Martin Wells

Read/Write Web’s Richard MacManus has posted a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 companies in Australia as a part of his world-wide coverage. Nice to see Tangler included.

This is definitely the most comprehensive list I’ve seen. It even includes Atlassian, which I’m sure Mike will be pleased to see. There was even room for another swing in the aussie VC bash fest.

Last night I had the pleasure of hosting another Dinner 2.0 in Sydney. Once again it was a terrific night with a great bunch of people in the ‘next web’ scene in Sydney.

Some great conversation around the current state of the industry, especially on the recent Bulletin article and the supposedly poor state of web 2.0 VC in Australia – Mike Zimmerman notably said he was misquoted in the article – and of course, more on the YouTube acquisition and what it means for the ‘bubble’ talk.

Yorke Hinds gave an update on Zookoda’s progress towards a sale (22 interested parties, 3-4 very serious bidders); negotiations underway. Chris from Smoothbudget discovered a whole new world. Remember The Milk forgot to come – actually that’s not fair, Omar ended up in hospital, but thankfully it wasn’t too serious. Alistair Smith had some great stories of wild patents he’s been approached about, including: a teleport device (only worked if you walked into it though), a dancing blow-up doll and tracking diseases using missile guidance systems (this one is actually pretty serious).

Everybody else managed a healthy consumption of steak and beer. Our only serious issue now: no girls! Damn I hate IT for that.

Attending last night was:

• Phong Mai (Tangler)
• Alex von Kotze (Tangler)
• Andrew Joyner (Dot Communications)
• Peter Crowe (Quotify)
• Mike Zimmerman (Tech Venture Partners)
• Marc Woodward (NEO)
• Nick Gonios (3eep.com)
• Yorke Hindes (Zookoda)
• Randal Leeb-du Toit (NICTA)
• Craig Baker (Tangler)
• Rory Brennan (Dot Communications)
• Michael Liubinskas (Tangler)
• Alisdair Faulkner (NICTA)
• Alistair Smith (Davies Collison Cave)
• Chris Hulbert (Smothbudget)
• Erik Miller (Tangler)
• Rhandy Lado (Tangler)

All the photos are available over here.

Check eet.

Our baby Tangler is growing up (sniff). The beta is currently hosted on servers in Sydney, but load is forcing this to be expanded. We also want to shift hosting to the US sooner rather than later (where bandwidth is much faster and cheaper). So shiny new Opterons, tier 1 bandwidth, and a San Francisco data centre here we come.

The problem now is the management of this infrastructure is getting too large to handle without dedicated people, so we had to figure out how we’d handle the expansion. Do we continue to try to run it ourselves or expand the team with some systems administrators?

Saving money is always a good thing, so we considered scraping along with part-timers (Minh, Craig and I most likely) for the first few months, but we felt this would be risky. Why? Because managing any sizable system is a large, complicated job that can’t be done half-hearted. The backups will fail; the HDs will fill up; that tier 1 provider will drop your class C off their AS due to a “clerical error”; you’ll fail to install that kernel update and get hacked. There are a million things that absolutely will go wrong – and yes, all of the above have actually happened to me at various times in the past. We needed someone dedicated to the problem.

That leaves the second option: hire a dedicated systems administrator. But we face a bit of a scale issue there. You can’t hire just one; these little buggers breed! If you hire one, no matter how hard you try there will be 10 within 3 months. OK, not really, but seriously, try sharing a 24-hour pager between two people, let alone one. I didn’t want to hire a team of people. We also didn’t have time to find and hire the right people, setup systems from scratch and still meet our growth at the moment. I started to consider outsourcing options to bridge the gap between kick-starting and our own team. After a bit of scouting and talking to other startups I came across a better solution.

Enter BitPusher, a company that specializes in operating sophisticated infrastructure using a commercial model that makes it accessible and practical, and a lot cheaper than hiring your own team. They’re working with us to develop a spec on our new systems, and then they handle hardware procurement, deployment and operations while we go to the beach! All right, maybe not. But it sure is nice to have the problem taken care of by people dedicated to it. Thanks guys.

And after a little pushing I’m happy to see Daniel (BitPusher’s CEO) has started a blog.

Joshua Gliddon of the Bulletin has done an extensive article on the state of Web 2.0 startups in Australia, focusing on their struggle with raising venture capital. Cameron Reilly of TPN’s recent decision to head to the US was the real catalyst for the story. TPN, Omnidrive, Gnoos and Tangler are all given a mention. Great article.

The cosy little world that is Tangler has been shattered… we hired a marketing guy!

