Every once in a while someone asks me about software companies to work for in the Seattle area that aren't Microsoft, Amazon or Google. This is the first in a series of weekly posts about startups in the Seattle area that I often mention to people when they ask me this question.

Jott is described as voice-powered, hands-free messaging and to do lists on the front page of the site. Jott is primarily a voice to text service with two main features

1. You can call 1 877 568 8486 and leave a voice memo that is converted to an email and sent to your email address.
2. You can call 1 877 568 8486 and leave a voice memo that is converted to an email or SMS text message and sent to one of your contacts

I don't have much use for the first feature but the second is quite useful for sending text messages while in traffic instead of trying to futz around typing with T9.

The founders of Jott are John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi who are both ex-Microsoft folks. I worked with Shree briefly as part of the MSN Windows Live Messenger server team before he left Microsoft. He was a smart guy and someone I regretted not working with more before he left the company. 

Press: Seattle Times on Jott Networks

Number of Employees: 5

Location: Fremont, WA

Jobs: jobs@jott.com, current open positions are for a VP of Marketing and a Software Development Engineer

 

Twice this week, I've been impressed by how some rant I made in my blog turned into an implemented feature in Web software that hundreds of thousands of people use. The first incident comes from my blog post Why Feedburner Doesn't Count Outlook 2007 Subscribers where I wrote about the fact that FeedBurner doesn't track subscribers to my feed who're using Outlook 2007 because it uses the same user agent string as Internet Explorer 7. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I logged into FeedBurner and saw the following

It seems that while I was on vacation the folks at FeedBurner decided to implement a solution to the problem I pointed out even though it isn't their fault. Nice.

The second incident comes in response to my post MSN SoapBox in Public Beta where I mentioned that neither Google Reader nor Bloglines would display videos from MSN Soapbox embedded in a blog post. Yesterday Mihai Parparita who works on Google Reader let me know that they added support for that while I was on vacation. That means if you are reading this in Google Reader you should see a video on the next line

Thanks to the Google Reader team for implementing this so quickly.

 

I'm back from vacation at Disneyland. My pictures are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/carnage4life

What did I miss?

 

I should be on my way to the airport but this was just too good to share. Below are the opening paragraphs of a LiveJournal post by chalain entitled So Beautiful, So Disturbing

I wake. For a moment, I stare at the ceiling trying to remember something. Something important. Something important happened last night, but the details escape me. Something fascinating yet sinister, like touring the CIA offices. Something exotic yet somehow familiar, like putting hot sauce on meatloaf. I wonder if I have a hangover. I wonder why I am thinking about the CIA and meatloaf. I roll onto my side.

There is a strange woman in bed with me.

A lot of things happen at once. First, I realize that this is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I am a lucky, lucky man. Second, I realize that this is not my wife, and I panic. Third, I realize that she's awake, has been watching me sleep. Fourth, before I can really react to thoughts 1 and 2, she smiles at me and speaks with a lovely accent I can't quite place: "So. You like new wife, yes? Yes. Up now, I make breakfast."

She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night. She seems to know this, and smiles at me again, but apparently she's serious about making breakfast. She turns and strides confidently from the room. As she does, I see for the first time the large Microsoft logo splayed across her back. My stomach lurches as I suddenly remember everything.

Windows Vista. I bought a new computer yesterday... and it came with Windows Vista.

Read the entire thing here. It's pretty good stuff and is kinda cool that software can invoke such positive and negative emotions from its users.

 

Mary Jo Foley has a blog post entitled Ballmer’s list: Microsoft’s CEO shares his top nine Microsoft growth picks where she writes

Ballmer's guaranteed nine growth spots:

1. Windows client revenues from OEMs (PC makers and system builders)

2. "Desktop value" revenues derived from corporations (big enough to have an IT department). This sounded like Office revenues

3. Server revenues — Windows Server, database, security products. Ballmer said he sees this as an arena where Microsoft has a good opportunity to grow its business vis-a-vis Linux

4. "Mature desktops" — i.e., add-on revenues in corporations where there's already some penetration of Windows and Office. Client-access licenses are a key growth driver here.

5. Emerging market savings — especially due to Genuine Advantage Initiative anti-piracy crackdown campaigns/mechanisms

6. Advertising — especially via adCenter, Microsoft's online ad system — and the properties fueled by it

7. Xbox, particularly in dollars derived from Xbox Live, attached hardware and attached software

8. Sales of Office to small businesses and consumers

9. Windows Mobile operating system sales to cell-phone and PDA makers

...
I was surprised that Windows Live — supposedly one of Microsoft's most important strategic efforts — didn't make either of Ballmer's lists. Ballmer did mention services, but talked about it more from a platform perspective, than as a bunch of individual point products.

Am I the only one who's wondering why Mary Jo Foley didn't realize that #6 refers to Windows Live?

