I’ve got an iPhone hooked up to our Twitter account and will photograph any car you tell me to go find. Let the wild goose chase begin. @driverside me
http://www.twitter.com/driverside
Now that we’ve got our Series B Funding finished up at DriverSide, it’s time to bulk up the development team. We’re looking for senior, experienced and passionate LAMP developer to help us keep making the product bigger and better.
The job listing is here: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/1067264417.html
A note to great developers working with recruiters: don’t. It just doesn’t make sense in this environment … for either of us.
Getting feedback from the users of your website is a crucial and ongoing process that can keep your product growing and evolving in the right direction. It’s not product development, it’s customer development (thank you, Stephen Blank). I just came across and installed a great little widget by CrowdSound that takes about 2 minutes to deploy and will collect feedback from your users through a highly-customizable, hosted widget.
You can see it at the bottom of every page of a new site I just launched that helps people researching used cars by VIN number find information about their car:
www.vin-history.com.
Nice job, CrowdSound! The widget is here: www.crowdsound.com
We’re adding lots of new features and functionality to DriverSide, and making them all easier to find and use, which is why we’re looking for a couple more passionate and talented front end web developers to join our team full-time in San Francisco.
See the job posting here – http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/904439016.html
I had lunch yesterday with a smart entrepreneur who recently had a very successful exit for his popular consumer destination web site. He was clearly relaxed, well-rested and loving life.
I’m having a great time making our vision for DriverSide come to fruition and am swimming in long hours, caffeine and product meetings … but part of me couldn’t help but envy his peaceful disposition. One of the things he said that really stuck with me throughout the day was that he’s recognized that every brilliant and creative idea he’s ever come up with was born from a quiet and chilled-out state – no stress, striffe or meanial tasks weighing him down. I remembered coming to the same realization when I’d come up with business plans for MarketSquare and DriverSide.
It’s good to slow down, be quiet and think sometimes.
Good friend and cofounder of DriverSide, Trevor Traina, and I are driving in the Gumball Rally this year. We leave in 2 days for a road rally from San Francisco to LA to San Diego to Las Vegas then airlift to North Korea and on to 3 cities in China, ending in Beijing where we attend the summer olympics.
We’ll be broadcasting live video and will be blogging w/ pictures from the car on every leg of the trip. All media from the car will go to www.DriverSideGumball.com. We take off Saturday @ 1pm PST (will be broadcasting live from the car).
Also, I’ll be on NBC11 painfully early tomorrow morning (5am, rerun at 6:50am) talking about how we’ve dorked out the Audi R8 for this trip and hopefully I’ll get a plug in for DriverSide. It’s live TV – I’ll get the plug in 
AutoBlog.com was also cool enough to agree to cover us throughout the trip as well! I promised them the exclusive if we get thrown into a Chinese or N Korean detention center.
DriverSide (www.driverside.com) is a new service that 2 good friends and former business partners, Jad Dunning and Trevor Traina, and I came up with a little over a year ago. Over the last 9 months or so we’ve raised some money, built an excellent team and created the first version of what we think is a very innovative new service in the online automotive space.
DriverSide’s aim is to not only help consumers find a new (or used) car and sell their old car online more efficiently, but to help during the ownership process as well. Car owners get nervous about how much to pay for routine or unplanned service or repairs to their car. People need to know what their used car is really worth on the open market and how quickly it is depreciating so they know better about when to sell. People need a place to turn when it comes time to make modifications or upgrades to their car. We’ve built DriverSide to solve those issues and many others that everyday car owners experience. We like to say, love it or hate it, everyone has a relationship with their car. We’re here to make that relationship go more smoothly.
So, our public beta starts today. We’ll be working out a few bugs and vigorously improving/adding new features throughout the summer.
I also want to thank my family and friends being so supportive through this busy time … and our wonderfully talented employees for bringing it all to fruition.
For the better part of the last 10 years one of my hobbies has been sampling the best the Internet has had to offer in investment research tools. I’ve dabbled in developing my own technical analysis algorithms, have done a fair amount of day trading and have taken some more traditional long positions in companies I believed in. Online investment tools have come quite a long way over the years, but one of the recent fads that the “Web 2.0″ wave of innovation has brought us is the concept of social investing.
Social investing sites such as Covestor.com, Cake Financial and several others have done a great job of bringing all types of (typically) non-professional investors together. Their sophisticated platforms allow members to enter their brokerage account login credentials (a little scary, but most of us swallow hard and do it anyway out of curiosity) in order for the site to “verify” your trades. Your trading activity is downloaded into the database and the site assigns a percentage of your portfolio each equity occupies. The number of shares (amount of cash you’re playing with) is not published in order to protect your privacy. The idea here is that, because the equities are verified by the site to exist in the member’s brokerage account, full-disclosure is satisfied and anything that member writes can be judged fairly by the readers. Many of the more active members on these sites keep blogs and write publicly-viewable messages about their rationale behind trades. In fact, when Covestor detects that you’ve made a trade in your brokerage account, they will email you asking for your rationale in the form of a mini blog post on covestor.com.
