This is a great article in trying to explain forking in the context of blockchains.

But today, the chain itself is not the entire community. If changes are made to the chain, then various applications – many of which are NOT open source – need to decide to support this new chain.

I think we’ll have thousands or millions of chains (depending on whether you think of them as databases). Orders of magnitude more tokens that are defined on top of these chains. There are various use cases that lead to unique super nodes or mining, but many token situations are better served by living on top of a base chain, without mining.

Perhaps some thoughts on what forking means with respect to miner choice. I’m already seeing wallets and others struggling to run, host, and query the nodes they need to. Across the top 6 chains, that’s already 18 servers for minimum redundancy. Re-centralization at this node layer is problematic as well.

I really like the concept of using the existing ownership and having a different distribution post fork. But ownership, control, and participation are only loosely related to the base chain.

Yes, thank you Roland Tanglao – fixed!

Blockchain’ ethos of trustlessness and decentralization is in part what drives interest in it, especially by people who don’t have the background to build the technology directly.

People like Trent McConaghy may subscribe to some of these beliefs, but are also highly accomplished technologists, computer scientists, and/or cryptographers, actively working on innovations which power different tools.

Josh Stark’s recent article Making Sense of Cryptoeconomics explores similar thinking around the cross-disciplinary nature of the field:

Cryptoeconomic systems like bitcoin feel like magic to someone who views them only as a product of computer science, because bitcoin can do things that computer-science alone could never accomplish. Cryptoeconomics isn’t magic – it’s just interdisciplinary.

I’m looking forward to further evolutions and enhancements around the fields of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, and decentralized web, and how we apply our ethos to these capabilities.

Available on the Frontier Foundry blog »

I have seen most blockchain teams not be very good at “classic web” technologies.

How many CRYPTOPROJECT.herokuapp.com sites are there for Slack invites, where seemingly the team can’t get it together to map a domain name to the Heroku platform? (takes maybe 5 minutes)

But that’s a digression. I don’t think building desktop apps fixes security at all.

Random apps – without knowing if they’re secure or not – downloaded to your Mac or Windows desktop? Where they have full access to everything on your machine? No, that’s not more secure.

For less technical end users, a mobile app on iOS or Android downloaded from the official App Store is likely the most secure.

Automated Tickler Reminders are Key

The automatic follow up with people after a lapse in communication – aka a tickler file – is a killer feature.

It gets even harder when something as “intimate” as text messaging is missed by these systems.

No, Capsule doesn’t do this. There are ways to create follow up lists – eg a filter of all cases that haven’t been updated in 30 days.

Nimble does this and captures social messaging as well.

Contactually is a good product. $40 per month is not expensive if you make just one sale per month.

Not a format issue

Maybe I overdid the title. Not a matter of representing the notes (although a constrained, simplified system could help), but rather one of representing them in a way that syncs as CalDAV and CardDAV do.

Parveen Kaler mentioned WebDAV, which may do. as a protocol, but I guess the question is, will the OS vendors play along with notes as a cross platform concept?

Time for a vNotes Format?

A note sync format across devices & systems

Today we have vCards for person & business contact data, and CardDAV for syncing and sharing. For calendar data we have vCal and CalDAV.

This means that CRMs, for example, can link data to your calendar and your contacts. Any changes can get synced to the native contacts and calendar in your phone or calendar.

But what about notes?

Evernote, Google Keep, SimpleNote, Apple Notes. Never mind other systems that people use for note taking like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper.

They don’t link to calendars for meeting notes, they don’t link to contacts that are mentioned.

Your CRM has a notes field, but at best you can save it as part of a CSV export. You can’t just sync your notes to your phone or desktop, so at best you’re copy pasting.

WebDAV is an existing protocol for sync / access, but is more complicated than “just” notes.

And even with all of these systems, we don’t have support for linking objects – a person, a company, a meeting, another document.

I’ve been using Dropbox Paper as my primary note taking tool, both for business and personally. It supports @-mentions for people and +-mentions for other Paper docs. It has a meeting template for your connected Google Calendar – but you can only connect one account, and it doesn’t write back to that cal event in any way. Also no mentions of cal events directly.

