News

It was fun while it lasted. It seems that Ted Dziuba, the hand behind Uncov, the extremely harsh startup review site, has given up, curiously, at the same time he attended the Crunchies, and is launching his own Web two-dot-oh startup, Persai.

Always extremely critic of other startups in the new ’social internet’, he was often cited as the anti-Techcrunch, providing alternative not-so-shiny reviews of the same companies featured there. The professional blogosphere is very closed and competitive medium, and so, you can find yourself in a position where you get effectively blackballed from being mentioned in most top blogs, either for making fun of them (like Ted did) or by being strongly criticized in one. In the latter case, it will be the rest of bloggers who will not want to step on the first one’s toes, and write good reviews or posts, for fear that their friendship could suffer.

So, I guess Ted finally woke up and saw the reality, and realized that he has to play ball in order to get his own startup promoted around the blogs and forums. It would be interesting to know what kind of reception he got at the Crunchies, I bet it wasn’t warm, and this made him see what happens to those who stray from the politically correct path. In any case, good luck with Persai Ted, you made us laugh a few times.

The Los Angeles Times provides a great Google Maps mashup that tracks the huge fires currently raging in southern California in almost real time. What is impressive is the amount of resources committed, with one fire pulling in almost 1800 firefighters.

Browsing through some old photo albums, I came across a set of photos from my years with the Kinder Mountain Rescue Team, based in Hayfield, UK. After going through high school in Southend, near London, I moved to Whaley Bridge, a small town south of Manchester, to pursue my degree in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Salford. One day, while walking towards the popular Kinder reservoir area for a weekend walk, I noticed a small hut belonging to the KMRT, and basically crashed into one of their meetings. After talking to some people from the exec team, I was accepted as a probie, not without a strange look on some faces (”what’s this guy from Spain who we’ve never seen before doing here?” sort of look). Normal probie period is six months, but, normally probies are introduced by team members, who know them and their capabilities and can make the recommendation. I was coming out of the blue, so I spent about a year as a probie, before being admitted as a full member.

Why, would you ask? Well, a couple of years earlier, I broke an ankle while descending a winter route in the French Pyrenees, and was brought to safety by a mountain rescue team. Ever since, I felt there was something I had to pay back – and this was the chance. During my stay with the KMRT, we performed all sorts of operations, from rescues of people with broken limbs, to searches for lost walkers. We trained a lot, and participated in huge exercises involving many local teams, Police, RAF helicopters and aircraft, K-9 units, and the ambulance service. One of the exercises I keep pictures of is a paper helicopter crash on Kinder plateau (we used the word ‘paper’ to describe anything fictional in the contest of an exercise, for example, “call the paper RAF and request a paper helicopter and a paper ambulance”, just in case anyone listening on the radio thought it was the real thing)

A very realistic victim, with a very realistic amputated limb. The excellent members of the Casualties Union provide the most believable victims you can find, with makeup, real bone fragments (from sheep of course!), and other surprises. Everything you’d need to film a good zombie movie.

Finally, this picture was taken during a winter route in Scotland, the most remarkable fact being that we had perfect weather – which is something to put in your memoirs. As we descended, a single, tiny, white and fluffy cloud passed by, as if saying “yeah, you’re not going to get away -that- easily!”. For the record, Andy was just making fun with the ice pick, he didn’t actually hit anyone!

A few days ago I saw a picture from back when I was in a UK’s Mountain Rescue team, and in good shape. In the mid 90s I broke my left ankle in the French Pyrenees, while walking down an slope after a good day in the ice, and things went downhill from there. The lack of exercise, combined with bad eating habits took its toll, and today I’m almost 118Kg, or 260lb. for those still using imperial metrics.

This morning I went to see a doctor who specializes in natural diets, and she has given me a strict one. To start with, no eggs or milk for a few weeks, so bye bye Starbucks (I can still drink black coffee though). It’s then a matter of combining the right kind of food, for example, breakfast consists of acid fruits (lemon juice plus oranges, pineapple or kiwis), the a salad plus chicken, fish or pasta for lunch. A friend of mine has recommended this doctor, having lost almost 10Kg the first month.

