Cameron, Dan and the rest of the folks at SSE are getting more well-deserved attention over at SSE:
A few weeks ago we ran the 2011 Eugene Marathon. Finally. I've been wanting to run this race for several years but the dates never seemed to work out.
The race started bright and early at 7am. The weather was dry with temps were in the high 30s/low 40s which made for a cold start. There were three corrals with about 8000 runners total.
Miles 0-8 were an out and back loop that held the biggest hills of the day - not huge and after Mile 9, the course was very flat. The miles clicked by quickly and before I knew it we had crossed the Willamette River and were running through Springfield. After crossing over Interstate 5, we were already at Mile 16 passing the U of O (the Ducks) football stadium. Wow, that thing is B-I-G.
Miles 17-25 followed the river northward, crossing over at Mile 21 and heading back south.
The last mile was a blur with a super fast finish on the track at Hayward Field - incredible way to finish a race. As the race slogan says, you feel like you are "running in the footsteps of legends"
Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:
Organization – Very well organized and staffed. Grade: A
Course - River section is scenic, neighborhoods are fun. Not a ton of crowd support. Grade: B
Aid-stations - Seemingly everywhere. Grade: A
Swag – Nice technical long-sleeve and medal. Grade: A-
SSE (aka Stanford Incubator) has been getting a bit of press lately:
- Business Week - "AOL Tries for Some Silicon Valley Cred"
Interesting story on AOLs West Coast office which houses SSE Labs. - The Next Web - "Watch out YC…There’s a new accelerator in town and they don’t take equity"
Video interview with co-founder Cameron Teitelman - TechCrunch - "500 Startups Demo Day: Motion Math Looks To Make Learning Fun Again"
Motion Math, team from the inagural class of SSE lands a round and demos at 500 Startups Demo Day - Inc.com - "America's Coolest College Startups 2011: Black Swan Solar"
Interview with Tom Currier of Black Swan Solar, also from the first SSE class,
As a mentor, it's been great to watch things take root and grow!
Ahorrando Juntos!
Quick post on the company I'm mentoring this term at the Stanford Startup Incubator (SSE Labs): The motto of Juntos Finanzas ("Saving Together") does a great job of helping explain the vision of founder Ben Knelman's company. In a nutshell, Ben and team are working to create personal finance tools (ala Mint) but with a twist - the target demographic is first-generation Latin Americans.
The initial product is completely SMS-based (there is an option to receive a monthly summary report via email) and does not require the user to even have a bank account. Tracking spending is as simple as sending a text message to Juntos Finanzas with information about the purchase. Interacting with the SMS-based service is done completely in Spanish. The technical solution (SMS) and target market resonated with me when I first met Ben as it is similar to some of the work I've been doing with the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University. Entrepreneurs are realizing that there are huge addressable market segments that require a different perspective.
The intial sign-up is really easy - just send a text message to 408 758-8269
Check out the service, interesting concept and target market.
Needs a wiki entry me thinks.
Even from the nosebleed seats it was a fun game!
After mulling it over seemingly forever, I’m going to migrate off of Moveable Type and onto Posterous.
The reasons are numerous, but mostly because Posterous is just a great blogging platform. I tried several others, including WordPress.com, but in the end liked Posterous the best.
Things will now be here but the current address should redirect you. Now just have to spend some time with mod_rewrite to make sure all my link goodness doesn’t go missing
We’re busy creating new UI for PersistentFan, including the addition of Facebook comments. Having comments on each video is something we’ve been after for a while, especially comments that have a built-in social graph.
Imagine my surprise, after fighting with the pretty simple plug-in markup, to discover that Facebook comments are pretty awful from an interface perspective.
Here’s a basic example from the Facebook Social Plug-ins page
Note that I’ve entered a comment and checked the box to have it published in my news feed, which is shown below
It is pretty hard to figure out what the context of the comment is (i.e. what is the comment in regards to? Shouldn’t there at least be a snippet of the site the comment was from?) and the citation of the source URL certainly doesn’t help.
At least with a like from the comment plug-in, a friend could have somewhat of an idea about the content:
This feature is definitely a #fail in my book.
Amazon is continuing on their crazed march, adding yet another impressive set of features to AWS.
Today they announced the Beta launch of “Beanstalk”, which significantly reduces the complexity of service deployment and management. Previously, an AWS user had to deal with all the capacity issues: provisioning, deployment/rollback, instantiation, load balancing and service monitoring. (Note that there are commercial solutions to this like RightScale and open source projects like OpenStack)
The initial offering is tailored to Java developers and uses Tomcat as the app server. All that is required is a .war file uploaded to Beanstalk that you then deploy. Beanstalk handles load balancing of the service and includes monitoring. Based on the post, it looks like there is some ability to control the environment (JVM settings etc) and directly login to a provisioned instance.
Of course, for the auto-scaling functionality to work properly, a site needs to be architected to work in an ‘n’ app server framework. I’d suggest testing this out before turning over the keys to Beanstalk.
Pricing for Beanstalk is attractive (free). The basic deployment looks incredibly inexpensive as well.
Was I surprised – this book is incredibly interesting and full of stories from Keith. Some of the things I enjoyed include:
- His stories and observations about the social upheavals of the late 60s/early 70s quite interesting. The Stones were constantly harassed by the Establishment at the time. Keith points out that the authorities were threatened by the band, which he found quite odd.
- Mick Taylor, Mick Taylor, Mick Taylor
- Long study of American blues including details about various musicians of the genre and era. Really interesting
- Making http://amzn.to/eCBqI3 ">Exile on Main Street – read a lot about this when it re-released recently, but learned even more.
- Wingless Angels and Keith Richards solo (X-Pensive Winos)
As expected, lots of complaints about Mick – zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
As I read the book, I would periodically take a break and watch Stones videos on PersistentFan.com Made the book that much better :-)
Overall, great book. The best musician autobiography I’ve read in a while. Definitely queue up all the Stones discs with Mick Taylor to listen to while you read.