From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Mon Oct 02 2000 - 22:28:25 PDT
These are old bits for some of you guys, but I've been getting enough requests of
the form "so what's the deal -w- Clickfeed" that I thought I'd just dump to the
list.
Clickfeed is pretty much done, poke a FoRK in it.
Clickfeed as such is at this point a hobby and not a business. We pretty much
missed the window on fundability, with Screaming making great progress and having
closed funding before the April crunch. (Anyone wanting more detail on VC politics
mail me offline; the net is that for the first time ever I was able to go out with
a solid B2B bizplan backed by real metrics and was unable to close funding because
of the April hit. This despite having been able, in the past, to get such wacky
things funded as wireless / handheld web connectivity in '94 and buddy lists without
realistic business model in '95-'96.)
The site's up, will stay up indefinitely, but we're looking for a home for the
tech. Anybody wanna buy a site and some near-rocket science? ;-) We've got some
cool bits: extensible scraper / bot architecture, N-way content switch for
RSS/RDF/XML/HTML/text, inbound and outbound; indexing (some, not really what I want
yet,) a "learning" classfication mechanism, blogging, a push / pull "reactive" event
architecture, publish / subscribe mechanism, and lots of other cool stuff either
deployed or sitting waiting for test that will never happen at this point.
The team has transitioned to consulting mode entirely; we're hired guns at this
point, working with several of my advisory clients and other clients on swat-team
work ranging from biz and pitch planning to analysis, design, and implementation.
I've been sucked into a lot of the latter, which yields to the following anecdote...
I've mostly been a spec writer / bplan writer / dog-n-pony pitchman and general
software exec for the last several years. This last three weeks I logged over 240
hours in the bowels of a coding project for one client; I actually ended up writing
an entire OBEX protocol implementation, solo, from scratch, over night one night
last week. So as you can imagine, my brain is scrambled eggs at this point. ;-)
Hand assembling protocol packets in hex bytes, no thanks. ;-) I bitch, but it was
actually kinda fun. Nice to know the chops still work. The most technical thing
I'd *written* prior to that in a coupla years, aside from toy code for myself, was
probably a detailed technical specification. UML baby, yeah! ;-)
Anyway, anyone with any interest in the Clickfeed site, tech, or the current team on
either a join-forces or consulting basis, for technical / tactical or strategic
business development / planning work, drop me a line.
jb
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