On the last ten days four very important Sampa sites where created. They were created by very close friends. And why they are important? Because these people used the Sampa Alpha version more than a year ago and never came back. I didn't bother them recently to create sites, but they did without even talking to me.
The sites created are one about a couple the moved to Washington DC and thought that a blog would be a good way to keep in touch with friends in Seattle. The other is another couple just creating a personal site. The third site is a guy that wants to create easy pages if he wants to sell something on Craigslist and the third is a personal site of a female friend.
Most of them are Microsoft people -- so they shall remain anonymous -- and they could have created their site on MSN Spaces (Live Spaces) or Office Live. I'm sure they have sites on those services as well. But the fact that they are using Sampa speaks a lot to our feature list and overall user experience. Maybe they can't do what they want on MSN Spaces (Office Live is mostly for business anyway) or maybe Sampa had just the extra thing that they needed.
IMHO, this is a sign that we are moving our user experience on the right direction.
Amazingly enough, Sampa gets more page requests from crawlers and bots than from real users. For example, yesterday 59% of the page requests were from crawlers and bots, only 41% were from real users.
Of course, on our stats we always discard the crawlers because those are not real users requesting pages and they can actually really inflate your number of Unique Users and Visits because crawlers (mostly) don't support cookies.
So, in prol of helping my fellow Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, I'm listing some of the strings matches that we use to detect if a user-agent is a crawler:
Crawlers:
bot
crawler
spider
spyder
fetch
perl
search
feedseek
screenshot
scout
thumbnail
reader
mediapartners
jeeves
ia_archiver
slurp
yahoofeed
yahoo-blogs
del.icio.us
nutch
netnewswire
moreover
stackrambler
boitho
blogpulse
snap.com
everest
filangy
stumble
zyborg
baldric
hanzoweb
yacy
wazzup
python
feedcheck
dragonfly
netcraft
grabber
linkwalker
egothor
irlbot
psbot
heritrix
tmcrawler
libwww
jakarta
httpclient
java/1
wget/
Besides those, any user-agent that has less than 15 characters is considered a crawler. I have to update this list every month, because every month there is at least a couple of new crawlers where the user-agent string doesn't contain the word "crawler" or "bot" and most of the time it is from some CS university.
Now, we also have a list of feed readers, which are crawlers but they are working on behalf of a real person (mostly). On those cases, we treat them a bit differently because we want to grab the number of subscribers from that feed.
We don't use the subscribers of feeds to our UU count, but we are still interested in knowing how many people subscribe to each Sampa site feed. The reason we don't use it is because if somebody subscribe to a feed it doesn't mean the saw it. Bloglines might say that I have 25 subscribers, but maybe only a handful really read what I write (in Bloglines), and the only way to detect that is by adding a tracking-gif on each blog post, which is something we are not planning on doing for now.
The list of strings to identify a feed reader is:
bloglines
yahoofeedseeker
newsgator
feedster
feedfetcher-google
netvibes
pubsub
sharpreader
rssbandit
feedbite
zhuaxia
One of the biggest problems with feed readers detection is the new IE 7 and Outlook 2007 that use the IE 7 regular user-agent, making it impossible to distinguish between a user that subscribe to a feed versus a user that just click on the feed link.
I hope this helps your startup and if you have other crawlers, bots or feed readers that I'm missing, please, let me know.
This Thursday our very own Paul Gross, Sampa's CEO, will be presenting at the Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF), an event organized by NWEN.
I'll be there to support Paul and Sampa on this important event. I hope to see some known entrepreneurs and investors and I'm eager to meet new ones as well.
First of all, I'm deeply saddened by the incident yesterday. Students at the height of their lives shouldn't be a target or witness to this barbarie.
That said, when I wake up this morning and they had identified the shooter as a native of South Korea, on the US with a temporary student visa, something big happened. It caught by surprise pretty much everybody.
Before I continue, let me say that I'm against violence, hypocrisy and everybody having the right to own a gun (most people should not be allowed to own a gun).
Now, the irony starts where yesterday night, unknowingly of the true identity of the killer, people were already talking about violent videogames, violent TV shows, second amendment and even accusing the wrong person!
Well, this kid was not brought up in the US. How about that?
This turn out to be a great week for Sampa. Actually, let me rephrase that and say this is a great month for Sampa.
Here is the scoop: We have just been selected to present at the Alliance of Angel's luncheon next Wednesday.
