Hello, Matt here. Since two people have already congratulated me on my move to Madrid, I thought I should mention explicitly that Cedric wrote the last post, not me. You can tell us apart because nothing ever strokes me when I enter a room. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I’m still in Prague, but a move may be in my future as well. Stay tuned.
Have you heard of MobuzzTV? If not, you are missing something big. If yes, well then you already know MobuzzTV is an award-winning online TV network. A kind of CNN 2.0. Every day, MobuzzTV produces and broadcasts 5 different shows in 3 languages for the web and any video-enabled mobile device out there (phone, iPod, PSP, etc).
As it happens, MobuzzTV is based in Madrid and its founder, Anil de Mello, recently invited me to visit his headquarter and offered me a job. I am now happy to officially announce I have moved from Prague to Madrid to become MobuzzTV’s new Chief Operations Officer.
For the past 12 years, I have been running Internet Start-Ups in Paris, London and Prague so I thought Madrid was not a bad location for my next career move. More seriously, I wanted to share in this blog post the top reasons why I have decided to join MobuzzTV.
1/ The team.
You know a company is healthy just by looking at the moral of its team. The first thing that stroke me when I entered their offices was the overall feeling of happiness. It was one of these “if you are having so much fun at work, you must be doing well” moment. I guess the fact they have cute and energetic female blond presenters walking around is good for the moral of the opposite sex. Recently we have been joined by GabeMac who, bless him, miserably fails in the blond female department.
2/ The space
Online videos is a fast growing space and with the global rollout of broadband and super broadband, the web needs more quality content (Would you like more Mentos with your Diet Coke?). This is how MobuzzTV is positioned: Professional Content. Each program is hosted by a talented presenter and targets a different audience. We shoot and edit our own programs in our TV studio in Madrid before it becomes available on the web, in iTunes and on your mobile video device.
3/ The Founder
I first met Anil de Mello 2 years ago at the Monaco Media Forum and we immediately realized we were on the same wave length. Like me, Anil is a serial entrepreneur and has been carrying MobuzzTV on his shoulders for the last 3 years. We complement each other very well (he’s chaotic and I’m maniac) so I’m very excited to help him build on his vision for the company. Amongst MobuzzTV shareholders we have Martin Varsavsky another succesfull serial entrepreneur and Enrique Dans, a professor in one of the top business school in the world and one of the leading Spanish blogger.
4/ The Company’s success so far
Like most internet start-ups, MobuzzTV was started in Anil’s spare bedroom. In 3 years, MobuzzTV shows have been viewed 500 million times. Currently, shows are viewed more than 6.5 million times per month. Recently, MobuzzTV has attracted top-tier brands (Levi’s, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Honda, Adidas, Disney amongst others) as sponsors. In other words, we are talking here about a growing award winning start-up with existing revenues (how peculiar I know!).
5/ The potential
MobuzzTV has great potential both in term of audience and revenue growth. We are already planning to launch a few new shows before the end of the year and we are lining up a few renowned partners to work with us. In fact we have some really cool news coming which we will announce in the next few weeks.
Update: Eric Shepherd already has some great documentation of the new JavaScript error reporting regime up on MDC.
Update: Note also that most errors will be reported by default, so the pref only turns on a few additional cases. Read the MDC article for full details.
I’ve been doing a lot of JavaScript development as part of my work on Prism, and I noticed a few weeks ago that a lot of errors I was used to seeing in the console weren’t showing up anymore. Unsure of the cause, I first took the expedient route of sprinkling my code with dump() statements whenever I had to track down a problem. This is tedious and time-consuming, however, and after a while I got fed up and (with Shaver’s prodding) spent some time trawling through the JS error reporting code trying to figure out what had broken.
Luckily for me, Sergey Yanovich noticed my incessant whinging on IRC and pointed me at bug 393627. It seems that some changes had been made to a JavaScript component that threw an exception that was expected, caught and managed in C++ code. Nonetheless, an error was being displayed in the console by XPConnect, so a patch was committed to suppress reporting of exceptions in these circumstances. Unfortunately this had the side effect of turning off useful and desirable reporting for a huge swath of errors.
