How I Lost a Bet on QR Codes

Mowingo is running a cool promotion at McDonald's: guests are invited to download Mowingo's application (available for Android and iOS), enjoy a free milkshake and get access to other cool deals.

As you can see in the picture above, we have large posters hanging on the walls at the Embarcadero McDonald's in San Francisco.

The poster invites guest to download the app either by typing a URL on their smartphones, or by scanning a QR code:

Unlike my co-founder, Ehud, I was skeptical about the effectiveness of QR codes.

Boy, was I wrong!

Here are the results for the first week:

• Download via URL: 41.3%
• Download by scanning QR code: 58.7%

We will see how things develop over the next few weeks, but I must admit I was wrong. QR codes do work!

Startup or Hip Hop? 10% Luck, 20% Skill, 15% Power of Will

You might be as stunned as I was to discover, courtesy of Fort Minor, parallels between hip hop and tech startups:

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill

Fifteen percent concentrated power of will

Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain

And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!

It’s an almost perfect image: Mike Shinoda has got the ingredients right, but the ratios feel a bit off. I would increase luck and concentrated power of will, at the expense of pain. Watch the clip, listen to the lyrics, tell me if you feel the same, and most importantly: remember the name - Mowingo!

Startup – The 2011 Capital-Efficient Model

Starting up a tech venture in 2011 is cheaper and easier than ever. My co-founder and I were able to self-finance Mowingo for a long while. Here is how:

Capital Expenditures: the cloud is your friend. My previous company, which I co-founded back in 2003, buried over two million dollars in data centers: we had to buy, install and maintain servers, routers, storage systems, load balancers, backup devices, etc. Mowingo uses the cloud: costless at the start (Amazon Web Services offers a no-fee starter plan,) infinitely scalable, and very inexpensive as your traffic grows. Our only capital expenditure so far: a laptop. Repeat after me: No CapEx!

Software: this is not really a 2011 thing; open source software has been around for a while. Thanks to a variety of open source projects, we can deploy database systems, utilize bug tracking software, enjoy rich development environments, etc. – all at virtually no cost. But in 2011, the wealth of free possibilities is indeed staggering: we use Google Docs for collaboration, shared directories on Dropbox as our Intranet, Skype for all our communications, and as a WebEx substitute we use Adobe’s ConnectNow (free for two participants, extremely cheap if we ever need more.)

Development: get a super-talented technical co-founder and encourage him to burn the midnight oil. Need to hire some extra help? There are offshore companies, with local liaisons right here in Silicon Valley, which offer reliable low cost developments services. Be careful here: selecting the right offshore partner is critical, but once you found it, you’re golden.

QA: finally a justification for procreation: nothing like a teenage daughter to spot bugs in your alpha/beta smartphone application.

Sales and marketing: if neither of the co-founders can sell… you should reconsider this whole entrepreneurship thing. Get a job.

Legal: be your own lawyer (or like me, marry one.) The web has a wealth of standard forms you can use as a starting point: not only templates for sales contracts and employment agreements, but even standard investment documents, such as Ted Wang’s Series Seed Financing Documents. Terms and Conditions? Privacy Policy? That’s what competitors are for. Visit their websites and plagiarize away. Once you are funded, you need to swim with the sharks and get a top-tier law firm; I can say only good things about Fenwick & West. Hire them.

Office space: given the recession and the excess supply in commercial real estate, you can find real bargains. Mowingo went one step further: a friend of mine is hosting us free of charge.

Smartphones for development and demos: they are cheap to buy, but when you have friends in the right places (I do) and you aren’t above begging (I am not) they can even be free.

Recruiting: need a temp sales rep? Post your gig on Craig’s List – they don’t charge you anything for that.

Banking: that’s an easy one: Silicon Valley Bank will offer you a lot of services for free, invite you to countless (free) networking events, and even feed you time and again.

Meals: you don’t need to rely solely on SVB’s food. Turns out angels and VCs can buy you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why pay for your meals, if you can pitch while eating at a potential investor’s expense? OK, maybe I’m stretching it a bit too far here…

Netflix Ruins My Evening and then Insults Me with a $0.24 Credit

False Alarm

I am the Email Insider Summit, held at a posh hotel in Utah.

