I’ve didn’t have time to blog anything last week since I was so busy implementing the system tray icon for AllPeers. The idea is that Firefox (and therefore AllPeers) will keep running after the last browser window is closed (but not if you quit the program using File/Exit), with a small icon in system tray like so:
This makes it possible for people to leave AllPeers running without having a browser window cluttering up their screen. It also gives AllPeers a tiny piece of screen real estate all its own, even when the user is using another application, which could be used, for example, to drag and drop files for sharing without having to activate Firefox, open the AllPeers Navigator, etc. All very cool stuff, although hardly earthshattering since all instant messaging programs already do something similar.
The really interesting thing for me was that I contributed my work to the Mozilla project as part of an existing bug, which had already benefitted from the efforts of Mark Yen (author of the MinimizeToTray extension), Daniel Glazman and others. Besides the obvious appeal of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” this means that the code should eventually find its way into the Mozilla core, making it one less thing for us to package, distribute and maintain. Hopefully it was also attract future contributions, such as multiplatform support (my implementation is Windows-only).
But by far the most striking thing about this experience for me, as my first substantial contribution to any open source project, is that people actually took the time to read and comment in detail on my code. Daniel, in particular, did a line-by-line analysis as part of an official review. This may be the secret sauce that makes the open source development model so tasty. Software vendors pay lip service to code reviews and even “pair programming”, but I suspect that very few actually do this consistently. In the open source world, code reviews are essential since far more people are making contributions. And you wouldn’t let someone walk in off the street and check code into your precious masterpiece of software engineering, would you now?
I’m therefore more determined than ever to move AllPeers towards a Mozilla-style programming methodology, despite the fact that we only have six programmers right now. Even if you don’t have a community and you aren’t releasing your source code to the public, I see many advantages in having developers propose patches for review, rather than checking in their code willy-nilly and having QA bash on it in the hope of unearthing bugs. The fact we intend to open source AllPeers in the future naturally strengthens my resolve.
It has occurred to me how much we get ripped off by hotels in Europe when trying to get on-line. In Europe, 24 hour Internet access in hotels ranges from € 15 to € 20 per day and of course in the UK, Euros quite naturally become Pounds. In Asia and in the United States, Internet access is in a large number of hotels free, simply part of the services provided to travelers. Figure that one out!
I am naturally not averse to paying for a convenient service and recognize that an upfront investment must bear its fruits. It is the level of the fee that gets to me.
Why does it have to be this way? Probably for the same reason it took a small company like Skype to get telecommunications costs to drop so significantly in such a short period of time. European businesses have a history and seem most comfortable when overcharging customers. Think of the costs of cable TV, SMS, mobile roaming charges, music and Internet access to name but a few.
In most cases these businesses will only change when pushed to do so. My guess is that we should see significant change in the next few years as companies such as Trustive, FON and The Cloud reach the critical mass to make a difference (I am an investor in none of these).
In the mean time, join me in cursing the hotel manager each time you connect.
We got back last night from Innovate!Europe. Having worked in the software industry in Europe for the past 15 years (and as an entrepreneur for the past eight), I’ve been frustrated frequently by the lack of respect accorded to European technology startups. It’s been common for companies to set up a U.S. corporation just so that they can pretend to be American, since the assumption has been that European software companies are not to be taken seriously. Access to capital, effective marketing of new products and connecting with potential partners have also been major problems for new tech businesses on this side of the pond.
All this to say that it was incredibly uplifting to be at a conference with so many exciting startups and clueful venture capitalists. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the European software industry has finally arrived. Much of this is doubtless a result of Skype’s high-profile success. The States, and especially Silicon Valley, have always had the advantage of slews of well-known precedents for eye-popping IPOs and trade sales which serve to motivate the next generation of entrepreneurs. Now (finally!) Europeans have a company they can look to when they start to worry about whether it’s really possible to create a worldwide brand and achieve a grand-slam home run of an exit without being based within spitting distance of Highway 101.
Besides driving the message home that there are many more success stories of this type to come, the conference was impressively well-organized. I don’t know whether it was the relatively intimate atmosphere, the layout of the conference area, the frequent breaks for mingling, the use of special “connectors” (i.e. gregarious PR people tasked specifically with preventing introverted geeks like myself from hiding in the restroom until all the scary people go away) or a combination of these, but we met a fantastic number of smart, interesting folks who I’m sure will be the engine of the coming European software juggernaut. I sincerely hope that many of these encounters will turn into lasting friendships.
