Question of the week…

For the past two months the view from my apartment window has been of the Boulder Flatirons.

Believe me – this view never gets old!

The only problem is that Rob and I are getting kicked out of our apartment at the end of the month. Back in May when we first found our apartment on craigslist, we were only able to secure our lease until the end of July.

That means in a few weeks Rob and I will be homeless. We’re not very excited about the prospect of sleeping on the street. That’s why we need your help.

Do you have a place we could sleep at night, or do you know anyone who does? We’re looking for at least a two bedroom apartment/house near the downtown Boulder area. Let me know if you can help!

Will anyone really use EventVue?

Last week EventVue launched an exclusive beta version of our product for the Community Next conference. Since then we’ve seen dozens of attendees sign in, create profiles and send messages to each other via our community.

We’ve been watching the usage statistics like hawks. These numbers are important to us, since they are an indicator of how much people value our product. We can get a good idea of how much benefit people are receiving from EventVue by the amount of time they spend on our site and how often they come back.

Since launching the community for Community Next:

• EventVue users have racked up over 4,500 pageviews
• the average EventVue user stays for 8.5 minutes
• the average EventVue user views 14 pages per visit
• 31% of EventVue users have returned 3 or more times
• 19% of EventVue users have returned 9 or more times

To put those numbers into perspective, that’s a total of over 47 hours that have been invested by the Community Next attendees to prepare themselves for the conference!

We no longer need to wonder if anyone will use EventVue – they already are!

Image storage: Database or File system?

From my experience, storing images in a database is a lot easier to manage than storing them in the file system. Here are a few of the benefits that I love the most:

• Related information is automatically kept in sync.
• It’s easier to backup your data when it’s all in one place.
• It’s easier to maintain an independent development environment.
• You can add additional file servers without having to deal with on-the-fly file replication.

Of course, the classic argument against storing images in a database is that it is slow. Retrieving images from a database takes longer than retrieving an image from the file system. At least, that’s what they say.

I decided to do a benchmark test for myself to see just how much of a difference it makes in performance. The results were surprising.

First, I created three different sized thumbnails of this picture and stored them in a directory on my file system. Then I took the same three images and stored them in a mySQL database. I then measured the total time for Firefox to display each image. I ran each benchmark 10 times for better accuracy.

Here are the results:

File system

• Large – average of 7.87E-05 seconds
• Medium – average of 7.77E-05 seconds
• Small – average of 6.65E-05 seconds

Database

• Large – average of 6.68E-05 seconds
• Medium – average of 6.69E-05 seconds
• Small – average of 5.90E-05 seconds

Wow! The images retrieved from the database were actually displayed faster than those retrieved from the file system!

Of course, we still haven’t proved this is scalable. I only had 3 rows in my table. What would happen if you have 120,000 images in your database? There’s one way to find out. Test it.

I inserted my picture into the database table 120,000 times (yes, that took a while). When I ran my benchmark test again, the average time was 6.07E-05 seconds! So much for being “slow”.

I’m not sure what would happen if my table contained over 120,000 images. For now I’m not too concerned – we’re still a few weeks away from reaching that milestone.

The big push.

This week has been crazy, exciting and a lot of fun!

Recently David has been pushing us to get our products out for people to start using them. We took his challenge to heart and had an early alpha launch with our first online community for a conference in Palo Alto, CA called Community Next. It’s a big deal for us to finally have real users interacting with our product. We are pumped!

Community Next is a conference on viral marketing which is organized by Adam Kalamchi and Noah Kagan. Last I heard, they still have 25 tickets left if you want to attend. They have some great speakers lined up and an impressive list of attendees. The EventVue community is only available to those who register, so if you want to be in on the action, you’ve gotta sign up! What more incentive could you need!?

The EventVue launch for Community Next wasn’t the only big push that took place yesterday. Here’s a fun video that Aaron from Villij posted earlier. Enjoy!

Are you using OpenDNS? You should be!

Earlier this year I started using OpenDNS and it has completely revolutionized the way that I navigate the web. In the old days I accessed websites by typing in the URL or by searching for the link in a mess of bookmarks.

Now I use OpenDNS shortcuts.

For example, to start writing this post I simply typed “blog” into my address bar. If I want to see how many people have been reading my blog, I simply type “stats”. To check my minutes on my Verizon phone, I type “v”. To check my balance with Bank of America, I type “boa”. OpenDNS stores the full URL for me and allows me to recall any website with an easy, self-defined shortcut. As a result, I am able to get where I want to go much quicker than before. OpenDNS also provides a javascript bookmark that lets me create new shortcuts with a simple click of a button.