Part of the plan is of course exercise, which having three kids plus a startup will be difficult to get done – my idea is to get a mountain bike and try to go to places with it, rather than take the car, plus a short cycle in the morning before everyone wakes up. Any recommendations? I was looking at some today, and the two manufacturers which seemed best were Scott and Orbea, not sure which to get though.

A weekly progress report will be posted here, I’m actually thinking of making some sort of weight widget, it’s just an idea for now.

This comes a little late as the event is over, but I thought it was worth making some final remarks. On the last day we presented the new look & feel of Whisher, together with some new features such as integrated SIP VoIP, and powerful geolocation functionality.
At the end of the day, Chris Shipley interviewed Martin Varsavsky, who was also being presented with an Entrepreneur of the Year award by the conference organizers. By this time, many attendees had already left, eager to catch trains to take them to Madrid or Barcelona for a flight back home, so the interview was rather bleak. People were asked by the organizers to sit towards the front of the theater to make it look a bit more full (if that was at all possible), and we even saw students from Zaragoza’s University turn up, who had not been present during the rest of the event. We also left after this, as we had a longish drive home, and felt sorry for SpeedBit, who were the last to present, after the interview with Martin.

Some comments about the event:

The venue was nice, but the low glass desks were totally inadequate. At DEMO, we had nice custom-build stands, with the company name on top, so even if you were standing, the laptops were at the right level to show people stuff. At this event, everyone resorted to stealing chairs from around the theater, as none were provided by the organizers.
The WiFi worked OK, but sometimes got too congested. There were two 3Mbit ADSL lines, and six access points tied to each, placed about 20cm from each other. You can guess that interference, and heavy usage by some of the attendees didn’t do the network much good.
For some strange reason, a van with a huge screen was placed in the middle of the main square of Zaragoza, near the event, and live video feeds from the event were shown there. A simultaneous translation ran at the same time, but the volume was set at the same level as the original audio, and the end result was a cacophony that basically amused the locals.
The catering did their best, but left every day just before 17:00. This meant 3 to 4 hours with no food or drink (not even water, never mind coffee).
Little publicity of the event was made, which resulted in basically a couple of local newspapers showing up to report, and the sponsoring newspaper Cinco Dias. Other media was there but were basically not very interested in investigating all the companies presenting. The feeling was a bit depressing, almost like you were presenting to the other companies also attending. There is no point running such an event if absolutely no national press coverage (at least) has been attempted to be captured.

I won’t say the event was bad, we actually met some great people, talked to a few VCs, and had a good time. I will leave you with a few more pictures from the event (and a few more are on my Flickr page).

We’re presenting Whisher at Innovate!Europe 2007, being held in Zaragoza, Spain. The event itself is not huge, and has not been written about much, but since it is a stone’s throw away from Barcelona base, we felt it was worth coming. I’ll be posting some pics and info a bit later on.

Day 2: Presentations, demos, networking and no coffee after 17:00

The day started off with an intro from Chris Shipley, and a few onstage demos.

One of the demos that caught my eye was a service called Smeet, which creates a virtual 3D space (in an isometric birds-eye view for your techies), for example, a bar, and places animated avatars which correspond to real users who login to the system. Each user also dials in to a conference number, and his audio can then be heard by others in proportion to their distance, i.e. there is a hearing range, and a speaking range. Thus, by moving your avatar close enough to a group, you will begin hearing their conversation, and even talk to the group if you get closer. Pretty cool stuff!

In the afternoon there was a discussion panel on angel and VC funding of startups, with some heavyweights present – Klaus Hommels from Benchmark, Simon Levene from Accel, Mark Tluszcz from Mangrove, Saul Klein from Index, and Oliver Jung from Adinvest. The moderator was supposed to be Loic Le Meur, but he didn’t show up, apparently due to political engagements back in France (my guess is he will be the next interior minister!), so Chris Shipley took the lead. Some interesting discussion was generated around when and how to take money, and from whom. One conclusion is that if you go for top VCs, you have to set your aims very high, not on a $10 or $20M exit, which can be fine if you take angel funding instead.

The event is OK for networking with others, but the catering disapeared around 17:00, and we were left with no coffee!