Entrepreneurs Connecting In San Diego With Springboard

Thinking of starting a high tech or bio-medical business in San Diego and need some help? CONNECT.org might be what you need.

Steve Hoey, a program manager at CONNECT for the past two years, says that the organization is “designed to engender and support innovation in San Diego through a culture of collaboration.” CONNECT, which was founded in 1985, has several programs and most entrepreneurs start with the free Springboard program, which first began assisting entrepreneurs in 1993.

Even in the current economic downturn Hoey points out the fact that innovation doesn't slow down. More and more entrepreneurs have taken the plunge since many people have recently found themselves out of work.

To apply for the Springboard program, which typically lasts three to five months, an entrepreneur simply fills out the application form on their website (http://connect.org/springboard). Applications are then reviewed and matched to CONNECT's subject matter experts known as Entrepreneur's in Residence (EIRs).

Each year, 50 companies go through the Springboard program and about 35 complete it. These companies range in size from one or two founding entrepreneurs, with just an idea, to companies that have raised millions of dollars in funding. Two recent success stories, which Hoey mentioned, are Benchmark Revenue Management, which helps make hospitals more effective and efficient, and Biomatrica, which stabilizes biological samples at room temperature.

EIRs will coach entrepreneurs and help them refine their business plan and fill in the gaps. For example, if an entrepreneur is technical and their plan needs help with the financial forecasts then interns can be brought in from UCSD’s Rady business school to help.

The Springboard program consists of several phases. Beginning with filling out the online application and an initial meeting with one of the 80 to 90 EIRs to ensure that the Springboard program can support the applicant’s goals. Once this match has been made, the entrepreneur will meet with their EIR several times in order to solidify their plan. The entrepreneur then refines his or her business plan by conducting a dry run in front of one or two panels of experts leading up to their final presentation panel.

The final panel consists of three groups; CONNECT sponsors, investors, and domain experts. It begins with a 20 minute presentation by the entrepreneur followed by a 30 minute question and answer period and then it concludes with about 30 minutes of feedback and constructive criticism.

Once the graduation panel has been completed, most entrepreneurs usually hope to close a round funding from investors. Since this is naturally the next step, CONNECT launched a new program in December 2008 called the Deal Network where Springboard graduates now have a second opportunity to present to investors.

The most important traits that Springboard applicants require are “coachability” and a willingness to complete the entire program. If that sounds like you and you are a San Diego based entrepreneur then CONNECT's Springboard should be your first step.

Amazon Web Service's Simple Storage Service: The 99% Solution

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) was launched about three years ago as a simple way to store files on Amazon's servers. Each file, also known as an object, can be up to five gigabytes (GB) in size and the filename is referred to as the object's key. The beauty of S3 is that each object saved on Amazon's servers is backed up onto at least three different servers. Where exactly the object is stored is not important since any computer on the Internet can access it - this is commonly referred to as the cloud, since, just like a cloud, there are no hard boundaries.


Strengths
1. Uptime – S3 uses the same infrastructure that is used to host its own amazon.com website. While downtime isn't unheard of, it is extremely rare.

2. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) access – Accessing objects stored on S3 can be as simple as typing in the web address to the resource in your web browser. Storing and retrieving objects on S3 can be done programatically or graphically using a third party plug-in such as S3Fox: http://go.joemoreno.com/e5bf

3. Security – Objects stored on S3 can be made public, such as a web page, or private so that only a single user can access a specific object (great for backing up sensitive files). Additionally, items can be semi-private so that users can anonymously access an object, once they are authenticated, for a limited amount of time. A good use of this feature is to prevent other users from "hot linking" or "deep linking" directly to a photo or sensitive document on your website.

4. Domain Name Service (DNS) Access – Objects stored on S3 are placed into buckets which can be thought of as a folder or storage area network (SAN). An object in a bucket can be accessed in one of three ways:

a. http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/key

b. http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/key

c. http://bucket/key where bucket is a DNS CNAME record pointing to bucket.s3.amazonaws.com. For this reason, bucket names must be unique throughout all of S3.

5. Price – Amazon only charges for its service based on use with no flat fees required. They refer to this as "Pay by the drink". Fees for storage, bandwidth, and access begin at $0.15/GB of storage, $0.17/GB of bandwidth, $0.01/10,000 GET requests and $0.01/1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST requests. For the first several months that I used S3 I received monthly bills for S3 totaling less than a dime (US$0.10). How Amazon can bill me that little and not lose money is a mystery. Here are copies of my first three bills from Amazon.

