I’ll be speaking on Ecommerce this Thursday December 14 at the Entrepreneur Center of the SBDC TAP (Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program, 84 W. Santa Clara St - downtown San Jose 95113)

The holiday party starts at 6pm and will include:

• 15 Minute Technology Demonstrations on Mobility, Ecommerce, Finance, VoIP
• Valuable door prizes
• FREE online subscription to Small Business Technology Magazine
• Networking with Leading Technology Consultants and Local Small Business Entrepreneurs

Register online here
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen comes out with a list of 10 web design mistakes every couple of years. Here's the top 3 for this year (2005):

1. Legibility Problems
Most complaints were about small font sizes or frozen font sizes (which you cannot alter using a browser's Text Size command). This one really surprised me, and it prompted me to start making websites with bigger fonts. With the baby boomers getting older, it's only going to get worse.

2. Non-Standard Links
This is broken down into 5 sections:
- Non-obviously clickable links (not underlined)
- No differentiation between visited and unvisited links
- No explanation of where the link leads to (a typical example is click here)
- JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links
- Opening pages in new windows (but Jakob says that's OK for PDF files and such)

3. Flash
Jakob says that

Most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won't recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

That fits in well with my philosophy and the reason I called my company no diamonds, meaning not flashy.

Jakob's homepage - an exercise in leanness weighing in at 15k with no images at all - too bad it still uses tables and is not XHTML valid

A war game was held last April by Fuld & Company where student teams from MIT and Harvard impersonated the big four web properties in a “Battle for Clicks”. As the Economist reports, this is how the teams introduced themselves:

already MSN and AOL are out of the picture

Yahoo!: “We don’t have to be the best at everything; we just have to be good enough for you.”

Google:“We are the true technological innovator.”

MSN: “We are all about leveraging Windows.”

AOL: “We are fortunate just to be invited to the party.”

No points for guessing who won (Google). This neatly sums up the current situation with those companies.

Although Yahoo! came last in the war game, there are those who say that its bid to become a major content provider and an advertising giant is working. On this blog I have 10 search results for Google and Yahoo, but I am leaning on Google.

I came across a fascinating site, the Annotated New York Times, which tracks online discussions on NYTimes articles. We get the physical version of the paper every morning, and occasionally I even have time to read it. I often wonder what kind of reaction certain articles provoke, and now there's a great way to find out.

A blog tracking blog entries on NYTimes articles

For example, David Brooks, the token conservative columnist of the NYT Op-Ed page, wrote a negative piece on Tom DeLay (for international readers, he is a top Republican Congressman) about some possibly corrupt practices, like getting $500k paid to members of his family.

This was an example of a Republican criticizing another Republican, something you don't see very often, so I checked out the discussion on the Annotated NYT site to see what the reactions were. There were 21 citations of the Masters of Sleaze piece. Some quotes:

we just aren't very 'conservative' anymore

And:

A miracle has occurred. David Brooks wrote a good column.

The Fourth Estate, from Wikipedia, is

the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues

The Annotated NYT is part of the phenomenon known as the Fifth Estate, where the people as represented by the blogs, watch the watchers, as represented by the press.

Since the beginning of the internet in the early nineties, browser market share has wildly fluctuated. As an excellent article on the browser wars at evolt.org explains:

In the First Era of browser history Mosaic and the other early browsers ruled. The Second Era was that of Netscape dominance. Microsoft's challenge to Netscape marked the beginning of the Third Era, the Heroic Age of the Browser Wars. Netscape's bleeding to death marked the start of the Fourth Era of Explorer dominance.

We are now officially in the Fifth Era, where Explorer starts to lose its dominance to an Open Source (freely available) competitor, Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation.

Here are some reasons to switch:

- Inbuilt Popup Blocking
- Tabbed Browsing (viewing more than one web page in a single window)
- Privacy and Security (no AcitveX controls, thus much safer than IE)
- Intelligent Search (Google Search is built into the toolbar, and there's a great “find in page” functionality)
- Lots of neat extensions, like local weather and controlling your music center at the bottom of your browser window

At its peak, IE had 93-94% of the market. As of April 2005, there have been more than 40 million Firefox downloads and Explorer's share is eroding fast. Microsoft originally announced that they would not update IE until the next version of Windows, but now they are scrambling to release an IE 7 beta version by this summer.

I live in Palo Alto, which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. Just a few miles from my house are Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple and many other cutting edge technology companies. Plus there is Sandhill Road, also know as Venture Capital Central, and Stanford University, which provides a lot of the raw materials (aka brains) to fuel the innovations in the Valley.

It was exciting living here during the boom years between 1997 and 2001, where everyone was involved in startups and VC's were lining up to fund them. Recently there's been a resurgence in startups around here. My evidence is anecdotal, and includes job listings, conversations and billboards along the 101 Highway.

I came across 3 interesting startups in the past month:

certainly competitive at $1/DVD, could it be the new Netflix?

Peerflix - tagline: Trade DVDs, don't rent them! For $1 you can trade a DVD in your collection for someone else's DVD. The trade is permanent, so no late fees. I don't know if it will work but it makes perfect sense on paper.

gotvmail - allows you to outsource a complete phone answering system. It can forward phone calls to home offices or cell phones, and you can receive voicemail as email attachments. Thanks Nancy for the hat tip. (I would have included their logo but their site is a little Flash heavy, so there were no readily accessible images to grab).

Cellknight

CellKnight - tagline: Track cell phone minutes usage and STOP paying cell phone minutes overage fines
Basically it sends you an alert of how many minutes you have left in your cellphone's monthly plan, so that you can manage it better and avoid going over. You can see it's a real startup from the use of Clipart in the logo.