Bubba Murarka

From the Cedar Creek Treehouse website:

“we are redefining the concept of a treehouse resort”

Turns out there is a market to redefine!

Last week Microsoft’s JD Lewin (Evangelism) and Michele Johnson (Strategic & Emerging Business) sponsored our Halo 3 Fragfest at the Microsoft Home.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any links to the Microsoft Home but it is one kewl place!  They have converted a part of the Microsoft Silicon Valley’s Conference Center into a home (living room with flatscreens, bedroomss, full kitchen, etc.) that shows how a variety of Microsoft technologies could exist in a futuristic home.  It is a totally dialed setup and even though I had worked at MS in the Silicon Valley for 4 years I had never been inside.  Be sure to go if you ever have a chance to see it!  They also have one up in Redmond that is even bigger…also worth checking out.

We had a great group of VCs, Entrepreneurs & Corp Development folks showed up for the Halo 3 showdown.  A while back Munjal Shah and I started doing this in his basement as a reason to get together and talk some trash with mutual friends.  I mean network and brainstorm new ideas! 

Having the event at the MSFT Home was a special treat and saved our backs from lugging TVs between houses.  Unfortunately there were a couple of Corp Dev ringers that joined the VC team to put the beat down on entrepreneurs!  Luckily the stakes were just bragging rights and not funding terms.  Nevertheless, I’m starting a serious training regiment to sharpen my skillz before the next fragfest.  If you are a top notch entrepreneur & Halo 3 player drop me a line…we might be able to use your help!

Found this via Brad Feld’s blog and thought it was a great peek into google’s internal intranet tools.   Most big company folks I know say their intranets are a mess and unusable. I’ve seen a bunch of startups doing interesting stuff in this space.  However,  it seems like google has tried something different on their own.  I wonder how useful it has been for their folks. 

Automated status report management with search is pretty killer idea, but doesn’t make writing status reports anymore fun (thus hard to get done)…even though it is critical for project management. 

I built an ideas portal at microsoft and it got lots of content initially, but the pipeline for reviewing / approving / implementing was not there.  Google seems like they’ve nailed that aspect with top down buyin & committed time to review and even fund some “out there crazy” ideas. 

Expert search is just freaking awesome assuming people update their profiles.  Stupid that it is so hard and takes human supernodes inside of a company to help keep information flowing between people. 

At Bfast on Sunday a few friends and I came up with a feature idea / request for facebook.  What if you could get a feed of friends’ status messages that contain specific words.  This is basically like twitter’s track feature.  Mike Vernal, who just joined facebook from MSFT, was at the table and thought it might already be available.   He said if it was not he’d look into it because it was a good idea.

Turns out that the feature wasn’t there after I fooled around for a bit on facebook.   I sent Mike a quick note letting him know and last night I got a response with the following directions:

Go here:
1. http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status
2. Click on the subscribe link
3. Add a &q=term1+term2+term3 parameter

Dang, that that was pretty fast.  Here is what I am using it for:

I’ve added a bunch of geo related keywords and tracking if any friends (esp. from Seattle) are in the bay area.  this is awesome.  it is like a poor man’s dodgeball when paired with an rss driven sms alerting service (like windows live alerts).

I wonder how long something like that would take to push live at Google, Yahoo, MSFT (not just coding, but the process)?  Of course the better comparison would be at a web company with ~ 500 people at it…but I can’t think of any of those off the top of my head. 

I wonder if this article promoting placement of ads near “action spots” (e.g. links) is the right thing to do after reading Mr. Belshe’s latest material.  From a UX perspective, I certainly have accidentally clicked ads near comment fields & site navigation links way to often. 

Facebook’s approach to I18N, outsourcing to the userbase, seems to be going pretty darn well.  What is even better about it is that popular apps will also benefit & get I18N much easier than in other development platforms.  Sweet!

I was surprised when Apple announced there would be a 20 dollar upgrade fee to get the new sweetness on my iPhone.  I felt like this guy does.

But then I thought about it and started to wonder…

Perhaps this is a test to see market reaction and upgrade rate for charging across all portable Apple devices.  I mean, they get ya with a 100 or so bucks for OS updates on laptops / desktops every year (or two) so why not for ipods and iphones.  I mean have you ever seen a phone get so much better since coming to market?  All that development work ain’t cheap to get done.   

I have no data, but my gut tells me that future upgrades of the iPhone software will no longer be free if no one makes a stink about the iPod touch charge.   Should we start a facebook group to protest?

Fred Wilson, Brad Feld & others just made an investment in Zynga, a social network game network with no destination site.  Fred outlines the thesis on the Union Square Venture Blog. 

It seems like folks are aligning to one of two beliefs for social network apps:

• They are another distribution channel with low cost to build but can result in massive impressions / awareness [e.g. an app is a measurable meme].  Folks like context optional take this thought to the extreme by building branded applications for others as their core business. 
• They are the future of the web and destination sites are thing of the past [e.g. get on board now & grab land before everyone else gets clear / confident].  Folks like Zynga & Mesmo are making this bet and now lots of VCs are now too [seed funds have for a while as a measured risk]. 

I guess there is a third belief that I still hear from time to time: social networks platforms / apps are all bullshit.  But not that often anymore. 

For now, I am the “distribution channel” camp because I have seen the overriding need to build dead simple apps to get any kind of meaningful viral growth.  That coupled with the lack of a meaningful way to make $$$$ makes it hard for me to take the leap of faith.  

How about you?

An old friend of mine and his partner just released a rich IM client that works with your facebook friends list.  It already got written up on Techcrunch and they’ve been making it better and better every hour since!  Check it out at www.social.im when you’ve got a chance! 

I’ve had a mixed experience with my Blackberry Curve (8300) over the past 6 months.  My favorite aspect of the Curve has been the battery life…I end up charging it about once every 3 days!  The keyboard is pretty darn good & the voice quality is legit.  However the browser sucks, the sync software sucks, and the UI was foreign to me.  Worse, I could never get the Facebook Blackberry App to work on it nor could I get the new Google Maps app with cell phone triangulation to install. 

Today I finally got around to checking if there were any firmware upgrades (not an easy task…RIM, get some help with your site design / UX) and hit pay-dirt (hint: you need to download is this file: 8300M_PBr4.2.2_rel301_PL2.4.0.73_A4.2.2.166_AT&T.exe).  And yes, you have to fill out a freaking form before to download and no, it is not clear what to download.  Anyhow, once you make it past all the hoops you can install it the upgrade but it isn’t clear if you can do an update in place or wipe the device. 

I had a brickbreaker game on level 5 with 7 lives already stored up so I was inclined to try to do an update in place.  But, then I realized how much cruft there was on the device and decided to sacrifice the potential high score for a faster, better, slicker device. 

Wait for about an hour for the update to finish and the device to re-boot.  Why it takes so long?  No freaking clue!

Go install the following software:

• Facebook Blackberry App(this links installs installs from a PC via an ActiveX control)
• Google Mobile Software(pick your posins - maps & mail)
• Opera Mini (jury is still out)

Results:  Yahtzee!  3 hours in with this new config is looking good…real good!