As I said in my I recently review, the new Kanye West album was a bit disappointing and a little over the top with the use of Autotune. To me, this has always been one of the more annoying trends – it’s ok in small doses, but definitely abused.

Roger Riley & Teddy Troutman’s brilliant Death of Autotune (via). They basically took a bunch of hip-hop classics and re-envisioned them with AutoTune. If you didn’t find Autotune annoying before, you surely will now. 

Download the whole thing here if you dare.

This is great.

Marriage is, as defined by Wikipedia, “an interpersonal relationship (usually intimate and sexual) with governmental, social, or religious recognition. It is often created by a contract or through civil processes. Civil marriage is the legal concept of marriage as a governmental institution.”

The problem with marriage is that the civil, religious and social aspects have become intertwined. When many people consider gay marriage, they take this holistic view of what “marriage” is and isn’t in their eyes, as opposed to what “marriage” looks like in the eyes of the government. Even many critics of gay marriage support the idea of civil unions for homosexual couples – but are reluctant to call it “civil marriage” because of what that means to them.

I have a simple, if controversial, solution to this. We should simply remove the emotional baggage of “marriage” from the equation and make this separation explicit. Going forward, the government should recognize a commitment between two parties that has contractual and civil rights through what it calls civil union. Marriage then becomes just the religious and social recognition of the union, at which point it’s fine for social and religious groups to interject their own morals and values into the mix.

As I discussed in my analysis of the Goodridge case, the idea of extending civil union to homosexuals – and marriage only to heterosexuals - is troubling. “Even if the rights are the same, the mere fact that they must call it something else is in and of itself discriminatory. As [the judge] pointed out, ‘the history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal.’”

Furthermore:

The other point to keep in mind here is that we are discussing the civil construct of marriage - that is, as recognized by the government. It is important to separate the moral and religious underpinnings that are closely associated with what many normally think of in terms of marriage.  Freedom of religion is an essential First Amendment right, and the separation of Church and State is critical to properly preserving this right. 

A good example of this is divorce. Catholicism does not allow divorce, but the government does. Allowing same-sex marriage does not mean that their Church must necessarily accept those vows - only that the government does.

Obviously, this would be fairly controversial and I don’t think it would actually work in practice – but hopefully it at least frames the debate in terms of what the issues really are. We’re talking about the civil aspects of marriage – the property ownership, visitation rights, medical benefits – not the religious, moral and social aspects. In that sense, the government should treat all citizens equal, regardless of whether it is a choice or not.

Note: While I would definitely love to have rational discourse on this topic, I will absolutely not tolerate any hateful comments on my blog. Any such comments will be deleted, so don’t bother leaving them.

I mentioned that I thought Yammer had a flawed business model, and I’ve been planning on expanding on that for awhile now. I recently revisited the topic with Corey and Dan in light of a NY Times article suggesting that Twitter had popularity and Yammer had a business model.

While I find Yammer very useful for our communications at Notches, it’s not fair to say that "they have a business model and Twitter doesn’t". This juxtaposition of “popularity vs. business model” is just improperly framed - Twitter could very easily offer the same private group functionality.

The problem, I think, is confusing revenue with a business model. Bringing in revenue doesn’t mean they’ve figured out how to best monetize communications. I would venture to guess that their cost per user is near or higher than $1 per month with SMS fees and infrastructure.

There is no doubt that showing some revenue early on is a great thing for a startup, but to be really relevant it needs to be “core” revenue that can scale accordingly. Personally, I think Yammer is going to have a hard time getting the growth they need to turn $4,000 per month today to even $40,000 per month in the future.

What’s to stop Twitter completely undermining Yammer by offering private group functionality for free (or the same fee)?

Twitter is interesting not because it’s collecting $1 from every user, but because of the new models and opportunities that can emerge from it long term. My guess is that Twitter realized that is looking at business models that can scale better and hit the growth that their investors are looking for.

(Then again, "growth" on $0 of revenue is, well, you know).

This is the third in a series of posts inspired by Yammer and issues in the business that I think underscore broader problems in our approach to building startups. See part one about innovation and part two about building for the enterprise.

I mentioned that people who never worked in an enterprise shouldn’t try to develop for it, to which Michael Arrington replied that “perhaps people who’ve never worked in enterprise are the BEST people to build disruptive enterprise products.” The problem is, I think you need to at least understand a market before you try to disrupt it, and it’s clear to me that Yammer doesn’t understand some basic dynamics of the enterprise which is ultimately going to hold them back.

So, let me rephrase and restate my original point: you shouldn’t build for the enterprise if you don’t understand the dynamics of the enterprise. These are just a few of the points that come to mind specifically on how Yammer misses the mark on building a true “enterprise” product and why they will never disrupt that market.

How big is an “enterprise”?

To me, Yammer seems like it was built for smaller teams, not the enterprise. Notches has a team of 4 people, and we’ve found Yammer to be a great tool for status updates, whereabouts, and the like. We use tags extensively, but even with the four of us it can get a little noisy. The other important thing to note is that everything said is public – this isn’t an issue for us right now, but you can imagine how you might not want to broadcast all discussions/status messages to everyone with an e-mail at that domain.