6. Bandwidth Throughput – While not advertised, the bandwidth throughput (speed) of objects served up by S3 is consistently in the 3-4 megabytes per second (MBps) [note: that is not megabits per second (Mbps), but megabytes per second - in other words, the throughput is approximately 24-32 Mbps]. Fast enough for nearly all users.


Weakness
Since objects stored on S3 are served up using http (and they can also be served up securely using https), it is possible to host an entire website on S3 for pennies/month with one small exception. Amazon has not implemented a way to serve up the default web page when a user initially visits a website.

The initial web page of a website is commonly named index.html. For example, when you visit cnn.com or apple.com, you are actually viewing http://www.cnn.com/index.html or http://www.apple.com/index.html. All web servers used for displaying websites automatically know how to serve up a default webpage - all but Amazon's S3. And users have been clamoring for this feature since 2006: http://go.joemoreno.com/esw2

Since a default object cannot be set to be automatically returned an entire website cannot be hosted on Amazon's S3 unless your users are willing to type www.example.com/index.html every time they want to visit your site - which, obviously, is not practical.


The 1% Solution
After grabbling with this problem since 2007, I finally implemented a solution allowing me to host an entire website on Amazon's S3 without requiring another web server to serve up the index.html file. While I did not discover this technique, it is certainly worth mentioning in detail since it is not very obvious.


Perfect Match: Amazon S3 & GoDaddy
Hosting an entire static website on Amazon's S3 requires a little DNS gymnastics, but its results can be seen here: http://www.adjixsucks.com

One of the first places a web browser checks, when a person enters a domain name in their web browser, is with the domain's registrar. The registrar is the company where the domain name was registered and this is how the domain name owner tells the world where to route users to find their website, route e-mail, etc.

Since the registrar is the first stop, this is the perfect place to intercept the request and send it to a website's index.html page.


How to do it
In order to forward a request to a website's index.html with GoDaddy you'll need to do a few things. For starters, since most people enter www.example.com or example.com into their web browser you'll have to store your entire website's files in an S3 bucket that is not named example.com or www.example.com. In my adjixsucks.com example, I choose to save the website in a bucket named web.adjixsucks.com - but you can call it anything, such as www1.example.com, static.example.com, etc.


Parked Name Servers
Once you've saved your website's files in an S3 bucket, you'll need to configure your domain name's DNS to use GoDaddy's "Parked nameservers" (ns11.domaincontrol.com and ns12.domaincontrol.com).




Total DNS
Under total DNS, you'll need to edit/add three entries for the "@", "www", and "web" hosts. Keep in mind that these updates can take hours to propagate throughout the Internet.

1. Under the A (Host) records, you'll need to set the @ host to point to GoDaddy's forwarding server (64.202.189.170).

2. Under the CNAME (Aliases) records, you'll need to add two CNAMES for www and web.




Domain Name Forwarding (back to your own domain)
Finally, you'll need to update the Forwarding section to your index.html. Once this it updated, it can take 20-30 minutes until the redirect is live.




When you're done, it should look similar to this:




Ta-Dah
When people enter your domain name into their web browser most won't even notice that the website begins with web instead of www. While this isn't a perfect solution, it's very close and the price is right: $10 for the annual domain registration and as little as a nickel or dime per month paid to Amazon for hosting your website.

Joe Moreno
President
Adjix
joes3@adjix.com
760.444.4721

Over Lawyering on the Web

Is it just me or have lawyers gone too far with all things online such as terms of service, license agreements, and disclaimers in e-mails? Of course, the only people that can answer this question are probably the very lawyers who come up with these requirements.

How important are a website's terms? I don't have to agree to any terms of service when I go to the local mall. But, if I pull out a camera and begin taking photos they can ask me to leave since it's private property (with public access - very similar to a website). Being a guest would seem to be a good analogy. I invite you into my house (or my place of business) and I can ask you to leave at anytime.

The disclaimers at the end of e-mail seem to be a bit over the top. Shouldn't I have to agree to the disclaimer? And, if I don't agree with it should I be bound to delete the e-mail? It simply seems unnecessary. If there is any legal precedence for these e-mail disclaimers, I'd love to know more.

