Apparently, Microsoft Word now knows the difference between Obama and Osama.
This got me thinking - what does EditLive's spell checker think? Not a lot better than Word used to... the suggestions for Obama were
Can we please add Obama to the dictionary for the upcoming EditLive! 6.5 release?
Oh, and is it too early to add Obama as a suggested synonym in the thesaurus for the word President?
I stumbled upon the web site for Oregon health insurance company Regence and I was immediately impressed by its clean almost Web 2.0 design. Remember this is a big, boring corporate collecting over $8 billion in premiums per year. Then I noticed their section 'The Buzz' and I was even more impressed.
Regence have done an outstanding job with a very plain English description of the challenges facing the health care industry in the United States and what we can all do about it include:
Their solutions are clearly only part of the answer as healthcare in the US is a hornet's nest of problems. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see a 'big corporate' use such simple, authentic communication.
Today the news is aghast that consumer prices are up 5.6 percent. This is bad news clearly. But the news yesterday was a sense of relief that healthcare costs are up only 10.6 percent.
If a 5.6 percent increase in the CPI is viewed as shocking and 10.6 percent increase in healthcare is viewed as a relief there has to be something wrong with healthcare costs in the US!
The Australian dollar is down more than 8% since the beginning of July.
This is excellent news for export-oriented companies such as Ephox who have a lot of expenses in Aussie dollars yet most earnings in US dollars. In fact, our worldwide price list is in US dollars so even when we sell in Australia we sell in US dollars. A weaker US dollar has made our software more affordable to a huge range of markets but on the balance I think it has hurt our business.
Before we all start celebrating and break open the champagne I am hoping that we can see the Aussie fall by significantly more ... even accounting for the recent drop the Aussie is up about 70% since the beginning of 2002. This seriously means that we would have 70% more staff in Australia than we do today if the currency had stayed where it was. We had our cost crisis long before it was popular for small business to be worrying about the cost of gasoline!
The other interesting thing to note from the graphs above is how closely the Aussie tracks the Euro. Most of the movement in the Aussie dollar has clearly been from US dollar weakness... not from any inherent attributes of the Australian economy despite what Australians might like to think ("We have mines! The Chinese love our coal!").
The relentless fall in the US dollar actually elicited some good laughs from a largely European audience at an SDForum event I spoke at during which I quipped "Thank you for traveling from Europe to evaluate Silicon Valley as a place to outsource your software development."
Homegrown US software companies are generally well funded, operate in a huge market and are thus often highly successful and difficult to compete with. The falling US dollar was the elephant in the room for any software companies with significant staff outside the US.
The US dollar's further rise is hardly guaranteed given how far it has come in just a week but I am certainly hoping it keeps 'going and going'!
These two acquisitions happened so quietly during the festive season last year that I didn't notice until today.
Firstly Australian ECM vendor Harvest Road hit the chopping block on December 21st 2007. They appeared to completely melt down last year and sold their assets to Italian vendor Giunti Labs. Founded in 1841, Guinti has to be one of the oldest content management companies around so hopefully their product has found a stable home. CMSWire has some more info.
Then Blackboard closed their acquisition of San Francisco-based Xythos on New Year's Eve 2007 for $25.5 million. This is appears to be a solid valuation of 4.5 time sales - their sales for 2007 were around $5.7 million. The valuation seems more appropriate for a software as a service company and they were mainly a licenses company but then again this is still a reasonable deal for Blackboard shareholders as BBBB is trading at 4.8 times revenues. The much larger, well funded Blackboard is a nice home for their products. Xythos' solid WebDAV-compliant repository has always seemed impressive, at least technically.
Xythos was founded in 1999 and raised a Series A of $6.3 million in 2001, a Series B that there is no info on and then a $4 million Series C in 2003. In 2001 Red Herring mentioned that their Series A had a post-money valuation of $20.2 million so a $25.5 million sale over 6 years later isn't exactly a home run but a whole lot better than nothing.
Brad Howarth spent some time talking to a variety of entrepreneurs, including me, on what it takes to be successful for an article in SmartCompany. The collection of secrets are:
My original three 'tips' I sent to Brad for the story were:
1. Focus
Initially Ephox targeted the broadest possible market we could. As a start-up in Australia this meant the small business market before trying the education market. Both of these efforts resulted in some great media coverage but few sales. When we started to focus on partnering with larger software companies such as IBM, Oracle and Vignette we were able to access much larger opportunities, build alliances and tailor our product development. Large customers do see value in the ‘next big thing’ but more often than not their concerns are around more mundane issues such as integration costs, reference sites and quality.
2. Sales Execution
Despite being a highly technology-oriented founder I always had a great appreciation of the importance of sales and marketing. However, appreciating the need for sales and marketing and translating that through to significant sales was another thing. We wasted a lot of business development and marketing activities on opportunities that were difficult or impossible to translate into sales. It is critical for a startup to have a professional discipline around the sales process and the day-to-day execution of sales.