 

While everyone else was raving about the fact that Feedburner can now count RSS subscribers coming from Google reader I've been noticing that there was another discrepancy in the Feedburner data that didn't seem to be accounted for. Below is a screenshot of number of hits from Web browsers on my RSS feed

It seems pretty unlikely that people have clicked on my RSS feed over 5000 times today. At first I thought Feedburner was miscounting feeds that had been subscribed from IE 7 but a quick look in Fiddler shows that IE 7 requests feeds using Windows-RSS-Platform as the User-Agent and is correctly counted by Feedburner.

So I sent some mail to Eric Lunt who's a co-founder and the  CTO of Feedburner to see if he knew what was wrong. He let me know that the problem is that Outlook 2007 doesn't identify itself in the User-Agent string and instead pretends to be Internet Explorer 7. This means there is no way to separate out accesses of your feed from Outlook 2007 from people clicking on your feed in IE 7.

This seems like a fairly rookie mistake to ship in a bigtime product like Outlook. I don't have the latest version installed so I can't confirm that this is truly the case but if it is I hope they plan to fix this soon. It's really lame to not identify your product correctly in the User-Agent string.
...
Oops. I should have done a search before sending out mail. It looks like this was already covered in a blog post entitled Outlook, RSS, & the user-agent string by Michael Affronti who was the PM for RSS in Outlook 2007. He wrote

For Outlook 2007 we will unfortunately not be able to report any custom user agent string for our RSS aggregation.  Due to the way we integrate with IE across many parts of the application (the WININET stack is the underlying infrastructure for all of Outlook’s internet communication), we cannot easily and safely change the way we broadcast ourselves when connecting to external servers.  To do so would require a fundamental change in the way the WININET stack is called from Outlook and could affect all of the Office applications.  The scope of this fix is unfortunately outside of what we can provide this release.

I guess this won't be fixed anytime soon, if ever. Anyway, I hope this post helps out other users of Feedburner who've also been curious about their weird number of hits supposedly from IE 7. 

 

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post entitled Where's Ray? Where's the Vista Campaign? where he claims that Ray Ozzie has been AWOL when it comes to presenting a vision for Microsoft as it's Chief Software Architect. There is an interesting comment in response to his post from an ex-Microsoftie which is excerpted below

>We need more engagement from Ray and his brigade about what's happening and what kind of coherent vision is coming about.

I'm sorry, but this is NOT what you need. You do NOT need vision from Ray. At this point, what you need from Ray is code!

I have a very long history with Microsoft, and I am no longer a softie. One of the reasons I left is the whole vision/strategy vs. code problem. In the old days, production quality code really mattered a ton. In the new Microsoft, from Forum 2000 onward, code was much less important. What really mattered was laying down a vision and a strategy.

I wrote a longish post in response to this comment then realized no good could come from posting it here. Suffice to say I agree with the sentiment in the comment. Somewhere along the line VISION became more important than SHIPPING CODE at Microsoft. This really became a problem when the gap between our vision (or should I say BillG's vision) and our ability to ship code widened a lot more than we realized leading to unpleasant results (e.g. Longhorn). 

What the company needs now is more focus on shipping code and less focus on vision. Quite frankly, I'd be quite happy to never get another vision memo or speech from Ray as long as I'm sure he's out there making sure we aren't working on any more obviously bad ideas. One of the reasons I'm still at Microsoft [specifically Windows Live] is that I believe that our current leadership believes in shipping code. I've also gotten the same vibe from Ray which is also goodness in my book. Time will tell whether my confidence is warranted or not.

PS: Is it me or are there shades of markl in that comment on Mini's blog?
 

A few weeks ago I announced the availability of the release candidate for the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit. We got a lot of good feedback from our users on that release and have fixed a ton of bugs based on that feedback. With the addressing of these bugs we believe the product is now stable enough for a final release. Thus we have refreshed the release candidate installer and made it available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/rssbandit/RssBandit.1.5.0.9.Jubilee.RC2.zip. Our plan is to watch for feedback on this release candidate and if there are no major issues left, then we will release a final version with a version number of v1.5.0.10 on March 3rd, 2007.

Below is an exhaustive list of the bugs that have been fixed in the past three weeks. Since there are quite a number of them, I've highlighted the fixed issues that were particularly annoying to users based on the amount of feedback we got on them.