I don’t want to slip down the slippery slope of semantic everything, but I do want to link, annotate, and preserve meaning and entity types as I build information.

We’re seeing a flood of systems across Slack, upgraded wikis, and more. Markdown is prevalent as a good-enough rich text formatting syntax, plus embedding / unfurling of remote content.

Somebody give me a sync / notes format that harmonizes notes and search for me!

Pointers to existing thinking around these concepts appreciated!

My own usage of Microsoft

I have a family license for Office which includes OneDrive storage space. The Outlook app on iOS is a great email client, although I really want them to bring back the full functionality of Sunrise Calendar, which was acquired and then killed.

I don’t use Windows on a regular basis. I have been experimenting with LiquidSky, a streaming gaming service which gives me a Windows desktop on a high powered machine in the cloud that I can install my Steam account and other PC gaming services. I like the utility of an on-demand desktop in the cloud — especially when I don’t have to worry about maintaining it.

(I’ve maintained my own Windows desktops before — they’ve always degraded in performance, never mind having to actively be concerned about virus scanners)

I’ve written about considering what my next laptop might be — and it’s by no means certain that it will be a Mac. Microsoft is quite good at hardware — it’s the end-to-end user experience of Windows and apps that causes friction.

As for Azure, I definitely would consider it on a case by case basis for projects. I’m interested in the Azure Bot Service. The Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) which provides NLP and other context services (like IBM’s Watson) is very interesting.

But I’m not a working programmer, and I’m not familiar with Azure because I’ve used it only rarely. The last project I experimented with was their Ethereum blockchain deployment quickstart template, and they now have Azure Blockchain as a Service.

For my hobbyist needs, I reach for Heroku most often. It’s the easiest and quickest way to get an open source app up and running and on the public internet for me. There are some new services such as Now or Glitch, and all of the cloud providers have some version of “cloud functions” where you can run a single function at a time. For Heroku, I don’t have to worry about maintaining an operating system or dealing with scaling, while easily being able to take a “traditionally” written chunk of application source code and get it going.

I’ll experiment some more with Azure and try creating a “Deploy to Azure” template for one of the open source projects I contribute to, to see how it compares.

But what I really want is a Heroku-like experience for my applications. I don’t want to deal with machines / operating systems, whether or not they are containerized.

What should Microsoft do?

I was impressed that Microsoft had taken the time to gather a group of employees and host us, to listen to feedback from the community. This alone is an activity that I don’t see other big companies doing, or at least I haven’t seen it in Vancouver before.

One of the comments that I made in regards to Visual Studio Code (of which there was a lot of interest in discussing further), was that Microsoft didn’t need to make a special event and buy us dinner just to talk about stuff we found interesting anyway. Have a Visual Studio Code meetup, and we’ll come out and participate.

If Satya Nadella does intend Microsoft to be the “most open” company, Microsoft can continue flying this community flag, actively participating in local events, and lead through their actions.

We are moving into a time where the “open source” license of the code matters less than ever. Data, privacy, and the tuning of algorithms — the open-ness of data and decision making — is what matters most. Microsoft has already turned the corner on a lot of their old ways, but many scars from the last 15 years still remain.

Welcome to the community, Microsoft. Let’s keep talking.

​​Cully: We’re building a bot!

​​Frontier Foundry partners with 20 Year Media, building messaging + machine learning engines

​​We’re excited to be announcing that we’re starting work on our first messaging + machine learning product at Frontier Foundry.

We’re partnering with ​​20 Year Media to build a team to tackle a consumer facing messaging bot.

​​Cully will live on multiple messaging platforms and recommend great events

We think of Cully as a cross between a knowledgeable concierge and your cool friend that has the scoop on new things to try out.

We’ll start by indexing Vancouver for evening events. All of us only have so many evening “slots” during the week or weekend to watch a movie, go to a community meetup, or see a dance performance. Some will be with coworkers, others with family, and of course with your friends. Cully will be exploring the concepts of the best events for you, but also when is best to go see them. That might mean pinging you about something tonight, or making sure you’ve got a good mix of work/family/fun booked in the next couple of weeks.

