I’m back in the software business.

http://brickstreetsoftware.com

If you have been investing for any length of time, you are probably familiar with Agora Inc. and their breathless direct marketing pieces about stocks that are poised to skyrocket.

Do not buy anything from Agora Inc. — Agora Inc. does not run money; they publish newsletters. If they were as good at running money as their newsletters say they are, they would not be publishing newsletters. They would be running money; it pays better.

The SEC sued Porter Stansberry and Agora Inc. for fraud in 2003.
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp18090.htm

In 2007, they were found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of $1,312,620 and penalties of $240,000. For your reading pleasure, I pulled the documents from Maryland Federal District Court.

Judgement Order

Judgement Opinion

Thanks to Stansberry, I lost some money on VaxGen stock, so I think this couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. A few years later, I was having lunch with an executive of a biotech company. When I asked him about VaxGen, he said, “Everyone in the business knew that vaccine would never work.”

In March 07, I decided to try out Prosper.com. Prosper is a peer-to-peer marketplace for loans. The allure of Prosper is that you can loan out money at high interest, much higher than a savings account. But there a number of problems with Prosper.

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I was the lunchtime entertainment at a recent CMU Alumni Advisory board meeting. I ended up telling war stories about my dot com startup days. Here are the slides. Enjoy.

Slides (pdf, 384kb)

Riya decides to close their Bangalore R&D office and consolidate engineering in Silicon Valley. India was getting to be too expensive to deal with the hassles:

Coverage in InfoWorld:
http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/07/05/29/riya-wage-inflation-sinks_1.html

CEO’s blog discussing the decision:
http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2007/04/episode_26_indi.html

One of my clients has been outsourcing a large software development effort to an Indian team. The time zone differences, experience level of the staff, and turnover have been a big drag on productivity.

I have a T-Mobile phone. Their web site has been slow to the point of unusability for the past week. I don’t know if the problem is on my end or on their end, but I have no problem reaching any other site on the Internet so I suspect that I’m ok.

After a week of trying to ignore their dead slow web site, I decide to be a good citizen and call T-Mobile customer support to report it. The first CSR puts me on hold and sends me to tech support. The tech support CSR puts me on hold and sends me to wireless data support. The wireless data CSR says the web site works fine for her. I say, just because it works for you doesn’t mean it works for me. She puts me on hold to talk to her supervisor. After a couple of minutes, she says they have verified that there is nothing wrong with the web site. I say, great, it’s still broken here so please take this data and forward it to the appropriate person. She tries to convince me that nothing is wrong and this is all my fault. I say, just take the data and escalate it to the right people. She says, I’ll ask my supervisor. Fine, I say, and hang up.

I know that the CSR is measured on his or her ability to get me off the phone as fast as possible. But maybe they should measure how they just pissed me off for trying to help them.

Cringley speculates that Apple will be coming out with an HD video iPod with a retinal scan display.

Link: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050714.html

Update (Oct 2005): Apple released the Video iPod but it does not use the Microvision display. Hope you didn’t buy the stock.

I’m trying out CMS (content management systems) for various reasons. This class of software used to cost $50k - $100k per server back in the day, plus hardware costs, plus implementation services. Now there are free PHP implementations that you can deploy to $5 / month web host accounts in about 15 minutes.

Mambo is one of the market leaders in the PHP CMS space. However, the latest version (4.5.2) has some new permissions / security problems that prevent it from working with my web hosting vendor. The online forums suggest there are some workarounds, but what were they thinking when they released this?

After reviewing the 50 other open source CMS implementations at opensourceCMS.com, I decide to try Xoops. We’ll see how that goes…

I’ve been using VOIP phones for over a year. I even dropped my local phone service about 6 months ago in favor of a VOIP line. I have had the most experience with Vonage. I’ve been a customer for over a year and have always been satisfied with call quality and have never experienced any problems. I also have no trouble sending faxes over my Vonage line and the price is pretty good: $25 / month for unlimited calling in US and Canada.

Based on the experience with Vonage, I signed up with Lingo as soon as they announced their service. Lingo is an even better deal: $20 / month for unlimited calling in US, Canada, and Western Europe (landlines only, mobiles are more). I also had my local number switched over to Lingo (a process that only took about 5 months). Compared with Vonage, Lingo leaves a lot to be desired. Lately, about half the calls get dropped. Messages show up in voice mail without the phone ever ringing. And I can’t send a fax with Lingo. I opened a support ticket about the fax issue and was told that Lingo does not support the T.38 fax-over-voip standard but I was welcome to try sending a fax anyway; it might work if I configured the fax machine to use a lower baud rate like 9600 or 14400. My HP multifunction device does not have a way to slow down the fax send rate so I would be SOL if I did not have the Vonage account. I’ll definitely be dumping Lingo soon if their service does not improve.

Council on Competitiveness releases report on National Innovation Initiative [ Infoworld ]

The final report referenced in the story is here.

The (US) Federal Trade Commission issued recommendations to Congress on ways to reform patent law. The whole affair was rather disappointing. Most of the testimony on software was from people with a vested interest in the status quo: intellectual property lawyers and people from big software companies with large patent portfolios.
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Havoc Pennington has apparently shaken up the GNOME community with his essay on why GNOME should move to Java. I think the essay is great but it ignores the most important reason for switching to Java: winning.

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Java is going to fail because it ignores the most important segment of the market. We agonize over J2EE vs .NET without realizing that, from a business perspective, it doesn’t matter. Both platforms have the same technical characteristics: compiled languages running on a virtual machine, heavy and expensive deployment requirements. Where it really counts — cost to deploy and programmer productivity — the two platforms are nearly identical.

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I read in the FT today that the Senate passed a bill to restrict offshoring. I think the offshoring thing may blow over in the next couple of months since:

• Offshoring is essentially a long-term bet on a strong dollar. If the dollar continues to weaken (and if it floats against pegged currencies like the yuan) then offshoring becomes much less attractive and much more risky financially. Imagine if all your savings due to offshoring suddenly turn into an expense-line risk due to currency fluctuations.
• We will eventually adapt to a post-offshoring economy. The high value-add sector of our economy is going to be in biotech and nanotech, not software or semiconductors. People will eventually get this and start retooling themselves for this new economy
• Offshoring will in fact make the US economy more productive. This study argues that many sectors of the economy (retail, healthcare, etc) can now be automated because IT will become much cheaper for them due to offshoring.

Business Week Online reports a Boston-area company that was looking at sending work to India. They were quoted $40,000 per year per programmer. They decided to try to hire U.S. programmers for $45,000 per year and the labor market is so bad that they found takers. This is the inevitable consequence of offshore competition for programmers. Gone are the days when a newly-minted CS major with 2 years experience could expect to make $80,000 per year and get a signing bonus and a Senior Developer title. We should eventually expect the price of real estate and cars to drop as well as standards of living take a hit.
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