Tim G Dowling Weblog

Onelogin.com

Check out Onelogin.com, identity management for the cloud. Over 2200 web applications supported. 

Cisco Buys Pure for $120M

It was great validation of the Pure's products and vision of a home networking platform. The team did an excellent job creating the value and building the partnerships. It was a wild adventure as most startup are. Many thanks to all the people who made this happen.The full Cisco Press Release

The McAfee Secure Internet

My blog has been pretty empty due to extreme focus on this project over the last year and half. The McAfee Secure Internet is a system of web site certifications and continuous testing of the internet to identifying the bad guys. This is has been a great project to pull together with such a clear need. So many great people have made this possible from the original Site Advisor team to the great folks at Scan Alert and of course the tireless efforts of McAfee. Of course this is shameless promotion since I work at McAfee!

It seems like search has been pretty stagnate for the last several years, which means the bad guys have had a lot of time to understand how search engine's work, especially for paid advertising. With browser exploit code for sale, or for that matter, an exploit, it has become simple for the average criminal to put together a website, buy Google keyword advertising, run it for a while, and then modify it with some links to sites that steal your identity or download key logging software. Many bad guys will buy badges for their web site that consumers always mistake for a "Trust Mark". Things like Verisign Secure, TrustE, or BBB Online, don't mean a web site has passed any screening for safety. Unfortunately the companies that offer these services design these badges specifically so sites can show them to consumers to enroll their trust. Because these don't go to any real hurdle for consumer safety, most bad guys have these badges on their web sites. The McAfee Secure Internet will try to keep out the bad guys and has a user system to allow the reporting of any web site for that may be malicious. For more information visit the McAfee Secure Site. McAfee Secure for Web Sites

Internet and Security

As many of you know I have been working at McAfee. In furthering the idea of transforming our lives I found a common quest with some great folks at McAfee to transform the internet and security to build it into the web rather than just relying on our pc's to defend and protect us. In December 06 I started at McAfee to pull together a plan to further protect users from online threats under the basic notion that there are two internets the "Safe" internet and the "Un Safe" itnernet.  Part of this opportunity is to further the ideas and product SiteAdvisor. (www.siteadvisor.com) Stay tuned for more.

Demand Intelligence for New Products

In looking at a lot of startups it's fun to bucket the startups into three categories; 1) Solves a problem people want solved or 2) Provides a capability people want, or 3) neither 1 or 2. Of course you want to avoid number 3. And with in either 1 or 2 you may have a large market or small market. These are the big questions to get answered. Many VC's answer these questions with money by funding a startup and the good ones actually only invest when either 1 or 2 is validated thru delivery and market traction or market evidence from another company. To help get my head around this early in an idea I have been using the Internet and keyword traffic to help give clues to weather an idea is a 1, 2, or 3.  The theory is simple; If people aren't searching for something directly related to your idea, it's likely that demand for it may be low to non-existent. Of course this can be proven wrong, so it does require some deeper thinking. As an example I show below the Overture tool for looking up traffic on keywords for "Online Family Calendar". The nice thing is you can actually see more of the specific terms that people are searching on. So for example if you thought the world wanted an Online family calendar you might get a clue about that from the terms below. 300 people/month isn't too many. You might search on family calendars and find a lot more, but then you're really trying to convince those folks they need it Online. Which is a big assumption. It's better to capture demand rather than create it. Experimentation is highly encouraged because you might tap something that has a little search volume but is in high demand due to the belief that a product doesn't exist.  A warrning with this technique is that it will not work for social networking services since peopel really don't search for social networking in search engines.

At the end of my analysis for Online Family Calendars I have concluded it's not a good idea. While there are plenty of people who want an online calendar the family side of scheduling seems to belong to paper right now and if you talk to the owners of those calendars they view putting it online as a problem not a help. It turns out the searches below tend to be husbands trying to get there wives to put the calendar online..in my experience that is an up hill battle :)

Well have fun with this...

Searches done in September 2006
Count	Search Term
252	online family calendar
41	free family calendar online

Shopping for Wireless Phones - Typepad's New Mobile Post Feature

 

I am posting this using the new TypePad PDA software to post blogs with photos. Attached is a photo of a wireless phone. I am shopping for a two line wireless phone that can expand to 8 phones. I haven't found a great one yet! Of course it has to pass the family test too.