Shortcuts are my favorite benefit of using OpenDNS, but there are many more:

• It’s faster
• It automatically corrects spelling mistakes (www,google.cmo becomes http://www.google.com)
• It warns me against phishing attacks
• It only takes about 30 seconds to set up

If you are not using OpenDNS yet, I recommend that you try it. I promise, once you use it, you’ll never go back.

The slightly-less-technical explanation for my mom:

Every time you view a website, your computer sends out a request to a domain name server. This domain name server is used to convert human readable domain names (www.google.com) into computer readable IP addresses (72.14.253.104). The average person does hundreds of DNS lookups every day. Usually these lookups are handled by your internet service provider (ISP), but you can actually use whichever service you like. OpenDNS is the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNS service. They are currently handling over a billion requests a day.

I’ve not pulled this many all-nighters since sophomore year!

We had our one-month demos last night. It was a lot of fun seeing what the other teams have been working on this summer. I am blown away by the vision and talent of the other companies here at TechStars. It’s been cool to see the friendships developing between us.

I also love the way the various teams are helping each other out. Take the villijers for example:

• Mike has been putting in as many late nights as we have. He’s been helping Rob get our server tricked out with cool stuff like mod-rewrite.
• Anthony helped us design our business cards.
• Theron drove us to Colorado Springs since we don’t have a car here. (To be fair, he did get to spend a day at the Broadmoor)
• Aaron keeps us continually entertained with his card tricks and philosophical conversations.

It’s people like this that are making our summer so incredible.

One blog that every team should be reading

My general expectation for blogs is for them to provide me some basic value. Every now and then you should probably post something insightful, interesting or funny to keep me coming back, but I certainly don’t expect you to blow my mind with every post.

That’s why I’m so impressed by one blog that knocks it out of the park every time!

I’m talking about ParticleTree from Ryan, Chris and Kevin at Wufoo.

They don’t post that often, but when they do, it’s good. The article they posted today is no exception. What’s cool is that they aren’t that far ahead of us. Not too long ago they were building their product at Y Combinator in Boston. They have gone through the whole process of starting a Web 2.0 company and are eager to share what they have learned along the way.

They have some really practical articles like:

• What we looked for in an angel
• The importance of RSS
• How to add an API to your web service

Wufoo guys, thanks for the great posts! Let me know if you’re ever out in Colorado. I’d still love to meet you all in person.

Want a sneak peak at EventVue?

We are not going to have a public launch of our product until the end of this summer. The good news is that our friends, advisers and loyal blog readers will be offered sneak previews long before then. If you want to be in on the fun, just go to our shiny new website and give us your email address. We’d love to keep you up to date on what’s happening here at EventVue.

The first 100 people to sign up get a free cookie!

Platypus update

This is what happens when Facebook adds your application to their directory:

Here is a quick summary of the other numbers from the Platypus experiment:

• 416 people have looked at it
• 227 people have installed it
• 158 people are currently using it
• 69 people (30%) installed it and then removed it again

The biggest surprise to me with these numbers is the low retention rate. Why am I loosing 30% of the people who install my application? Has anyone else noticed this trend with their Facebook applications?

Watching and learning

Last night I got to sit in and watch companies pitch to an angel network from CTEK. It was an amazing learning opportunity for us. Here are some of the things that really stood out:

Know your business

Last night one of the presenters made the following comment:

“We don’t track anything. I couldn’t tell you how many people use our product”.

What!?! Are you kidding me?

Contrast this to another presenter that stood up and demonstrated that they knew their business inside and out. They knew everything about their customers – where they live, where they shop, what they like. They knew the size of their market and had a reasonable strategy for increasing their share of it. They knew their business model. They measured and evaluated everything. They knew exactly how much it cost to move their product into a new region and they knew how much revenue that would bring in. They had a mathematical justification for how much of a return you should expect from your investment.

Which company would you trust with your money?

Know your pitch

Know your pitch! This seems like it would be intuitive, right? Last night I saw a CEO get up in front on everyone and just start rambling. Another one kept turning around and reading from his PowerPoint. By doing this he:

• Showed that he didn’t know his numbers very well
• Communicated that he didn’t take the time to prepare
• Missed out on crucial eye contact that would have allowed him to connect to his audience and get instant feedback on what he was saying.

Your pitch should be clear and should answer the big questions right away. At the very least I should understand:

• What you do
• Who your customer is
• How many customers you can realistically reach
• How you plan to reach them

If you get done with your pitch and someone has to ask you what you do, I doubt they’re going to give you any money. And yes, this really happened.

Know your audience

I realized last night how important it is to pitch to people who know your industry and can understand your business.

One of the presenters did a great job outlining their strategy, their competitive advantage and their knowledge of their business. The problem was that no one else in the room knew anything about their industry. They could be sitting on an amazing opportunity, but it wouldn’t matter. No one is going to invest in something they don’t understand.

It pays to find people who get what you’re doing.