and music. Tonight, Jon told me to check out Andrew Bird (his latest album got a solid review from Pitchfork). I’ll put that on my list. . . .

I’m really glad to see Jon in the blogosphere, and I’m looking forward to reading more of what my favorite Aussie guitar-playing CTO has to say!

Born on a train: Twitter and musical serendipity

I had plans this weekend and Twitter led me astray from them briefly, but I discovered a new cover of an old favorite in the process.

It all started when I woke up on Saturday morning, checked in with Twitter, and noticed that Cody had twittered: “Departing to Kansas for the weekend. If Magnetic Fields changed song lyrics to ‘Baby I was born on a PLANE’ it would apply to my recent life.” I absolutely love Magnetic Fields, and “Born on a Train” (available on iTunes) is one of my favorites, so Cody’s twitter had me puttering around the house on Saturday morning singing this amazing song:

Some roads are only seen at night
Ghost roads — nothing but neon signs.
But some nights the neon gas gets free
and turns into walking dead like me

And I’ve been making promises I know I’ll never keep
One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep
I’ll have to go when the whistle blows, the whistle knows my name
Baby, I was born on a train.

Feeling inspired, I sat down to play the song (I learned to play it on guitar long ago — it’s easy, like most Magnetic Fields songs), but I couldn’t remember past the first verse, so I did a search and near the top of the results was a link to the Arcade Fire lyrics. Arcade Fire?! I had no idea.

Now, I’m not totally sold on this whole Arcade Fire thing (that’s another post entirely), but when a band covers one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs, it goes a long way towards earning my musical respect. I had to find their cover, and it only took a search or two to locate it. It was a live version done on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Electic on January 17, 2005. You can watch the whole performance (“Born on a Train” begins at the 29:40 mark — open this URL directly in RealPlayer instead of the built-in player if you want to see the time) or you can go straight to it on YouTube.

In the process of finding the Arcade Fire cover, I discovered a video of the Magnetic Fields’ original version, and a fan write-up that compares the original and the cover head-to-head. I’ll still go with the original, but I’ll give a nod to the Arcade Fire for good taste, and a nod to the Internet for giving me the chance to make the comparison.