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The newspapers today are reporting that Cisco has acquired Pure Networks. Congrats to the team, and to Cisco/Linksys which is getting itself a fine group of people and some great technology. Pure was always in a complicated marketplace but it makes a ton of sense to me that an industry leader like Linksys would see Software as a great advantage in making Networking easier for their customers. Plus it makes me feel like my decision to buy that Linksys WRT600N a few weeks ago was the right one.

Speaking of which- so far the WRT600N is performing really well, and I’m also using it with a WGA600N which is a dual-band N bridge that I’ve got to hook up equipment downstairs (the XBox, the Wii and the TV). There are two main problems I’ve had so far with the WRT600N. The first is that I named both my 5.4ghz and 2.4ghz networks with the same SID and its sometimes really unpredictable which network a given device has joined (and usually difficult to tell which one its connect to). This is partly a problem with the devices which don’t really communicate well which band they are on, but the router could help a lot here too. Its really confusing to figure out which devices are going to work best on which bands (between trying to balance distance, penetration through walls and media-playback performance). Messing around with it sometimes my TV (which acts as a media extender) works with awesome HD capability and sometimes its just crap. This seems like one of those things some intelligent home network management software could help with (hint hint).

The bigger problem is that for some reason its tunneling isn’t working. I love to use the remote access client to connect in to my home machines and I just can’t get that to work with this router. I can’t tell if its bugged or I’m doing something wrong, but the interface to set it up is actually less intuitive than normal (which is saying something).

Brad Feld posts about Office hours during college and how he tries to do similar things now at their TechStars incubator. We have a different take on office hours at DeepRockDrive but so far it works out really well and I thought it would be interesting to share.

When I started working with DeepRockDrive the technology folks up here in the Seattle area didn’t have a real office at all yet. Folks just met most days in a coffee shop and would hang out and work on the code. There were a few contractors scattered off around various parts of the world and people would often work at home. Everyone would log in to Skype all day in a common chat room so you get the similar concept to shouting over to the guy at the desk near you.

We have had an office now for several months, but its over in Bellevue. Our staff is all over the Puget Sound area and traffic isn’t so wonderful around here most of the time. I was hoping we could maintain some of the culture of being able to avoid wasting 40-60 minutes a day in traffic plus the advantages of being able to concentrate at my home office (not to mention reducing the environmental impact of all that driving especially in stop and go traffic). At the same time to act as a well oiled agile startup we need to have great communication with each other and it was sometimes really difficult to find a time when all the right people were around to discuss a given topic.

What we came up with was the concept of “core office hours”. This is roughly Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 3pm. During those times people are expected to be in the office (with the obvious exceptions for vacation, travel, important appointments, etc). Those are great times to schedule a meeting, plus you can usually pull together the right people for an impromptu meeting for just about anything. But, with the limited hours this also helps prevent our schedules from filling up with constant meetings so we have solid times to get code done, tested, write important documents, etc. On Tuesday and Thursdays I can avoid getting in the car at all. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday when I do need to go into the office I can do it at a time when traffic is WAY better (20min vs 40-60) plus its a nicer time if you want to bike too.

So far overall I’d say this system is working great, but I do have a few thoughts about some considerations that are necessary to make it work-

• It is not going to work for all job roles. Some types of jobs require you to be at the central place where people can be there together. And the job needs to be something where the output is pretty measurable- if you can’t tell if someone is goofing off, its going to breed ill-will. If the job is something where the results speak for themselves (amount of code written, bugs found, etc) it is a good fit.
• It is not going to work for all people. To make this work you need people that are very self-motivated and self-starting.
• The Skype thing helps us a ton (although any other form of live chat-room with presence information also works). It helps both give us that ability to communicate and get problems solved with colleagues in real time, as well as helps people be visibly “on the job”.
• It helps to have good network resources. We rely on a combination of the Skype stuff, as well as GMail, Google Docs, Basecamp, and an SVN and Trac server that we have deployed in our data-center. I’d also point out that all of those services are accessible without VPN so our staff can easily work on stuff from home / a cafe / vacation / the road. In theory having to VPN shouldn’t matter but I’ve always found it to be a big barrier to getting real work done.