Contrast this to my previous employer, Goldman Sachs. My old project team was around 15 people, my department (one of the smaller ones) was several hundred, and my division (one of many) was probably 10,000 globally. Obviously, the noise and public broadcast issues are much amplified at this level. Plus, as I will discuss later, there are sometimes compliance issues with broadcasting certain project/department specific details to the entire organization. (After I originally wrote this, news came out about a new “groups” feature that Yammer is launching, so we’ll see if this helps at all).

The simple fact is that Yammer is going to need to do much more to help team/project organization if they want to attract larger teams. In that sense, the only thing Yammer brings to the table for us is the ability to broadcast messages within a small group (our team). If Twitter had support for private groups, we would probably not be using Yammer at all.

As successful as Yammer has been early on, I think the numbers they have reflect this. They’ve signed up 10,000 companies with an average of 6 employees per company, and have only converted 2% of those into paying customers (200 companies with an average of 20 employees each). This is far from what I would define as the enterprise. Yammer is bringing in $4,000 per month right now - in order to get this number up, they either need to sign a lot of large enterprises (which I don’t think they can unless and until they address the compliance and other concerns) and/or convert a lot higher percentage of their users into paying customers.

What’s the story on compliance?

Public companies are subject to a number of compliance and regulatory requirements that do not affect private companies. By nature, investment banking is one of the more heavily regulated industries, but in general there are a lot of requirements that public companies have that you’ve never experienced if you’ve only worked in private startups. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 802 now requires proper retention of business documents and “material communications” – which e-mail and IM and things like Yammer would/could fall under.

I know this is boring stuff and most of us in startups don’t want to think about it… but it’s important when you’re building a communications tool you want to sell to public companies - and yet Yammer does not mention compliance or retention anywhere on their site. They offer no assurances that past communications can be archived or exported. If they want any chance of being adopted by the “enterprise”, they need to address this question.

Blackmail doesn’t work when you can be blocked

Perhaps most telling is their business model: the service is free to users but they are in effect attempting to blackmail businesses into paying for admin access. What this misses, of course, is that most enterprises are closed networks and Yammer can very easily be blocked on all corporate devices.

For the compliance and other reasons, many enterprises block web mail, forums, and IM entirely. While they maintain their own blacklists and whitelists as well, most use an outsourced filter like SmartFilter and block by category. In other words, Yammer is already blocked at GS because it’s classified as “forums” or “chat” – so users didn’t even have a chance to build critical mass.

This is the second in a series of posts inspired by Yammer and issues in the business that I think underscore broader problems in our approach to building startups. See part one about innovation.

When I talked earlier about why it might be better to start a tech company outside of Silicon Valley, perhaps the biggest point was avoiding the echo chamber. The fact that Yammer, a Twitter clone for the enterprise, had won the TechCrunch 50 conference, reinforces this point.

Therese Poletti had a great column in Marketwatch that discussed this a little.

Product features and improvements are important to keep technology evolving, but some of these seemed like incremental extensions to existing products and ideas, and not really "new, new things," to quote the popular Michael Lewis book of the same title.

She goes on to question whether these are sustainable businesses by themselves.

So the variety of startups I saw makes me wonder: are many of these companies long-term horizon plays that are not yet obvious winners? Or are many just flash-in-the-pan startups, looking for a quick exit via an acquisition by a larger company, since the initial public offering market is pretty much dead in tech right now? Maybe a little of both.
…
"These businesses may not appear to be large opportunities because the issues they solve are just appearing in the marketplace," Ressi said. "Give it a few years, and at least five of the companies will be really large, operating in markets that nobody would predict to be interesting."

Suffice it to say, I don’t think that something like Birdpost, a social network for bird watchers, will ever be anything but a lifestyle business with modest growth. It’s a niche community site – which can certainly make money – but there are simply not enough birdwatchers in the world to achieve the scale that most VCs would look for.

Jason Calacanis has said that one of the big reasons they chose Yammer is that it’s Twitter with a business model. The only issue is that I think it’s a very flawed model. The problem, I think, is that many of these people on both sides of the startup equation think the answer is “selling to the enterprise” – after all, enterprises are willing to pay for things that consumers are not – but they have no enterprise experience themselves (working in one or developing for one) and don’t fully appreciate the dynamics here.

Therese puts it more tritely: the biggest innovation at TC50 is that the winner asked “What are you working on?” instead of “What are you doing?”

Ironically, Jason discussed on TWiT 161 how big problem with the first bubble was everyone was pursuing the same opportunity; he says that today we’re in a similar situation - “there are tons of copycat sites” just like the first bubble - except that they haven’t taken 100 million in VC funding.

In other words, we’re not in a funding bubble, but it sure looks like we’re in an innovation bubble.

