With a whole wide world on the other end of this phone, with millions of people needing help to decrease their drag and increase their profit, how can I now connect to Immuexa's next project, one that's soulful, innovative, and lucrative for all? My Haiti work has brought me to a precipice I haven't seen since Immuexa's early days, almost thirteen years ago: no work in sight. In all that time, I've always had a billable project on the horizon. With ongoing sales & networking, I managed to keep the Immuexa fires burning without much effort, even through the 2001...

And then came Haiti. The very day after my last blog post, I was invited to a think tank at the MIT Media Lab to discuss my experiences with Haiti and the OLPC laptops. Since then, nearly all of my time has been spent organizing and supporting our current seven Waveplace pilots in four locations with 200 XOs. This of course meant three more months of delay for everyone that's waiting for me. "Everything I do is instead of something else I should be doing." After some soul searching since returning from Haiti, I decided to bring on Beth Santos...

"In a capitalist society, there is always an opening for someone who will do the work of three employees for half the pay."...

Today's the tenth anniversary of our business, Immuexa Corporation, which makes custom-built software and websites. Ten years ago yesterday, I drove away from my job at Lotus Development Corp. Ten years ago this morning, we started Immuexa. Here's a photo from the tenth anniversary of my father's business, Arthur Falconer Associates, an advertising agency in Englewood Cliffs NJ. My father and mother are in the photo, which was taken a few months before the first moon landing. AFA went on for another twenty-five years before it folded up shop, though its spirit lives on within my two brothers and me,...

Today Immuexa turns eight, and as before, Jon and I lunched at Bubba's to celebrate. Last year, we officially launched Tidepool and Storymill, which after fifteen hard months of work, was a big deal to us at the time. Now a year later, I should probably mark the occasion by writing of the year's lessons and course corrections, or wax philosophical about persistence and the future of things, but tonight I'm not in the mood. Suffice it to say that Jon and I had a great talk. We're both still psyched about the semantic web, particularly the upcoming roles of...

Here's what I wrote tonight before I took out the snipping shears: Q) Why should I pay money when other programs and websites are free? A) Our answer is pretty simple: if you like us better, you'll want to pay our modest fees. We feel they're fair and the money lets us keep making our products better and better. We're not some corporate juggernaut, throwing money and bandwidth away just to capture mindshare to inflate our stock value. We don't secretly have an "acquisition strategy", hoping to be bought out by someone. Truth is, we've all worked for companies like...

Talk as much as you like about sales & marketing, pay big bucks for strategists and research firms, brainstorm your branding and gonzo attention getters, but it all comes down to the simplest of requests: please give us some money. The natural response is "why should I?" The spectrum of answers can be dizzying: public radio pitches, new car "extras", "don't blame us" anxiety inducers, glamour life seduction scenes, and even straight-up "we have something you want" appeals. If you buy into the cluetrain meme, we all want sellers to be straight with us ... "here's what I got, here's...

Ten years ago today, I signed away 51% of my second software company, Gravity Systems Inc, to a businessman with an incredibly deep gravely voice named Don Van Natta. This time around, I'd been in business almost two years, working for next to nothing to chase my dream of a worldwide interconnected marketplace powered by multi-agent systems. In those days, it wasn't unusual for me to donate plasma once or twice a week just to feed myself. Sure, I could get a good job just about anywhere, but I knew too well what was coming. I'd tell people, "the tidal...

One of our clients is a public radio station. Yesterday, they finished their ten day spring pledge drive. For those in the world that may not know, public radio and television stations in the US have pledge drives (usually twice a year), where they cut into their programming to plead with their audience to send them money. In return, these donors become "members" of the station and often receive a thank-you gift. Along with grants and underwriting, this is how stations make all their money, since they don't allow advertising. Yes, that's right: American media without advertising. Our client's pledge...

I started Cluetrain last night. Yeah, I know, I'm a little late in the game, though in some ways I'm not (written at the same time). The Cluetrain tone is actually where I started (both written pre-Web). Since then, my challenge has been in avoiding the corporate siren call before it dashes me against the inhuman rocks of pointless posturing. #33, Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can't be "picked up" at some tony conference. My current project's been stressing me out, though not because of the tech or the schedule or the...

