Living in California

For all of you who are living the new tech bubble in Silicon Valley, don’t miss this video: it is so true and funnier than anything else I have seen. Indeed, thank you Sergey and Larry!

Since the late 1990’s and my first truly professional job I have been grappling with timesheet solutions. On the one hand they are necessary to find out how many hours you spent working for a specific customer and be able to bill them accurately, as well as finding out unplanned activities that swallow your time and represent a cost center that could be optimized out.

The issue with timesheet software is that they require you to input your times manually, to keep an up-to-date list of projects, etc. Basically, they add a measurable overhead to your work and require a pretty strong discipline on your part if you want to have a neat and realistic breakdown of the hours worked in a month.

RescueTime that I discovered last night has the potential to ease the pain of keeping track of where your time goes. Although not strictly speaking a timesheet solution, RescueTime does track the time you spend on any application that has the focus on your Windows or Mac desktop. It does so by installing a small tracker program in your PC that will regularly update the RescueTime site with your application usage statistics. The installation process was very smooth and their use of the GetSatisfaction forum for customer support is quite clever and could deserve a review in itself.

My primary goal with RescueTime is to gain a better understanding of where I’m wasting time - on Facebook, on YouTube, etc.? I hope that in the future (the application is still in beta mode as of the date of writing this post) RescueTime will allow me to tag activities with client or project names, thus helping me in the task of accounting for billable time. Overall, this is an interesting solution done right and with a nice design and user experience considering it is only beta software.

Today a friend of mine asked me to give her advice about her career options in the high-tech industry. I rattled off a fairly long list of tips that I learned by experience and since I didn’t hear her fall asleep at the other end of the line I believe they were of some relevance. Hence I have decided to share this career advice that applies to all recent graduates facing a bewildering number of options in the high-tech industry.

1. Know thyself: we are all unique individuals with different passions in life, energy levels, comfort needs, career ambitions, etc. The key to success is to pick a career path where you will do something you love, and others will value your contributions because you are really good at what you do. List and prioritize your key strengths and job requirements on a piece of paper and evaluate each job opportunity against those.
2. Think global: high-tech companies are mushrooming from Beijing to Berlin and San Francisco to Stockholm. Working for a foreign firm will expand your horizon and give you invaluable experience. Your best bet to learn reusable skills is to find a job in the UK or the US. These two countries promote efficient work practices that you will be able to apply anywhere.
3. You are the product: there is somewhere a company that needs you real bad. That employer is the buyer, with some pains, some needs that YOU will help him/her fix. What makes you unique? In what kind of position do you fit like a glove? What are you missing to be the ideal solution to your dream employer’s problem? Does your CV accurately depict how fantastic you are?
4. Avoid HR like plague: they are the main obstacle on your way to full-time employment and you must use any means to avoid having your CV pass through their hands BEFORE it is actually selected. HR should be involved only after your future boss hires you - sorting out details like benefits, parking space, etc. is what they do best. This means that sending your CV unsolicited to hr@bigcompany.com is a waste of time. Instead, you need to use your network to find your future boss.
5. Network, network, network: it’s never too early to create a network of contacts and as you progress in your career you can expect the vast majority of the best job opportunities to come from your network. Always do your best, try to be helpful, make friends and collect good contacts. Register them with LinkedIn and ask for online references - good words never hurt. Let your network know that you are looking for a job. You may be surprised who knows who!
6. Corporate ladder climber vs. entrepreneur daredevil: you probably fall into one of these two categories of people, but you don’t know about it yet. My recommendation is that your first few jobs be in corporations where you can learn best practices, build-up a CV with nice entries and boost your network. If after a couple of years of team meetings, form-filling, process re-engineering, etc. you long for the freedom of the Wild West (or East), then it is time to try out the entrepreneurship pill.
7. Work time/leisure time balance: most customer facing or startup jobs entail working ungodly hours. I can’t recall how many times Wednesday morning has come and I realized that I had already worked my “normal” 40 hours. Don’t jump into an early-stage startup if you have a family or a significant other and want to keep her. You’ll bleed working hours like you had never thought possible - and you may even like it.
8. Do your due diligence: you are about to invest 1, 2 or more years of your life in a company, hoping to make it the world leader in, say, sliced bread production. Are you getting into a career dead end learning useless skills? Your choice is no different than a VC investing in a startup, except you can’t use spread betting techniques. Do your due diligence carefully, learn about the industry the company is in - is it growing, does it have a future, what differentiators does your future employer have, etc. Besides, during the interview you’ll be able to shine by demonstrating your in-depth knowledge of the company - I’m yet to meet a prospective boss who doesn’t love that.

I don’t claim to be a star entrepreneur but my career has been and will continue to be rewarding, I have no doubt about it. I hope that the above advice will help you love your job.

In 1960 the Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest volcano culminating at 5,747 m. above sea level, had five glaciers. Today only two are left. A couple of years ago before climbing that mountain I saw old photographs showing the splendid glaciers that went down its slopes. Yet it’s only when reaching 5,000 m. that we had to adjust our crampons and start the strenuous climb on ice. In 30 years, the Pico will be barren, all its ice gone. I hope I can do something to prevent this from happening.

In 1981 I was standing on top of the World Trade Center in New York city. Today the site is a memorial to all those who have lost their lives because of terrorism. What we are witnessing is ecological terrorism on a global scale, and it is our collective duty to fight it. I applaud the Nobel Prize committee for their decision to make Al Gore the recipient of the prestigious award. His movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is well worth watching and might be an eye-opener to some.

A while ago I bought a Roku Soundbridge M1001 network music player. This is a fantastic device that lets me listen to Internet radio stations from around the globe from my living room, without depending on a PC/laptop to be on to stream the audio to my loudspeakers. As an eternal expat with eclectic musical tastes, I quickly came to love my Roku.

However, I also have a collection of CDs that I have partially converted to MP3 files. How could I listen to them wirelessly at any time, whether or not I got my laptop at home? The solution is cheap, effective and takes only a couple of hours to install:

1. Buy a USB 2.0 external hard disk drive, like the Western Digital MyBook (the Essential edition 500GB is more than good enough for my purpose)
2. Buy a Linksys NSLU2 unit to convert your external hard disk drive into a flexible, open, NAS.
3. Follow these detailed instructions on how to set up the Firefly Media Server on your new NSLU2 device. You must install the nightly build since the stable release is really old and buggy. I had to set up my NSLU2 with a fixed IP address (192.168.1.77) since for some reason the DHCP server of my 2Wire router failed in allocating a dynamic IP.
4. Make sure you install OpenSSH on the NSLU2 so that you can copy MP3 files from your PC/laptop to the external drive using a tool like WinSCP.
5. To avoid a lot of grief with your new wireless media streaming installation, make sure that all the MP3 files you copy from Windows to the hard drive have the correct permissions, namely rwx for all users, otherwise the mt-daapd (Firefly) media server will fail to scan them and your library will remain desperately empty. There is an easy way to select the files permissions in WinSCP or you can make the change via chmod a+rwx * from the SSH prompt of the NSLU2.
6. Another problem I faced was that all the songs from a given album never appeared on the Roku. It turned out that the album name specified in the ID3 tag was too long (over 64 characters it seems). For Firefly troubleshooting your only real hope is to turn on logging. I set it to level 5 in the startup script /opt/etc/init.d/S60mt-daapd and checked the log file with tail -100 /var/log/mt*. I downloaded the excellent freeware MP3 tag editor Mp3tag and truncated the album name. I transferred once again all the songs from the said album and deleted the Firefly database file /opt/var/mt-daapd/songs.gdb. I ran the startup script again and in a few seconds the database was populated again with the shortened album name that the Roku had no trouble to process.

