Hey Everyone,

We’ve always believed in an open culture at Publictivity, and trying to get to Foo Camp/ Startup Camp held by O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures is no exception.    A month ago, I dropped my entire life and moved to Silicon Valley, while the rest of our team (by team, I mean 2 other people) stayed in Miami,FL. It’s the American (Geek) Dream, but not an easy one with having to leave behind anyone and everything.  Everyone I already know and continue to meet seems to ask me one question… Why did you move? Was it fundraising?  Was it the “dream”?  Was it a change of scenery?  It wasn’t any one of those things specifically, but something a hell of a lot more important: people.  Silicon Valley is endowed with people that will blow your mind.  These people encompass such a wide spectrum that they are other entrepreneurs, potential investors, biz dev partners, like minded hackers, or just intelligent people to talk with about technology until 6 AM.  When you put together all of these amazing people in a geographic area, you start conversations that help spark great ventures such as Apple, HP, YouTube, Facebook, Netscape, and more.  

On July 10-11 at Startup Camp and July 11-13 at Foo Camp, many of these great conversations are going to be happening with some of the world’s most intelligent minds.  I believe that we will learn a ton from these conversations, but that we can also give a ton back to the community through our own experiences.  We’re working on two areas that we could talk about all day that are not only important to O’Reilly ATV , but the entire community as a whole: open source software and information management tools/open data.  

We believe that open source software is what drives startups and innovation.  With tools such as MySQL, PHP, Linux, Eclipse, and more, we have seen the democratization of what was once a selective and expensive proposition… creating a web app.  Frank and I started our first company when we were both just about 20 years old, and realized through the process that entrepreneurs need tools to run their business.  Most of these tools are expensive, disconnected, and flat out suck.  We knew there had to be a better way to give entrepreneurs and companies the tools they needed to run their business, but at the open source level.  What if Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and more were open source?  They’re powerful tools that significantly improve a startup, but often too expensive or over burdening for startups to deal with.  What if we added to the MySQL, PHP, Linux, and other open source tools, a great open source solution that let companies become more productive not only through the apps we’ve built, but eventually the other apps developers build on our platform.  The same way PHP, MySQL, and more dramatically reduced the costs needed to technically startup a company, is the same way Publictivity will dramatically reduce the costs for running your startup’s business processes.

If the past paragraph described why we created Publictivity, then this describes more of the what.  We’re creating a new way for companies to organize and share information.  Entrepreneurs and companies are so overwhelmed with information, and at the end of the day the best way to organize + share this information is through a horrible one-two punch of excel spreadsheets (organize) and a loose string of emails (share).  With Publictivity we’re giving companies a way to create data structures that matter to them, whether it be to manage contacts, track press coverage, log customer support issues, or track investment deals as a VC.  The possibilities are endless, because the structures are open, allowing companies to easily create forms for their data in a way that is relevant to them.  Think allowing companies to do with data, what Freebase has allowed consumers to do on the web. Last, but just as important, we make sure that any and all information can be shared socially and flow easily to the rest of the organization.  In short, we’re taking as many concepts from the social web, and applying them to companies.  If we can make information flow inside of companies as fast as consumer web tools such as Twitter and Facebook, things are going to change big time.

Maybe we’re 100% wrong, and things will blow up in our face.  Trying to change the world through software is as risky and uncertain as things can get.  I am certain about one thing though: we’ll not only learn a lot from Startup Camp / Foo Camp, but more importantly help contribute all the knowledge we’ve learned over the past 2 years while building Publictivity. Hopefully, we can join in on the 10-13th along with 5-7 other startups to start discussing the amazing things we’re all doing, but also will be inspired to do.

-Jason Baptiste

 

Update:

 

So about a week ago we posted the presentation and slides on Hacker News. We got our asses handed to us.  In short: Great presentation, but

 

a) Too long (27 slides vs 12 now)

b) Hard for people to simply understand what we do

c)  No straight forward use case.  What are we going to change? ie- this is how things work now and this is how things will change once we exist. 

 

Attached below is our full pitch in video form along with a PDF of the slides + notes:

 

View PDF Slides on Scribd

 

This is in response to Dan Rua’s Post on Coming Full Circle to Apple. I was originally writing this in the comments, but realized the comment was really better suited to be a blog post.

It’s funny, I grew up on Windows and PCs. My dad got me into DOS and Excel at like 5. I grew up with Bill Gates as my idol and told my teachers in grammar school that Macs were for kids and Windows is what dominates the world. I stopped handwriting any and all assignments in the 4th Grade because of MS Word. I thought Windows, MS, and PCs were unstoppable. Well, that changed. I bought the first iPod ever back in 2001. I was a digital music and MP3 aficionado. I had the Diamond RIO 16 mb player back in 97. Problem was, the first iPod was Mac only. So what did I do? I bought a mac. It was an iBook g3 probably. I barely used the thing. I couldn’t get away from Windows. 3 Years later though, I finally snapped. I couldn’t deal with the Windows experience. My 6 month old toshiba was virus ridden, heavy, breaking, and horrible. Maybe this was coincidence, but about a month before I formed my first Startup, I switched fully to a Powerbook.  Windows was out of my life.  Since then everything I’ve done is influenced by Apple. Publictivity runs on apple machines.  Publictivity was completely coded and designed on an apple.  Even the UI quirks are very apple like.  In short, I am Apple.  I’ll be even more Apple when my sprint contract ends and I grab an iphone.  I do joke about the lack of copy+paste functionality :-P.
To respond to Dan’s post a little bit more though: Yes, the ease of use of Apple, its power for pro apps (coding, design,etc.), with web based apps is the ultimate configuration.  Go for the Mac.  Use Keynote to make a presentation instead of Powerpoint, and youll be sold at the quality of what youre using.