My buddy Eric Berman writes about how badly the major airlines have screwed up their recent pricing changes where they charge for checked bags and nickel and dime you on every bit. For what its worth Eric is a former exec at Expedia which I think qualifies him as an expert on aspects of the travel industry. The main point is that there were totally different ways to position this- “we aren’t going to charge you for stuff you might not use”. They sort of successfully did that with most of the changes in in-flight meals. Considering how bad they were I haven’t minded that they don’t provide them anymore as long as I can bring my own food on. What scares me about the checked baggage thing is that the result will be even more people competing for the limited overhead space, and many of them will be infrequent travelers with huge over-packed bags. This could easily turn into a mess with 15 minutes of extra boarding time which would quickly cost the airlines more than they are saving in the first place.

Meanwhile Signal vs. Noise writes about how Alaska Airlines did some smart research to redesign the check in area in Seattle with a projected savings of $8 million this year. Alaska has actually been doing this kind of thing for years- a very long time ago they were one of the first to put kiosks in the Seattle airport. Back then I was flying them a lot and it was great to walk from the parking garage and be able to hit the kiosk right away (before you got up to the full mess of the check-in area) and it would print out your boarding pass with the gate # right there. No milling around looking for the right place and the frequent Alaska travelers got to skip the whole mess.

Its things like this (as well as my recent experiences flying from Washington DC back to Seattle) that put Alaska Airlines in the “new airline” camp. They may have been around for 80 years or so but mostly they still behave more like Southwest and JetBlue than like an old-school airline (American, United, etc…)

Elliot.org brings us more stories of how American Airlines is manipulating the system to avoid having to pay bump-fees. The only thing is, this isn’t some new tactic created since the bump penalties were recently increased- they have been doing this kind of stuff for over a year.

Just keep in mind- this is an organization that is only still in existence because we bailed them out- $15 BILLION in tax-payer dollars were given to the major airlines, and they still treat their customers like crap who have no other options. If we let more of the “old guard” go out of business rather than bailing them out, it opens up more space for the newer service-oriented (yet typically less expensive) airlines to thrive which would be a great thing all around.

This video clip says it all.

Earlier today I was listening on the radio to them talk about how 30% of the Bear Stearns stock was held by employees and many of them mostly had the company stock in their retirement accounts- hadn’t they ever heard of Enron?

Of course this is actually very common in the financial industry- I’ve heard of some of the top firms (I won’t name names) that do all their 401k match in company stock. Folks in the financial industry really should know better. I usually like to avoid government regulation, but it does seem like the sort of thing someone should investigate / question.

My buddies at Jackson Fish made the New York Times, with a picture even!

Congrats! They couldn’t have picked a better set of folks to be the “poster children” for the Seattle startup scene, although Jackonfish is pretty atypical as startups go…

Funny clip from the writers of the Colbert Report on the viewpoint of the studio execs.

In general I’m very sympathetic with the views of the writers here. If the pay structure for their jobs is supposed to involve getting paid when the studios make more money off a given work, the Internet and all other media should be included. Now, I’ve heard some suggestions that the writers want some form of fixed payments which seems like a bad idea since it would constrain how the programming can be used in this modern environment. But it seems easy to solve that by doing it as a percentage of revenue and then it should apply to anything.

My buddy Chris recently left Microsoft and went to join a new startup Deep Rock Drive which is doing online “live” music shows. Overall seems like a really cool concept and while they have the usual startup things to overcome, they already are up and running and it sounds like they have some cool deals on the way.

The one difficult thing for me to get my head around from the “consumer” viewpoint is that the experience is inevitably going to be different than the in-person “live” experience. So much about what I enjoy about going to see a live show is in the venue, the physical presence. Of course from my discussions with Chris they have all kinds of cool ideas coming that go way beyond the kind of ways you can interact with a band at an in-person event. Its one of those things where the Internet thing is just going to be different. The trick is to set expectations and understand how that different character will influence who becomes your audience and their usage patterns.

Anyway, this will be a fun one to watch- I’m hoping Chris will hook me up with a tour of their studios in Vegas soon.