Besides these minor problems I’m rather happy with my new wireless media streaming architecture at home. If only I could transfer the MP3 files from my laptop to the external hard drive faster than 54Mb/s and have less than a terrifying spaghetti of cables in the audio corner of my living room, I would arguably be the most satisfied Internet audiophile in the world.

… no, I do not mean the French restaurants that can be found in the Bay Area, but rather the Silicon Valley startups that boast a unique French flair through their founders that did not hesitate to cross the Pond to try their luck in California. To my surprise I discovered that no less than 10 of the 105 companies hosted at the Plug and Play Tech Center (PnP) are actually French. PnP organizes a French Event on September 26th if you fancy participating (those are generally quite good, snacks included).

It is no secret that access to venture capital is extremely challenging in France which hasn’t yet opened itself to business practices that have made the success of Silicon Valley. More often than not, if you have an entrepreneurial talent and were born in Toulouse or Reims, you are better off booking a flight to San Francisco than swimming against the tide in the hexagon. Some of these French expats congregate online at the SiliconFrench Web site.

It is good to see France adding to the venture-diversity of the Valley. I doubt that frenchmen (and women) make a sizeable percentage of the population compared to the Indian or Chinese entrepreneurs though. A noticeable trend is the increasing presence of Chinese people in high-tech as opposed to purely manufacturing commodity goods. The rivalry with India is exporting itself and America is bound to benefit from it.

We had to accept credit card payments and do so fast, which ruled out setting up a merchant account. We evaluated PayPal but disliked the emphasis they put on convincing customers to sign-up with them. Besides, they apply surcharges for international payments and many of our customers are located abroad.

Google Checkout was ruled out immediately because neither I nor the CEO of the company could make any purchase with our Mexican or British credit cards. We kept getting our transactions declined. I blogged about this in anger a few months ago.

Finally we ended up with 2Checkout and so far our experience has been good. They might not have the cheapest transaction rates, they might redirect your users to their site, but setting up an account with them has been really easy with every step well documented. They do everything we want, including recurring charges.
My main concern is that our new customer signup flow is complicated and labour intensive (hence error prone): a business registers on our Web site (e.g. via our Google AdWords landing page), we establish contact and determine their needs, we create an account in our open source CRM system (the excellent vTiger), generate a PDF invoice and send it to the customer directing them to our online payment page where the customer pays for the service via 2Checkout.

In the next four months we will be evaluating other CRM and billing solutions with a view to automate the signup process. A new entrant in the credit card payment field is Amazon.com with the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS). Still in beta, the service looks impressive and may become a fearsome competitor to PayPal.

I came across this really neat London Underground style map of the Web Trends of 2007.

Check out their clickable map too!

As a travel fanatic I have made forays in many online communities of like-minded freaks, such as Virtual Tourist. I use Tripadvisor as my main source of reviews when picking a hotel - and so do nearly 20 million travelers weekly. Yet I was often frustrated to see third rate hotels climbing to the top of Tripadvisor’s listings or reading comments obviously manufactured by some desperate B&B owners.

Today I discovered VibeAgent, a compelling cocktail of social networking and travel advice with a modern Web 2.0 user interface. I was lucky enough to be admitted in their private beta program and spent a couple of hours playing with the site. I’m convinced that VibeAgent has lots of potential and will gather an enthusiastic following when it opens to the public. It may not make Tripadvisor obsolete yet, but getting unbiased reviews from people you can relate to has definite value to me.

Priceline.com seems to be their reservation partner and the rates offered are competitive. Their technical support is the fastest and amongst the nicest I have seen to date - their responsiveness is truly incredible. I wish them well and will remain an active member of the community.

The Travel 2.0 space is heating up fast! It is only normal to see startup founders attracted by a US$78.2 billion industry. I am going to subscribe to Hotel Blogs 2.0 to keep my finger on the pulse of this growing sector.

Few technical details have filtered out regarding Ooma. It seems the device is based on embedded Linux and uses a distributed peer-to-peer termination algorithm. This is hardly ground-breaking: Dundi has been around in the Asterisk world for a couple of years for example. I found it funny to see that the PhoneGnome people launched a “Build your own Ooma” challenge. In essence Ooma are doing a consumer play version of what Nimcat Networks did a few years ago before being acquired by Avaya.

Their technology is interesting but I’m not sure the value proposition makes sense: US$400 is an expensive initial investment to lower your phone bill (what’s the typical ROI?) and for the business to be viable you’ll need enough users strategically located around the US offering PSTN egress points via their Ooma devices. During the ramp-up period Ooma will have to fund PSTN termination in regions with an insufficient user-base. Besides, to use Ooma you still need a landline subscription and a DSL connection – those aren’t free yet. Worse, my impression is that most people have become mobile phone dependent – and with Cingular-to-Cingular phone calls free, who needs Ooma to call the family or friends?

Perhaps the “coolness factor” will play a role as with the Apple iPhone. I read you could download your own ringtones on the Ooma device. Still it would have looked better with a colour screen capable of displaying the menus for nice value-added applications. People prepared to fork-out US$400 on an Ooma device aren’t suburb dwellers looking to save a buck per month on their telephone bill. They’ll need impressive marketing muscle to convince average consumers to buy their device over and above a Skype hard-phone for example.

Honestly, having read more about it, I would have been more thrilled if it had been a sort of home or SOHO device hub with Wi-Fi satellite mini-gateways to connect other phones, equipped with a nice colour screen and an open application runtime environment where new services could be downloaded from the Internet and charged for. In a nutshell, I would have preferred a peer-to-peer hardware response to Skype, with the same coolness factor as the Apple iPhone.

Never mind, even if they rot in the graveyard of “too soon” and “not quite compelling enough” technologies, Ooma would still have achieved a good shake-up of how the Joe Bloggs see their good ol’ telephone.

