Archive for October, 2006
October 31st, 2006
As a Jotspot customer I am not at all excited by the portents around Jot’s announcement that they had been acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum and that, for the moment, no new accounts could be created. From Jot’s Home Page
New users:
We’ve closed off new account registrations while we focus on migrating to Google’s systems. If you’d like to be notified when we re-open registration, enter your email address below.
Why when you would probably have the most interest in your service would you not allow me to add any accounts or allow anyone new to signup. Because it’s going to pull a Writely and dissolve indistinguishably into Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I don’t think this is a good reason to add new clients into a GoogleSpot workspace. This is an experiment on Google’s part. Their business model is advertising driven, and private workspaces for confidential work with clients–which is our use case–are not amenable to having a crawler come through to generate context specific advertising. I certainly agree with the three challenges that Jot faced as outlined by Scott McMullan in their developer blog:
- Startups fail all the time — will you be around next year?
- This will be mission critical for us — do you have the manpower to support your service?
- We need fast, reliable, and scalable access — are you up to snuff?
This looks to me like an experiment on Google’s part, and large companies abandon experiments all the time, especially since they haven’t announced an acquisition price. Mission critical doesn’t require Google scale to succeed (in fact a wiki service based on Amazon’s EC3 would be as rock solid, something for some of the remaining 100+ players to consider). Not only that but Amazon’s business model is more conducive to charging me a small amount for good service on a pay as you go basis. There are other grid alternatives as well worth considering,more on that later.
Peter Thoeney, speaking from the Twiki perspective, believes that this is a good thing because it eliminates them as a competitor in the enterprise space:
I believe this is good news for the open source TWiki project because:
- It further boosts the awareness of wikis in the general public; and with this will bring more recognition to TWikis running at the workplace.
- With JotSpot moving to hosted only solution and staying away from software packages and appliances, other enterprise level wikis will get more traffic, such as TWiki, Socialtext and Confluence. I have not seen many large companies that entrust their mission critical wiki data to be hosted by a third party.
I am more sanguine about the possibility for hosted wikis penetrating the enterprise, but I do think it’s good news for Twiki.
Ross Mayfield offers a way to “Get Yourself out of a Spot” We may take him up on it, if only to reduce some of the uncertainty for existing clients. Altassian has also announced a migration path for JotSpot Wiki Server customers (but not folks like me who I think Zoli characterized correctly as preferring to pay rather than have Google analyze all of my shared work product with a client; it would be an interesting exclusion in the non-disclosure agreement: we allow the Google advertising context spider to read everything we work on together).
I will have to browse through the http://www.wikimatrix.org/ and investigate some alternatives. We also use Socialtext and EditMe with existing clients. We also use Webex Office, which now looks like it should add/acquire a wiki (without raising prices).
I am not knocking the execution and delivery of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets (see for example an Oct-17-2006 PC Mag Review) I was an early Writely user (but wouldn’t commit to any customers when they wouldn’t give me a monthly fee I could pay to guarentee service) and we have experimented with Google Spreadsheets and was extremely impressed. It’s the alignment of the Google business model with my business needs that has me the most concerned for this application.
End Note: while researching this I was surprised to learn that the San Jose Mercury was podcasting. They posted a Feb 2006 interview with Joe Kraus to add context to their Nov 1 news story.
October 27th, 2006
I have had the pleasure of meeting Carole Edman at a number of networking events and been impressed with professionalism and expertise. She started consulting in 1986 as Carole Edman & Associates, and has been offering the following services to small and mid-size companies:
- High quality interim, on-call, or part-time Human Resources Management consulting services, to prevent or resolve tough issues in hiring, retaining, and managing employees
- Human Resources training, coaching, and guidance for HR team members, CEO’s, senior and mid-level managers, first-line supervisors, and employees
- Development and implementation of employee handbooks, benefits, compensation, and performance management programs.