Tangler’s new Chief Marketing Guy is Mick Liubinskas (that’s him in the Santa suit). He joins us from previous gigs as the CMO of Sharman Networks (makers of Kazaa), helping kids in Africa and more recently, Zapr.

Mick and I have known each other for a while and I’ve always had respect for his ability to turn innovation into need. Most importantly: he gets 2.0. He gets community. He gets Tangler.

Over the years, I’ve think I’ve directly hired more than a hundred people. Most of the time I knew within the first 3 minutes if they were the right person for the job — after those 3 minutes I’m looking for reasons they’re not. I had that feeling about Mick and my impression has only improved as we’ve gotten to know each other better.

I’m really psyched Mick has decided to join us. He’s an experienced guy who could have had pretty much the pick of startups at the moment: including starting his own thing. His belief in Tangler and the team is great to see.

We’ve been debating the COPPA today. What’s that? Well if you’re an online service that has the potential for the disclose of information for kids under 13 then you’ll need to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

This law states that we must obtain consent of a parent or guardian if our service is used to disclose personal information (such as email address, name, address). It applies pretty broadly to chat sites, web page tools, social networks, forums… which means basically anything with user contributions.

The easiest way to comply is simply don’t allow users under the age of 13. To do that you just request a confirmation as a part of the registration process that they are indeed 13 or over. Pretty simple really. Entirely pointless, but simple.

Then enter the Xanga case; these poor guys seem to have been nailed (fined $1m) because their users were able to change their birth date on their profile to a value below the age of 13. The FTC considered this evidence of users admitting their age (post registration confirmation of their age being over 13) and slapped them with a fine.

Now I don’t actually know a lot of the details of the Xanga case, so maybe there was something stupid involved as well (like non-compliance). But on the face of it it seems a little harsh — I did enjoy Xanga’s counter claim that users were changing the birth date to be that of their dog.

The FTC’s ruling was that sites need to maintain vigilance over their awareness of a user’s age. Which means if you can reasonably monitor this, then you must, or face a whopping fine.

Tangler has profile pages which allow you to change the birth date (we’re just adding it now). During the registration process we request confirmation of them being over 13. But we’ll now have to figure out what to do with the profile birth date field. Options:

1. Remove the birth date field entirely — pretty silly.
2. Check if they change the birth date to something under 13, then give them a warning confirmation, and if they click ok terminate their accounts — umm, pretty silly.
3. Not allow birth dates to be set to a value below 13. How can they set to that anyway, since they already confirmed they were above 13… right?! — probably the best move.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

We won! 11-5. Close for the first half and then we ran away with it. Rhandy scored 5 goals I think. He was the typical magician. Nice work by Ed the Star, Isaac the Solid, Simon the Tired and Conrad the Crazy.

Three years, eight seasons, and some very intense rivalry, and it all comes down to this. In about 10 minutes Team Tangler (and some Dot guys) will play the grand final for the Ultimo Indoor Soccer Championships! (Well for the Thursday lunchtime league at least…) Results in a few hours. Wish us luck!

OK, I did it. I ordered my new notebook. Sounds like a simple decision right? Pick something nice, make sure it’s powerful and has the right mix of features versus size and weight, then order. Simple? I’ve done it 4-5 times before. Yeah, right. Not anymore. It’s a struggle nowadays. Why? Because the mac is well and truly back.

Hanging out in San Francisco recently (especially with people like Tara Hunt and Chris Messina) left me feeling distinctly ‘corporate’ when I whipped out my slate grey trusty HP. Ye gads! I was the “PC” guy from the mac ads.

I’m a technical guy and frankly the mac is looking pretty tasty. OSX really is an excellent OS. It may not have the same level of app support, but it’s more than passed the point where that’s an issue… and if it’s still an issue there’s always bootcamp. The mac hardware is core duo (although they’re taking their sweet time with a Core 2 Duo), and the machines look and feel great.

So what was a dedicated PC user (I think 20+ years now) to do? Embrace the new world and get a mac book; even with it’s oft-denied heat, noise, and crash issues? Should I go over to the dark side, and to hell with the consquences? It was a suprisingly tough decision, something long debated by a few of the Tangler guys.

But I had to do something, and ultimately I decided to… chicken out and go with a PC again. So why? Well it really just came down to timing. Right now I just can’t afford to upset probably the most important aspect of my everyday activity. I’m the CEO of a startup, one that is frantically snowballing its way towards launch. Doing a complete about face on my primary operating tool isn’t something I think I can afford to do, at least for now.

Soon… I’ll buy a mac book I can play around with on my own time. Until then… my shiny HP nc8430 beast is on its way.