So, the first thing I did was pick the top 3 or 5 members on Covestor as ranked by their portfolios’ performance. The site has very nice graphs that show members’ performance against other indices like the S&P 500. After following a few of these members I noticed that a lot of their trades were solid (and common) like BUY APPL @ 110 or other fairly safe bets. This made their track records look decent and they typically edged out the market. Other equities they had would typically take up < 10-15% of their portfolio and would be very small-cap companies. These stocks would have a lot of blog posts associated with them and you could see the record of the member buying the stock all the way down a hill, often with comments to the effect of “time to load up, this one is on sale”, etc. Any time there was a pop in the price, you might see something to the affect of “you like that 200% gain today? More where that came from!”. But, the overall performance of the stock since the member initially bought in would typically be abysmal. Often you’ll see other members posing (publicly viewable) questions to the trader to the effect of, “I see you’re taking a bath on XYZ but you keep buying it up … you must have some inside info”, etc. That is often enough to get the degenerate-gambler-day-trader to jump in on the action and wait for that next 200% pop.
The first few of these I encountered made me think, “Well, the guy obviously believes in this stock because Covestor verified his ownership of it”. But, Covestor and others don’t publish how many shares the member owns! This trader could own literally 1 share to begin with and then keep buying 5 or 10 more as the price drops just to back up his public enthusiasm about the “sale”. Then, in another brokerage account not connected to Covestor (and therefore not publicly viewable), he may be making very different trades.
Call it pump-and-dump 2.0. It’s analogous to how the spam kings of yesteryear would pump penny stocks for a week then dump them after enough suckers bought in. I think Covestor and others are great sites with impressive platforms and very innovative features. The first one who figures out how to solve this problem, though, will certainly have the advantage. The only way I can think of off the top of my head would be if the site were to award different “badges” to positions in a trader’s portfolio. One badge could signify that the position is in excess of a certain dollar amount (proportionate to the share price). This would give users that track the trader a little more comfort in knowing that this is less likely to be a pump-and-dump trader.
For many years, new technology and gadgets have often wasted more time than they’ve saved. Only recently have I been mildly satisfied with my latest entanglement of services and devices that I rely on to run daily life. Here is my current run-down.
- Email: I use my own domain(s) for email and Google Apps for Domains has been the best solution yet. I’ve been running it for about 16 months now after using MS Outlook for almost a decade. The free version has 6.5+GB of space and the Premier Edition gives you 25GB for $50/yr. It also allows you to POP3 or IMAP mail in/out of the system. I imported all of my old email so I can use the search feature (it’s Google, the search rocks) to go back over a decade of mail. A lot of people like to keep all their old email (like Mark Cuban, who should definitely check this out). Cost: $0.
- Calendar: Google again. It comes with the Apps for Domains package. I like keeping multiple calendars (work, personal, financial/investment, birthdays) so you can turn them on and off as you need them. I also like the database of calendars Google keeps that you can search through and add to your own. That is the only way I know which sports games on are and when. Also, it finally 2-way auto-syncs with my BlackBerry with the new Google Sync for BlackBerry. Cost: $0.
- Tasks: I still can’t figure out why Google hasn’t made even a primitive task manager part of their online suite that is slowly eroding Outlook’s market share. Until they do, I’ll be a faithful user of RememberTheMilk.com. It lets you create multiple task lists, set due dates, add notes and associate links all very quickly. They are also one of the earliest adopters and best users of Google Gears so the task system works when you’re offline and will sync later when it detects a connection. I use this on multiple machines throughout the day and it does a great job of staying in sync. The only thing they really still need is BlackBerry sync (they have a Pro Version ($25/yr) that syncs with iPhones or Windows mobile devices). Cost: $0.
- Chat: Because I really only chat with people in my organization (which runs Google Apps), I really only need GChat (Google Talk). They have a great BlackBerry client, though, which can tell when you’re not at your PC anymore and will send chat conversations to your BB (which blinks red when there are new IM’s). All your chats are logged and searchable later (unless you tell it to go “off the record”) Works flawlessly. Cost: $0.
- www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk from your BB browser.
- Phones: I still have 2 phones because I haven’t found one yet that is durable enough for all of life’s activities (and I like redundancy).
- Motorola K1M KRZR (Verizon) – horrible UI but very small, durable and cheap/easy to replace if lost.
- BlackBerry 8830 (Verizon) – A great device, though I’d use a Curve if Verizon carried it. And it obviously has a lot of support from the Google Apps.
- Backups: Both desktop and web server backups are very important in my (and most peoples’) business.
- Desktop files: I’ve been an avid user of FolderShare.com for quite a while now and it has always been there for me (it even survived being acquired by Microsoft!) It is a small desktop client that runs in Windows or OSX and monitors directories you tell it to watch for changes to files. When files are created/changed/deleted, they are sent to the other machines in your FolderShare network that are currently online. It does so in a peer-to-peer fashion so your files never touch a Microsoft server. You can also access all of your files via foldershare.com (as long as the client machines are on and connected). This has saved me countless times when I’ve been on the road and needed a file I forgot on my desktop. There is a lot of buzz these days around backing up to “The Cloud”, but I see no reason to move away from FolderShare anytime soon. Running it across my home and work machines has allowed me to stop paying for and bothering with expensive RAID arrays as well. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
- Server files: I also have a leased Linux web server that I host a few non-mission-critical web sites on (like this blog, for instance). Even though it is not mission critical, I’d rather not lose everything when it inevitably dies. I also would rather not pay for expensive RAID gear or managed backup services. For this reason I use a nightly RSYNC via SSH to backup to another Linux web server. This isn’t an extremely process to set up, but if you do the following 2 how-to’s in order, you’ll be set. You’ll need some Linux CLI knowledge but nothing hard-core.
This technology changes and typically improves almost every month – especially the Google offering. I’ll probably end up jumping on the iPhone bandwagon, too, once the next version is released and they start using a real network.
