Just a little Cooqy

eBay Sellers have unexpectedly had the rug pulled out from under them by Slide last week, who quietly axed their eBay support.

According to this eBay seller who was using Slide to advertise inventory, Slide “doesn’t have the resources to maintain the eBay tool as a high quality product.” (This particular seller has made the switch to Cooqy’s free Showcase widget.) All links and mentions about eBay have been removed from Slide.com and their blog. What happened?

Slide was founded by Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, and has raised about $20MM in three rounds of funding. This is a silly amount of funding for a simple Flash widget that just scrolls photos. So are we to believe that the current round of funding on Nov 14 isn’t enough to maintain an eBay RSS feed reader?

Slide began life as a multimedia hobby of Levchin’s. In the beginning, Slide just ran on the desktop and didn’t have any web page widgets. After accepting some “buddy funding”, some sort of revenue had to be found. Retooling their widget to integrate with eBay was probably a no-brainer, givin Levchin’s past experience selling a company to eBay.

As an eBay shopping tool, Slide wasn’t very useful and clearly showed its roots as a simple non-commercial multimedia showcase. You couldn’t quickly view the seller’s inventory, for one thing. Another problem was that MySpace’s recent changes made it impossible to click on inventory within Slide and be taken to the item page on eBay. (Cooqy currently has the only known eBay seller widgets that provide this ability on MySpace.)

This is probably the case of a company recognizing that its core competency wasn’t in catering to eBay sellers.

Another company who recently faced a similar issue and outcome is Seattle-based Mpire. Mpire discontinued all their listing tools for eBay sellers before Thanksgiving, deciding instead to focus on providing shoppers with search tools and analytics. Mpire is only a year and a half old, backed by $5.5MM in funding.

Mpire emulates functionality that I originally built into my first eBay shopping tool called AuctionVision in 2003. The difference is that AuctionVision did a much better job of calculating what I called “Fair Market Prices”, because AuctionVision was focused solely on eBay, while Mpire is trying to make aggregated “average price” calculations across many shopping sites.

While I love the company’s name (but now the name doesn’t make sense as a buyers tool…) and share in their vision of how shopping can be made better via analytics, I’m not a fan of Mpire’s AJAX technology driving their website, nor of the accuracy (or lack thereof) of their calculated price averages.

Mpire’s search engine at their website is a mixed bag. It many respects, it is how Cooqy would look implemented with AJAX. I was frustrated trying to shop for a particular item. I entered “Ferrari F430″, hoping to have an easy way to view the real cars at auction. Instead, I received a bunch of toy cars and no obvious way to navigate to the real ones. [Note: This would only take three clicks in Cooqy. Even though Cooqy is better than most, shopping for particular items on the Internet is generally unpleasant and frustrating…I intend to discuss this more in the future, as well as experiment with solutions to this problem.] They also have some outright mistakes in choosing UI controls, like the slider to adjust the min/max price.

Although Mpire has a browser plug-in to assist shoppers while browsing the web, they don’t have a widget strategy to allow shoppers to use their search engine from beyond their website. This will limit their growth.

Mpire is the type of service who has some of the right ideas with regards to improving Internet shopping, but fell down with their implementation. A major reason I started Cooqy is because in my view, nobody has really “nailed” Internet shopping yet. Internet shopping should be a fun and powerful experience, with so much information available to help make informed shopping decisions. The trick is how to tame the technology to make the experience pleasant and fun, while at the same time providing pertinent information in a manner that is accurate and digestible.

With 2007 just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to peer ahead and see what the new year may have in store for the Internet. To make it even more fun, I will express each prediction as a quatrain, too.

In no particular order, here are my five predictions for the Internet in 2007:

Prediction #1: Internet Startups will flourish

As good as 2006 may have been, I think that Web 2.0 is a long-term and sustainable build-out phase of the Internet (see my post about this below). The recent YouTube acquisition will be seen in historical perspective as the start of a new wave of M&A activity.

Internet startups will be smaller and leaner, but the M&A valuations will grow steeper. As a result, people will wonder “how did those two guys sell their startup for that much money so fast?”. A few magazine covers will have some of these guys grinning like Cheshire cats.

Instead of more MySpace or YouTube clones, watch for interesting ideas implemented as widgets.