A few weeks and 21871 bugs later found us embroiled in a heated discussion in the comments of bug 415498. The problem, it transpires, is a tricky one, as Ben Turner explained:
Ok, so here’s our basic problem: Some folks think that throwing exceptions is a perfectly valid way to communicate with C++, others try to avoid any unhandled exceptions and want to know if any make it back to C++. There is no way to consolidate those opinions, and we’ve argued back and forth about it many times already. A functional Components.resultCode might make this situation better, but that’s been broken for far too long to hope we’ll see it fixed in the next week.
Ben’s solution was to implement a preference, dom.report_all_js_exceptions, that turns on the verbose error reporting so vital to JavaScript developers. So even if you just skimmed the last few paragraphs, please pay attention because if you code in JavaScript in Firefox 3 you want to know this. Grab yourself a recent trunk (Ben says the fix landed last Wednesday or so). Set that preference. Watch your error reporting woes vanish before your eyes. There should be real documentation on this soon, but in the meantime hopefully this information will be of use to some.
TechCrunch is running a guest post of mine about the exciting new field of site-specific browsers. Needless to say, it’s a honor to be on TechCrunch, and I hope my article will help to increase awareness of what SSBs are and why they’re important. Personally I’m convinced that they represent the future of web apps.
I haven’t seen any sign yet of the “gaggles of groupies” that Mike promises in the post’s comments, but I’m sneaking out the back door to pick up a sombrero and some wraparound sunglasses, just in case.
I’ve just come across this horror story about G-Archiver, a windows shareware which backs up your gmail account to your local hard drive but also emails your username and password to the creator!
When we initially launched AllPeers, the client was not open-source but we always said our goal was to do it. At the time, the source code was not clean enough to open but we knew this was the only way for us to prove we were genuine and not planning on spying on our users.
When we finally opened the code, some people saw it as a desperate move on our part. It was not. It was a way for us to be transparent and to say “if you don’t trust us, just look at our code”.
There are a lot of advantages about developing open-source software but trust and security are certainly high on the list.
Now forget about open-source software and think about all these websites who ask you for your login credentials in order to “import your contacts”. Can you really trust them and if so how? How paranoiac are you about this? I usually tend to trust the sites but is a nice design and a groovy name enough to earn my trust when it comes to my email credentials?
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis caused a blogostorm with his candid treatise on making every startup dollar count. The controversy is not especially surprising when his list of tips for thrifty includes such items as “fire people who are not workaholics” (which provoked so much ire that he felt compelled to change it to “fire people who don’t love their work”). Some went as far as to label Calacanis a “prick“, with the obligatory observation that they’ve never heard or his company, but love to death the products of cooler companies who pay for their employees to go backpacking.
I’ve seen both approaches in action in my day. More than one startup founder has told me that they keep the hours reasonable because they “don’t want to burn out their staff.” Sorry, but what I heard was “I’m too lazy to work long hours so I can’t expect my staff to.” Of course, it depends to some degree on your ambitions. If your goal is to earn a good living with a bunch of smart, like-minded folks tackling some not-too-intractable problem, with plenty of free time to bungee jump from helicopters or make erotic origami, that is doable. But if you want to create a world-beating company, Mike Arrington has it nailed: your odds of succeeding are long enough without four-day weeks and ambling trips to the local juice bar five times a day.
Besides which, software geeks don’t have the same view of life/work balance as most people. In their response to Jason’s post, 37signals explain that:
Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.
Probably the guy who wrote this is a graphic designer or something, since for all the real programmers I know, the most interesting subject imaginable is the software project they are currently working on. That’s why our social skills suck so bad. When we run into someone who isn’t a geek, we have no idea what to talk about. Naturally this gets old eventually, and even the pocket protector set ends up settling down, getting a dog and starting a family. Ever wonder why most startups are populated mainly with 20-somethings?