Her website has a rich set of resources on HR questions, one question that came up recently that she was very helpful with was how to determine whether a worker should be treated as an independent contractor or an employee. Here are some references to both Federal and CA rules that are with reviewing before you make this decision.
- Federal
- Federal Pub 15 A Who are Employees, in particular
- Form SS-8 (PDF) Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding
- California State
Carole offered the following advice
The FED & CA rules are not the same and many companies (including Microsoft, FedEx, many others) have had to pay huge fines for misclassifying workers as independent contractors (ICs). Audits occur when ICs who should have been employees make a claim for unemployment or state disability or are unhappy that you terminated their services, or just at random. They also occur when the IC has only one client and one 1099 in a year, or gets a W2 and 1099 from the same company in the same tax year. Several small clients of mine have been audited and it is a time-consuming, expensive process, to be avoided if at all possible. The EDD has become very aggressive in auditing for non-compliance, as it is a way for them to bring in $$ with fines and back taxes (payable by the employer, regardless of whether the employee/IC already paid them; they are double collected).
Carole has been very helpful to a number of folks I know. If you are a Silicon Valley startup I would encourage you to keep her HR Manager To Go website on your list of resources for when those thorny employment and human resources issues come up (or if you want to prevent problems consider being pro-active about an employee handbook).
October 26th, 2006
I had lunch with Sylvia Nessan, a veteran of Synopsys, CoWare, and several high tech startups and she made an observation that I thought was worth writing down: the founding team, and CEO in particular, don’t pay enough attention to how much time they waste on administrivia. Hiring an admin or other outside service providers to take care of the four to eight hours a week of work that they really don’t need to do–basic e-mail networking, taxes, finances, office management / operational issues–reduces the number of different balls they have to juggle at once and increases your effectiveness by 25-40% when you take into account that, although it’s an important set of tasks that must be done, the founders don’t have to do it.
October 24th, 2006
I’m late to the party on GoogleGuide, based on who else has written about it, this blog entry was triggered by Nancy Blachman’s upcoming talk, “What Google Can Do For Your Business,” Tuesday, November 21, 2006 7:00 PM, at the IEEE-CNSV meeting at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA.
This looks to be a good talk, but if you can’t make that Nancy has a schedule posted for other upcoming talks. And you can always just consult her Google Guide directly. Two sections I found particularly useful were on adwords and advanced commands. And as the Pandia Post Newsletter observed in January 2004
Take a look at her GoogleGuide web site. There she gives away a lot of web search information for free. Actually, if you print out the printer-friendly version of her site, you end up with a very useful book containing some 114 pages of Google tips and information.
Actually, as of Oct-23-2006, the Google Guide PDF is now 149 pages, so Nancy hasn’t been idle in keeping up with Google’s new features. With her very impressive resume (an MS from Berkeley in Operations Research and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford) she should be working at Google..say on an easy-to-use constantly updated guide to how to use Google for novices and experienced users alike. But she may happier running Variable Symbols and letting her husband work there–since 1999 according to this interview.
If you are a technical consultant in Silicon Valley, the IEEE Consulting Network for Silicon Valley frequently runs useful and informative events and is an organization you should consider joining.
October 23rd, 2006
Here’s a couple of our favorite places to meet clients in silicon valley: Meeting Locations
Do you have favorites?
October 22nd, 2006
Some follow-ups to yesterday’s post on Nusym
- Why de-cloak? Don’t most stealth startups emerge? Yes, at least according to Google and EET. But a good Star Trek allusion (or is it Harry Potter?) always enriches a blog post and the Duke “invisibility cloak” demonstration announcement had recently gone out over the mojo wire, so it was fresh in my mind. Technically I think you have a cloak of invisibility and boots of stealth, so a stealthy start would de-boot (debut?).
- you might wonder how they could have been “on my radar” if they were in stealth, but think Jorn.
