firedrop! zaplet!
In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin
... (read more) ...some days
no specifics to go into, but some days just go a little strange. felt like most things i touched today went in the wrong direction, despite good intentions.
on the other hand, something i was pretty worried about turned out to be nothing.
anyway, looking forward to tomorrow being a new day.
... (read more) ...May 1 Innovation Conference @ Stanford d.school
[note: the conference is now at Hewlett 201 on the Stanford Campus]
[note 2: crossposting to planet because I've mentioned this to many folks at Mozilla, we've got a history of doing projects with the d.school, and it's super-relevant to what we do]
Great conference for folks in Silicon Valley, put on by some of my favorite folks at the d.school, and featuring Huggy Rao (among others), who’s got a very interesting book on the way about market dynamics & how they’re sometimes like political movements. Highly recommended.
... (read more) ...heading home
great & productive, but fast, trip to tokyo — been raining all day — about to get on the plane from Narita & happy to be heading home.