I will again repost what I wrote in 2006, on the 5th anniversary of the attacks.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I went to work at 1 Liberty Plaza across the street from the World Trade Center. We happened to have a global department meeting that morning, so I had passed through the transit hub at the base of the WTC earlier than usual - 7:45 instead of 8:45.

I still remember the sound of the first plane. I was in a conference room on the 12th floor facing south, so we couldn't actually see what was going on at the time. The paper and ash looked like confetti, and our first reaction was that it was some sort of ticker tape parade.

Without television or radio, we had no sense of what was going on. I called and woke my girlfriend who was living a few blocks south at the base of West St. My plan was to come down to her apartment and figure out what to do. I watched the second plane hit, and by the time I got to her building it had already been evacuated.

Standing in Battery Park, I stared at the burning towers. It was only as I watched the first tower fall that I began to understand the gravity of the situation. I simply stood there in shock with countless others as a cloud of dust and debris and God knows what else enveloped us.

I was on the FDR ramp on my way uptown and did not see the second tower fall. At this point, everything was pretty much a blur. Things hadn't quite sunk in, but all I could think about was where my girlfriend (now fiance) was. I finally got through to my parents on a landline. Tara was ok. She wisely ran to the ferry terminal and managed to get on the last ferry off of Manhattan and was making her way to a friend's apartment in Jersey City.  

All trains leaving the city were closed, so I eventually ended up at Chris' apartment, a good friend who I worked with and who left the office with me. We eventually met my father for dinner who was still in his office a few blocks away coordinating things. I don't remember what I ate or what was said that night. The only thing I really remember was how grateful I was to be sitting with my father and a few close friends, knowing my mother and sister and girlfriend were all safe.

The greatest gift was waking up on my birthday the next morning at home with those I love and learning that none of my family and friends had been taken. There were 2,749 other families that were not so lucky, and my heart goes out to each and every one.

I still don't fully understand the impact that day had on my life and I don't know that I ever will. I do know, however, that I never forget September 11th, 2001.

I’m pleased to be able to announce the inaugural meeting of the New York City ALT.NET User Group will be held Thursday, September 25th, 2008 @ 6:30pm. We will meet regularly on the 4th Thursday of every month. The first meeting will focus on both the philosophy behind and tools for Object-Relational Mapping. (We’re very big fans of SubSonic ourselves).

Are you passionate about the profession of Software Engineering, always looking for new learning experiences, stimulated by engaging in conversation with peers who challenge your preconceptions, and looking to improve your software development skills and practice?  Then ALT.NET NYC wants YOU!

What is ALT.NET ?

ALT.NET is a loose confederation of like-minded, self-organizing .NET-focused software developers that delight in challenging the expected norms, experimenting with new and creative ways to solve problems in software engineering on the Microsoft platform, and aren't afraid to challenge convention.

We will be meeting monthly to discuss issues that interest us in a loose, informal discussion-style environment.  All software developers of every stripe are hereby extended an invitation to participate in the discussion or just come and see what all this ALT.NET stuff is about.

Meeting Topic: Object-Relational Mapping: the philosophies and the tools

To get things started, our initial meeting will be focused on a discussion of the pros and cons of different Object-Relational Mapping technologies.  With the recent releases of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework, NHibernate 2.0, and SubSonic 2.1, the .NET Object-Relational Mapping space is hotter now than ever and the choices facing .NET developers in this area are widely-varying in their focus, capabilities, principles, and goals.

Participants will be on-hand to discuss their experiences with tools like NHibernate, SubSonic, The ADO.NET Entity Framework, and more offering attendees a unique opportunity to ramp up their understanding of where each of these kinds of tools may fit into their developer's tool belt and also to share some of their own experiences with these tools and frameworks with other attendees in a relaxed, conversational atmosphere.

To ensure proper access to the building, all attendees are required to register no later than 48 hours prior to the meeting.  For additional information regarding registration, location, and other meeting details, visit http://nyalt.net/view/events.aspx

We at Notches are big proponents of the ALT.NET movement and are happy to be involved and support the group. We hope to see you there on Thurs!

We released the first version of the Notches Toolbar today.

From the start, we’ve always felt that reviews need to be delivered contextually and thus have emphasized partnerships over simply aggregating reviews. At the same time, we recognize that partnerships are not always possible for a variety of reasons.

To that end, I’m very excited to be able to finally announce the Notches Toolbar, a Firefox 3 extension that enhances your browsing experience by adding reviews to sites that don't have them. Of course, this functionality builds on the Notches platform, so any reviews written on other partners (such as Facebook and Microreviews) will also be visible through the Toolbar (and vice versa).

I hope you’ll try it out today and let us know what you think.

A church sign in Wisconsin makes an amazing admission that Favre is not, in fact, God.

On a related note, I can’t wait for this NFL season. The Giants looked great last night – when I get a chance I’ll post some pictures from the game as well. It’s a little premature, and I’m not saying either team will be able to do it, but how awesome would a Jets-Giants Super Bowl be?!!