Quatrain #1:

The year 2007, seventh month,
From the other valley will come a great King of none:
The world too late will not be without debates,
Of him who will cause all his followers to weep

Prediction #2: E-commerce 2.0 will start getting traction

Social websites and now video have had their time in the Web 2.0 sun. E-commerce hasn’t yet gotten any of this attention, primarily because no new innovations have been widely applied to E-commerce.

Rich Internet Apps and widgets, like those Cooqy provides for eBay, will start to be seen as necessary components for E-commerce companies.

Quatrain #2:

Seven and two thousand, born on the third of the ninth,
They will make an entry between ropes of thorns:
The hungry masses ache,
For the hidden nectar that eludes none

Prediction #3: Goodbye, Meg

After failing to monetize both the China market and the Skype acquisition, Meg Whitman determines that eBay’s best days are behind and decides to leave while “on top”.

She may decide to leave after orchestrating a merger deal, as a way of providing a graceful exit.

Quatrain #3:

Two suitors of the powerful Queen emerge,
Across two worlds they do tremble in bitter angst:
Prey for one that wolves hasten the end,
For the victor’s fate shall be worse

Prediction #4: Rich Internet Applications begin to go mainstream, but as widgets

Rich Internet Applications become fashionable, but in a widget format. OpenLaszlo and Macromedia’s forthcoming Apollo platform gain momentum as the development tools of choice for constructing RIAs.
Look for fancy video editing RIAs to support customizing YouTube videos. Also watch for RIA’s powering more and more E-commerce.

Finally, I predict that enterprises will start experimenting with RIA technology to power business applications, primarily via AJAX.

Quatrain #4:

The illegitimate girl, alone through a window does stare,
Across bloodied fields strewn with brothers from afar:
The Great Battle scars flesh from bone, sight and smell,
With unhappy reluctance are treasures divided

Prediction #5: MySpace gets greedy

MySpace decides to block all 3rd-party widgets, replacing them with their own home-grown versions. Users complain, but MySpace holds firm. As a result, users look to other social websites where they can freely express themselves.

Quatrain #5:

The southern Duke violates the western King,
He will impose for the treason committed:
Immature ones and sycophants rue their wisdom,
Never were their supporters so wronged

Disruptive technologies experience a predictable pattern of an initial frothy boom, followed by a hard crash, then a long, gradual, sustained period of build-out. A good article discussing this pattern as it has related to historically disruptive innovations can be found here.

The “E-commerce 2.0″ moniker may be a bit long in the tooth, but it represents the current build-out phase of Internet commerce. There won’t be a “Web 3.0″, or “E-commerce 3.0″. E-commerce 2.0 will be a sustained period of improving Internet Shopping for shoppers and sellers alike.

The build-out phase for E-commerce will be characterized by:

1. Enhancing the shopping experience with Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
2. Extending commerce to more touch-points on the web via widgets
3. Leveraging the power of social networks
4. Improving the ability for shoppers to find what they want

Online shopping today is still mainly dominated by the remnants of the Web 1.0 boom. HTML was forced to dance and sing to the tune of “application technology”, which was never its original intention. Still, to the credit of the engineers they were able to get enough application functionality teetering on top of HTML to be acceptable for consumers to place orders. Most e-commerce websites today are still nothing more than static electronic catalogs…an online version of the old Sears catalog received in the mail.

Online shopping is ripe for the innovation that is just starting to occur in the E-commerce 2.0 build-out phase.

RIA technology was heaven-sent for online shopping. Shopping is a complex activity that uses all the senses mixed with unpredictable logic and emotion. RIA’s can provide a dynamic, interactive environment to engage consumers in what should be made to be a fun activity. I’ll explore what makes for good RIA designs for online shopping in a future post.

E-commerce 2.0 stores will stop being chained to their single dot-com domain point of presence. Online stores will begin providing customers with widgets so they can shop the store from wherever they want, like widgetized start pages provided by Netvibes, Protopage, and Pageflakes. For stores with Affiliate networks, they will also create widgets to advertise inventory throughout the web. An Affiliate with a blog about car audio systems can place the widget on his/her blog to drive customers to the store, while taking commissions for driving traffic.

Social networks like MySpace are ripe targets for online stores to find customers. Widgets will be used to enhance their presence within these social networks, funneling traffic to their store. MySpace already has many eBay sellers setting up social networks among those people who enjoy collecting, vintage clothing, etc. You can view some of these eBay sellers via Cooqy’s MySpace friend list.