Since a project that I did in the Caribbean 1 year ago, I’m a self-confessed fanatic of the open source SIP proxy, the OpenSER. In two weeks it was possible to set up a high-availability SIP load-balancing platform in front of 28 E1s worth of PSTN gateways, complete with rather complex routing rules expressed as regular expressions. The system is made of two HP DL 380 (2GHz Intel Xeon CPU) running Red Hat Linux 4 and is processing over 3.5 million calls per month with 2% average CPU usage and no downtime.

Recently I learned that a major player in the telco space in Mexico is also using the OpenSER. We are witnessing the advent of a wonderful SIP platform for a wide variety of applications and customers. However, OpenSER is notoriously difficult to configure and even for a trivial installation the openser.cfg file can turn into a several hundred lines long monster. For this reason, the SIPwise OpenSER configuration wizard is a Godsend. This tool may not automate the entire configuration process but it does make it easier for non-experts.

… and he is from Germany, not Silicon Valley. Jan Hegenberg’s songs have been downloaded millions of times from his Web site (plus countless more from file swapping networks) and the very serious Berliner Zeitung claimed that “in the Scene he is probably better known than Britney Spears”. He has become an icon of the German online gaming world with fabulous songs featuring superb lyrics relating to popular games from the World of Warcraft to Counter Strike. Best of all, his songs are all free!

His “Horde Rennt” song has become the nearest thing to an official WoW anthem in Germany. Fine will you snigger, but he makes no money despite all his talent and fame. Wrong! Jan sells thousands of t-shirts online at 10 Euros each with gaming expressions such as “Cheater an die Wand” or “Du Sau!”. Furthermore, he has embarked on a concert tour throughout Germany, selling out in Dortmund.

Take a thriving online games scene, throw in a ton of talent and the clever idea to write songs for the gamers, and you get a nice success story and a business model that neither the Valley nor LA had thought of. Yes, it’s all about filling a niche market…! Gut gemacht Jan!

You may have noticed the sudden appearance of a click-to-call button on the right sidebar of my blog. I can now reveal that this is the activity of my startup: creating an innovative peer-to-peer telephony application platform. Our first service is an easy-to-use click-to-call button for Web sites, connected to a state-of-the-art contact center based on Skype. This 100% on-demand solution can be embedded into any Web site to connect visitors with sales people, technical support staff, etc.

Please feel free to click on the button when I’m available, I’m always happy to have a word with my readers.

While exploring geomapping sites I discovered Cyberhomes where people wishing to buy or sell a home in a given area of the US can see extensive information until now only available to real estate agencies.

A quick search for information in Sunnyvale (CA, 94085) yielded downright discouraging results: while the median value of homes in the US is US$240K, it reaches the stratospheric height of US$660K in Sunnyvale. No wonder that 60% of the population is renting!

As a matter of interest, the median value of homes in Cambridge (MA) is identical to that of Sunnyvale. Both regions are famous for their high-tech startups and exhibit similarly insane housing costs.

If only it was possible to combine the cost of living of (say) Oregon with the business opportunities of Silicon Valley… Wishful thinking I realize, but in the meantime we will continue to see normal people streaming out of the Valley and being replaced by young, eager, geeks - if they can stand the boredom of social and cultural life there.

After several hours of work I’m finally done uploading to Flickr and placing on a world map 72 digital pictures from my recent trips. Remembering where I took that photo of a Lebanese monastery hanging between sky and earth as if suspended by invisible threads was next to impossible. If only each picture file could contain the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of where it was shot!

Geotagging will allow you to embed GPS coordinates as EXIF data into your photos for accurate placement on a map, such as Flickr’s or Google Earth’s. I’ll summarize here the steps I took to geotag my pictures:

1. Obviously, you need a digital camera (for example the Canon PowerShot SD1000 7.1MP Digital Elph Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Silver)). Price: US$300-400.
2. To capture the location of your photos you must get a GPS device capable of interfacing to your PC. A good option is the Garmin Geko 201 Handheld GPS Navigator. Price: US$100-150.
3. The Geko 201 requires a special serial cable to transfer data from the GPS to your PC. Instead of paying Garmin’s inflated price, you can go for a compatible product, like the Garmin compatible PC Interface Data Cable for eTrex Legend Venture Vista Mariner, eMap, Geko (Vista, Legend, etc.). Price: US$7.95.
4. If you own a laptop, it is more than likely that you have no DB9 serial port to connect the serial cable. In that case, you need to purchase a serial to USB adapter, such as the Cables To Go USB To Db9 Serial Adapter USBa/db9m Rs-232. Price: US$18.
5. Turn on your Geko, go to Menu -> Setup -> Time and set the time format to “24 Hour”, the time zone to “Other” and the UTC offset to +00:00. This sets the device to record times in UTC format, which is more convenient than having to change to the local time zone when you are traveling.
6. Turn on your Canon digicam, press Menu, go to the Setup tab, scroll down to Time Zone and set it to GMT (London) which is the same as UTC. Once done, set the date and time to exactly match the Geko’s. This is made a little bit difficult because the Canon digicam does not display seconds.
7. Now that your Geko is synchronized with your digicam, step outside to take a test photo. Turn on the Geko and let it acquire the signal from a few GPS satellites. Make sure you have no track in memory, otherwise clear it first. Once your Geko properly recognizes your location, take your photos. You do not have to record any waypoint.
8. Go back to your PC and plug in the USB to serial adapter. Install the device driver from the supplied CD. It appears that you need to re-install the driver every time you plug the adapter into a new USB port of your PC. Normally the virtual serial ports created will be number from COM4 onward.
9. Connect serial end of the adapter to the Geko serial cable and attach it a the back of your GPS device. Turn on your Geko.
10. Download the excellent GPS TrackMaker for Windows and install it on your PC. The program is free. Many alternatives exist, such as EasyGPS also for Windows (free).
11. Launch GPS TrackMaker and go to Tools -> Options -> Units to set your local time zone. Go to GPS -> Garmin Interface and set the correct COM port (COM4 normally). Click on the ProductID button; you should see Geko 201 displayed: this means your GPS device is properly hooked up to your PC.
12. Now click on Tracklogs to download the track log from your Geko to your PC. Click on the Exit button to return to the main screen of GPS TrackMaker. You should now see your track displayed on screen. Select File -> Save As to save your track in .GPX (GPS Exchange File) format into a new directory.
13. GPS TrackMaker has a cool feature that allows you to display your track on Google Earth. For this, just select your track in GPS TrackMaker and click on the “3D View in Google Earth” toolbar button. Google Earth will run automatically and zoom to the area that your track covers. Very convenient for sharing the direction to your home with friends.
14. Transfer your photos from your digicam to your PC. Store them in the same directory as the .GPX file from your Geko.
15. Download the open source gpicsync program for Windows and install it. Execute the application and set the pictures folder to where you just transferred your photos; also set the .GPX file you want to use. You shouldn’t have to modify any of the default options since you set your Geko and digicam to use UTC time. Click on the Synchronize button to embed the EXIF tags in your pictures. Verify the logs to make sure that all your photos were tagged properly.
16. On Flickr go to You -> Your Account -> Privacy & Permissions -> Import EXIF Location Data and set the option to Yes in order to have the EXIF location tags imported when you upload your photos.
17. Upload your photos to Flickr as you normally do, except now they’ll be automatically positioned on the Flickr world map! Congratulations, you have just made your first succesful foray into geotagging photos!