And you thought it takes you forever to get ready in the morning?
After an excellent weekend in Barcelona prior to the conference, we got an insider’s view of Zaragoza nightlife thanks to a portfolio company of one of our investors that is located in the region. In true Spanish style, they invited us to join them for dinner at about 10pm on Tuesday night. We knew we were in trouble when the gins-and-tonic we had ordered as aperitifs arrived in glasses the size and shape of a goldfish bowl. The rest of the meal presented a similar paradox: far too much to eat/drink, far too good not to. So we did.
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Cedric’s starter tided him over til the main course arrived.
The following day we were not the freshest and most alert entrepreneurs in attendance. This didn’t present us from heading out again that night to Casa Colas, another restaurant recommended by the aforementioned porfolio party animals/culinary sadists. The dinner was originally conceived as an intimate tête-à-tête with Mike Arrington, but we managed to rope in the what eventually seemed like every conference attendee still in Zaragoza.
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Mike thinking: “How did I end up sitting next to this joker?”
Special credit goes to Andrew Carton for deploying his impressive linguistic abilities and managerial talents to ensure that even the non-Spanish speakers in the crowd were amply fed. We then milked the Zaragoza nightlife for all it was worth and staggered home when what appeared to be the last open bar in town finally closed. An hour of sleep, a frenetic packing session and at least one aspirin later we were on our way to the station for the early train back to Barcelona and thence to Prague.
Hair of the dog that bit you?
Rodrigo from VPod.tv, who went to the same IT enginering school in France as me, caught up with me during the opening cocktail reception of InnovateEurope’06 with his video phone. So for more Inspector Clouzeau’s accent with moving images this time, bring your mouse here.
Okay, not quite live, but you can check out Ced and me pontificating from the Innovate!Europe conference here in sunny Zaragoza in an interview with the inimitable Cathy Brooks. Of course, between the million-words-a-minute guy and the Inspecteur-Clouseau-accent guy, I’m not sure anyone will understand what we’re talking about.
The conference has been great, and I’m planning to write much more about it (including photos!) when I get back to the office on Friday. I’ve been travelling a lot lately; luckily we’ve expanded our development team considerably since we closed our investment round, so the product work has been continuing apace.
We have released a new version (0.33) today and are inviting a new batch of a few hundreds of testers today. If you are already running AllPeers, go to “Tools/Extensions” in your Firefox menu to install the new version. We are working to make the upgrade alert more visible to the user.
Invitation emails will go out this afternoon (CET). As always, the purpose of this is to test AllPeers, track down bugs and collect feedback and features requests from early users.
This new version fixes a few minor bugs and introduces new features like the ability to attach a message with the shared files. This one was requested a lot by our existing users (and by us too) so we moved it up the (5 pages long) features list.
Thanks for the feedback from existing users and we look forward to welcoming the new testers on board our Support forums.
During my flight to the States a couple of weeks ago I finally found time to read John Battelle’s The Search. As expected, the tale of Google’s vertiginous rise is described in fascinating detail. Where the book exceeded my expectations was in John’s assessment of the current and future state of search technology. Like our resident VC blogger Mark, John points out that existing search engines only scrape the surface of what could theoretically be achieved. The holy grail is a system that understands the intent of the user’s search and responds accordingly, rather than doing simple keyword matching. This is an unbelievably complex task as it involves boiling down the meaning of each webpage into some formal semantic representation, using a similar formalism for the user’s query and then matching the two up in an efficient manner. It may takes decades to achieve this, but some aspects of this type of approach will doubtless find their way into mainstream search software in the not too distant future.
John also develops a vision for the future of media and advertising which I believe is spot-on. I criticized Bob Cringely for lacking sufficient imagination in his portrayal of a prospective media/advertising consumption scenario. Specifically, he makes it sound like the ad-defaced broadcast paradigm will perdure, but the ads will be chosen based on your web surfing habits (or something like that). In John’s vision, people will view the shows they want, when they want, and they will be able to ask explicitly to view relevant ads (lured, perhaps, by discount offers and the like).
This jibes completely with my own expectation of how the media landscape is evolving. What’s more, it’s already happening. Highly recommended.
Here’s another testimony from one of our Beta Tester. Of course we are listening to all the comments, requests and critics and are updating our developers’ to-dos based on the feedback we receive. Hey that’s why we have this beta program after all.