- Quiet mode (stealth mode): I am normally in favor of this, but if you are advertising jobs for folks and identifying yourself as associated with the startup in public forums it can’t hurt to to at least talk about the problem you plan to solve. Other opinions on “stealth mode startups”
- Other “stealth mode startups” that have emerged in 20006 according to EE Times:
- Gear6 (FYI their news page alllows you to enter your e-mail to be notified of new developments).
- Takumi Technology (they “emerge from stealth” here).
- Micro Magic (reborn in stealth after being acquired by Juniper; their CEO believes ”What separates Micro Magic from other EDA companies is that we are actually designers.”)
- The Company page contains a paragraph that looks to be more appropriate for B round solicitation than a customer oriented briefing:
- The company’s technology is based upon ground-breaking research done at Stanford combined with 60+ years of design and verification experience of the founders. The company has attracted funding from individuals that are legends in the EDA industry and Silicon Valley and from venture capital firms prominent in the EDA industry. We have assembled a team of outstanding technologists and a seasoned management team.
- You have to be careful that you don’t base your customer briefing on your funding pitch and instead work from scratch on customer pain points. I guess the counter-argument is that it establishes their financial viability.
- I got an e-mail from Howard Landman (he of the Law and Lemma) that pointed out Patterson’s Precept was coined by “David Patterson, co-author of Patterson and Hennessy computer architecture book, professor at U.C. Berkeley.” I have amended the original post to reflect this.
Details as they frolic in plain view but beyond understanding, like the invisible ineffable cues that a school of fish use to synchronize their movements.
October 21st, 2006
Nusym has been on my radar screen ever since Venk Shukla came to a SIPA dinner on April 26, 2006 and joined their advisory board. Venk has been associated with a number of successful EDA companies (e.g. Cadence, Ambit, Magma Design, and Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE)), a charter member of TiE, and definitely someone to watch. So I did…for a long time their home page read like this:
“Nusym is focused on functional verification area of Electronic Design Automation. The company is a well-funded Bay Area startup with seasoned EDA management and luminary technical advisory board. The company was founded by hardware design engineers with decades of experience in chip-design. Our technology automates much of the tedious functional verification tasks and enables design verification team’s precious resources to focus on what is important to verify. User will get much higher verification coverage in less time with less efforts.”
I thought it a little odd that they would hide their light under a bushel basket, so to speak, since Venk had included the fact that he was CEO in his bio for SIPA, but so be it. Sometime yesterday that changed, so when I checked the Home page this morning (Oct 20-2006) it read:
The most significant breakthrough in functional verification in a decade
Nusym Technology is an EDA software company that provides order of magnitude improvement in verification productivity while leveraging existing infrastructure of test bench environment and checkers.
We are currently operating in “quiet” mode engaging with a very limited number of potential customers. We encourage you to visit this site often for updates on our progress.
Observations
- I am surprised that they don’t talk about either Venk or Chris Wilson who lists his affiliation with Nusym on the International Conference on Computer Design’s (ICCD) verification and test track co-chair page.
- And why does Jayant Nagda languish in the comments in the HTML?
- An HTML title tag of “Webpage” means that the page bookmarks as “Webpage”. Probably better as “Nusym Technology.”
- They might want to ask for my e-mail address to notify me when things are updated (or offer an RSS feed).
- What happened a decade ago that they are using for a benchmark? Cycle Based Simulation?
- Normally the “quiet period” refers to a pre-IPO state, and “stealth mode” is used for companies that haven’t announced.
- Where is their blog? Their website has no dial tone.
From the Company page
Nusym is an EDA company developing software solutions that will revolutionize functional verification – just as introduction of logic synthesis in the late 80’s revolutionized logic design.
The company’s technology is based upon ground-breaking research done at Stanford combined with 60+ years of design and verification experience of the founders. The company has attracted funding from individuals that are legends in the EDA industry and Silicon Valley and from venture capital firms prominent in the EDA industry. We have assembled a team of outstanding technologists and a seasoned management team.
The company is founded on the following set of core beliefs:
- Simulation continues to be the most potent bug finding tool and will remain so for a long period of time.
