What Were You Expecting, Exactly?

On one monitor I'm watching a bit of NASA TV as an Ares rocket sits on the pad. Not sure what it's got on board yet, but it's fun to follow a launch of an old-school stick rocket again. NASA TV is great - they don't really care if there's a 20min shot of a rocket on the pad, with birds flying around. It's all content. No schedules to worry about for them, it seems.

Meanwhile, I'm working a bit more intensively trying to get through my latest pass thru the code for the next feature. A couple of steps forward yesterday... maybe one step back.

Still a bit curious about a VC contact last week. Reminds me of selling stuff behaviors. When selling things online, or even in the 'old' days in the paper, you'd often get a call asking if the item is still available. When you say yes, there is no other contact. One must wonder what answer they were hoping for.

Well, similarly a response from a VC, to an initial contact, was "Yes, we're interested in learning more, can you meet with us!" My response was "Sure, how about this date." Then there's no more response, and it's been several days. What answer were they hoping for?

Anyway, I won't worry too much about it. Building the business now, and that helps in the funding needs later on.

Researchinator displays some head shaking behaviour...

Spotty Blogging

Busy times, and I've been sketchy on keeping this part of the routine up. Must admit that the twitter universe seems to have filled that early morning niche.

A couple of networking events lately - a Montreal one, and an Ottawa one. While Ottawa has a large group of Start-ups, I've been finding that the networking events there are too often a sea of consultants and self-appointed start-up experts (who strangely are not doing a start-up themselves just now). A few too many self-appointed gurus.

The Montreal events have had a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors and media. That's a more enjoyable session from an entrepreneurial point of view. I should try to make it to some Toronto events, or heck, even a Kingston one perhaps. Will have to watch to see if there are any there.

Researchinator is here, just not always highly visible.

What's Cooking with Google Wave?

There's a lot of internet buzz about Google Wave today. I have to give credit to Google for the hype generated. That's free advertising that you can't buy. Then all the people tweeting and reTweeting about getting invites and giving invites. That' social approach to signing up your initial users is a good idea too.

The old approach was to announce a beta and wait for people who felt like debugging your service for you to show up. With the 'invite' approach, you make it seem like a privilege to be a beta-user.

The kick off for Google Wave, if you remember was a near hour long video'd demo, which was rather sleepy to my eyes, but created some 'peer-pressure' to tell viewers that the service is very cool, even if the actual demo didn't really seem that amazing. "But if that whole room of Californians is cheering, it must be cooler than I realize."

I do see some potential to move seemlessly from the asynchronous connection of email to the increased immediacy of chat, and the threading elements I saw for what I watched a few months back.

But I also think that email - for those of us who have used it for a good 25 years - has a role that is well understood. It fits into a spectrum of connectivity. Walking up to someone's desk is the most immediate and synchronous. There is a momentary delay in engagement if they're busy, but usually there's an immediate interaction. Telephone is the next step, where the user can selectively engage. Chat is similar, but has the other issue that once you engage, it's harder to disengage and hence the ability to manage your status. Still, once you disclose your presence, you get nabbed by chat-buddies.

With email there is a disengagement. Sometimes a recipient will shoot back a reply and a few messages will bounce around for a few minutes, rather chat like, but if there's no reply for 24 hours, that's not a shock.

Twitter fits in there too, now, perhaps slightly further up the asynchronicity spectrum, but slightly more disengaged. Some users ignore their @ comments. Some people follow people who don't follow back.

Google wave will open a new can of worms, frustrating some with a stickiness that regular email doesn't have. It may lower productivity because it converts an email into a stickier chat situation. But it might enable improved distance collaboration through enabling new group dynamics.

Then there is the complexity. With existing Outlook tools widely used, but confounding many non-technical users with cryptic, non-intuitive use of scheduling, resource booking and hard-to-use receiver-list management/creation, I have to wonder if the complexity of Google wave will penetrate beyond the geek crowd.

Regardless, there's going to be new cultural adjustment required to adopt it, and the jury is out on whether it will catch or not. I don't think this is a clear slam-dunk for Google, and could potentially be their Apple Newton - basically good, but unable to cross into broad adoption by the masses.

Researchinator will, for now, let it bake a little longer before opening the oven...