Conversational front ends

One of the big challenges with bots is their interface – their “front end” – is very basic and lacks context. Users become frustrated when they ask a question and the bot doesn’t understand, or answers one question and doesn’t understand what seems to be a logical next question.

Human: “What’s the weather in Boston?”
Bot: “It’s raining”.
Human: “Should I bring my umbrella?”
Bot: “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and great conversational dialogue design are needed. We aren’t claiming we’re going to solve this, but we have some ideas about an opportunity for better design tools, much like front end frameworks led to richer web applications.

Machine learning’s role in bot experiences

​​Many marketers have flooded into bots thinking about it as another push / broadcast channel. But instead we need to be thinking about these interfaces as personal agents that learn relevance, timing, and an individual’s taste over time. This means learning more about the user, remembering their past (and current!) context, all leading to more relevant recommendations.

​​This is where some of the machine learning comes in. We could be saying artificial intelligence (AI) but we very much agree with Katherine Bailey on this point:

​​What is Artificial Intelligence? It’s a meme; an impressively resilient and fecund meme. No sooner does it land in the brain of one unsuspecting human than countless new #ArtificialIntelligence tokens are spawned and sent out into the world. – Hashtag Artificial Intelligence

So we’ll stay away from that hashtag meme from now, and just say that we’ll be working on better learning, feedback loops, and interactions to recommend great events for you, at the right time and place.

We’re hiring for three positions for the Cully team now: lead product designer, senior tech lead, and an intermediate developer. You’ll be working with the Frontier Foundry team out of our space in downtown Vancouver, building out messaging, machine learning, and conversational front ends.

An early prototype of Cully with a basic web interface is live now and filled with Vancouver events. Check it out at Cully.io, feed us some event recommendations!

We’re also exploring working with existing startups in different ways. Adrian and I’ve always informally mentored & advised early stage startups. Frontier works with select founding teams in an advisory role, working on fundraising, hiring, or other special projects.

I’ve written previously what a startup foundry is, but even that was a projection and ideal model. As an operating company Frontier Foundry has the flexibility to work with companies, organizations, and individuals in different ways which we will evolve over time. Existing companies need partners because of their physical location — Vancouver, in immigration friendly Canada, with easy access to the rest of the US west coast — and/or because of their capabilities: Frontier is an organization designed for innovation and company building.

We’d be happy to chat more about what we’re doing. Check out the roles we’re hiring for now, or get in touch so we can sit down and talk further.

See you on the frontier!

Nope! I’m using Capsule CRM as my personal CRM (which I mentioned in the article) which seems a better fit now. Really, everything I mentioned in the article are good apps, what you use is very context dependent.

Recent article about Point Nine’s Tech Stack shows how they use ZenDesk as their CRM — which isn’t even designed as one!

For my new company Frontier Foundry, we’re using Drift and Pipedrive. Drift has been a pleasant surprise, including things like meeting scheduling and team profiles. I think I’m almost ready to get rid of Pipedrive and use just Drift.

Comparison to Electron?

Will ReactXP extend support to run as desktop apps on Mac and Linux too?

Because otherwise, as a desktop solution, I’m better off using “regular” React / React Native and combining with Electron to get multi-platform desktop support.

Since Microsoft built and maintains VS Code on Electron, will be interesting to see which direction they go.

Frustrated with Google Docs

This is very close to the system I use. However, I’ve become really frustrated with Google Docs. It is (ironically) very difficult to find things, and (more importantly) the mobile app interface makes it hard to edit or review docs in anything smaller than a tablet.

I still use Google Apps for Domains to run email and calendaring, but I only use Sheets for complex budget scenarios and other financial forecasting. Everything else is in Dropbox.

And, specifically, we’ve been experimenting with using Dropbox Paper. It’s nice to be able to use one app that can @-mention people, link to other docs like a wiki, and has a great mobile client for quick note taking.

The sharing model is like Dropbox itself, which means you can only share top level folders, but other than that I’m very happy with where the product is heading.

I just want more Lee, direct to the page. And yes, I should be doing more of this as well, although the bulk of it ends up on my wiki.