But the good news doesn't stop there, we also got... Well, I can't tell that otherwise it'll jinx it, although I'm not a superstitious person.
To round up the month:
We are presenting tomorrow at the Early Stage Investment Forum. Paul and I will be there the whole day, so if you want to stop by and chat just come find us. We will be wearing blue tutus so it makes really easy for anyone to find us.
We've been selected to present at the Keiretsu Forum in their June meeting as well.
All in all, over the next 8 weeks or so probably every single Angel and VC in town will hear about our business plan.
Tomorrow, I *might* live-blog the event. It all depends on Internet and my availability during sessions.
If you follow this blog you saw some mobile-posts yesterday, during the Early Stage Investment Forum. The event was good. There were about 30 companies presenting, and more than 300 attendees for the full-day event. I was told that about 100 those were accredited investors, Angel Investors or VCs.
They recommended that companies arrived at 6 AM (!!!) to set up their booth (a.k.a. 3-feed of a table against a wall). Paul and I decided it was insane. We are a software company and 6:00 AM doesn't exist on our clock. Paul got there at around 8:30 and I got there at around 9:00 AM.
I've met a ton of entrepreneurs, like Jon Clemens that founded Jakoba software, Meetul Shah from Knouen, Jordan Mitchell from Others Oline, Phil Cohen from Adapx, Peter Weiss from HyBlue, Allison Nelson from The Local Vine, and others.
Events like this always have their fair share of ex-Microsoftees, some are entrepreneurs, some are investors, some are looking for a startup to help, or are still working at Microsoft and desperate to quit and do something exciting.
On the VC side of things I've met Eric Monsowitz from Maveron, Rick Lefaivre from OVP, Tim Porter from Madrona, which was also the moderator of our presenting room. Meet a handful of angels that I won't disclose their name for now.
What is worth it? I have to wait a couple of weeks to tell you if anything good comes out of that, and by good I mean the 2-3 angel investors that we are looking for.
Our presentation on ESIF yesterday landed us a paragraph on the Seattle P-I today, by John Cook:
"Investors who listened to the presentation of Sampa -- a Redmond Web site creation service -- were so impressed with the backgrounds of Chief Executive Paul Gross and Chief Technology Officer Marcelo Calbucci that they wondered why the startup even needed angel financing. Gross has spent 25 years in the software industry, most recently serving as an entrepreneur in residence at Ignition Partners. Before that, he held senior vice president positions at Microsoft and Borland International."
First of all, we are honored by the "so impressed [with our] background" part. After Paul's presentation he had to leave the room so people could discuss the company, but I stayed (hidden in the back) and I heard a few people praising the team. My favorite was a gentleman that said "...this is a dynamite team...".
Second, I feel the need to explain why we need Angel Investing since John Cook paraphrases somebody on the audience that asked that question, and here it is...
I absolutely have no money left to invest. I literally invested 100% of my liquid assets in Sampa. I also sold my nice BMW and put into Sampa. My wife has a full-time job and she can pay the bills. I have not received any salary over the last 28 months and I have no discretionary spending money whatsoever. The angel money will not be used to pay me a salary (that I will wait until the Series A).
Paul, on the other hand, already made financial investments (besides his time and career investment) in Sampa. He is also going to reinvest side-by-side with the new investors, and, like any smart person would do, it is good to have external validation that you are going somewhere and that we are not drinking too much of our own Kool-aid. Another reason that we need other Angels, which Paul explained during the presentation Q&A session yesterday, is that he has put the bulk of his "risk capital" into founding a clinical research network for Hydrocephalus -- a brain condition that his son (and other 1 million Americans) have.
In summary we do need Angel Investors and hopefully that need will be met on the next few weeks with investments from angels that we've encountered on ESIF, Alliance of Angel and Keiretsu.
For me to consider a technology that requires a client-side platform, I'd probably would like to see 50% or more of adoption on our user base. Silverlight at this moment has close to 0.00001% (give or take a few digits).
Microsoft did other stuff on that past that didn't get any adoption, so, if they fail with this one it won't be the first time.
As a startup, every bet you make has to bring significant return and move you forward. A single bet that doesn't pan out is enough to kill your business. For now we are sticking to well-known, well-established client technologies like a browser, HTML and Javascript. Turns out that 100% of our users have that and near 100% of the Internet population have that as well.
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October, 2007