Entering my suite's bathroom, I noticed a red dot staring at me from the mirror on the wall:

Not losing any time, I rapidly ducked down and swiveled back to locate the sniper aiming at me.

There was no sniper.

Turns out there's a TV embedded inside the bathroom's mirror; the red dot signals that the TV is currently off. Here's how it looks like, once you turn it on:

Bottom line: (fortunately) my life is not an action movie.

Don't Use a Do-Not-Reply Email Address

I hate it when a company or an organization sends me an email from a do-not-reply address. It's stupid and counterproductive. Don't they want to hear back from their customers or audience?

If I could, I would have sent the author of the message below a discreet reply, suggesting that having three typos in a single paragraph does not reflect too well on the school district. But since they don't want to hear from me, as evidenced by the use of a DoNotReply address, I'll vent my frustration on this blog.



My older daughter, now at UC Berkeley, graduated from Gunn High School. My younger daughter is still a student in the Palo Alto Unified School District. They were taught to write better than that.

Exciting times to be an email professional

For the last couple of years, my colleagues at Goodmail and I have been on a mission - determined to advance email into the 21st century. Our catchy motto was that at the same time the web moved from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0," email moved a couple of steps backwards.

In "Email 0.7," as we dubbed it, delivery is spotty, images are blocked, trust is nonexistent. Our CertifiedEmail product addresses these issues: by guaranteeing delivery of valuable email messages, displaying images and enabling links by default, and by placing a trust mark next to trustworthy messages, we began to restore trust in email.

But we didn't stop there.

Remember your excitement the first time you used Google Maps and you could actually pan and scroll the map using your mouse? If applications can live in web pages, why couldn’t they live inside email messages? The answer is security. The very same technologies that enable cool functionalities can also be used by malicious senders to harm users. To protect their customers, ISPs routinely block each and any active component embedded in incoming email messages. As a result, email remained moored in the 1990s.

But what if ISPs could enhance the user experience and enable advanced functionalities with full confidence that their users won't be exposed to security risks?

Goodmail developed technologies, based on its flagship CertifiedEmail platform, that can do just that.

Over the last few months, Goodmail lead an industry initiative to leverage its unique enhanced email technology, and to introduce interactivity and "Web 2.0" capabilities into email. The interest we generated is enormous, the response from the email ecosystem electrifying, and the very large partners who have so far participated in the initiative extremely gratifying.

These are exciting times for the email ecosystem, Goodmail, and for me.

Daniel T Dreymann
President and Co-Founder

Why Are Jews Liberal?

I have just finished reading, on my Kindle, Norman Podhoretz's excellent book "Why Are Jews Liberals?"

Podhoretz's Wall Street Journal article, bearing the same title, does a good job summarizing the book, but to form your own opinion, do read the longer essay.

One of the best passages in the book is reproduced almost verbatim in the article:

Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.

In this realm, too, American Jewry surely belongs with the conservatives rather than the liberals. For the social, political and moral system that liberals wish to transform is the very system in and through which Jews found a home such as they had never discovered in all their forced wanderings throughout the centuries over the face of the earth.

I couldn't agree more.

The reasons behind the historical liberalism of American Jews, as laid down in the book, are almost undisputable. Podhoretz's conclusion as to why Jews remain liberal now is more controversial:

Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

Podhoretz convinced me. Read the book and tell me if he convinced you too.

Ken Is Calling It As It Is

Ken Magill nails it in an article titled "Stupid Statement Watch: Umm, That’s Not True":

Goodmail is not a way for marketers to buy their way past ISPs’ spam filters. In order to get Goodmail certified, marketers must adhere to certain best practices, among which are avoiding spamming.... to say Goodmail creates a two-tiered system, one for paying spammers and one for everybody else, is ridiculous.

Read the entire article here:
http://directmag.com/magilla/0929-goodmail-rpost-patent-lawsuit/

All In One Click

From my latest contribution to the CertifiedEmail blog:

One of the most important business rules, whether you sell widgets or services, is that you want to make it easy for customers and prospects to buy from you. This rule certainly applies to e-Commerce on the internet, and it does not pertain just to the sale transaction per-se, but to virtually all interactions between an organization and the individual customers it serves.

Leveraging on Goodmail's CertifiedEmail technology, Goodmail partner, Striata created One-Click, No-Registration, In-Email Payments

Read the entire blog post here.