Finding items of interest on the Internet is still frustrating. RIA-powered E-commerce 2.0 stores will experiment with new ways of shopping on the Internet. Etsy has a fascinating way to shop for handmade items by color, for example. Expect to see more and more innovations powered by RIA’s to help shoppers shop more effectively, above and beyond the familiar guided navigation provided by Endeca that is built into many popular e-commerce websites today.

Converting mailed paper catalogs into static electronic form at a single dot-com domain was the result of the Web 1.0 boom. The E-commerce 2.0 build-out phase will see Internet shopping transition into a more dynamic and social activity that occurs at many more touch points on the web, thanks to RIA’s and widgets.

The Web 1.0 dot-com boom of the 90’s saw many smart programmers and engineers making other people very rich. Sure, developers frequently had stock options as a part of their compensation packages, but the real money was made at the top by forked-tongued business people who frequently never knew how to operate a computer, let alone actually *use* the product their company developed.

With the Web 2.0 boom we are seeing much smaller companies taking much less VC money, if any at all, because all the technology needed to launch a Web 2.0 business is either free (software) or magnitudes cheaper than in the ’90s (hardware).

An even more important factor is that the software technology has become far more powerful and efficient, with freely available libraries providing all the needed low-level infrastructure found within Internet applications. It is possible today to simply snap together free prefabricated infrastructure components and begin building the value-added product functionality immediately. Contrast this with Web 1.0, where it was necessary to have teams of people building the application tiers. Time and money were invested (wasted?) in creating software security mechanisms, object persistence layers, logging, etc.

The turn-key software technology powering Web 2.0 is making it possible for smaller and smaller teams of people to implement and operate a service. Very soon, grid computing services like Amazon’s EC2 (currently in Beta) will make the hardware side of the equation equally commoditized. As with software, there are layers of “grunge” in hardware that are necessary evils…grid computing services provide an abstracted walled garden to software developers, hiding the grunge from view and allowing focus to remain on the value-add service being constructed.

Just as we have mom-and-pop restaurants at your local strip mall, I believe we will start having more and more mom-and-pop Internet companies. The difference will be that your average ma-and-pa bricks-and-mortar business will be unlikely to generate the income possible with a worldwide Internet service.

Marcus Frind of PlentyOfFish.com is an extreme example of how successful a one-man band can be on the Internet. Note the check for over $900K from Google for two months of AdSense revenue! Marcus is generating $10,000 per day, yet only has about $15,000 in monthly expenses for hosting the service, with zero employees to pay. So, out of $300K in monthly revenue, $285K is profit.

Marcus built and grew his website by himself over the course of a few years, and is now taking on the largest online dating companies in the world with his free service. Similar to Craigslist, Marcus is blazing a new trail that will doom existing industries. This makes Marcus my new, favorite superhero. Go Marcus, go!

There is something very satisfying when smart technologists make themselves rich, rather than being milked by others. The best news is that there is plenty of room on the Internet for new wealth to be created. Indeed, today only 1/6 of the world has Internet access. The Internet is a level playing field without boundaries that welcomes all players without discrimination (well, at least if you reside in a country that supports individual freedoms).

Google’s AdSense, eBay’s Affiliate program, and other similar payment platforms make creating free services like PlentyOfFish and Cooqy not only possible, but possibly very lucrative. Marcus proves the results within reach of a one-man band technology act. I predict that more and more examples of Marcus’ singlehanded success will be replicated.

My philosophy with Cooqy has always been to deliver functionality as quickly as possible. This usually means that software updates are streamed into production throughout the day, even as users are on the system. OpenLaszlo has the ability to compile code changes on the fly, which makes production software updates a snap. At times, I have even had to turn on the OpenLaszlo debugger in production to isolate issues hand-in-hand with end users. If needed, Cooqy has a built-in system alert message system that delivers messages from the sys admin to end users in near real time, via a popup message that end users receive in Cooqy. This is used to notify online users that a system [Tomcat] reboot is imminent, which are needed to activate servlet changes.

The race to deliver meaningful functionality has resulted in relatively few compromises. Usually I circle around and fix earlier shortcuts within a few days/weeks. Yet one in particular lingers to this day: Cooqy’s main website.

Cooqy’s main website is currently an OpenLaszlo-generated Flash app, but it has no business being so. Nobody in their right mind (quite correctly) uses Flash for an entire website. Although visitors with a broadband connection are unlikely to notice or care, visitors with dial-up are likely to bounce right off the main website and never bother to try Cooqy. There is a loading progress bar w/ text that describes the benefits of Cooqy to dial-up users, but even with that I expect that many don’t bother to wait for the main website to load.