- Tools that require a lot of effort to learn and need a lot of work upfront to get any benefit from them will never become the tools of choice for hardware designers and verification engineers.
- Productivity begets quality. If the tools enable the engineers to become dramatically more productive, quality of the design will improve. Tools that focus on improving the quality without regard to improving the productivity of the engineer are not likely to be adopted.
Stay tuned for the most significant breakthrough in functional verification in a decade!
Observations
- Logic synthesis in the late 80’s Maybe they really meant to benchmark themselves against the biggest jump in design productivity in 20 years, Synopsys Design Compiler.
- The company has attracted funding Remembering to Google, I learned that the Woodside fund (OK they don’t list it directly, but they point to this Aug/2005 Economic Times article and Ashish Gupta’s bio does), Draper Richards, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (again not in their portfolio list but found in their 20 Year Anniversary Book) all had invested. Also some of the Silicom Ventures folks.
- Simulation continues to be the most potent bug finding tool I think design reviews are probably more potent. But this is probably meant to argue against formal techniques.
- Tools that require a lot of effort to learn There are very few easy to learn breakthroughs for any engineer wrestling with Moore’s Law. I remember taking an experienced logic designer to a demo of Design Compiler in 1998, before Synopsys figured out “Gates to Gates” (read in your current design as gates and output another gate level netlist that was smaller or faster) and was still trying to sell folks on top down design. The demo concluded and he told me “the future is not now.”
- Productivity begets quality. Automated checking begets quality.
- Patterson’s Precept: Inexperience coupled with ambition leads to very large designs.
- Landman’s Law: In any sufficiently large design, if there is a type of error for which you have no automatic way of checking, then the final design will contain at least one error of that type.
- Landman’s Lemma: All designs are now sufficiently large. See Patterson’s Precept.
- I wonder if Nusym had a graphical logo instead of a text treatment ( nu · sym ) they might be listed in more VC portfolio pages. I have come around on this one from a few years ago: spend the money on a simple logo.
- Why not list all of the engineering and management talent associated with the team.
From the Products page
If you are a potential customer looking for more information, please send an email to info@nusym.com
Observations:
- It’s odd they list a phone number on the Contact page but just email here. Some description of at least the problem, with some specific symptoms, that they can help address and an e-mail sign-up box. Don’t know, this feels too minimal.
From the Careers page
If you wish to participate in the most exciting EDA opportunity in a decade, please send your resume to jobs@nusym.com We are looking for bright, highly motivated and performance oriented engineers. Nuysm has multiple openings for the following positions.
Application Engineer @ Los Gatos, California
Job Responsibilities:
- Customer Deployment: Demonstrate value of verification automation tools to customers. Develop and deliver product and verification methodology trainings to customer’s design teams
- Pre-sale Customer support: Provide technical guidance to customers to effectively and successfully use verification EDA tools. Responsible to develop and help verification environments at various customers.
Job Requirements:
- BS with 5 years of relevant experience, MS with 3+ years of relevant experience experience in functional verification.
- Functional verification experience in design verification or consulting environment working with latest EDA tools.
- Good understanding of verification methodologies including usage of coverage driven test bench automation techniques or formal methods.
- Ability to understand functional specifications of network protocols and processor buses to connect with design and verification team.
- Good communication, presentation and customer interaction skills
Sr. Software Engineer @ Bangalore India
We are looking for bright, highly motivated and performance oriented software developers who understand computer language based compilers and hardware description language simulators.
Job Responsibilities:
- Person in this position will be responsible for design and development of tools based on Hardware Description Languages like Verilog, Vera and SystemVerilog.
- Responsible for designing, developing and debugging software programs for the EDA verification technology. This involves working with Hardware Description Languages (Verilog, SystemVerilog, VERA) in Front end compilers, Simulation kernel, Optimizations, Debug, Constraint Solvers and Test bench automation techniques.
- The technology involves understanding of compilers and simulation techniques to implement innovative verification automation tools.