PS- blog overhaul and full alpha materials are coming this week. I promise.
[tags]  apple, microsoft, switching, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

David Cann, our awesome developer has put together another amazing iPhone app. This time he’s made iChat, a feature everyone wants, but won’t be getting on the 29th… until now.  David’s a good friend, so we took care of hosting the application on our servers (call this stress testing). You can check out David’s application at:

www.publictivity.com/iphonechat/

PS- sorry for the lack of posts.  We’re getting ready for alpha, and waiting to post until then.  Expect that late next week.  Also expect some other very big announcements in the next few weeks.

[tags] iphone, ichat, digg, david cann, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

Valleywag has the exclusive that Myspace/News Corp is Buying Photobucket.  The price isn’t disclosed.  Now with the events that have been going on, I’m sure this has been one hell of a negotiation by News Corp. Here’s how I think it went aka Mike this is your backstory:

Round One

Photobucket: Hi News Corp, we’d like you to buy us for 300 million.  We’re a big asset to MySpace, you wouldn’t want google owning us

News Corp: you are a big asset, but you only had 6.3 million in revenues.  We’re myspace we don’t need you.  Try half that and we can talk

Photobucket: OMGZ our VCs and Bankers tell us 300 million, watch this.

Round Two

Photobucket To World: We’re for sale for 300 million and we’re making the announcement on Tech Crunch.  Come buy us!

World: Not for that price.

News Corp: Watch this…

Round Three

News Corp: Eat Shit Photobucket, we just hit the off button

Photobucket: Oh shit, now we’re screwed…

World: you’re not worth anything to us now

Round Four

News Corp: Half your price, which is being generous.  If you don’t give in, we’re never turning you back on

Photobucket: Okay, we’re still millionaires.

Yahoo: Oh crap, Flickr still only has minimal marketshare and is overhyped. At least we got rid of Yahoo! photos
[tags] flickr, photobucket, news crop, acquisition, tech crunch, valleywag, publictivity, web 2.0, myspace [/tags]

Our good friends at Scrapblog forwarded this over.  They’re looking for someone who is really in touch with the community and “gets it”:

“Please see this post: http://blog.scrapblog.com/?p=71

Thanks in advance,
-Alex

“
[tags] scrapblog, publictivity, jobs, community, miami startups, web 2.0 [/tags]

“Enterprise is last now. We have 1,500 employees on Facebook because we don’t have the internal tools to provide community,” Scheinman said. “A lot of the enterprise has been behind in adopting all these tools.”

… nuff’ said.

Why am I posting this and what is its relation to us…? In due time my friends
[tags] cisco, publictivity, web 2.0, dan scheinman, social software, enterprise, facebook [/tags]

Okay, so last week was pretty hectic for us. We spent the end of the week and some of the weekend moving everything over to our brand new servers (except our blog, which is still hosted by Media Temple). So what are we running on you ask… a MAMP stack? Wait, there’s a typo there isn’t there? Nope, we’re using Macintosh Apache MySQL and PHP. Let me tell you, it’s pretty awesome. The servers we’re using are:

Dual Core 1.88 GHZ Macintosh minis with 2 GB Ram. We’ve also lightened the load on OS X and done some custom configs. (ie- no iphoto and that junk).

Why are they awesome? They’re cheap enough, easy to swap (I can go to a mac store and within 20 minutes have a new server), energy efficient, and when we really start buying a lot of them we can fit WAY more than 42 of them in a cabinet. Oh, and they run on OS X, which makes administration really cool. Here’s a screen-shot of what everything looks like. The screen shot below is what I see when operating the server remotely… it’s OS X:

So let me explain everything:

1. We’re using Remote Desktop 3 to connect. It’s amazing.
2. CocoaMySQL for database administration. Cocoa MySQL is a grat application
3. FTPd for FTP stuff. David set that up, not sure
4. Textmate for code and config editing
5. Super Duper for backups
6. Safari for checking pages,etc.
7. Terminal, console, etc.
8. We’ve also kept quick access to our config, confd, and ini files.
9. We made it look nice with the Publictivity logo there.

So in short, that’s what we’re using for our servers. Let me know if you try the same.

Expect a new landing page, blog look, and alpha test to come in the next couple of weeks.

[tags] mac mini, mac servers, os x, apple, remote desktop 3, mamp, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

That’s right folks, we’re moving over to our brand new colocated Apple Servers!  Please be patient with us as the blog, main site, and even *gasp* our emails will be down on and off for the next 72 hours.  If you need anything else please email me personally at jasonlbaptiste [at] gmail.com Thanks! PS- Expect the alpha testing to begin real soon.
-Jason L. Baptiste

CEO of Publictivity

[tags] publictivity, web 2.0, servers, apple [/tags]

404? Weird. More updates coming

Final Update: Youtube is back up.

Update: 4:07 AM EST and it is still down. No word on why yet.

Update: rumor is the Qwest and other servers backbones might be causing it. Question to any geeks: Could the facebook layout change have ANYTHING to do with it? If not, pardon my ignorance.

[tags] youtube, 404, google, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]

Do yourself a favor.  Try getting your company’s mission statement/ elevator pitch down to one twitter message.  I guarantee you, it’s an exercise that will help.  Here’s my twitter profile btw:

Jason L. Baptiste

[tags] twitter, profile, elevator pitch, VC, publictivity, web 2.0 [/tags]