Application Services are hot!

Check out www.zoho.com for a suite of desktop ajax apps. It will be interesting to see the kinds of features these web apps will enable particularly with how easy it is to use existing web services. I am sure the www.google.com guys will exploit their web services. It's very clear these guys don't think like traditional desktop application coders.

A great laptop bag!

I am a bag nut along with gadgets. So when my friend Judy Johnston arrived on a recent trip she showed me a great bag made in her home town. The Company is www.sfbags.com. I have the Sony VAIO TX laptop (It's great by the way), and the sfbags team has a custom fitting chart for each laptop manufacturer.  They also let you configure your bag. It arrived two days later with a personal note from someone in the company. It was great.

Thinking about the Motorola Q Phone

I am researching switching from my Treo 650 to the Motorola Q Phone, mainly because of the Jog wheel. I loved the jog wheel on my blackberry, but it lacked good phone features and I am finding the Treo 650 Phone quality not to be very good. Verizon is the carrier for the Q. For those of you looking at the Q, I found a good review by Matthew Miller at http://www.geek.com/hwswrev/pda/Q/index.htm.

Startup and Venture Activity Picking UP

There seems to be an excitement in the Seattle air these days for startups. Attending the WSA Investment forum proved to be a very active event. Every VC in the area and many from the Bay Area attended. There were some great presentation from several new startups that look promising. Check out www.farecast.com and www.redfin.com.

The Focused Startup

Really should there be any other kind of startup? Starting a new business is fun and often people start businesses with an idea in mind and it often can get very complex very quickly. After being guilty of this a few times myself, it is very clear that every business needs one simple focused idea that works to get off the ground. Finding that idea and elminating all others is critical. Believe me they will come up. "Oh we could make money if we did this other thing with it too!" is the cry you will hear. But doing those other things will mean sacraficing doing the most important thing very well. You have to choose one and find out if it has traction in the market. Once you really know what will work in the market place then nothing but that focus matters to get a company off the ground.

Great Blue Tooth Headset

Check out the plantronics headset... It works pretty well. It lists for $169.00 on plantronics website. www.plantronics.com

Drive Hard, Manage Loosely

For those of you running software or internet services, I been playing with this notion inspired by John Ludwig of creating a culture in our business of creativity. Google, of course, is the company that seems to be doing this. The elements seem to be basic. I think they break down into 1) A clear vision for the company, 2) A mission for each team that span multiple releases, and 3) An abundance of resources and time to try both planned and unplanned things internally and in the marketplace.

The basic notion is that it's better to get a lot of products or features out in the market and let the market place tell you what they like or don't like. This is very contrary to the days of focus group planning and building what you think is the perfect product. It's actually the opposite. You need a way to proto-type and productize faster and let the marketplace tell you which ones to invest in. More on this later....

Treo Versus Blackberry

I love cell phones and pdas. I seem to go thru them pretty fast.  I either break them or drop them in the water when boating. (Yes it's a problem for me). I have recently had to replace my phone and upgraded to the Treo 650. The Treo 650 includes an improved screen, bluetooth, and a better camera.  I used the color blackberry before getting the Treo and the thing I liked the best about it was the jog wheel. However it wasn't a very good phone. With the Treo 650 I have a speaker phone, better dial pad on the keyboard and screen. I use verizon wireless sync and have an old laptop running logged into my Exchange server forwarding my mail. It works great. Of course it's important to have a spam filter on that PC so you don't get a lot extra mail sent. I use cloudmark and it works great with outlook.

Network Magic helps stops Wifi Intruders

Network Magic from my company has really helped me stop WiFi Intruders. I have always used Wep security built into my wifi router, but as I have started to add devices other than PC's it was really a pain to use. Plus my daughter's school requires a laptop computer for her homework and so consequently she has friends come over who want to get on the network. So with Network Magic's Intruder alert feature I was able to turn off my wep and have Network Magic monitor my network. When an intruder shows up it alerts me and everyone in the house, log's it in a network log, and shows it on the visual map as an intruder.  Once I see an intruder, which have been far and few, I have used my router's MAC Address Filter and Newtwork Magic to enter the address. Network Magic will record the MAC Address even if the intruder has left your network.