3. Think Long Term
Continuous improvement of product, sales, marketing, engineering and operations takes time to add up and take hold. Ephox took three years to get its first $1m in sales, 18 months to get the next million, 12 months for the third million, 10 months for the fourth, 8 months for the fifth, 6 months for the sixth, 4 months for the seventh and is now on course for its first $1m month. I have always had an unshakable belief that if we improve every part of the business every day of every year our efforts will translate into superb results over time. In my experience, the cliché that starting a business is a marathon and not a sprint is completely true. A smart, committed and passionate team who share a view of the long term is essential.
In a high steaks competition Australians are now apparently out-eating Americans at the Obesity Games.
Bloody hell, lighten up!
Apple announced the winners of their design awards last week of which their were two notable winners.
The first is Screenflow. It looks like superb screen recording software that I am downloading as we speak.
The second is Aussie start-up Remember The Milk. I use RTM quite a bit and highly recommend it. Their iPhone app is great. Well done!
A few years ago our marketing director and I were chatting with an IBM marketing executive about search engine optimization. We were amateurs when it comes to SEO but we held court for more than an hour and they took several pages of notes. The one thing we knew about SEO was that inbound links improve your ranking.
I mentioned how Microsoft, IBM's sworn enemy, appeared to be quite capable in mobilizing its many bloggers to improve its rankings. Surely IBM, with 386,558 staff, must have a built-in channel that could improve its rankings via links on its employee's blogs? Nothing dodgey... simply a suggestion that the world's greatest portal software was WebSphere and wouldn't it be great if that was what you truly felt that way, Valued IBMer, you could consider a link. It would only be a matter of time before IBM could rise to the top of search engines in their chosen keywords if just 0.1% of their staff used their blogs to link to "service-oriented architecture", "grid computing" or "anything else".
Whilst this may actually be a bad idea as IBM may end up banished from search results entirely, IBM's lack of basic insight seemed to be from another era. A few years on and somebody amongst 386,558 people has clearly started to get the Brave New Web. IBM has launched the IBM Resource Center (or 'Diggable Resources') powered by the Web 2.0 darling Digg.
So far Diggable Resources appears to be an isolated good idea within Big Blue. The small number of "diggs" says that huge army of IBMers still need a kick along. For this idea to truly be successful they need the general public to participate but 370,000 people can certainly give it a good kick start.
Adrian recently wrote of the checklist our developers use before declaring that a bug fix or enhancement is truly finished.
In discussing the benefits of checklists Adrian pointed to an article from the National Review of Medicine about the crusade of a Dr Peter Pronovost. The cause that the John Hopkins professor has taken on is somewhat simple but devastatingly effective. His thesis is that the usage of checklists in Intensive Care Units can dramatically decrease complications and therefore deaths and costs.
Compelled to read on, I discovered a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande offering an in-depth review of what the good Dr Peter has been up to and I highly recommend reading it. In discussing Dr Pronovost's results:
Michigan's infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.
His initiative has saved more than fifteen hundred lives in Michigan alone. Do you recall the coverage the so-called 'Subway Hero' Wesley Autrey received last year? He was undoubtedly brave and heroic but where are Dr Pronovost's front page headlines?
When asked how much it would cost for him to do for the whole US what he did for Michigan, he said:
About two million dollars, maybe three, mostly for the technical work of signing up hospitals to participate state by state and coordinating a database to track the results. He’s already devised a plan to do it in all of Spain for less.
When I am unfortunate enough to find myself or a loved one in an emergency room I sure hope they use a checklist. Of all the people in need of funding and support in healthcare research, Dr Pronovost should be at the top of the list.
As Adrian points out, checklists must also be widely applicable to fields beyond medicine. I am sure they would have an impact anywhere where experts are relied on to 'practice an art' yet are busy and stressed. Based upon Dr Pronovost's research, if we all swallowed some humble pie and submitted to a checklist or two the world would be a better place.
I am off to write a checklist or two.
Ephox is now in Europe! I have just signed the lease for our new offices near London.
We are moving into the ground floor of Gainsborough House on Thames Street in Windsor.
The location is superb. The building is located right next to a pedestrian-only bridge over the Thames River. The beautiful Eton is just across the bridge and if you look up you can see the imposing Windsor Castle. There are many restaurants, pubs and shops around. It was almost too picturesque! I am hoping the great surrounds will enable us to build a strong, fun culture.
An appealing thing for me was the office is very close to the train station. Getting to central London involves catching a 6 minute train to Slough and then a 15 minute train to Paddington - very reasonable.
We are now recruiting several account managers to work alongside our CTO Adrian Sutton (who now lives in the UK), our European MD Mark Whitehouse, and, shortly, myself. I am planning to move to London for about 12 months starting in July.
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