Dial-up users are an important target market for Cooqy, b/c they can surf eBay auctions up to 10x faster with Cooqy as compared to eBay’s website. Yet I’ve created a roadblock to them with the Flash main website.

Have I lost my mind? Maybe, but not entirely.

The main website is only 250 lines of OpenLaszlo code, written in a couple of hours. At the time, this saved me days and days of work designing a typical HTML website, without having to worry about cross-browser compatibility issues. I plead guilty to programmer laziness in this case.

My strategy thus far has been to wait for the OpenLaszlo Legals release that would magically allow me to generate a DHTML runtime for the website from essentially the same code. (It remains to be seen how modem-friendly the generated DHTML runtime will be, though.) I was hoping that by this time Legals would be far enough along, but alas it looks like I won’t be able to try the conversion until next spring.

In the meantime, Cooqy is only being marketed via bloggers, word-of-mouth, and PR that generally targets techno-geeks…meaning that at the current time I expect most of Cooqy’s visitors are using broadband, probably from work. This is seemingly confirmed b/c Cooqy’s traffic drops off on weekends.

I will post more later about the importance of dial-up users, especially as it relates to Web 2.0 companies in general.

While promoting Cooqy to some bloggers in late June, I by chance ran into Hooman Radfar. He inquired what my “widget strategy” was.

Truth be told, turning Cooqy into a widget was not something I would have thought about on my own. Up until then I was focused on creating a killer Rich Internet App that supplemented the eBay shopping experience with a better UI, better performance, and better features than available at eBay’s aging website.

Up until this point, I has always been rather uncomfortable that OpenLaszlo’s generated runtime was Flash. I originally selected OpenLaszlo because of the promise of generating a different runtime (DHTML is forthcoming soon). But Flash turns out to be ideal as a widget platform. After some quick thinking, it was obvious that this should be the direction to take Cooqy.

Like the other development efforts on Cooqy using OpenLaszlo, converting Cooqy from a full-page RIA into a widget form factor only took about a day. The main challenge was some redesign of the UI to look acceptable in a small screen space. This was accomplished by judicious use of OpenLaszlo’s constraint mechanism. Today, you can start the main Cooqy RIA and shrink the browser window size to watch how the screen elements reposition themselves dynamically as the available real estate changes.

The “myCooqy” search engine widget, as I call it, was functional as a widget, but had a rather bloated download size. With Yahoo! mapping, the download was 380KB. A short-term workaround was to create a myCooqy Lite version that did not include mapping, resulting in a download size of 280KB. In October, I took a few days to work hard on minimizing the download footprint. By making use of OpenLaszlo’s dynamic library import mechanism, I was able to successfully reduce the footprint of myCooqy to less than 240KB. I was hoping to get it closer to 200KB, but alas it was not to be. An additional benefit was that the separate myCooqy Lite version was no longer needed.

By August, I saw that Cooqy’s growth was not ramping up as much as I had hoped. I knew that I needed something that could trigger viral adoption. I quickly came up with the idea to create widgets for eBay sellers, thinking that they would not only funnel traffic to Cooqy, but also be a new revenue stream.

The Seller Showcase widget was the first to be created, again in something like a day or two. I was determined to keep the download footprint as low as possible, so I started with a clean slate of code and borrowed from Cooqy’s code base as needed. The result is a widget of about 100KB, which was my target size.

The Seller Storefront widget was conceived to be a widget-ized version of eBay Stores, with full search functionality throughout the seller’s inventory. As such, I decided to use Cooqy’s codebase for the Seller Storefront. As it turns out, the exact same code runs both Cooqy and the Seller Storefront. Flashvars in the widget’s EMBED statement control the overloaded functionality, with a minimal increase in overall download footprint. Thanks to using the same code as Cooqy, the Storefront widget was also created in something like a day or two.

No sooner than the widgets were built, I realized that a mechanism was needed to configure the widgets for end users. At first, simply placing text instructions in Cooqy’s Forum had to suffice. I searched around for some prefabricated widget services, finally coming across Widgetbox. Widgetbox was exactly what I was looking for! They provided meta-data driven configuration options for all the widget settings. Cooqy was even submitted to their Developer’s Contest, and was a winning finalist!