Cocktails, politics, musings. Bring it!

Well that’s something we’re going to need to fix if we want the next 1 billion people coming online to participate.

The age of desktop computing for anyone other than sophisticated professional users is coming to a close.

Mobile-only is the scenario that we should be focusing on.

Not crazy at all. I think we have to train the next generation of investors today. What if we could get founders investing in other founders?

Do they have $1000 to invest in the company of one of their peers? It means that all founders need to be able to learn to think with their investor hat on – which might very well give them better insight into their own company, or insight into how to present their company to other investors.

The Crowdmatrix platform is one example that might make this possible today.

How do you quantify the value of the time and money you invest in keeping organized like this?

Great question. Sometimes I feel like a hoarder, just gathering stuff for no reason.

But I have ~3,000 contacts with some level of tagging and information around them.

I would argue with better tools this should only become a more valuable resource. If I ask you right now to find 6 people in your contacts that program in Ruby on Rails, could you find them quickly and easily?

I think you need to have this become a habit. And a habit at a time investment / cycle that makes sense for you.

So, maybe you review, tag, and clean up your contacts once a quarter, along with catching up with people.

Maybe you do it weekly as part of your cycle of doing work, reflecting on the week ahead, and other communications.

I think that you can’t have this be extra work. That’s why a tool that works for you, your work style, and your needs is so important. For sales teams and mainly direct leads, that’s why sales CRMs cost so much. The payoff is big. For me, I can’t quite quantify it, but I feel more organized and it helps me review and reflect on people I know and the communications I have with them.

Hope that helps answer your question. Thanks for promoting me about it!

I tried the full res version of Google Photos. No direct linking to photos (not embedding a widget) is a deal breaker.

If I was only concerned with backup, a Dropbox paid plan or the 1TB I have with OneDrive would be fine.

But I want my photos – which are more documentary in nature – to live on the web and be addressable and findable. And my intent with this is my own domain, too, which is ownership and attribution in today’s web.

I think that a decentralized solution for the entire archive of my Flickr photos will give me that: never having to worry about cost or space.

For now, S3 is the next best thing.

It all comes down to what you want.

I haven’t found anything that works really well for me to remind / prompt on stale contacts.

Theoretically Contactually does this. I kicked the tires on it again recently. It’s just too complicated for what I want as a single user.

I am not currently actively selling, but I do have a very large contact database. And really that’s what I want – a collection of facts about people & companies, with different ways to slice & dice & search.

I’m over on CapsuleCRM now, which has “data tags” so you can create modified custom fields for different kind of contacts. So, if I tag a company with “startup” I can include other fields like “last raise”, “investors”, “AngelList link” etc. Or tag someone as “investor”, and add a field of “investment stage” or “investment interests”.

I have used Nimble a long time ago. It really does pull in every single communications channel. I seem to remember it having pretty good stale features, but it’s been a while since I used it.

Hope that helps. Let me know your experience!

Early Exits are a fit for Rising Acquisitions

Great to see you go through the math on this and paint it in black & white numbers.

Basil Peters has written a book on Early Exits. There is strong alignment between this path and local angel investors.

One of the challenges I have with broadly giving this advice is that I find it contributes to founders “aiming low”. That is, that they are building smaller businesses, which then don’t become something that anyone wants to acquire. This is subtle, since it assumes a lot of experience, and can be hard to explain to more junior founders. If you’re not careful, what ends up being heard is “go big” again in an unrealistic sense – eg I’m going to build the next Facebook.

I believe that more acquisitions are coming as “tech” pervades all industries. Another thing to consider is the industry you are targeting. Without disruption happening already, there will be less impetus to purchase a startup to compete. So is your industry segment used to acquisition as a growth strategy, or will your startup need to teach the industry that as well?

Final point: this might be an interesting path for foundries to follow. Making connections within an industry and then serving up purpose-built solutions made for acquisition.

I still love my MBAir 11".

I think an iPad Pro with keyboard would work, but I’ve decided I won’t buy new devices unless they have USB-C. The next gen of the iPad Pro is likely to have this.

It will be interesting to see what the next gen of devices looks like.