Which brings me to my real point: in light of this state of affairs, does Europe have a chance in the software biz? I’ve been working in European software startups for 15 years (and running them for 10). Having grown up in America, I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of obsessiveness when it comes to driving the company’s success. Programmers on this side of the pond work a lot harder than, say, post office clerks, but traditionally it’s still been a far cry from the mattress-under-your-desk workathon of the American startup nerd. When Arrington mocked the idea of “three weeks vacation” I had to smile. Over here, the big question is whether we can beat our staff down from five to only four weeks.
The good news is that the situation is changing. I’m seeing more and more startups built up around the American model. Globalization, more awareness of “cool” company cultures like Google’s and a few European home runs (such as Skype) are helping to reshape attitudes on this side of the pond. Lack of precedents for success, paucity of venture capital, stifling regulation and excessive risk aversion have conspired with our generally sedate work habits to lock Europeans into second-class citizen status in the software world. As we overcome these obstacles, I expect we’ll mount a much more credible challenge to America’s technological dominance.
Although AllPeers didn’t produce the kind of outcome that we had hoped for and expected, it’s been a tremendous learning experience. Hopefully others will be able to benefit from what I consider to be the main lessons.
Luck and ambition
Naturally the success of any startup is dependent to some degree on luck, and the luck factor rises in proportion to your ambitions. If your plan is to sell T-shirts online then execution is probably the main consideration. If you make really cool designs, have an easy-to-use website and do good marketing then you’ll probably make money, though you’re unlikely to be buying a private island in the South Pacific any time soon. If, on the other hand, you plan to dethrone Facebook by adding state-of-the-art social features to the fabric of the web, transforming the internet experience of billions of people, you’re going to have to execute to perfection and still get really really lucky if your company is to succeed. Of course, if you make it you’ll be assured a very comfortable early retirement.
Neither of these approaches is inherently wrong but you should be aware of what you’re getting yourself into. If you can’t stand the thought of failure, make sure you’re not tackling a problem that is too big and ambitious. In the case of AllPeers, we knew that there was going to be a lot of luck involved (as there is with any product that relies on network effects and viral adoption), and we were pretty well prepared for the challenges we would face. It is comforting to see failure in this way because we certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed our lofty ambitions to increase our chance of moderate success.
Raise as much as you can
I’m not the first one to say this, but let me express my wholehearted agreement: raise as much as you can, as soon as you can, and not a penny less. In early 2006, before we had released even a private alpha of AllPeers, we suddenly became a minor web star thanks to a couple of white-hot buzzwords (”Firefox” and “BitTorrent”) and a very positive writeup on TechCrunch. (And in fact we owe a great deal to Mike Arrington, who grasped our vision immediately and did a great job of articulating why it was exciting. It’s easy and intellectually lazy to be pessimistic before the fact and snarky afterwards, while it takes courage to go out on a limb and predict success.) We believed our own hype a bit too much, unfortunately, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to raise a lot of cash at a high valuation. Instead we brought in a very modest amount under the assumption that we’d be in a great position in a few short months to close a much bigger round.
As a result, we were under constant pressure to get user numbers up so we could raise more money. This isn’t the way to run a company, particularly one with an ambitious technological vision. We ended up making a string of tactical moves rather than taking a step back and looking at the big picture. As a consequence, we ran out of money before we could get the product to where it needed to be. Don’t make this mistake.
This shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Mangrove Capital Partners, who led our series A investment round. They are a fantastic group of individuals whom I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any entrepreneur seeking funding, and a classic example of a VC who really does offer much more than money to a budding startup (something they all claim to do). But only a company’s founder has a single-minded focus on the company’s success, and this includes acquiring a war chest to deal with unforeseen contingencies.
Since the announcement of the closing of AllPeers we have been submerged by emails, IMs, SMS and phone calls from total strangers and friends in the industry.
Before making the announcement, Matt and I were wondering yesterday if anyone would really pay attention. After all we had not been in the news for some time and we would not be the first company to “join the deadpool”. To our surprise, our announcement has generated a lot of press coverage including Wired, CNET, InternetNews, Ars Technica and of course blogs (from the most famous ones to the smallest ones). The feedback is a general feeling of sadness and incomprehension.
This has been beyond our expectations (this is a recurring thing here at AllPeers) and we are turning all this love into positives vibes for our personal and professional lives.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi said: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.“.