As good as Widgetbox was for configuring Cooqy’s widgets, I was never quite satisfied. In particular, at the time Widgetbox didn’t have color pickers or MySpace support. I submitted a request for the functionality; Widgetbox responded they would add it “soon”. Well, after a few days of waiting I decided to build Cooqy’s Widget Wizard. Guess how long it took? Yes, about a day. [Widgetbox finally added the requested functionality weeks later…]

The Widget Wizard is the “cherry on top”, being the last new subsystem built for Cooqy to this point in time.

After Cooqy was submitted for the eBay Developer Challenge ‘06, I did minor tweaking in February, primarily building some of the extended search functionality that previously existed in AuctionVision. Cooqy’s design was done ad-hoc, so it was very, very rough at this point in time. Cooqy continued to run on my home PC until early March. I was getting a trickle of revenue via eBay Affiliate commissions, which kept motivating me to keep moving forward.
After some time off in March, development of Cooqy picked up again in April with the first major redesign of the UI to introduce tabbed search results. I was impressed that using the OpenLaszlo components allowed for very quick overhauls of the UI without too much trouble. Cooqy’s UI underwent three major overhauls…each overhaul of the UI typically only needed one or two days to complete.

This is maybe a good time to mention that each major subsystem within Cooqy typically only required about a day to complete, thanks to the productivity of OpenLaszlo. It’s a great feeling to not only be that productive, but to also end up with a rock solid cross-platform UI.

Cooqy started to shape up in May, culminating with some coverage by bloggers, including at ZDNet and GigaOM.

I continue to refine the UI and build out new functionality in June, finally resulting in some attention from Mothership eBay in a Cool Tool review.

It was in June that I remember really focusing on minimizing network traffic to the browser, finally getting a 50x reduction in network traffic for item listings as compared to eBay’s HTML website. Testing over a 56K modem revealed that Cooqy was performing up to 10x faster than eBay!

By the end of June, Cooqy as a full-page Rich Internet App was humming along nicely. The functionality was more or less complete, the UI design was more or less the way it is today, and traffic was growing as a result of the recent blog attention.

I started to code Cooqy the week of Christmas 2005. OpenLaszlo proved to be unusually productive…a little code went a long, long way. I initially had difficulty communicating with eBay’s web services. I never could get OpenLaszlo’s built-in SOAP to work against eBay, so I abandoned that and used Java XML-RPC from the Tomcat server.

Cooqy was very much built in a race for time, due to the Jan. 31 deadline for submissions to the eBay Developer Contest. The only other major problem I remember was with the way OpenLaszlo didn’t seem to use the browser cache for images, causing slower performance than I wanted. It continued to ping the server (where images were transcoded into SWF), even though the image was already available in the browser cache. OpenLaszlo’s chief architect gave me some pointers, but in the end I discovered the solution on my own by switching the client to an “unproxied” mode, even though it continued to make proxied Java-RPC calls to the server. According to the OpenLaszlo documentation this shouldn’t even work (by definition, an unproxied app should not be able to communicate with the server), but it solved the problem I had with no side effects.

Cooqy was originally hosted on my home PC w/ DSL. I would code at night and test during lunch from the office. Four part-time weeks later, Cooqy’s core search functionality was working well enough to be considered ready for eBay’s Developer Challenge. Unfortunately, when the eBay judges were evaluating Cooqy my home PC was having a bad hair day…I am sure their experience was piss poor. I was patching code at the same time they were actually doing the evaluation! Ugh.

eBay ended up selecting Unwired Buyer as their overall winner, which to me seemed kind of lame b/c they were a company (albeit small < 15 people) who took an existing product (their technology was originally used for singles to connect with each other via cell phones) and simply tweaked it a bit to work with eBay's API for placing bids (which at the time was undocumented by eBay and remains accessible by invitation only to this day). It was as if a secret handshake was done under the table. The spirit of the Developer Challenge was to invoke Pierre Omidyar's holiday weekend when he built and launched what was to become eBay. Another prickly point: after years of doing everything possible to shut down snipe services, eBay suddenly does a 180 and gets behind what is effectively a snipe service...encouraging last-second bids via cell phones.

Unwired Buyer has gone on to receive over $7.6MM in funding this year. Prior to their first round of $1.5MM, I read a post somewhere by their founder that the service at that point had made something like $150 in revenue from eBay commissions. Their business model is pretty much the same as Cooqy's: provide the service free to consumers and get revenue from eBay's Affiliate Commissions. But they are going about it like an old-school dot-com flameout. They even had a $20 promotion: win an item via their service and they would send you $20 via PayPal. Of course, lots of people placed bids on penny auctions and kept most of the $20 as pure fun money. I’ll write a lot more later about why starting a Web 2.0 company today only requires one smart/experienced person and virtually zero money.