If you want to know more about geotagging your photos, don’t miss these excellent online resources:

• GPS Photography
• Free Geography Tools
• GPX Resources
• Slashgeo
• Digital Geography
• Geonames
• Travelr

I’m convinced that the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices combined with the current wave of social networking sites will transform the way people travel and thereafter share with others the wonders they have seen.

Google Checkout has launched last year and offers to sellers to process all their orders for free until 2008. For any startup, choosing the right credit card payment processor is an important decision. I have read many horror stories of businesses having to fight teeth and nails to recover tens of thousands of dollars of genuine online sales blocked by their payment processor.

Fraud is the Achilles’ heel of the online payment industry. According to Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Paypal was losing millions of dollars per month to fraud until they developed a proprietary and little publicized anti-fraud engine. Google Checkout is very aggressive in attempting to minimize fraud. For example, if you select Google Checkout to sell your goods online, here are the customers that you’ll be turning down, possibly without even realizing it:

• A Mexican co-owner of a US business buying a few hundred dollars worth of computer hardware, for delivery to a US address and paid with a Mexican credit card
• A British buyer with an existing Google Checkout account that was successfully used for small transactions (e.g. < US$100), linked to a UK credit card with a US delivery address

These buyers will receive an e-mail similar to this and will promptly seek a different vendor with a more flexible checkout option:

“To ensure a safe shopping experience, Google relies on a variety of systems to evaluate the risk levels associated with transactions. It appears that your order may have failed one of our initial credit card checks and will require you to update your billing information. Please update the billing information in your Google Checkout account so that it matches the address on file with your credit card company.”

There are many more options than only Google Checkout. You should also check if your preferred partner is supported by your shopping cart or invoicing software, such as Freshbooks.

Don’t we all love the Apple commercials which together with the frustrating slowness of Vista can be credited for putting the Cupertino company back in the saddle as far as personal computer sales go?

Here is a funny Apple-style video that pits Ruby on Rails vs. Java. I still remember when in 2001 a contractor delivered his VoiceXML and JSP code for an e-mail by phone service we had designed and I found it riddled with Struts constructs - the code looked as beautiful as a statue from Bernini surrounded by scaffoldings! Oh, irony has that he now works for… Microsoft (and he’s a great guy too).

Accounting is not my forte. Actually, keeping track of my incomes and expenses is a major chore for me. For a long time I was looking for a truly easy to use accounting Web site and thanks to eHub I discovered the perfect match. Web 2.0 sites listed in eHub are of consistently high quality and the format of the directory is highly usable. Emily also kindly indicated that anyone can subscribe to the eHub feed from their preferred RSS reader. Top stuff!

A blog has the power to draw together a group of like-minded people thus forming an ad hoc social network, so why not associate a social networking site with Living in California? So here you go, feel free to join up the Living in California social network! I truly doubt that anyone will do so but at least I have drawn your attention to one of the hot buzzwords in the Valley as well as two tools to build your very own social network, me.com and Ning.

I’m back in Mexico City after one week in the US meeting with VCs and companies interested in beta testing our product. There is a whirlwind of thoughts in my mind that I’ll try to summarize in a trip report to the Board of our startup. Right now my feeling is that we have developed a nifty technology that goes beyond what our target users - the American SMBs - need, while leaving some important requirements unfulfilled.

What makes me feel better is that in that respect we are no different from Paypal for example. Winning startups are characterized by their perseverance and adaptability, and my company has plenty of both. For anyone interested in startups, don’t miss Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. This book has everything going for it: superb coverage of dozens of well-known startups, truly intelligent interviews of their founders, solid-gold advice for any would-be entrepreneur, excellent writing style, etc.

If you are in a startup or looking to make the jump into an exciting venture, just buy this book - it might well be the smartest $25.99 you’ll ever invest into your future!

US laws constitute a maze that is hard to navigate for the novice entrepreneur (i.e. me). All the paperwork for the incorporation of our company was drafted by one of the top law firms in the Valley. Getting good counsel is essential, and not only for legal matters: the shadow of the IRS looms large over unsuspecting founders!

As a founder, I was granted restricted stock of the company vesting over a given period of time. This potentially creates a large tax liability as the stock value appreciates over the vesting period. Luckily, my partner contacted a well-respected accounting firm to help us with tax matters (you can check this good directory of financial services companies for more information).

We were advised to file a section 83(b) election with the IRS within 30 days of the stock grant. A readable explanation of the purpose of the filing is found in this newsletter article, for which I quote the most relevant excerpt:

• Founders need not suffer the potential tax exposure described above. That’s because IRC Section 83(b) gives the Founders the opportunity to “elect” to pay — at the time of the grant — the tax (if any) on the difference between the amount paid for the shares and the fair market value of the shares. Thus, since the shares were purchased in a Section 351 transaction, there is no difference between the amount paid for the shares and their fair-market value, and a proper Section 83(b) election will result in zero tax liability upon issuance and receipt of the shares notwithstanding the vesting provisions. To obtain the benefit of the Section 83(b) election, however, the Founder must complete and file the Section 83(b) election within 30 days of the date of the stock grant.

As CTO of our startup, I admit that such topics are hardly my cup of tea, but any Silicon Valley startup founder needs to be aware of the hurdles facing him/her and negotiate them with intelligence.

This post is mainly a shameless plug for my preferred programming language, Ruby. The code snippet below has been taken from a blog posting about the State Pattern, Ruby style:

Ruby is not only a wonderfully object oriented, highly expressive, programming language, it is also ideal to implement new Domain Specific Languages (DSL).

Expect more postings about Ruby in the future. To make the source code more readable, I have installed the excellent Wordpress plugin, SyntaxHighlighter.

Proud representative of the increasingly powerful bunch of opinion makers that bloggers are, TechCrunch boasts no less than 200,000 subscribers. So when we learned about the Supernova 2007 Connected Innovators program co-hosted by TechCrunch, we knew we had to apply and hope to be among the dozen lucky companies that will be selected. Last year’s pick of startups is a who’s-who of the Web 2.0 world and we would be immensely proud to belong to such a select club.