This is pretty much how we feel right now 24h after going public with the news. Thanks to all for caring, this is why we create businesses.
It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.
The past few years have been an incredible adventure for us. We would like to thank all of the amazing people who have helped us along the way. This includes countless users who provided us with valuable feedback about how to improve our product; the Mozilla community, who has proven to us that “community” is more than just a word when it comes to open source software; the many volunteers who spent hours translating each AllPeers version into fifteen different languages to make it available to non-English speakers across the world; and the friends and family who have supported us as we pursued what undoubtedly seemed like a crazy dream.
Being an entrepreneur is the most rewarding and exhilarating job we can imagine. Being able to build on a vision you have one morning and watch as it grows into reality is quite an experience. Seeing people get excited by what you are building is incredibly gratifying. The praise, devotion and even harsh criticism of the user community is what keeps you going despite long working hours, frequent stress and periods of uncertainty.
When we started working on AllPeers, we knew that it was an ambitious project with no guarantee of success. Such is the nature of any software startup. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Although we are deeply disappointed with the way this adventure has ended, we hope that fear of failure will never prevent us from daring to act on our inspiration.
We have met many many new friends thanks to AllPeers (you know who you are). This is a fantastic silver lining that gives us great comfort. We hope you will stay in touch as we move on to new pastures.
The success of this blog has also been one of the best experiences to come out of AllPeers. We will continue to operate it under the “Peer Pressure” name, posting our random thoughts about the web, the software industry, the evolution of media and whatever else strikes our fancy. We hope you’ll keep on reading. Matt will also continue writing his Just Browsing blog with a focus on web browsers and browser technology.
You haven’t heard the last from us. See you in our next life!
Honza Odvárko, our user interface developer extraordinaire, has been doing some work on the excellent Firebug extension. He’s published the first two parts of a tutorial on extending Firebug on his new blog: Software is Hard (part one and part two). Anyone interested in developing and debugging web applications should check it out.
You think you’ve put it all behind you, but one tiny script and you tumble off the wagon. Such is the fate of the Greasemonkey addict. Someone mentioned yesterday that MXR search results should include a link to CVS Blame. (Regular readers of this blog are used to ignoring me when they don’t know what I’m talking about, right?) Rumor has it that real support for this is in the works, but I went ahead and wrote a script, just because I could. After all, the hallmarks of a good Greasemonkey script are quick-and-dirty hacks and planned obsolescence, and this one emphatically has both:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Add MXR blame links
// @namespace http://justdiscourse.com
// @description Add links to CVS Blame to MXR search results
// @include http://mxr.mozilla.org/*search?string*
// ==/UserScript==
var results = document.getElementsByTagName("ul");
for (var i = 0; i < results.length; i++) {
var ul = results[i];
var anchor = ul.previousSibling.previousSibling;
var span = document.createElement("span");
var blame = document.createElement("a");
blame.href = "http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?&file=/mozilla"
+ anchor.href.substring(anchor.href.indexOf("/source")+7);
blame.appendChild(document.createTextNode("blame annotations"));
span.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" (View "));
span.appendChild(blame);
span.appendChild(document.createTextNode(")"));
ul.parentNode.insertBefore(span, ul);
}
Click here to install (Greasemonkey required).
It’s incredibly empowering to have this kind of client-side control over your browsing experience. One of these days someone is going to do this right and it’ll take over the world.
It’s a minor thing, to be sure, but it’s always irked me that Bugzilla defaults the platform and OS for a new bug to those of the reporter. This makes sense for bugs from “normal users” since it’s important to know where the bug occurred, but for the most part I file generic bugs or enhancements requests. So the first thing I have to do every time I file a new bug is to set those two fields manually to “All”. This takes me about five seconds, so if I file a bug a day (on average) that could be as many as 25 minutes a year. Twenty-five minutes that I could have spent taking movie quizzes on Facebook! This is unacceptable.