Change Log for RSS Bandit 1.5.0.9 (Jubilee Release Candidate 2)

• Fixed: RSS 0.91 DTDs now fetched from local machine instead of http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd to cope with announcement made by Netscape that the file will stop being available on July 1, 2007.
• Fixed: Custom actions in installer prevent installation on Windows Vista.
• Fixed: security exception on opening Options dialog if UAC is activated or a user does not have admin privilegs
• Fixed: Scrolling through newspaper can mark items unread if they were marked as read outside the newspaper view(bug 1641219)
• Fixed: Selecting multiple items then right-clicking on them, deselects them (bug 1642463)
• Fixed: Size limit on podcast folder wasn't being honored (bug 1642923)
• Fixed: The search index somehow becomes corrupted then every couple of minutes a dialog box would pop up with the error message "Unexpected Exception on SaveApplicationState() ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException"
• Fixed: Marking an item as read in a search folder doesn't mark it as read in the main feed.
• Fixed: Some feeds refuse to display with the following error message - "Error retrieving feed ... from cache: Item has already been added".
• Fixed: Save Search button was not working in the search panel
• Fixed (completed): Back button chevron should be removed when web browsing
• Fixed: Feed Subscriptions Panel width was not remembered on restart (bug 1647343)
• Feature: search folders now have a context menu entry to toggle display of full item texts (somewhat slower than show summaries)
• Feature: the font style and color used for watched news items are now configurable via Options|Fonts dialog
• Feature: the font style and color used for unread counters in the subscription tree is now configurable via the configuration file options (sample enables rendering similar to outlook express)
• Feature: Open browser tabs are remembered on restart
• Fixed: Newly launched browser tabs grab the focus instead of opening in the background (multiple related bugs reported at sourceforge)
• Fixed: Url combobox not always in sync. with the current displayed tab
• Partially fixed: Back button chevron should be removed when web browsing (bug 1638805)
• Fixed: Feed with initial focus is always refreshed on startup (bug 1634694)
• Fixed: Sometimes the toolbars replaced by giant red 'X' while browsing the Web from within the application.
• Fixed: Option "Initiate download feeds at startup" was not being honored
  
• Fixed: Restore from system tray doesn't always re-display window (bug 1641837)
• Fixed: Upgrade IE 6 to 7: cannot use ALT-Tab to switch tabs anymore (bug 1602232)
• Fixed: mouse wheel support for treeview re-activated (wheel-scroll while not focused)
• Fixed: The "On initial subscription: Only download X items" setting was not obeyed.
• Feature: Can now drag multiple urls separated by newlines to the treeview for "batch" subscribe

 

The intrepid investigators over at LiveSide seem to have stumbled upon a Digg-like site created by Microsoft called MSN Reporter. From their post MSN enter social news arena with Digg competitor - MSN Reporter we learn

As an ongoing part of MSN's efforts to increase the amount of user generated content on its network, the Dutch MSN team has created MSN Reporter, a social news site similar to the likes of digg and reddit. Available in beta since October 2006, currently MSN Reporter has launched only in three markets, Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

Allowing users to share and rate news on the site, it has a simple interface, much like the Digg of old. It also has Windows Live integration, with Alerts, add to Live.com and with a BlogIt! option sending posts straight to Windows Live Spaces. With buttons that says "Kicken!" and "Dumpen!" who doesn't feel the urge to participate?

So far there has been considerable interest in the new service, with reportedly 500,000 and 800,000 users visting the site in the 1st and 2nd months respectively.  With articles getting upto 10,000 votes and 1,000 comments, this is a on a completely different level to most existing social news sites.

This is a pleasent surprise. I've been wanting Microsoft to do a Digg-like site for a while but gave up on it after I stopped being able to figure out whether I should be pitching the idea to folks at MSN or Windows Live. It looks like the folks at MSN have not only taken the initiative and built a social news site but it seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the MSN brand in Europe given some of those stats above.

PS: In other Windows Live MSN news LiveSide is claiming that Windows Live Wifi Suite will rebrand to MSN. They even post a link to http://hotspot.msn.com which is still Windows Live branded at the moment. It looks like they even scooped the product team's blog. I'm not sure if this is just a rumor or a leak since I have no insight into what goes on at MSN but it would make sense if the LiveSide story is true. . 

 

It seems that I must have missed some key conference or memo sometime this year because all of a sudden I see a lot of blogs dropping the term social media and I have no idea what it means. I tried reading the wikipedia entry for social media but ended up more confused than ever. The first paragpragh seems OK and it reads

Social media describes the online tools, platforms and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

This seems like an explanatory definition until you consider that this pretty much describes the majority of the Web today. We have moved from the read-only Web of the 1990s to the read-write Web of today where personal publishing is king from self indulgent blogs and ugly MySpace pages to home made rap videos and amateur photo journalism. Personal publishing and the editable Web is here to stay. Thus this term seems pretty redundant especially since the odious "Web 2.0" still seems to have legs. Did the pundits get tired of "Web 2.0" and decide they needed to create a new buzzword to yank our chains with? Seriously...WTF?

PS: Is it just me or does most of the Wikipedia entry seem like a cleverly disguised ad for a PR firm with references to "Social Media Press Releases" and "Social Media Campaigns". Double WTF?

PPS: The tipping point for me with regards to this silly term was reading the TechCrunch article about Microsoft hiring Michael Gartenberg and trying to parse "Hiring social media power users to evangelize for your company’s product" into a statement that made sense and failing. Woefully.