Abstract:
Using it seemed too easy. Its just like browsing the net when you browse into someone’s collection. You can invite guys to join you in the testing of AllPeers. No need to worry about privacy the files you want to share are decided by you and no one can reach on to other files on PC. It shows when your friends are online on Firefox.
I’ll be giving a 6-minute demo of AllPeers at the OnHollywood conference tomorrow. You can follow the gripping drama by watching the live webcast. The session is scheduled to start at 9:30am California time.
Update: Check out the webcast archive if you missed the live presentation. I’m really happy with the way it went… the demo went off flawlessly which is rare in our business. Unfortunately the panel totally failed to get it, but I trust that most viewers will understand that this is much bigger than what the pundits apparently perceived.
On July 7, 2006 I will be presenting AllPeers at The Next Web conference which will take place in Amsterdam.
The Next Web conference is a one day event about how new web-technology will influence the way we surf, the way we do business and the way we live.
See you there!
My sense is that the search experience has hit a plateau. Use Yahoo or Google and arguably you will get the same results. Some exceptions of course exist, but generally what you get from one is about what you get from the other – the overall experience has not evolved significantly in recent memory. Sound familiar? How about telephone companies or banks – when was the last time you noticed a difference?
My thesis here is that search as an industry has matured and will face the same problems of innovation that entrenched traditional industries have faced. After all, few of us ever go past page 5 and it is not because we have found exactly what we were looking for.
Much remains to be done in the search space and while the folks at Yahoo and Google might argue that they have the brightest and the finest to further innovation, my sense is that they can not escape the inevitable problem of being too big to really innovate. As far as I am concerned that provides entrepreneurs with opportunities. Think contextual associations, community related content, visual techniques or specialized verticals, to name but a few. Do net get deterred by what on the surface looks like and impregnable fortress. Opportunities abound for the brave hearted.
According to the French monitoring company Xiti, half of the European countries monitored by the firm have now passed the 20% usage level for Firefox.
(if you are not sure at what you are looking at, this is a French map of Europe. Aaaah the same good old jokes 
)
The monitoring took place between the 8th and the 14th of April for a total number of 268 154 857 visits. More info on Tristan’s blog (Head of Mozilla Europe).
Update: According to our internal logs, in April, 63.3% of the visitors to the allpeers.com domain were using Firefox.
Since Mark was comparing the merits of Europe vs. U.S. for startups, I thought this anecdote might be worth mentioning. Last week I was in the States at my parents’ place in a smallish, extremely rural Connecticut town. (That’s right, despite my finely honed image as a sophisticated urbanite, I’m actually a nature boy.) One of the few exciting things to do in Connecticut is buy clothes, so I headed over to the outlet mall about half an hour away to bargain hunt. After buying an entirely new wardrobe for about $20 (I exaggerate slightly but believe me, outlet malls are where it’s at) I returned home with my purchases.
The next morning, like any good metrosexual I was quivering with excitement to try on my new duds. I slipped on my Brook Brothers linen pants and stepped back to admire myself in the mirror. Instead, my eyes fixed on a small plastic device on the left leg.
“Drat,” I thought. They had forgotten to remove the little anti-theft sensor doo-hickey. My first thought was to wonder how I got out of the store without setting an alarm, but all became clear when I examined the device in question to see how easily I could get it off with the entire firepower of a suburban family’s toolshed at my disposal. Turns out it wasn’t a sensor, but rather an “InkMate” that threatens to spray ink all over the place if you try to remove it. This cooled my inclination to try the do-it-yourself route, and since I was without vehicle and scheduled to leave for the airport in a few hours, I was in a bit of a pickle.
Hot under the collar (and more than a little irritable since I’ve been taking my perennial efforts to quit smoking more seriously over the past couple of weeks), I called up Brook Brothers, ready to read them the riot act. The shop attendant who answered the phone listened to my complaint and passed me to the store manager. Without missing a beat, she took my address and (I kid you not) sent someone out on the hour-long round trip to my parents’ to rid me of my inky nemesis.
Further proof that in the United States, the customer really is king. I can’t for the life of me imagine this happening in any European country. Until snotty Frenchmen and apathetic Czechs cotton on to the importance of not pissing people off, the U.S. will retain its formidable advantage in customer-facing service industries.