I asked around, and apparently fixing the problem is hard for some reason. Just now it dawned on me that I could take matters into my own hands. I used to be a Greasemonkey maniac, and I wrote a few pretty complex scripts back in the day. (None of these work anymore, I’m sure, due to changes in the associated websites, Firefox and Greasemonkey itself, but perusing the source code will bring you hours of enjoyment.) Wikiproxy and Bloglines Sidebar Squeezer even made it into Mark Pilgrim’s Greasemonkey Hacks.
Anyway, here’s the script I wrote to fix the Bugzilla nit:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Bugzilla Platform Defaults
// @namespace http://justdiscourse.com
// @description Changes the default platform and OS to ALL
// when filing a new bug
// @include https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi*
// ==/UserScript==
resetDropDownList("//select[@name='rep_platform']");
resetDropDownList("//select[@name='op_sys']");
function resetDropDownList(xpath) {
var dropdown = document.evaluate(xpath, document, null, 9, null).
singleNodeValue;
dropdown.selectedIndex = 0;
}
Click here to give it a spin. (You must have Greasemonkey installed.)
The inimitable Robert X. Cringely, who writes a much-read weekly tech column for PBS, brings new insights to the white-hot Microsoft/Yahoo merger story in this week’s piece. Cringely may or may not be talking out of his hindquarters with his speculation that Microsoft’s main motivation for the takeover attempt is to achieve a culture shift inside the company, but at least he brings something new to the party. Indeed, the most interesting part of the article is arguably the first paragraph:
It’s a challenge for a journalist coming late to a story like Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo. I had literally just pressed the SEND key on last week’s column when news hit the wire. What to do? The way things are structured at PBS I couldn’t just pump out another column (that structure may be changing by the way), so the big question was whether the passage of seven days would make pointless anything I would have to say. So I waited and waited, and it is a testament to the shallowness and endless repetition of both the tech and business media that there is still plenty to say about the deal, the true nature of which few people yet understand.
Quite. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve simply become bored with the self-referential ranting of the tech blogosphere or whether it has actually become boring. I still read Techmeme every day, but I’m increasingly drawn to a select group of publishers: mainstream publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc.), a small handful of professional-quality tech news/analysis blogs (Ars Technica, Read/Write Web, sometimes TechCrunch), individuals with real credentials (Nick Carr, John Battelle, etc.), speciality blogs (The Unofficial Apple Weblog, TorrentFreak, etc.), company blogs and the occasional random article that catches my eye.
Granted, this is still a pretty broad group, but I don’t read all of them all the time. I try to get news about a given story from the best, most authoritative sources. For example, for analysis of the Microhoo sturm und drang, I read articles in the NYT and WSJ and the announcement on Microsoft’s web site. Why would I spend the time reading six or seven rehashings on all the “A list” tech news blogs out there? What purpose do these me-too pieces actually serve?
I predict a slow decline in the number of such blogs. It’s kind of harsh to put it this bluntly, but if you don’t do any real reporting, don’t write exceptionally well and stir up interest mainly through wild speculation, your long-term prospects probably aren’t great. Instead, the mainstream news outlets (and their blogging arms, like Bits and AllThingsD) will win the battle for general tech news and analysis. They’ll buy the best blogging networks, so TechCrunch and Read/Write Web are heading for a big payday. The other A listers will fade into oblivion as tech news junkies like me realize that they have better ways to spend their time.
The other area that has a bright future is specialty blogging. Rather than reading what some dude who has built up a big audience by blogging something generic about absolutely every story that crosses the wires has to say about the ruckus du jour, folks will seek enlightenment from the blog best placed to have inside information or true insights. Incidentally, that’s one of the main reasons I decided to set up my own specialty blog, Just Browsing, rather than continue to pen my own uninformed opinion pieces on random topics here on Peer Pressure. Yes, like this one.
Since Internet slang coinages based on “phishing” are apparently in vogue, I decided to try my hand at it. Whishing: “Posting an indirect comment about some problem you’re having on IRC in the hope that someone will chime in and help you without you asking directly.”
Examples:
plasticmillion wonders why he’s getting strange linker errors when building Spidermonkey on the latest trunk
plasticmillion can’t remember where he put his car keys
plasticmillion could sure go for a pizza
etc.
If you are thinking about raising capital for the first time, The Funded has some excellent resources.
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