Subject Line: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Message: Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
user@domain.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected user@domain.com (state 14).

The Cause: There is no “mail.domain.com” in the dns system.  In my case I was sending the mail via an alias (it was a notification email from the web server).  The receiving mail server sees the email as forged and bounces it.

The Solution: Go to the dns system and create a mail.domain.com and point your MX records to that.  It’s a bit silly, but it has to be done that way.

photo credit: derrickkwa

The community was quite nice (I saw a number of familiar faces, and met some new people too), and the Georgia Tech was nice enough to loan out the Georgia Tech Research Institute facility auditorium. I had a great time meeting everyone and Mike Schinkel and his volunteers moved things along well. It is impossible to overstate how important it is to keep these events running on time.

And now, the contestants! We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity. I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better). I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested, and vice versa? This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc. That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation.

And so, with no further ado, here are the startups from last night. I’m going to omit descriptions of the startups as those can be found on their websites.

• Less Meeting – Jeff Steinke presenting – Short Version – a web based application that plays the role of a crotchety timekeeper enforcing the meeting agenda.
  1. Problem Solving – 10/10
  2. Actual Customers – 10/10
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 5/10
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 7/10
  5. Remarkability- 6/10 – I find it easier to describe the effect rather than the cause

  Total Score:38

• Spitter – David Eckhoff presenting – Spitter.com provides real-time, relevant sports information (the wheat is separated from the chaff somewhere along the line)
  1. Problem Solving – 5/10 – Providing relevant information is going to be a relative thing for everyone, both provider and consumer.  If I were a bigger sports fan I might see the utility in this.  Seemingly it would be better used spinning off into politics or outright inside gambling tips.
  2. Actual Customers – 0/10 – Apparently they were not at the point of defining the people who actually pay money yet,  David Eckhoff is a capable guy, so I assume they do exist, but since they were not presented, I’m rating this a zero.
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 0/10 – No pricing yet either
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 10/10 – no problem that I can see.
  5. Remarkability- 10/10 – “Twitter for Sports!” – It is a highly remarkable venture

  Total Score:25

• Other Number – Andrew Johnson and Walter Duncan presenting – They provide a virtual PBX
  1. Problem Solving – 7/10 – Phones seem to be a solved problem, so I’m not sure of the benefits of having a virtual PBX, but it does seem like a cool product.
  2. Actual Customers – 6/10 – In my limited experience nobody ever wants to switch PBX systems.
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 5/10 – Variable pricing!
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 7/10 – no problem that I can see.
  5. Remarkability- 7/10 – “Virtual PBX!” – which is easy enough for those who know what a PBX actually means

  Total Score:32

• Chirbit – Ivan Reyes presenting – Online swapping of sound files for social media. Full disclosure, I’ve been friends with Ivan for the past several years
  1. Problem Solving – 8/10 – Chirbit does supply a way to move sound files easily, especially the recording of them.
  2. Actual Customers – 6/10 – Voiceover talent isn’t the largest market, but this would solve a lot of problems for them.
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 0/10 – No announced pricing
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 7/10
  5. Remarkability- 5/10 – “Social Media Condiment” was how Ivan described it, but that doesn’t really tell the story

  Total Score:26

• Co-Thrive – Rachel Orston presenting – Online task management with lots of cool email features
  1. Problem Solving – 7/10 – I’m still waiting for an application that insists on the active voice and won’t let you use adverbs. Their system does not fix the human problem of task management (that would make it a 10) – Their system does take it quite far.
  2. Actual Customers – 8/10 – they have actual customers! A wonderful thing for a startup.
  3. Simplicity of Pricing- 7/10
  4. Chicken and Egg Problem- 7/10
  5. Remarkability- 5/10 – The product is a well executed application of a simple concept (the best kind) but I honesty can’t think of a simple, accurate way to describe it

  Total Score:34

So, my rankings were LessMeeting, Co-Thrive, and Other Number.  I learned quite a bit from all of the presenters, particularly David Eckhoff.  I look forward to the next one!

photo credit: juhansonin

The Cause: While the web project portion of the solution is being compiled and run, the Silverlight project is not being built.  This just happened to me recently.  Visual Studio crashed and somehow the Silverlight project portion of the solution decided to remove itself from the build list.

The Solution: Right-Click on the solution, then select “Configuration manager”.  Make sure that the “Build” checkbox is selected for both projects.  That’s it!

photo credit: Mooganic

Message: Unhandled Error in Silverlight 2 Application An exception occurred during the operation, making the result invalid.  Check InnerException for exception details.   at System.ComponentModel.AsyncCompletedEventArgs.RaiseExceptionIfNecessary()
at StronicoMain.ServerUtil.AddressTypeListCompletedEventArgs.get_Result()
at StronicoMain.Page.proxy_AddressTypeListCompleted(Object sender, AddressTypeListCompletedEventArgs e)
at StronicoMain.ServerUtil.ServerUtilClient.OnAddressTypeListCompleted(Object state)
Line: 1
Char: 1
Code: 0
URI: http://www.servername.com/Silverlight.js

You spend an hour or so trying to decifer the InnerException, which gives you no useful information.  You then try to access the web service via a web browser, like http://www.servername.com/MyService.svc, and you get a 404 error.  You then add that to the mime type list and still the problem is not fixed.

The Cause: Your WCF services are not mapping properly to the IIS 7 metabase.

The Solution: Run the following command “%Windir%\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\ServiceModelReg.exe -r” in a command prompt.  That clears everything up.  Please see this page on social.msdn.microsoft.com for more information.

photo credit: ⓙanet

Sadly there does not seem to be any company devoted to forming and maintaining secret societies.  I think it could exist, and most of it would happen on the web.  Such a company would have the following features.

• Maintenance and storage of the purpose, the history, and the minutes of the group
• Keeper of the secret punches, recipes, or whatever secret intellectual property that is one of hte features of the group.  Traditionally secret societies have their own punch, but it could be a distinctive micro-brew, health formula, whatever.
• Listing of requirements for membership – it would give the designated enforcer of rules knowledge and authority to keep the integrity of the group intact.

Basically the site/company would serve as a grizzled member of the group – similar to Bobby Elvis on the show Sons of Anarchy.  It could also offer discounts on membership card, mugs, events, etc.    I would like to join the bluegrass and woodworking versions of these.

photo credit: ChrisDag

As an addendum, please read the seminal Derek Sivers blog post -Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.  The first business idea will follow soon.

Addendum – one requirement of all of these ideas is that I would buy them if I had they did exist at a reasonable price.

The Cause: The correct event is the Shown event, which is not intuitive (to me anyway).

The Solution: Just add in the following code:

private void MyForm_Resize(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (FormWindowState.Minimized == WindowState)
{
Hide();
}
}

private void MyForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.Hide();
}
private void MyForm_Shown(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized;
Hide();
}

and you’re done!  You can then the start the program and it will automatically minimnize itself to the tray.

For whatever reason I find this sort of open, public, rule based scheduling more appealing than the current approach most companies (including mine) follow.  As one must commit to software these days the process of development is important to my decision to buy in the first place.  I’m not sure I have any real reason to believe in this, but it would seem that this approach would be more likely to fix problems that actually exist, as well as resulting in greater usability.

In sum, the idea is that software scheduling should have the following characteristics

• Performance over new features
• Separation of performance development and new feature development
• Published scheduling
• Transparency for timelines

Thoughts?  This is actually close to Milton Friedman’s idea of a monetary rules to replace a gold standard, instead of monetary policy being arbitrarily set by the Federal Reserve.

photo credit: Peter Kaminski