The company name and corporate web pages are somewhat abstract, but it’s clear that there’s something significant going on here from the community forming around their technology platform. Users are free to assemble a collection of applications, called a stack, and publish them for others to make use of, amortizing the cost of their creation and configuration.

In a similar vein is Kimbro Staken’s company JumpBox, which packages single applications as virtual servers. They just raised another round of funding and it looks like they have revamped their website to have that popular three-things-on-the-home-page look. They are focused on solving the problem of getting users from download to running application as quickly as possible, which is a hurdle that users are putting less effort into jumping over. JumpBox gets less attention than they deserve, probably because they’re based out of Pheonix Arizona, where startups are thin on the ground.

Kimbro and I were competitors for a while, back when we were both working on native XML databases, I was working on DB XML and he was working on dbXML. Notice the subtle capitalization difference there!

I emailed the winemaker, Nobilo, and a nice lady there, Jane Bennett, replied:

We worked with our label printers to use this concept on our Nobilo wine labels. Unfortunately, we cannot take claim for inventing the idea. I am glad you liked it though.

I found the label maker, Collotype:

It’s a great idea, but I think they could do with some help with their marketing. “Wine Find ™” is what’s it’s called, with the slightly disturbing sounding tag line of “The silent salesperson”. I couldn’t find any validation or testimonials that it actually works. I wonder if it does…

In March last year I visited London and to start a conversation about ‘UK vs US’ entrepreneurialism, and in a small way I helped pushed along this idea of a trade mission.

Ideas are easy, execution is hard. Congratulations to the team that put this together:
Oli Barrett, Julia French, and Jim and Bron.

Redefining search… with a red animated zebra?

http://www.redzee.com

The result of applying the ‘Cindy Crawford’ test has her homepage at position 11 in the results. Not so good.