East African Cell Phones

When I was living in Nairobi, Kenya, a few years ago, I was amazed at the state of their mobile phone networks. There I was, in one of the poorest countries in the world, and everyone had a cell phone. Not only that, but cell phone coverage was nearly ubiquitous and the features built into their networks impressed me - even on my bottom-of-the-line Nokia cell phone.

Since the Internet isn't very common there, their cell phones were the most sophisticated piece of technology which they used for communications. Texting was widespread.

There are four features that their cell phone networks had, which we still don't have here, in the US.

1. Business Cards

Have you ever needed to give someone a phone number that's in your phone's address book? Ten years ago, I could beam it to another person on my Palm Pilot. Today, I can't even do that with my iPhone - via Bluetooth or otherwise. In Kenya, there was a "B card" option on the phone's menu. Simply choose a person from your address book whose number that you wanted to share and then choose the recipient. Within a minute, the recipient receives a text message asking them to review the contact information and then choose to either accept or reject it.

2. Busy Signal Call Back

When calling a number that was busy I could tell the phone system to keep trying the number, then I'd hang up and wait for the phone to ring back once the number wasn't busy. This reminds me of a circa 1980s technology (Demon Dialer) that would dial a number, automatically, until the line was no longer busy. I'm sure phones have this feature, here in the U.S., but it's neither common nor basic.

3. Missed Calls

I could turn off my phone and when I turned it back on the system would tell me which calls I missed. Can't do that in the U.S. I only get to see missed calls if my phone was on when the call came through or, if the caller left a voicemail.

4. Text Message Payments

This feature still blows me away. Kenyans, like most Africans, are unbanked. They live paycheck to paycheck (at least they don't have to worry about the sub-prime mess) and, for the most part, they don't use: banks, computers, e-mail, iPods, etc. The two key technologies they use are cell phones and faxes – and they were fantastic at filing and retrieving paperwork; never losing a page.

While we rely on computers, printers, and the Internet; they have substituted the cell phone, fax, and the wireless carrier's network. In place of PayPal and charge cards, they simply used their cell phones.

I'll never forget the moment when my driver told me about Safaricom's Sambaza, which launched the month I arrived in Kenya, as a simple way to share cell phone minutes. I was truly amazed, thinking, "How can they do that here and we can't do it back in the U.S.?"

Unlike cell phone contracts and subscriptions plans we use here in the U.S., the Kenyans primarily use a pre-paid payment plan. In order to add, say $10 worth of minutes (or, more accurately, 10 KSh [Kenyan Shillings]), you'd simply buy a scratch-off card with that face value, scratch off the number, and enter it into your cell phone. This works exactly like pre-paid cell phones in the U.S. No need to worry about subscription fees (but the minutes do expire, just like here, if not used within a certain time.)

The one thing you can't do here that you could do there is transfer your minutes to each other. This became an instant form of electronic currency. For example, people who grew up in a village would move to Nairobi to find a job. They'd take a portion of their paycheck, purchase a pre-paid card, and add minutes to their cell phone. Then, they'd text some of their minutes to their mother living hundreds of miles away, in a rural village - yes, mom has a pre-paid phone with network coverage in the boonies. Mom would go to the local market and text some of her minutes to the grocer at the market to pay for food. Very elegant electronic barter.

Sambaza soon evolved into M-PESA that transferred actual money which, obviously, is a much better feature if you're looking to pull cash out of the system at some point.

The only hitch with Safaricom's system is that the sender and receiver had to use the same wireless carrier (different carriers are incompatible in a way similar to a Visa credit card's incompatibility with American Express). In Kenya, which only has two wireless carriers (Safaricom and Celltel), this wasn't much of a problem. However, there are even better ways to make this system carrier agnostic just like PayPal doesn't care which bank, credit card, or Internet service provider you use. What's the hold up here in the U.S.? Simply put: the Patriot Act.

Electricity in the Early 20th Century

I love this photo - it was probably taken almost 100 years ago.

(click to enlarge)



In this photo, you can see the wiring from the Christmas tree running into the light socket hanging from the ceiling.

In the late 19th century, electricity was used almost exclusively for powering incandescent light bulbs. But that changed around the turn of the 20th century. The problem was that offices and homes were only wired for light bulbs. So the light bulb socket was used like we now use a wall socket.