This type of PR exposure is part of the Silicon Valley secret sauce that causes some startups to get funded by VCs, along with market traction measured in hundreds of thousands of users or downloads for most Web 2.0 ventures. We truly believe that our technology is revolutionary and can change the way online businesses communicate “live” on the Internet. Let’s see if TechCrunch shares our viewpoint…

Following up on my previous post about what I view as a redeeming quality of Windows Vista, here is a funny video about how Microsoft can drive a normally sane person to total despair and perhaps even beyond:

… a more thorough one at the very least. After many hours of patient testing I have discovered that our application suffers from a heap corruption problem. Windows XP silently ignores the issue while Vista diligently terminates the program (with an uninformative error message, but that’s another story). I suspect that many buggy applications that ran just fine (i.e. with tons of hidden defects) on XP will crash on Vista, and users will blame the operating system when in fact poor programming practices are the root cause of the problem.

The much-hated Microsoft actually provides an interesting tool for developers to stress test their C/C++ (i.e. “unmanaged” in Microsoft parlance) programs: Application Verifier (a free download). The description of the tool, as taken from the Microsoft Web site, is as follows:

• “Microsoft Application Verifier is a runtime verification tool for unmanaged code. It assists developers in quickly finding subtle programming errors that can be extremely difficult to identify with normal application testing.”

Besides heap corruption issues, Application Verifier can detect many other potential flaws in a program and even run it under artificial “low memory” constraints where most code tend to break (do YOU always check the return of your malloc() function call to make sure it was successful?).

Our desktop application must run flawlessly under Windows XP and Windows Vista. The issue is that nobodoy in our development team has the nerves to put up with Vista. So I decided to create a Vista testing environment that won’t sink my productivity.

VMWare Server is a free environment to run virtual machines (vm) with pre-installed or custom operating system setups. Since I had already created a Windows XP vm, I decided to use a “Microsoft Windows Vista Upgrade Business” CD to upgrade the image to Vista and test our application from within that vm, in a controlled environment.

This turned out to be less than trivial. I had generated my Windows XP vm with only 8GB of virtual disk space. The VMWare documentation claims it is impossible to resize the disk, but this blog entry from Michael Daniel explains how to do it in a few easy steps (I opted for 25GB total size and left out the -t option). Of course, you also need to allocate enough runtime resources to your Vista vm: I set it up to use 1GB of virtual memory (RAM) on my Intel Centrino Core Duo laptop with 2GB RAM installed. In the Settings –> Options screen I selected Windows Vista (Experimental) as the guest operating system.

Installing the Vista upgrade from the CD took around 1 hour. When it was complete everything seemed fine, except for drivers complaints regarding some SCSI device and the virtual (TAP) network card. The fix is straightforward and explained in this blog as well as in the PDF manual for VMWare Server: right-click on your newly set up Vista vm and select Install VMWare Tools. Once you are done, just reboot the vm and Vista will pick-up the correct drivers.

To analyze application crashes on Vista I recommend two invaluable tools: Microsoft Procmon, which could be qualified as “visual strace for Windows”, and the Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows, that remind me more of gdb than the superb Visual Studio debugger. If you program crashes in Vista, just run WinDbg, select Attach to Process making sure you check the NonInvasive option. From then on, you can display a stack trace of your application and navigate contexts to see assembly or source listings (if you have the .pdb symbols file handy) of your code.

With the commercial version of VMWare Server, VMWare Infrastructure 3, one can run dozens of vm’s simultaneously with as many application instances working in parallel. This is a nice way to manage functional and load testing under set conditions reproducing a variety of target execution environments.

I’m scanning at least 2-3 times weekly a few dozen blogs where I find the latest news and trends of the Voice 2.0 and Web 2.0 industry. For this, I’m using the excellent Omea Reader, which I highly recommend. I also imagine that some of my readers subscribe to Living in California via the RSS feed. To make their life easier and allow me to track the popularity of my RSS feed, I have replaced the native RSS support in Wordpress with Feedburner. Please let me know if this causes any trouble at all.

It all started with a cursory glance on the Web 2.0 Directory and its exhaustive list of Web 2.0 sites, and turned into a major discovery that ate away my Sunday afternoon (and night at this rate).

Apart from entrepreneurship and technology, my other passion in life is traveling - and taking tons of pictures while doing so. I have been registered on countless travel Web sites and forums, from Virtual Tourist (VT) to the (in-)famous Lonely Planet Thorn Tree.

I have always wanted to find a way to share with others the wonderful sceneries I have been fortunate enough to witness, along with useful tips. Since my VT days I am convinced that a world map is the most compelling way to visualize travel destination information. Except I refuse to surrender my precious content to sites like VT or WAYN.

The Web 2.0 site trippermap is exactly what I was looking for: a Flash-based interactive map of my travels that I can embed into my blog with links to my online photo album. Granted, I didn’t have any online photo album prior to discovering trippermap, but I found the idea so compelling that I jumped on the opportunity to create a Flickr account, upload some selected photos to it and go through the tedious process of geo-tagging them. The result can be see on my newly created Travel page on this blog.

Trippermap does have some competition online, for example with the impressive Panoramio. However, I preferred having my photos on Flickr than Panoramio’s own site. As with YouTube, I had to install a special WordPress plugin called Kimili Flash Embed in order to display my trippermap Flash map.

The potential of this technology mashup doesn’t stop there: with GPS photography I can have exact lat./long. coordinates obtained from a GPS unit stored directly into my photos, ready to be mapped with zero cumbersome data input. The trick is to synchronize the clock of my Canon PowerShot SD1000 digicam with the clock of a GPS unit and transfer the waypoint data to a computer where a special program will geo-tag the photos automatically.

More fun ahead, and a whole new way to preserve and share those loving travel memories!

Googling for “Web analytics” predictably returned Google Analytics as the top option and I promptly set up an account to start analyzing what happens on this blog.

However, despite hours of searching and reading online I couldn’t find what I truly wanted: an open source real-time clickstream analysis Web framework that would allow me to conditionally display a link to visitors that have been clicking onto a specific sequence of links on this blog.

Google Analytics doesn’t have any API that would allow me to tap into the data they collect. Additionally, their responsiveness is anything but real-time: it took hours for the initial data to be gathered and the reports displayed.

Traditional Web analysis packages tend to support clickstream reporting, sometimes in real-time, but never with an API. More specialized tools like StatViz (open source) excel at clickstream analysis and could presumably be hacked to support an API with event triggers to detect user click patterns of interest.

What I dislike about StatViz is that it taps into the Web server logs and requires mod_usertrack to track individual user sessions. In other words, I’m still without any hint of a solution that I could tailor to support the conditional display of links. If you have any suggestion, please don’t hesitate to add a comment. Thanks!

Last night I came across the highest quality news feed I have found so far regarding the fast-paced Web 2.0 world of Silicon Valley: the YCombinator News.

