Month: December 2007

Passing messages between Google Talk and ICQ

Recently Google announced that GTalk users can now communicate with AIM users.  I didn’t mention it here and, in fact, didn’t pay it much attention since I don’t use AOL Instant Messenger.  Why do I suddenly come back to this announcement?  Well, because my memory played a Grand Failure Play on me.  Here is a quote from Wikipedia page about ICQ:

ICQ was developed in 1996 by Mirabilis. The company was founded by four young Israelis: Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir. After AOL bought it, it was managed by Ariel Yarnitsky and Avi Shechter.
America Online acquired Mirabilis on June 8, 1998

This was almost 10 years ago.  ICQ is still popular among a few million users.  AIM is also popular among a few million users.  Isn’t two popular instant messaging protocols just a little bit too much for one company?  Well, it’s not too much, if these two protocols share a lot in common.  Do they?
Yes, they do.  That’s why you can go to your Gmail right now, navigate to Chat section of the Settings, and login into AIM with your ICQ credentials.  It’ll just work.  You’ll get all your contacts from the ICQ server populating buddy list of your GTalk.  You’ll see who is online and who is not.  You’ll be able to send and receive messages to your ICQ contacts from GTalk. And you’ll have the history of your communications saved in your Gmail in exactly the same way as you have it with GTalk.  Wow!

(Note that there this functionality is still very young and there are a few issues here and there, but I’m sure they will be ironed out in the nearest future.  One of the annoyances for now though is encoding problem when receiving ICQ messages in Russian, and possibly some other languages too.)

I’m really glad to see such integration.  I do use Gmail for a lot of communications and contact related work, and having ICQ/AIM integrated with it helps me to keep it all together.  Hopefully, there will be more and better integrations with  other communication tools – Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Twitter…

Downtime, with database error

Apologies to those of you who noticed a brief downtime last night.  My hosting company was moving the database from one IP address to another, and they have warned me about it a few times early on the way.  All I had was to update configuration of the blog, but somehow that slipped through my memory.  Once I noticed the problem, it was trivial to fix.  Everything is back and should be working just fine now.

This blog wasn’t the only one affected – I’m hosting quite a few  web sites, and most of them had the same problem.  As far as I can see, all of them are up now.  Let me know if you notice that something is still broken.

Read it later Firefox extension

Web Worker Daily is being extra helpful recently. Via one of their posts I learned about Read It Later Firefox extension. It’s simple and, as many simple things – genius! It adds two buttons to your Firefox toolbar, which you can use to control your “I don’t have time for it now, but I want to read it later” list. Great idea, much needed tool, and brilliant implementation – that’s what I can say about it. It has all, and just enough of, functionality that I’d expect from such an extension.

Go check it out! There is even a video demonstration on how it can be used. Instant favorite.

19 inch from PrimeTel

No, no, you aren’t getting screwed.  Quite on the contrary!  I got an SMS from PrimeTel today with their special offer.  Here is the text of the message:

Free 19″ LCD TV.  Get 2 of your friends to become PrimeTel subscribers and the 19″ LCD TV is yours.  Call 133. Learn more www.primehome.com/offers

I know that you know that I’m biased towards PrimeTel, being an ex-employee and having a friends over there.  But I still have to say that this is a pretty neat offer.  I saw that 19″ LCD TV (remember that LCD means flat), and I wish I had any friends who aren’t PrimeTel subscribers… I have a much bigger CRT TV, and would swap it any day for a smaller LCD, that I could use as a monitor for my laptop too.

Too bad I’m out of non-PrimeTel friends right now, but you.. you got get the TV!

What is a startup?

There is a lot of talk about startups on the web.   But what exactly is a “startup”?  Different people put different meaning in the word, and sometimes it gets very confusing.  Here is one example I came across recently:

 The reason I get asked this is that I left a perfectly good start up called Preemptive Solutions to come here. When I say “perfectly good” its one that I am a co-founder, is now 10 years old, and was President (which I later became VP as I decided I wanted to live away from the HQ).

Somehow, a 10-year old company didn’t fit my understanding of “startups”.  From a quick definition check at Google I like the one from Oakridge Venture Capital best of all:

 New business venture in its earliest stage of development.

This fits my understanding perfectly.  And with this in mind, I think that most companies grow out (or die out) the “startup” stage in their first year or so.  If the company survives that period, it starts getting some routine in it (procedures, practices, paperwork, traditions, etc).  The culture of the company shapes up.  Most of the “what is good and what is not” issues are ironed out.  Etc.  And then it’s not a startup anymore.

What’s your understanding of startups?  How can you say if a company is a startup or not?