Back then, electrical appliances didn't have on/off switches - you'd just screw it into the ceiling socket. Appliances like electric fans, beginning in 1890, and open top washing machines of 1908 could be fairly dangerous. You can't turn them off and you can't yank out the cord. There are some unpleasant stories of people getting their hair and clothing caught in washing machines.

Innovation and good engineering takes time, no matter how obvious it seems.

Source: Jeff Bezos at TED

Sensory Deprivation Tank

Today I floated, for the first time, in a sensory deprivation tank. For years I've been wanting to try one and I finally took the plunge.

The tank about the size of a twin bed and it's filled with eight to ten inches of water heated to 93-94 degrees (skin temperature). About 800 pounds of epsom salt has been dissolved in the water so there's no problem floating.

The facility I went too was definitely up scale. Each person gets a private room with their own shower, a place to change, and, of course, the tank. Since it's private you get to float in your birthday suit (but you can wear ear plugs to keep the water out of them).

After rinsing off in the shower you enter the tank. Most people float with their head on the far end of the tank since it's slightly warmer there. The door to the tank is very light and you can keep it fully opened or close it - whichever makes you most comfortable. Just outside the tank is a spray bottle of fresh water in case you accidently get salt water in your eye.

Very soft music plays for about ten minutes which fades to silence. At this point you're in total, complete, darkness and quiet (if you opted to shut the tank door completely). Neither a photon of light nor decibel of sound can be seen or heard. You'll know when your time in the tank is up because the music will start playing again and, just like the Academy Awards, that's your cue to exit.

So what happened inside the tank? Sorry to say that it wasn't anything like the 1980 movie Altered States; nor did I have visions like Lisa did on the "Make Room For Lisa" episode of The Simpsons (about 15:40 into the show).

But it was relaxing - very relaxing. I guess it's the closest you can get to being back in the womb as you float in solitude. There's nothing to distract you so you can focus (or not focus) on what ever you want. I could definitely get used to relaxing in one of these. The cost is similar to a massage ($40-$90 per hour).

I should sleep well tonight.

Lessons in Customer Service

Not So Great Service
Good customer service is a pet peeve of mine. Recently, I wanted to order some pajamas with feet for my wife for Christmas. The company's website was out of stock, in her size, in early December so I wrote to them asking when they'd expect more. Three weeks later (between Christmas and New Year's) they responded and told me to keep checking the website.

Fast forward to February when their inventory levels on their website hadn't changed at all - I'd been checking about every 10 days. I e-mailed their customer service department again asking about their inventory and the response I got was that they were working to increase their inventory levels over the next few weeks.

I replied asking to be put on the back order list and they asked what specific item I wanted and this was their response:
I can actually answer this quite quickly - we don't expect to run another production on the penguin print until late summer to be available for fall.

I think they just lost a customer for life.

Unexpectedly Great Customer Service
Today, I experienced unexpectedly great customer service at a tea shop in San Clemente called the Lavender Lounge Tea Company. The shop is located off the beaten path, above a 31 Flavors. When it opened, about eight years ago, I thought that it would soon go out of business due to its location. I lived on this street from '94-'98 and had seen many businesses come and go.

Today I found out why it's still around.



When my wife and I arrived there were about five patrons that were just leaving so we had the place to ourselves - along with what looked to be about a hundred different kinds of tea. The only employee was a young woman (early 20s) who we asked for some recommendations. She wasn't the owner, but she clearly knew her teas.

I am not a tea person and I'm not a coffee connoisseur either - by the time I've prepped my coffee it has sugar, syrup, and cream. I ended up having the Ruby Cocoa Kiss tea (would a tea aficionado tell me that this wasn't "real" tea?). This tea was good - very good - and I didn't need to add anything to it which is a first. It was so good I bought a tin of Ruby Cocoa Kiss tea as I listen to the employee explain some differences in teas.

As I was being rung up, I saw a coconut meat cubes dessert, from Indonesia, that I had never heard of before called Jubes Nata De Coco. When I asked her about the dessert I was impressed that she knew all about it and how it compared to boba (pearl), but, what impressed me the most was that she told my wife and I that we should visit the Jubes website. She told us how cute the website was because you had to put the cubes into the Jubes mascots' mouth to navigate from webpage to webpage.