Although I am in disagreement with some of Paul Graham’s essays, in particular “Microsoft is Dead” which reminds me of Churchill’s famous “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, I can’t help being impressed by the geek sub-culture of YCombinator. Nowhere in the world, to the best of my knowledge, inventive and eager software developers are put in such a pressure cooker with the ingredients to come up with innovative creations. This does make Silicon Valley and YCombinator special.

I took advantage of the Semana Santa extended weekend in Mexico to visit Chiapas in Southern Mexico. I booked a cheap airfare (US$120 plus tax; short 70 minutes flight) from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutierrez on Click (Mexicana), connecting via taxi and Omnibus (a souped-up van) to San Cristobal de las Casas.

I can’t recommend enough visiting San Cristobal: it is one of the most beautiful colonial towns I have seen in Mexico, second only to Guanajuato in my opinion. There are plenty of hotels, all looking equally attractive on the Internet and all poorly managed. Poor service is also a common trait in restaurants: it takes hours to get served and credit cards are hardly ever accepted. A wonderful exception is the restaurant Casa Raiz where I had my best “tampiquena” steak ever, complete with salad and dessert, all done to perfection in 45 minutes!

From San Cristobal I hired a taxi (US$18 for 2 hours) to go to the little village of San Juan de Chamula. This is an experience not to be missed, featuring an original Tzotzil Mayan community with the most bizarre catho-pagan rituals and fearsome inhabitants that would happily lynch you if you dared to photograph any of their religious rituals! Don’t forget to buy your doll of sub-comandante Marcos there!

As much as the highlands around San Cristobal were marvelous, the over-publicized sites of Agua Azul and Misol Ha in the Mayan jungle were a huge disappointment. Undoubtedly I had the worst timing in the universe for this visit, but arriving in the hyped up waterfalls of Agua Azul I found myself facing 10,000 other visitors (or so it seemed, I didn’t count them all), mostly Mexican working class, fighting for every square foot of river-bed!

On the contrary, the boat ride in the Sumidero Canyon near Tuxtla Gutierrez was jaw-dropping: the scenery of the massive cliffs soaring 3000 feet above the crocodile infested waters is simply unforgettable! I couldn’t resist the temptation to make a YouTube video of this experience:

As a technical note, using Windows Movie Maker for making the video was child’s play. YouTube took nearly one hour to “process” my video until it became available to the public. This is surprising, I wonder what that “processing” entails? Finally, I discovered that the object embedding used by YouTube wasn’t to the taste of the WYSIWYG editor of Wordpress. I used the EasyTube Wordpress plugin to resolve that problem.

Ah, I realize this has little to do with “Living in California” but hopefully it will spark a few vacation ideas…?

The blockbuster 300 was released in Mexico barely 2 weeks ago and already it is possible to find pirated DVD copies of it in the street stalls of the city center. Their price hovers around US$8, cheaper than a premium movie theater ticket. However, as proof of the superiority of the digital economy, the Web site VideoHybrid offers the same movie for free, on-demand, to anyone willing to watch it in a tiny window.

It seems painfully obvious that YouTube has become a prime target for DMCA takedown notices and is now very careful to remove copyrighted material as soon as it is reported. Doing this they create a market niche that sites like VideoHybrid, DailyMotion or GoFish. Sooner or later the entertainment industry will have to find a more intelligent answer to the problem of online piracy.

A couple of weeks ago I finally upgraded to an ADSL broadband connection after years crawling the Web on a 56 Kb/s dialup link. According to the OECD, even the US hovers around 20 percent broadband penetration of the whole US population. However, amongst active Internet users, broadband is eclipsing dialup, with over 80 percent penetration nationwide.

This means that dinosaurs like me will eventually be history, yet in the meantime there is still a significant chunk of the online population using dialup. The issue is that nowadays most Web sites are designed with broadband users in mind:

• Fancy flash introductions on company Web sites that take minutes to download on 56 Kb/s and have no button to skip them and get to the real content
• Sites loaded with videos that are beyond the reach (or patience) of any dialup user. Practically, I never considered YouTube to be an attractive surfing destination until I got broadband.
• Mega-downloads for must-have programs that get larger and larger at each release. The perfect example is Skype: version 1.3 was 7.23 MB, version 2.0 weighed 9.54MB and the latest version 3.1 beta is a 20.45MB monster!
• Hotmail (now renamed “Windows Live Mail”) almost lost me as a faithful customer since 1998 when they launched their new AJAX visual interface. It was nearly unusable from dialup. This is particularly ironic considering that AJAX was invented to make Web sites more responsive, not less!

Is it wise to leave out 20% of the US online population? Techies and Web designers alike have probably long forgotten what it’s like to be on dialup. The persons ultimately in charge of a Web site must reign-in the tendency of their staff to produce masterpieces that would be lost to potentially valuable users.

Small is beautiful! This is a lesson that wasn’t lost on Google.

Blogs have made it a lot easier to keep abreast of the latest relevant developments in our fast-paced world of Internet and VoIP technologies. I subscribe to 60-80 feeds that I scan regularly. Besides professional news of use to my company, I often come across new online tools or gadgets announcements. I would like to share a few of those with you today:

• RedMine is probably the best online project management tool we have tried so far. It leaves Active Collab in the dust when it comes to managing internal software development projects. Project planning and control is simple, highly visual (we like the Gantt chart display), with practical options located where they belong. Obviously a very well thought-out tool.
• Scribd is unlikely to become a tool that we use in our business, but it features a nice interface to upload, search and view documents. What amazed me is that many examples of copyrighted work (e.g. programming books) could be found on Scribd. I suspect they are in for a rough ride with respect to DMCA compliance.
• Twitter is old news, and I suspect I’m the last person to get on it. However, I do see the value of keeping your friends informed of what you are doing. It strikes me as a less American teenage-oriented site than MySpace. I could even foresee a twist in which companies use Twitter to collect timesheet data from their employees. This might be possible with the right APIs. The Apollo Twitter application shows how these Web 2.0 services could be added to the desktop. I don’t know about you, but I still find it a pain to launch Firefox, login to a site, in order to see an update to . Apollo Twitter raises the curtain on a fascinating new class of Web applications!

This is it, we just completed our presentation at Etel (sigh of relief). I have to say that nothing prepares you to say a text in front of 200 people - live, in 7 minutes and in anger. I rehearsed for 2 days, trying to memorize every line, but had to fall-back to my trusted notes to avoid the embarrassment of fumbling in front of such a distinguished audience. To my surprise our demo was rather well received with many encouraging comments.

The organizers are running now an SMS contest for the best presentation using a cool platform from Mozes. This is the first time ever that my performance is judged via SMS - I’m starting to feel like Miss America!

I knew about GrandCentral since their launch but never thought much of them: just a neat AJAX Web site running on top of Asterisk, offering call screening, voicemail, etc. What drastically changed my viewpoint is their recent blog posting that GrandCentral was interconnected with Gizmo, a soft-phone with a lot of features and a nasty tendency to crash.