- This challenging and rewarding opportunity involves working with the top talent in the industry.
Job Requirements:
- 3+ Years of EDA software development experience in simulation or test bench tools.
Application Engineer @ Bangalore India
Job Responsibilities:
- Customer Deployment: Demonstrate value of verification automation tools to customers.
- Pre-sale Customer support: Provide technical guidance to customers to effectively and successfully use verification EDA tools. Responsible to develop and help verification environments at various customers.
Job Requirements:
- BE or B.Tech. with 3+ years of relevant experience in functional verification.
- Functional verification experience in design verification or consulting environment working with latest EDA tools.
- Good understanding of verification methodologies including usage of coverage driven test bench automation techniques.
- Ability to understand functional specifications of network protocols and processor buses to connect with design and verification team.
- Good communication, presentation and customer interaction skills
Observations
- experience experience I caught this in the “Application Engineer @ Los Gatos, California” description when I ran my blog post through a spell checker. Something you should probably do for your own job postings (will they be as tolerant of errors in inbound resumes).
- Only the senior software engineers in Bangalore get the opportunity of “working with the top talent in the industry” ?
- Hiring an application engineer in Bangalore: further evidence of the tidal shift of design work offshore. I wonder what fraction of verification work is now offshore? One challenge Nusym may face in increasing the productivity of engineers by a factor of 10 (just for the sake of argument) is that, according to Frost & Sullivan, most Indian design houses compete on cost. That means you have many fewer hours to sell unless you can re-configure your business model to promise (and sell) a result.
- VERA is about ten years old. I wonder if that’s the benchmark. And what is Daniel Chapiro up to these days?
From the Contact Page
Nusym Technology, Inc.
101 Albright Way, Suite E
Los Gatos, CA 95032
Phone: 408-583-0980
Fax: 408-583-0985
Observations
- They should consider a skype address, given that 2 of the three open positions are in Bangalore (or perhaps even their Bangalore facility coordinates).
Hopefully you will find some useful advice in this entry if you are working on the first or second web site for your startup.
October 20th, 2006
Diane Greene, VMware’s CEO, gave a fireside chat at TiE Silicon Valley tonight. It was outstanding. I had never heard her speak before. I was encouraged by two folks who knew her and she did not disappoint. She was the founding CEO of VMware, which was acquired by EMC in January 2004, and still runs it as a wholly owned subsidiary.
I got a real sense of her as a genuinely caring leader (what Jim Collins would call a “Level 5 Leader” ). She cited at various points in her talk, or in response to questions, several key lessons learned from the last few years at the helm of VMware:
- Users evangelize users, at several key points in its history, VMware has seen it’s growth hit a new take-off point because its users cared enough to make it happen. 6,000 users have signed up for VMworld.
- Open communication keeps everyone on the same page (and moving forward): every Wednesday the company would buy lunch and have an open communication forum to cover recent events, plans, and allow employees to air concerns and issues.
- If your technology isn’t evolving fast enough, give it away. In particular when you are in a
deathmatch market with Microsoft, neutralize one of their common tactics of giving away technology by giving away your products that are not moving fast enough.
- Continually invest in high quality IT infrastructure: it’s the basis for communication, coordination, and collaboration in any high technology firm.
- Server Virtualization (consolidating many applications onto one server by leveraging virtualization technology) is more about cutting power consumption and saving floorspace than saving hardware cost. Power has become the single largest component of the total cost of ownership of hardware.
Asked a question about “what was your blackest day, and how did your prevail” she answered that there had been two: when Microsoft acquired Connectix, many in the company assumed that they were approaching their Netscape Moment and would soon transition from high growth promising startup to roadkill (she never believed that this would happen); when VMware was acquired by EMC (she convinced EMC management that they would make them more money as an independent subsidiary).
Oddly Netscape Moment can refer to either the IPO (a good thing) or Microsoft launching IE for free. Diane’s meaning was more at “This is their Netscape Moment, when it becomes clear they are not really in the vanguard for the next wave.”