Exercise: Ask a Starbucks employee when was the last time they were on the Starbucks' website or visited the website of a third party whose products they stocked. (Of course, I ask this knowing full well that, when I worked at Apple, I was on the apple.com website at least daily.)

No, this wasn't a Starbucks barista who only knew how to make coffee according to an operations manual - she obviously was well trained in most every aspect of the business. It turns out that all of the Lavender Lounge Tea Company's employees are "students of tea".

I'm impressed.

How Good is Your Algebra?

How good is your algebra?
Solve for x:

Great AT&T Experiences

I shouldn't always complain about things - that's just unhealthy; so, here are three things about AT&T that impressed me.

1. Business Class Broadband
I've been using AT&T's (formally SBC) top of the line business class DSL with five static IP address since 2002 and it's been rock solid. Outages have been virtually non-existent. Occasionally, the bandwidth drops which can be fixed simply by power-cycling the router. There's probably a firmware upgrade that might fix this problem, but it happens so infrequently that I don't have the guts to try it out and risk the downtime if there's a problem.

2. iPhone Upgrade to 3G
This experience went very smoothly. I was most impressed with the fact that our family plan's roll over (RO) minutes remained. I really expected to lose those 4000+ of RO minutes.

3. Prepaid Cell Phone (Go Phone)
My mother has the bottom of the line cell phone plan. She hardly uses her cell phone - maybe 15 minutes/month, but it still costs her about $30/month which is more than $360/year with the fees added in. So, last month, we moved her to a pre-paid option. She got $100 of service minutes that will last a year (plus a sign up bonus of $5).
She had a choice of paying 25¢/minute or 10¢/minute with a daily $1 charge on the days she uses it. Which plan to choose? The key is: will you use your cell phone for more than seven minutes on the days that you do use it? If so, then go with the 10¢/minute and the $1 charge; otherwise, go with the flat 25¢/minute. Regardless, text messages cost 15¢ to send or receive unless they're free marketing messages from AT&T which can be stopped simply by replying with the world Stop.

iPhone Upgrade & AT&T Fleecing

Sometimes, something really gets my goat and this is one of them.

I was wondering how much an iPhone upgrade would cost. There's no "one price" answer on the apple.com web site.

Ok, so I fill out the form, give them my phone number and the last four digits of my social security number to find out I'm eligible for an upgrade. But it's not a free upgrade... Obviously, I'll have to pay either $199 or $299 for the new hardware - fair enough. And I knew that AT&T will charge an extra $10/month for the 3G access. But on top of all of this, AT&T has the nerve to charge an $18 upgrade service fee. It's really the perfect screw over for a returning customer not to mention the loss of 5000 roll over minutes.

There are three ways I can think of that businesses thrive.
1. Keep the same offerings but lower prices (i.e. clearance sales).
2. Keep the prices the same but increase the offerings (i.e. innovate).
3. Keep the offerings the same and increase the prices.

The last one is all too common with the phone companies. Two specific examples that jump to mind are SMS and caller ID.

1. SMS, also known as text messaging, is a simple, 160 character message, sent from one mobile phone to another. As text messaging has gained in popularity the wireless carriers have increased your cost from a nickel to a dime to as high as 20¢ or 25¢ while their costs have decreased. Think about this: Since the wireless carriers charges for both sending and receiving a text message they stand to generate 50¢ from a single text message. That's more than the USPS charges to deliver a physical letter from Florida to Alaska! Fifty cents for 160 characters!

2. Last July, caller ID on my land line increased from $7.99/month to $9.99/month. A 20% increase simply as a way to get more revenue from their customers for a service in which costs have decreased.

In both of these cases, rather than improve the offerings, the phone companies simply realized that the market could bear higher prices because they are an oligopoly. After all, the phone company is a closed system making it the DMV of the business world when it comes to customer service - why improve customer service or innovate when you can just sit back, increase prices, and out bid Google on the 700 MHz spectrum?

Here's a sound business idea... why not charge more for services that cost more and lower prices or increase features as technology allows? What other high tech industry gets away with increasing prices for older technology.

Of course, having both a mother-in-law and father-in-law who have almost 50 years of combined time working for Ma Bell before and after the breakup gives me some insight into this process.