Figuring out Digital Music

For years we have been buying CD’s and we are horrible at keeping them organized and now we have too many to keep in one place. My 13 and 10 year old daughters are also getting into music which is great, but they are even worse at keeping CD’s organized and unscratched.  So the move to digital music was something we all wanted to do so we could better manage them and make them last. So began the trials and exploration. 

First we just tried ripping CD’s into windows media player which is great to get your CD’s in a manageable form. Although frankly we didn’t feel comfortable throwing away our CD’s, even tho I secretly would love too. I guess I won’t until I really have a reliable back-up and recovery system (an opportunity for pure).  So began everyone ripping CD’s which actually didn’t do much for us since no body wanted to listen to music on their PC. So I purchased a Turtle Beach Audiotron. It was kind of cool because it plugged into my network and would automatically access and music files that you enable to be shared on your PC. Not bad…. but then we gave an iPod(www.apple.com) to my oldest daughter for xmas along with an iTunes account and so more confusion. 

If you have kids you know that owning an iPod is a required device in order to be any where remotely cool. So began my daughter’s purchase of music and then listening to it on her iPod. Problem is she want’s to listen to it on the home stereo and as it turns out so do Lisa and I. She got into the older rock music from my youth (Chicago, Queen, Elton,etc) and we wanted play it at parties and for fun on the home stereo. Our home stereo is piped in all the rooms on our main floor and is connected to an amp in our home office.  So to accomplish this we purchased an Apple Airport Express. This device is a home residential router/gateway, access point, and media adapter for music. It’s very cool. I plugged it in and it showed up on the network.  It looks like it uses a corporate protocol for management called SNMP and Apple supplies a utility to configure it with all the same settings you would see on a router management page.  So for identification sake I changed the icon in Network Magic to a music media adapter and named “wireless iTunes”. You have to buy a separate cable package to connect it to your stereo, which we did, and plugged it into the “Tape Deck 1” inputs… kinda funny cause in explaining how to get iTunes in the home to my daughters I had to go thru a description of why a stereo would use Tape since they think it’s for wrapping presents.  So to start playing iTunes on the stereo you need to have iTunes running on one of your computers on your network, then in the bottom of iTunes you will see a button show up that will allow you to pump the sound to any of the Airports on your network. You could actually have several if you wanted although I couldn’t get it both play on my PC speakers and the Home Stereo. The other thing iTunes does is let you access other iTunes libraries on other PC’s on your home network if they are running. This is a pretty cool feature for us because we can have my kids PC’s upstairs and use my office PC to control the stereo but still access music on the upstairs computers.  In setting up iTunes we used Network Magic “My Shared Folders” to pull all the ripped music from each PC into the iTunes on our office PC. iTunes let’s go and browse for new music by telling it which folders to look at. We selected my shared folders and it pulled all the CDs into iTunes and converted to Apples music format. 

We have been using it for a while and it works very well. We noticed that Network Magic is doing a pretty good job of highlighting newly purchased music from iTunes although we all wish the Album Art would show up in Network Magic and we also which it pop toast when a new subfolder is added and show the Ablum Art in the toast.  My daughter and I use NM to know when we each purchase music it’s a much better alert system that what iTunes does. iTunes will pull it in from another computer but it’s hard to discover. 

On a final note we also picked up one of the new Roku Sound Bridges which is an iTunes wireless media adapter and it also support some of the new rental services; raphsody and naptser. Lisa and I like to listen to music in our bed room, but we don’t have the household music speakers on the second floor nor do we want to put a computer up their just to listen to iTunes or have to find our iPod and remember to bring it to the room. So the Roku device connects without any configuration to our wireless network and it has it’s own volume control, two RCA jackts, an optical jack, and comes with a cord to go from the two RCA jacks to a set of speakers like the kind you would buy for your PC sound system. We picked up some great creative speakers from the Apple store and plugged it into the roku and now we have iTunes upstairs with the ability to select music from any PC running iTunes… it’s great, with one problem, Roku doesn't play iTunes purchased music because of the proprietary DRM. 

So that’s the story… I am sure we will learn more .....