Nov 5 follow-up: the VMTM Blog (”Veni Vidi Virtualizavi”) picked up my summary of Diane’s key points to entice VMworld attendees into attending her Tue Nov 7 keynote.
October 19th, 2006
From the Call for Papers for the WACI track
Wild and Crazy Ideas (WACI) at DAC 2007
Submit a paper to the new WACI track at DAC and demonstrate your long-term vision! The WACI track will feature novel (and even unproven) technical ideas that create a buzz and get people talking. The aim of WACI is to promote revolutionary and way-out ideas that inspire and generate discussion among conference attendees.
a quick perusal of the submission form shows the following areas of interest:
- System-Level Design and Co-Design
- System-Level Communication and Networks on Chip
- Embedded HW Design and Applications
- Embedded SW Tools and Design
- Power Analysis and Low-Power Design
- Verification
- High-Level Synthesis
- Beyond Die-Integration and Package Design
- Logic Synthesis and Circuit Optimization
- Circuit Simulation and Interconnect Analysis
- Timing Analysis and Design for Manufacturability
- Physical Design and Manufacturability
- Signal Integrity and Design Reliability
- Analog/Mixed-Signal and RF
- FPGA Design Tools and Applications
- Testing
- New or Emerging or Specialized Design Technologies
- Automotive Electronics
In fact, “Automative Electronics” is a special theme of the show. Proof that a near death experience, in this case for the automobile industry in the US, can re-awaken a desire for innovation, or at least lower internal barriers against risk taking. Judging from his rather wacky website, the WACI track must be the brainchild of Sachin Sapatnekar, 2007 DAC technical program co-chair, who is quoted in announcing it:
“The DAC community is instrumental in enabling the development of all of the latest innovations in electronics and bringing the latest ideas to reality, enhancing all aspects of life. We are excited to provide a forum for the truly revolutionary and controversial ideas at DAC 2007 with this new WACI track.”
The submission deadline for regular papers and WACI submissions is Monday, November 20, at 5 p.m. MST. This looks like a good opportunity to submit some innovative ideas and trigger some fruitful discussions in San Diego next June.
October 18th, 2006
“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo
“The future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson
“This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One–a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.”
Thomas Carlyle
“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world which no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer
“Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There’s this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive. We’re especially drawn to the power. Many of the images of technology are about making us more powerful, extending what we can do. Unfortunately, 95 percent of this is hype, because I think we’re powerful without it.”
Laurie Anderson
“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend.
Do not wait for the last judgment.
It takes place every day.”
Albert Camus
“Master plans have two additional unhealthy characteristics.
To begin with, the existence of a master plan alienates the users… After all, the very existence of a master plan means, by definition, that the members of the community can have little impact on the future shape of their community, because most of the important decisions have already been made. In a sense, under a master plan people are living with a frozen future, able to affect only relatively trivial details. When people lose the sense of responsibility for the environment they live in, and realize that they are merely cogs in someone else’s machine, how can they feel any sense of identification with the community, or any sense of purpose there?”
Christopher Alexander (from The Oregon Experiment)
“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
John Lennon
“For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years won’t change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.”
Larry Niven, “Flash Crowd“
“The key journalist of the future must be able to relate today’s event to yesterday’s fact in a way that helps indicate tomorrow’s meaning.”
Edward Barrett, founder Columbia Journalism Review
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas.
If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
Howard Aiken (1900-1973) American mathematician
“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power;
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small;
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs;
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
Charles Beard (1874-1948) American historian
Summary of human history, in reply to George S. Counts
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.”
Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) English engineer and inventor
An Autobiography, ch. 6 (on the development of the cane press)
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance
–it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914) American historian, educator, writer
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
Peter F. Drucker
“What is life’s heaviest burden?” asked the child.
“To have nothing to carry,” answered the old man.
Anonymous (source unknown)
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