Brainnovate

I already know from this blog’s stats that a large percentage of you are either 1- not using windows at all, or 2- not using IE. But nonetheless, I implore you to get in on making history when the new Firefox launches in June. The Mozilla foundation hopes to set a new world record for the “most downloads” in a 24 hour period. I sure hope they have a lot of servers and mirrors lined up. Here is the official badge:

So go ahead and pledge to download the new software the day it comes out (which incidently has yet to be announced, but it will be in June.)  And if you have a site, blog, myspace, or all of the above- by all means add the fox to your site.  This could generate some great press and further the reduction of the buggy, unsecure, piece of crap that is IE.

I finally did it.

After making noise about it for better than 8 months, I bought a Macbook Pro over the weekend, and joined the “Apple Elite.” Having sworn off Microsoft months ago and using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon as my mainstay OS, I was already aware of the greener pastures awaiting me on my trip out of Redmond.

The first few days in Macland have been great. I got most of my stuff moved over from Ubuntu with no problems, got Ruby installed, Gems, Rails, Mysql, the whole stack working great.

However, the biggest problem came from another, slightly smaller, but no less over priced monopoly of Enterprise software, Adobe. Now most of the Adobe CS3 suite is great, albeit a little bloated. Like many, I wish they had a little competition.

As a veteran of the web world, I have been using Macromedia, and then Adobe’s Dreamweaver software for building web sites for a long time. Longer than I could remember as it turns out. I learned this when I decided to go about moving my CS3 license over to the Mac platform.

Having bought a Dreamweaver license before Macromedia started keeping track of online purchases on their extranet means a couple things:

• You are a very loyal customer
• You are among their oldest customers
• They have sucked more money out of you then most people
• You probably have a lot of friends and maybe a lot of influence online
• You are among the most experienced web people around, and cheapest to support
• You run into the most trouble if you need to go from Windows to Apple platform

Now to me, this stinks, and it smells of a broken system. Come on Adobe, compared to newer purchasers of your software, I am sure those of us who bought way back at the very beginnings of Macromedia’s existence are relatively few. At least give us a perk for sticking around for so long.

The problem is that to upgrade your license, your purchase history with Macro-Adobe doesn’t matter. Your golden ticket, so to speak, is the first product you ever bought. I looked on the extranet and saw the oldest one was circa 2000, “Macromedia Ultradev 4″ and figured, “I am all set!”

But as I learned over 3 consecutive calls and over 60 minutes on hold, this was not it. No, I had bought something even more antiquated, and now I had to produce it to complete my move to Macland, and avoid a $1600 Adobe fine along the way.

After rumaging through box after box in my basement, and plenty of cursing, the earliest I actually had on hand was Dreamweaver 2! If you remember Dreamweaver 2, you have better memory than I, because that had to be ten or more years ago. But there it was stacked neatly with Fireworks 2, Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 3, and Ultradev, the License code for each scribed neatly on the disk in my handwriting. And oh yeah… Microsoft Office 97 was in the stack too. Are you kidding me? It was a little like returning to the incarnation of the web!

Anyhow, once I had the required documentation in hand, things went relatively smoothly and about a week later FedEx showed up with a box containing my packaged CS3 suite box- for the Mac. I installed, and everything is great now.

I am truly scared to “destroy” my old software now, even though Adobe made me promise to do so. What if I need to move from Mac to some new unheard of system in 30 years? I just might need them then!

Note- I wrote most of this story about two weeks ago and held off on posting it- I wanted to make sure I had the new version in hand before writing my criticisms. And yes, I love Adobe stuff, its just this process is broken! Clearly!

This is the first post in a series I am going to call “Growing this Blog.” Essentially I plan to periodically chronicle the progression of Brainnovate. I am not so egotistical to think that my little blog will reach great heights, but if it does, I figure it sure will be useful to people to be able to go back and see how I got there.

I kicked this blog off two weeks ago today, and it’s been interesting. After a few relatively placid posts I decided to kick it up a notch with a highly opinionated (and maybe not so well researched) article on how CMS platforms are bad for Innovation. It was like a calling out for the Drupal community… generating a bunch of backlinks, pingbacks and comments. People were polarized- some agreeing and some disagreeing. Only a few took it personally.

This also sent a flood of traffic to my new blog- barely a week old when I wrote the post! Wow, in a way its been like going from zero to 60 25 mph in one week. Its amazing how strongly people reacted to a blog with fewer than 10 posts total.

I have learned a couple important lessons:

1. First it pays to be opinionated. Pro bloggers like Michael Arrington know this, although you risk your credibility when you do it. Arrington has been called the “Fox News” of the blogosphere more than once for his drama injected reporting. Yet people keep reading and he has an astounding 800k RSS subscribers. He must be doing something right.
2. If you want to get people involved in a post, involve a programming community. This I already knew- which is why I did it. For some reason, writing code seems to engender an amazing loyalty and passion. A lot of people, once beyond the basics of a given language, tool, or framework, put a stake in the ground and are willing to step up and defend it like a nation defending their homeland. This is true even if the tool is not optimal for the described use case.

Thats all for now on this topic, we’ll circle back in a couple more weeks and see what has happened.

On Friday I attended a “LivePitch” event put on by FundingUniverse.com This was very similar to speed pitching events, but was open to the public. In case you are not familiar with the concept of speedpitching, it follows the same format as speed dating, where a number of entrepreneurs get to pitch their startup, but they only have 4 or 5 minutes to do it. In an hour, potential investors can quickly see if they want to “date” any of the entrepreneurs. Typically these are closed door affairs, meaning unless you have money to invest, you aren’t getting in.

FundingUniverse decided to change this paradigm up and created the “LivePitch” format to allow anyone to come and watch. Everyone in attendance was give $100 dollars in fake money to invest in any of the five companies who were pitching. In addition, there was a panel of “celebrity judges,” made up Steve Grizzell (Innoventures Capital), Stan Kanarowski (Park City Angels), Jeremy Hanks (DOBA), Mark Bonham (Ray Quinney and Nebeker), Kent Thomas (Olympus Angels) who judged the entries and gave feedback on each idea.

The five companies that pitched are summarized here, along with their approximate investment totals:

1. Dolphin3D: A new web browser with many new features not found in IE ($250)
2. Egghead Intensity: Social network for new college graduates ($350)
3. InciteWorld: Social network and resources for medical associations ($500)
4. iSecureMyNet: Portable security product to protect your passwords on any device ($1100)
5. ISYS Technologies: Patented computing technology that promises much smaller CPUs that run cooler and can easily be grouped together ($3000)

Congrats to each of the presenters for getting up and sharing their concept. ISYS was the clear winner among the audience “investors” and also was the top pick of the expert panel. You can learn more about their technology at their web site or Youtube channel.