The fact that I could register an area code (408) XXX XXXX number for free with Grand Central and get my calls routed anywhere in the world to my Gizmo soft-phone was rather appealing to start building a virtual presence in the Bay Area. Starting the GrandCentral registration process from Mexico I discovered that non-US users cannot set up an account (a silly restriction in my viewpoint).

In order to fool GrandCentral into thinking I was already a US resident (which will be the case shortly) I set up a Canadian http proxy in my Firefox browser. This trick worked marvels and GrandCentral allowed me to register my (408) number. Setting up the connection with Gizmo was very easy and in minutes I was able to call my Bay Area number from my Mexican mobile phone and pick up the call from Gizmo running on my laptop in Mexico.

Now I just need to find a practical solution to get these GrandCentral calls to some “always-on” device, not my laptop. I have read that Gizmo can run on some Nokia N series phones - maybe this is the solution?

The joy of US-style at-will employment is that our main Ruby developer has decided from one day to the other to pursue his career with Microsoft and left us rather under-resourced. So now we need to urgently find a crack Ruby hacker to fill the gap. The issue is that Ruby is virtually unknown in Mexico where our R&D team is based. What should we do?

I’m tempted to give a chance to online project marketplaces like RentACoder.com. Our experiences haven’t been so positive in the past with project outsourcing but we are stuck and our release deadline is looming close. Since we operate a complete set of online development tools (Mantis, Active Collab, Wiki, SVN, CVS, Skype, etc.) it shouldn’t be impossible to bring in a remote team member, at least I hope so.

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I have just arrived back home after 2 weeks of holidays around Europe, including a visit of Istanbul (Turkey), skiing in Bad Hofgastein (Austria) and shopping in London (UK). I’m not sure how I used to travel before the advent of the Internet. I booked my transatlantic flights on aa.com after having compared tariffs on expedia.co.uk. My flights in Europe were reserved on easyjet.com (London to Istanbul), ryanair.com (Salzburg to London), flypgs.com (Istanbul to Antalya) and condor.de (Antalya to Munich). I shopped for hotels on tripadvisor.com and generally booked direct from the hotel’s Web site. With the exception of printed guidebooks (such as the indispensable Lonely Planet), all my vacations were planned online - and it all worked out for the best!

Throughout my trip I enjoyed wireless Internet connectivity from most hotels, except for the apartment I rented in Austria. There I opened a roaming dialup ISP account with MaGlobe which proved reliable, with a local access number in Austria, but high connection charges, their US$14.99 prepaid recharge being wiped-out in in 1-2 hours only. Not ideal for long chat sessions with the development team back home.

During my return flight I read The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time which was both well written and provided an insightful summary of what Google is about. Certainly not a book for engineers, it is non-technical, but an enjoyable read with many lessons to be learned for would-be Silicon Valley startups.

I feel I have two options that are each rather attractive when it comes to living in the Bay Area: I could live close to the office in Sunnyvale and not waste time commuting, but lose on the cultural life afforded by a large city. Alternatively, I could settle in San Francisco and use the Caltrain (1 hour journey) or drive to Sunnyvale (journey time dependent on traffic). I suspect the former option is more practical especially since I hate wasting time in traffic.

Finding an apartment has been made a lot easier by the Internet, though nothing replaces an on-site visit. I have compiled below a list of Web sites that make the task of finding your dream place a mere point-and-click affair:

• Craig’s List: the site everybody seems to be using to find housing (and much more) in the Bay Area
• Rent.com: vast selection of properties with photos, floorplans, etc. Probably the second best option after Craig’s List
• Apartment Guide: 195 Bay Area properties listed with photos, floorplans and rental prices
• Rent in San Francisco: 5000+ properties, displayed on a Google map for easy pinpointing
• Apartment Ratings: reviews from tenants and Google map with top properties in a given city

What I believe is missing from the Internet is a mashup site that would take properties from Craig’s List and display them on a Google map, linking them to tenant reviews if available. Another startup idea perhaps?

I’m back in the Bay Area! More than ever I’m struggling with the contradictions of the American culture. Take for example office vs. apartment rentals. At Plug & Play Real Estate, you can rent for a few hundred dollars per month a fully equipped office in a building full of 80+ high-tech startups. Past tenants include illustrious Valley success stories like Google, Paypal, etc. Rental can be month-to-month, telephone and Internet are ready-to-go, facilities include everything from conference rooms to a data center (and a discount at the gym next door, Planet Granite, with so many climbing walls that you’ll think you are in the middle of the Dolomites).

While everything is designed to save time for entrepreneurs in their quest for the next Valley killer business, the apartment rental world offers a stark contrast. For the privilege to rent an unremarkable 2-bedroom unfurnished apartment (110 sq. m.) for “only” US$2000 monthly, you’ll have to overcome the following hurdles: submit your last two payslips, give your Social Security Number (if you happen to have one, unlike me poor foreign entrepreneur), have a good credit history (which takes months to build), provide so much information about yourself that your landlord will know more about you than your closest relatives, and finally pay a US$500 deposit so that no one hijacks your little piece of American real estate. Once you are done, you can start thinking about buying or renting furniture, installing your phone, cable TV, Internet, etc.

Are you still with me? I wish that the same no-nonsense approach that Americans take for business could be found in residential accommodation matters. From my viewpoint, I think we have found our office but I still haven’t got the faintest clue as to when I’ll secure my O-1 visa, when I’ll move to the US or where I’ll live.

To conclude the previous technical post, Jungle Disk worked very well for me. Since the program first stores in cache all the files that will eventually get transferred to Amazon S3, my subversion application TortoiseSVN has no problem locking data on the disk, an operation required for a successful import of files to a new repository. Now I just need to finish committing all my work to Amazon S3 and finally sleep peacefully knowing that my work is well protected in the vaults of Amazon.

Hosting Rails includes for additional fee the option to create subversion (SVN) repositories. I use SVN to control versions of the source code I develop (yes, I find time to work between two blog postings). SVN is the modern successor to CVS which the rest of the team still uses. My current SVN repository is on my laptop, which leaves me (and my company) exposed to both catastrophic events (a Starbucks ice-chocolate spilling over my notebook) and theft that would deprive us from the valuable source code I have developed.

I use the excellent TortoiseSVN program that seamlessly integrates SVN commands into Explorer. While we set up a proper CVS repository on a networked server, I need a solution to store my SVN repository on a highly available, online, secure platform. Amazon S3 (which stands for Simple Storage Service) provides a Web Services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data with 99.99% availability under the protection of a secure authentication scheme. Amazon S3 is cheap, costing only US$0.15 per GB-month of storage used plus US$0.20 per GB of data transferred.

