Last week I got an email from Allan Mauer, the editor at TechJournal South. He was interested in running a story about my recent entrepreneurship talk. I chatted with Allan on the phone for about 30 minutes and said he wanted to run two stories, one about my talk and the other focused on StatSheet.

The first article ran on Friday and the other was published yesterday. Maybe one or both of the stories will make it to the print edition of the magazine!

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

Included in the award for winning an NCIDEA grant is access to an MBA student from UNC or Duke over the summer. I was fortunate enough to land Marc Zawel.

Marc is not your ordinary intern. He's a Kenan-Flagler student focusing on entrepreneurship, is the 2009 Young Entrepreneur in Residence at NCIDEA, and has solid experience in digital media. 

Marc has already been very helpful in strategizing about StatSheet's future plans, and I'm excited to see how he contributes over the next couple months.

Welcome Marc!

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

A couple weeks ago I was invited to speak at an upcoming Refresh the Triangle meeting. Refresh the Triangle is a local user group for web designers and developers. I've given a bunch of talks on technical topics during my book writing days (when I pumped out 10 books for O'Reilly in the span of 5 years), but I haven't done any entrepreneurship talks yet.

Do I have anything to say given my experience with StatSheet over the last couple of years? Turns out I do. There is a lot of conventional wisdom in the startup world. When I was at MIT taking classes on entrepreneurship, it was clear that there is a certain way you are supposed to run a startup. My experience with StatSheet runs counter to a lot of what I've heard and read about. StatSheet is still a work in progress and so is this presentation (consider it Part I). I'll add more to it as StatSheet evolves.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

Update: Over at Hacker News, malte pointed out that http://stat.us was one of the original domains considered for Twitter: Screenshot

Ugly Details

Back on May 4th, I chronicled the unfortunate situation of Twitter suspending all of the StatTweet accounts because I supposedly violated their terms of service.  Today marks the 2 month anniversary since Twitter suspended the accounts. I've decided to stop trying to get the accounts re-enabled despite their popularity (63,000 followers). Why? In short, because dealing with Twitter Support has been a nightmare...worse than my worst experiences dealing with cable and phone companies (and I've had some bad ones).

We can argue whether I violated their TOS and to what degree, but you'd be hard pressed to condone the way they've treated a developer that was simply trying to create an innovative service on top of Twitter.  From the first day I was very open about my intentions with the accounts and my willingness to change to meet their needs. Typically the kind of reply I'd get back would be a restatement of my TOS violations. I'd reply that there was a misunderstanding and my reasons for it. I'd get a reply back that they were "reviewing my accounts". This went on and on for 2 months! It was always a 1-way communication. This includes an email I got from @ev (Twitter CEO) after my story ran on TechCrunch (he never replied to my subsequent replies). It took me 7 days to create all the accounts and start populating them. Each account is virtually the same...just the team is different.  There is nothing to review!  Yet week after week they said they were "reviewing" my accounts.  And it often took up to 5 days to get a response to my email (if they responded at all).

Then out of the blue they asked for copy of my content licensing agreements (for stats and news).  WTF? They never said they had an issue with the content of my tweets before.  They gave me a fax number. They wanted me to send them a confidential corporate document to some fax machine that who knows who had access to with no promises that this would actually resolve the issue.  It is clear now that much more was going on behind the scenes related to this issue than they were letting on.

Finally, three weeks ago I was told that "SOME" of the accounts would be enabled the next week (ie, two weeks ago).  Guess what?  Didn't happen. I sent an email asking why and got nothing back.  I sent one last email asking for an update. Nothing. Why some and not all? Who knows.

I know everyone is real busy at Twitter. Yada-yada-yada.  At least with the cable/phone company, you can call someone up directly. You may get the run-around, but at least it is a human on the other end you can talk to. With Twitter, you are lucky if one of the support people decide to grace you with a form reply in 5 days.

They turned a 1-day issue (or 1-week at most) into a 2 month ordeal. Even if they didn't want to re-enable the accounts they could have just said so instead of dragging this out and being so unresponsive. All I was looking for was a little open communication.  That's what Twitter is supposed to be about, right?  Twitter corporate culture seems very anti-Twitter to me.

Adversity creates Opportunity

It is all for the best. I've never been one that needs much motivation, but this is the kind of thing that really gets me going. I'm moving full speed ahead with my own solution to the problem StatTweets was trying to solve. Real-time information is all the rage now and I'm going to provide a solution in the sports space. I recently acquired the domain stat.us and it's a perfect name for the service I'm building. I can't wait to share more in the coming weeks. Signup over on stat.us if you want to be informed of future updates.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

About StatSheet.com

Have a suggestion?
Let me know