We’re very excited to announce two major updates that just went live today: new versions of our IE and Firefox toolbars, which are substantially faster when loading WebNotes in your browser, and a new Beta invite system that allows any user to invite up to 10 others to join WebNotes.
We hope that these updates will make it even easier to use WebNotes and to invite your friends and colleagues to try us out. These updates were based on your feedback, so keep the comments and suggestions coming!
Last night was my first (of hopefully many) meetups at Resolve Nations Entrepreneur Meetup. It was great to meet a lot of passionate business owners who really loved what they do. Plus I got a lot of good/interesting advice.
Among the topics covered:
1) Marketing during the holiday season
2) Business Ethics (which I'll comment more on in my personal blog)
3) How to do business during an economic turndown.
If you are in Boston and want to meet up with some other entrepreneurs, come to the next meeting!
This guy took up residence on Ryan's monitor over the weekend. He's been helping us track down and kill our bugs. We're thinking maybe we can patent this new tech, and license it out to other startups.
He also helps us with our web crawling efforts.
Thank you folks, thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the veal. And be sure to tip your waitress.
A while back we went to the MIT career fair. I took some pictures but neglected to put them on the site! Here are the handsome mugs of Matt Long and Ryan Damico.
Unfortunately, once again this was taken with my camera phone. They are far less distorted in real life.
One of my favorite things to do is swing by Wikipedia for some good ol' fashioned random web surfing. And though it may feel like procrastination at times, it's quite educational. In effect, it's like watching the Discovery chanel. You may be watching TV but you have become infinitely smarter than anyone who chose instead to watch reality TV.
After a stimulating conversation with my colleague, Bennett, my quest for today was to research Ray Kurzweil (you can find my annotations here). Ray is an interesting guy who wrote his first computer program at 15 (which was actually used by IBM). He's then had his hand in all sorts of different technologies ranging from OCR to speech synth to pattern recognition. He's widely regarded as a leading "futurist" and has a crazy dietary program to boot. Enjoy your procrastination!
Thanks again to all of our users who have been submitting bugs and providing us with valuable feedback on how we can improve WebNotes. We’ve been spending a lot of time lately making adjustments to our
toolbars,
bookmarklet and
"My WebNotes" site to address the issues you’ve brought up, and today we rolled out a major update that takes care of many of them.
If you’re using the WebNotes toolbar for IE or Firefox, you should be notified of the update automatically, and if you’re using the WebNotes bookmarklet, these changes will take effect the next time you run it.
Keep the feedback coming!
I was just reading Seth Godin's blog where there was a little cartoon quote saying "the market for something to believe in is infinite". Some of you might know that I was in Vegas for the weekend, and nowhere else is this philosophy more evident. We all want the big lotto ticket to hit, we want to believe that betting our 401k on the 40 to 1 odds is the right thing to do, but it almost never works out. Heck, Casino War (or alternatively "high card") is even offered, where your odds are exactly 50/50 in the long run and effectively zero in the short run (unless you have excessive amounts of cash to ride out the streaks of bad luck). Now, there is nothing wrong with having the big dream as long as it comes with the understanding that to get there, 90% of the time you have to grind it out.
An apt poker quote from the movie Rounders:
"Guys around here will tell ya...you play for a living. It's like any other job. You don't gamble. You grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it. Get your money in when you have the best of it, and protect it when you don't. Don't give anything away."
The same applies to product development, startups, etc. There is chasm between you and the big dream and hard work lays in between. Of course, Mike McDermott goes on to say:
"But finally, I've learned this...If you're too careful, your whole life can become a grind"
Grinding is a good way to get you inch by inch to your goal, but there comes a time when you need to take a risk, double up when the odds are in your favor and hope for the best :-)
As a side note, it probably helped that I won a bit this trip. My attitude could've been very different had I lost big!
A few weeks ago I met up with Gopal Shenoy, Director of Product Management at salary.com, after he saw us present at this summer’s Web Innovator’s Group. Gopal runs a great blog about product management best practices, and recently posted a review of WebNotes (along with a video interview with me) on his site. Check us out!
Forbes and Gartner recently published a study called "Day in the Life of C Level Executives" where they studied how lower level executives get their information. OVERWHELMINGLY, executives found their information from the Web. Not actual newspapers, not actual magazines or trade journals. The web is considered to be their most important source of information. 60% + of those surveyed consistently use the web for research and over 80% will utilize a search engine.
My question is, what do you do with all this information? How do these executives organize their thoughts? WebNotes certainly will help 100% of the businesses and executives become more efficient in their day to day struggles with information overload, and it will certainly help the 50% + of the executives who youtube consistently to watch more online video in their free time. :-)
Since we launched our private Beta program this summer, we’ve
been getting non-stop feedback from our users (keep it coming!) about how they
use WebNotes and what we can do to make it better for them. For the last couple of months we’ve been making
improvements and rolling out updates on a continuous basis, and later this
month we will be releasing our largest patch to date.
The latest update will contain major performance improvements
in our browser plug-ins, as well as numerous UI and stability updates to our
annotation, organization, and sharing tools.
Stay tuned for more information as we get nearer to rolling this out –
and in the mean time, keep up the great feedback!