I downloaded S3Drive to create a Windows networked drive mapped to my Amazon S3 online storage. I first had to obtain an Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key from Amazon, which was easy enough and only involved registering my credit card for Amazon Web Services (AWS) payment. Configuring S3Drive was painless and in a snap I had a drive L: of infinite space residing on Amazon’s mighty servers! Once done I managed to create an SVN repository with TortoiseSVN on my new drive L: and attempted to import a whole project. The operation failed with TortoiseSVN reporting an error getting an exclusive lock on some required file.

Since the combination of S3Drive and TortoiseSVN didn’t work out, I will download Jungle Disk and see if it functions any better. More on this soon!

A few years ago I signed up with a Web hosting from Eastern Europe that offered excellent value for money: 6-monthly billing of US$6.95 per month for what amounted to an “all you can eat” plan. Unfortunately, as with many other hosting providers, they do not support PHP5 and ActiveCollab requires support for that version of the language.

Since I’m a passionate Ruby developer, I decided it would be nice to find a Web host supporting both PHP5 and Ruby on Rails (RoR), the new Web development framework that contributed so much to the popularity of Ruby. It turns out that there are many RoR hosting options, such as Rails Playground and A2 Hosting (both with PHP5 support).

However, I found that Hosting Rails was offering an irresistible deal: free hosting (after rebate) for 5.0GB disk space, 20GB data transfer, RoR and PHP5, SSH access, unlimited domains, etc. I signed up and within 24 hours my account was provisioned, ready for use. Their customer service reps answered my billing questions rapidly and so far I’m satisfied of what I got for my massive investment of US$0.

ActiveCollab still doesn’t work, but this is because of a missing PHP extension module that hopefully will be promptly installed at Hosting Rails. I have also taken advantage of a GoDaddy special offer to buy a US$1.99 .info domain to host ActiveCollab. I’m truly amazed at how cheap it is possible to get things done on the Internet today. A far cry from what it used to be during the dot com boom of the late 90’s!

Now that I’m in the process of organizing myself, I also need to think about how to keep together a development team spread across two countries and timezones, between Silicon Valley and Mexico City. I certainly don’t want to turn this blog into a collection of technical ramblings but I can’t help sharing a some of my discoveries about online project management tools.

GTD is fine for an individual but it doesn’t cut it for a small team. We need a shared calendar, task lists, a way to track bugs and share information. The latter two goals are easily met by Mantis and Tiki Wiki, packages that we have been using in our Mexican company for over a year with positive results (the adoption of Mantis has been particularly impressive amongst our developers).

Online project management has proven to be a much tougher nut to crack. In Mexico we tried dotProject but it didn’t work out for us. The overhead of keeping the project up-to-date online was simply too great and we slowly stopped using the tool. Armed with that (negative) experience we started seeking a simpler, yet functional, alternative.

We looked at promising but immature tools like Wrike or Voo2do, as well as monsters belching features by the dozen, such as Zimbra, but lacking the basic set of calendar/task list that we need. Right now we are leaning towards the popular BaseCampHQ or its open source cousin, ActiveCollab. Both support a calendar (more visually pleasing in the case of BaseCampHQ), a task list (strangely missing space for extensive notes and attachments in BaseCampHQ) and a message board. ActiveCollab looks tempting for developers like us and it would also give us unlimited storage and privacy, two important advantages.

No decision has been taken yet. Let’s see how we’re going to overcome the challenge of keeping together an international, distributed R&D team.

As a follow-up from my previous post, I’m going to try out David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. Having lost plenty of time reviewing GTD software, I have decided to trial Fusion Desk. I like the simple and elegant user interface of that software. The fact that it is Windows based and not online is essential for me as I tend to think of new tasks anywhere and at any time, most often far from any Internet connection. So far I have found it easy to use although I would have welcomed an Outlook-style calendar view and a more logical way of handling copy & paste operations.

Sudden realization: time flows at a different pace in Silicon Valley than in Mexico City. After more than 5 years in Mexico and most importantly managing my own schedule (independence is not always a good thing), I feel I have lost some time management skills that I used to have in the UK. Part of the challenge in moving to the US will be to regain (fast!) some degree of punctuality and organization of my time.

None of this can be achieved without discipline. No tool can replace dedication. However, for methodology-challenged people like me, a tool can be a valuable help in supporting my 2007 enhanced time management resolution. In that respect, and amongst the dozens of blogs I read, there is an article that I recommend as an extensive compendium of useful tools: 20 Different Ways to Manage Your To Dos. The name of the article is somewhat misleading and in reality much more than mere “To Dos” is covered.

I don’t cease to be amazed at the difference between Mexico and the USA, as well as startups vs. established (“corporate”) firms. On the bright side, our US lawyers work until ungodly hours, sending e-mails at 2AM or even later. No lawyer that I know of in Mexico would do that, not without a gun to his temple. Retaining that gung-ho mentality in a big law-firm is impressive.

Where startups beat most corporations (Google too? Who knows) is in their ability to use every parcel of time thrown to them. For example, while our mighty lawyers celebrated Christmas, we were coding and debugging our software. If American culture rewards daring entrepreneurs and dedicated teams, I think we stand a good chance.

Nevertheless, it’s been slow going on the immigration front. To my mild surprise, immigration is a federal law in the US and thus anyone is free to select a lawyer from anywhere in the country, which we did, electing to work with an East Coast firm. I’m currently vigorously scratching my head figuring out whom could write the letters of recommendations I need.

A reader of my Mexican blog sent me an interesting article about an increasing trend concerning Californians seeking a better lifestyle in other States. Spiraling housing costs in California, and in particular Silicon Valley, are a good motivator.

I have never understood why people are prepared to pay US$2 million for a house in a posh neighbourhood of Palo Alto when the same sum of money would get them an entire peninsula in Chilean Patagonia, complete with rivers, salmons and interesting extreme weather as opposed to the balmy and boring Californian climate. As far as I am concerned, I’ll be renting!

I’m forcefully against passports, visas, borders and all the paraphernalia related to immigration.  How can governments promote freedom of trade and wield the prospect of economic sanctions or military retaliation for countries that protect their markets while simultaneously imposing bizarre immigration barriers to individuals who for one reason or another have no other option but leave their home and go work and live abroad?

One of those restrictions is the fact that for US L-1, O-1 and E-2 visas the only dependents recognized by law are the spouses and children of the main visa holder. This means, for example, that you cannot bring your elderly father or mother with you to the US unless he/she applies to a B-2 visa, which can be denied by the immigration officers.

Besides, it is rather difficult to find the official rules about US immigration on the Internet since they are buried amidst thousands of more or less genuine sites offering green cards and legal advice. For example, here are the O-1 visa rules.

Considering all the hassle, I understand why tele-working and outsourcing to exotic countries has become so popular with US corporations!