Slate has an article on the economic analysis of whether newspapers should charge for their online versions. Now before I go on I should say that us Internet types are supposed to pooh-pooh these kind of analysis as “old school” and “not understanding how the Internet changes things”.

So I’ll get right on it. Don’t want to disappoint after all.
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My reading of this article is that all its analysis is in terms of traditional models. It asks the classic economic questions “does one product (the online version) act as a replacement for another product (the print version)”. And it looks at pricing/revenue models in terms of subscription vs. advertising. It suggests the big thing that has changed is that advertising on the Internet is becoming more mature and thus there is real money in it.

Of course the article totally ignores the ways in which the Internet is not like other media. Their analysis might be appropriate for comparing newspapers to TV news (with TV having free + advertising vs. subscription, not that anyone was crazy enough to try to charge for the subscription beyond the inclusion in the basic cable package).

What’s missing about the analysis of the Internet sites is a discussion of the effects of linking and search engines, and those don’t really have a comparison outside this new medium. By keeping lots of their content locked up inside a subscription site the NY Times and Wall Street Journal have by and large kept their content out-of-play from the rest of the Internet.

When looking at any Internet property, you consider three types of non-paid traffic sources- direct, referral, and search. Sure, there are some web-sites that people will regularly go to on a frequent basis just by typing their address into their browser, and relatively speaking a daily newspaper is a good candidate for this since their most important content has a low shelf-life and thus if you are prominent enough you will get a fair amount of direct traffic. But even among daily news a large amount of traffic can be from blogs, link blogs, news aggregation (like Google News), and search. These publications actually do tons of articles (food reviews, recipes, movie info, and more) that would be great targets for organic search and could generate substantial long term advertising revenue if they were available.

The NY Times had the worst of these worlds. Much of their daily content was available for free, but after a week or two it would get locked away. So they didn’t get the ability to really monetize that old stuff and people would be reluctant to link to their news since the links would go dead after a bit.

Hopefully with the recent changes these publications will actually join the web (the world of interconnected sites) and I’m expecting with the huge value of their content they will be able to make some great bucks off that.

Joel writes on outsmarting your airline. I do this all the time- use FlightAware and other services to tell when your incoming flight is actually arriving. Also as a pilot I have access to aviation weather and flow control information and I’ve often checked up on them when the airlines claim a flight is delayed due to ATC flow-control or weather. I’m estimate is that for the major airlines like American, United and Northwest, about half the time they claim delays due to ATC or weather its a lie. Which is not to say that the gate agents are telling a lie themselves- they may not know, but someone at the airline is. More often than not the cause is bone-headed airlines that have scheduled 50 of their own flights to take off or land at the same moment at one of their hubs, which is just inexcusably bad management.

An interesting contrast in airlines is our trip out to Minnesota two weeks ago. Outbound we flew Northwest. I just missed taking a photo of the gate sign showing our “departure time” as 10 minutes in the past. The flight was late (ok, it happens, no big deal) but they never bothered to try to keep people informed or update the displays anywhere.

Our return flight was on Sun Country, one of the newer-style airlines. The contrast was amazing- the return flight was also late. But they made announcements every 10-15 minutes keeping us updated on the status, they frequently updated the board with a projected (and fairly realistic) new boarding and departure time, and even suggested that people call ahead if they having someone picking them up to warn about the potential delay. It was the model of good customer contact through proactive honest communication.

I just don’t believe that its that hard for an airline to keep passengers and gate crews informed of what is really going on- heck, I was in Bend Oregon the other day being picked up by a friend in a small Columbia aircraft and could track his arrival with better precision than Northwest or the other guys would ever communicate to their customers. Travel can be complicated and stressful and if these big airlines would spend 10% of what they spend creating ads showing the beautiful travel experiences, on actually giving a better experience, people might not hate them so much. Instead they are just lazy and take the short cut of telling deliberate lies to try to placate their captive audience. Lets be clear- if it were not for government subsidies, the old guys would have already been out of business by now in a classic case of good capitalist “creative destruction” and there would be more room for the new guys like Sun Country, JetBlue and Southwest to replace them with good service.