The danger in doing very new things is getting wrapped up in being first. Whether it's "first mover advantage" or academic clout, we want to be the one and only, the one people talk about. Second place is "also-ran" at best. Last night I watched The Endurance, which is about a guy named Shackleton who should have been the first to reach the south pole. He was one hundred miles away from his goal, after travelling fifteen hundred, then turned back because he was worried they'd run out of supplies. A few years later, two other teams beat him to...

How often have you worked on projects where your company first re-evaluated its project infrastructure and development plan? "I think the task priorities should be Hairy, Ignorable, and Pointless." "We need to change our source-control system to MultiMegaMerge." "Let's create a worldwide distributed automatic build like Seti@Home, only more secure." Everyone's got their own opinions about project management, which is why there's so many products in this space, most of them homegrown. Around the time I decided to quit Lotus, they had an all-day, all-hands meeting at a local conference center to "discuss" our new development process. Sitting in the...

Of the various labels I could saddle myself with, "entrepreneur" rings true. This may seem like bragging, but it's really not. Entrepreneur means "one who assumes risk for a business venture." I know Inc magazine wants you to think entrepreneurs are the new breed of cowboy, that we're all on our way to being Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, always seeing past the industry buzz to the "new new thing". That's just a lot of journalistic hokey. Entrepreneurs are people who take a chance on an uncertain idea. They risk their time, their passion, and their money for something that...

Tonight I was negotiating fees with an illustrator for reproduction rights of our upcoming icons and title screens. She quoted numbers from the Graphic Artists Guild, which has the website address gag.org, which is kinda funny. My family business was an advertising agency, so I know how creative folk usually charge for logos, graphic design, and illustrations. They first size you up and try to determine how much money you're gonna make, then charge accordingly. As tonight's illustrator put it, it's not fair to her if she gets the same amount for a Times Square billboard illustration as for a...

A few days ago, I was chatting with someone about browser cookies. He wanted to know why this site collects them. I told him it was to help keep statistics, that without cookies there's no way to determine the true number of returning visitors. You see, many ISPs use rotating IP addresses, particularly when people log off, then log back on. Without cookies, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 1000 people who visit once (and never come back) and 200 people who visit five times. If the former, I'm wasting my time. If the latter, I'm doing...

In 2000, my wife and I wanted a new house. We drove all over, we talked with our realtor, we went to open houses, we looked online. Nothing felt right. We decided to write up our "top ten" lists of what we wanted most. My list led with "space" and "light" and "land". Hers included "jacuzzi" and "closets" and "great kitchen". We both wanted "fireplace." These lists became our informal search profile. Such profiles are the stock in trade for real estate agents, whether they're helping you buy or sell a house. The better a realtor can predict whether a...

Okay, we've got RDF, we've got OWL, we've got Jena, we've got ontologies. Now what? What can we do with them? Let's take the semweb for a spin. In Sanibel, I did lots of brainstorming with folks. Seemed like most there were hunting elephants: big grants and big business. My focus was on a different market: the small and the many. Horizontal markets are harder to reach; you gotta really know marketing. It's not just board rooms you're pitching to... it's everyone. So what semweb products could succeed with the many? Well, there's my own company's products, which I'll talk...

Today I've been working on my company's updated business plan, outlining the features of our two new products, describing their competitive advantages in the current market. I went to Sanibel to determine if we should use Semantic Web technology. I came away with a "Yes" from a technical standpoint, but a "Maybe" from a business point of view. Much of my writing here, particularly the Angela Talk, is motivated by my current need to make the business case for the Semantic Web. I really do believe there's money to be made in this space. The tough part's describing how to...

Given my entrepreneurial background, I was shocked at the open exchange of ideas in Sanibel. Most projects I've worked on have had non-disclosures. Most of my colleagues hold their cards close to the chest. My amazement reached its peak on the demos & posters night as I walked from station to station, hearing one breakthrough after the next. "This is way too easy," I thought. Given adequate funding, I could probably turn at least six of those projects into lucrative ventures. If you're doubtful, call me up. I'll rattle off the how and who, brainstorming market, branding, and sales potential....