Before beginning a line of code of what was to become Cooqy, I had to pick a name for the “thing” I was about to create. I remember agonizing over the name for a full week due to finding an available dot-com name. It truly is a matter of naming your service based on what’s available. My firm requirements for the name were:

1. Dot-com or bust
2. 5 letters or less
3. Had to have zero Google search results
4. Had to be playful, fun, and inviting

Re: #3, I wanted to be able to track the growth and spread of the new service. [As of today, Cooqy comes up with 35,000 Google search results. This blog is partly an attempt to get that number climbing higher.]

There is a lot of theory behind naming things. Linguistics and phonetics control how words make us feel. Early on I decided to mutate existing words rather than contriving a word like “Xerox”. This was mainly due to a futile attempt to use a random name generator in hopes of finding a pleasant contrived word. I was very much against anything that was “AuctionX”. AuctionWorks, AuctionChamp, etc. Besides, most of those names are taken anyway, too. Anyway, I had already gone down that path with AuctionVision I started in 2003.

Trying to find an available 5-letter (or less) dot-com name is maddening. If you want to waste many hours of your life, just try to find an available dot-com name 5 letters or less. It almost seems that every possible combination of letters has been already taken.

I really don’t remember how or why I started muting the word “cookie” into Cooqy. I remember that I wanted something fun to say. I also remember wanting something people would let into their homes…something like Grandma’s Home Cooking, all warm and welcoming. Being a consumer-oriented service, this was top on my mind. Having a name starting near the top of the alphabet was another consideration in the mix…the reason I didn’t start the word with a “K”, besides not wanting to look like “kooky”.

Actually, the word Cooqy has its problems that I recognized right off the bat. The lower case “Q” is frequently (always?) mistaken for a “G”. I decided to live with the consequences. I kinda liked the symmetry of the lowercase O-O-Q when it was drawn into a logo. The overall roundness of the logo enhances the playfulness, which the font accents. What I didn’t expect was how many people cannot pronounce the word correctly…eBay Radio did a segment this summer and the fellow just stumbled all over it for like 20 seconds, finally calling it “Cook-kwee”. Was good for a laugh, which made the segment stand out on the broadcast that otherwise didn’t have any laughs.

I was not surprised to find Cooqy #3 on this list of “stupidly named Web 2.0 web sites”. (I was kinda disappointed not to be #1…I’ll take the promotion to help drive traffic!)

How passionate am I about the name today? Actually, I’m on the fence. At the time I named Cooqy I was in a rush to get the development started, so when I discovered Cooqy met my minimum requirements I grabbed it and moved on to the next issue.

Would I change the name tomorrow? Wow, I don’t know. Cooqy’s metrics are starting to grow at a good clip (more than doubling month-over-month), so I’m already up against a fair bit of name recognition. I won’t let that be a fatal mindset, however. Let me put it this way: if I knew with certainty that a different name alone would catapult Cooqy higher, then by all means YES! On the other hand, the uniqueness and issues with the name also play into its charm and personality.

When I query our customers, they say they like it well enough. What do you think, Hot or Not?

Wow, my first post. My first blog. And to think I’ve been on this revolving rock for roughly 14,500 spins without having created a blog yet…what have I’ve been doing with myself?

Actually, I have been very busy for the last year creating Cooqy. Now I find myself sort of regretting that I didn’t keep a blog to document Cooqy’s progression. After watching Guy Kawasaki and Mike Arrington today, and also learning about Markus Frind, I decided a blog must accompany a web startup.
I have some goals in mind in creating this blog:

1. To backfill and document some of Cooqy’s history.
2. To help market and spread the word about Cooqy.
3. To share my technology and startup experience.
4. To generate meaningful content that will make you want to plug this blog into your RSS reader.

If I get bold and have the time, I may start doing short daily video segments a few minutes long. I recently bought a new Canon Powershot SD630 that makes nifty videos for such a small device.

I’m going to backfill some content into the blog to get rolling, so be prepared for a brief history of time. After I get that out of my system I will start providing current and forward-looking content that I hope you will find of some value.

Wow, I’m no longer a blog virgin. Was it good for you, too? :-p