If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

-Peter Drucker.

Chris Sacca, a West Coast angel investor who I met at the Defrag conference, tweeted about a utility called RescueTime the other day.

RescueTime is a hybrid desktop application-web service that monitors how you spend your time on the computer and generates reports and analytics for you.  You install the tracker on your computer, where it monitors and tracks what application has focus – i.e. which of the 30 applications I’m running is the one I’m actually using.  It sends that information to a server, which turns the data into interesting reports. 

RescueTime has done a great job of classifying different applications (Total War: Rome shows up appropriately as a game, as does Tower Defense) and websites (espn.com, alabama live’s Alabama football section, and si.com all get grouped into a ‘sports’ category) into the right buckets.  I now know that I spend a staggering amount of time on sports websites, more time than I should gaming, and less time on Twitter/Facebook/RSS than I expected.

But even more valuable, RescueTime tells me how the productive time when I’m being “good” breaks down as well.  I know how much time I have spent on developing the CSS and HTML for Baydin.com’s new homepage redesign, how much time I spent QAing Boomerang, and how long it took me to record our shiny new demo video. I know exactly how long I spent in Visual Studio for each of the last three weeks, and how email grows to suck up however much time it possibly can (seriously, between Outlook and Gmail, the number is terrifying).

That’s not to say that I’m doing fantastic job of working harder since I installed it. I haven’t been especially more productive, but at least I know how I’m doing.  And I think I have a better handle on what kind of bang-for-the-buck I’m getting out of each activity.  I’m going to try very hard to spend more time coding and less time writing long emails that nobody’s going to read anyway.

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Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin blogged last week about a technique that he claims he’s been using for years to make a little bit easier for himself to respond to all of his e-mail.

The idea is that you treat e-mail much like an SMS twitter message.  You limit the length of the response you’re going to make beforehand, so that it is easier to finish writing.  Since it’s a pain in the neck to count letters, or even words, instead you count sentences. Limiting responses to two sentences, three, four, or five – and no longer – seems like it could make it much easier to manage email.

The home of the website for the idea is here: http://sentenc.es/ with the different numbers at http://two.sentenc.es/ and so on. 

Given the amount of complexity and richness possible in email (see our Enron email and Twitter analysis), it seems like using this technique on every email is really limiting.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good framework to start with for emails that aren’t deeply technical in nature.  Or maybe Seth uses something besides email when he needs to convey complex information. 

Do you know anyone who has had success with this?

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Baydin quietly launched a new product today. We call it Boomerang, and it is a snooze button for your email.  It lets you take a message out of your inbox for a period of time, and then, when you are ready to follow up, it returns the message to your inbox and flags it and/or marks it unread. 

Check it out here:
http://www.baydin.com/boomerang

Why Boomerang?

Over the past few months, we spent a lot of time talking with people about how Baydin could make their interactions with email more satisfying.  We found that talking about improving email made us magnets for our customers’ general concerns about email – not just finding information. Over and over again, we heard frustrations about trying to manage an enormous amount of email, feeling overwhelmed, and losing track of information.

Boomerang is a response to that problem.  It’s incredibly easy to use.  Here’s how:

1. Right-click a message, and tell Boomerang when you want to see it again
2. Boomerang moves the message out of your inbox (into a special Boomerang folder it creates, so you can always access the message)
3. At the time you specified, Boomerang moves the message back into your inbox.

The funny thing is, while we thought it would be an interesting idea, we didn’t think we’d use it that much ourselves. But what we found was that Boomerang helped us stay on top of our own messages a lot more than we expected.

Last week, I got an email asking me to remind someone on the 22nd.  A couple clicks later, I didn’t have to worry about whether or not I’d remember to follow up.  I didn’t have to think about that message again until when it was time to deal with it.  My inbox (and my brain) were at peace. 

Try it now!

Sound interesting? Try it for free for two weeks, and if you like it, we’re taking 50% off the price for customers who purchase it during beta. Let us know what you think, and look for more great stuff from us soon!

What about Baydin (the automatic search product)?

It’s not going anywhere.  In fact, we’ll be releasing Alpha 6 sometime in the next two weeks.  Although now that Baydin Inc. makes more than one product we’re probably going to be renaming it. 

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When you’re writing managed add-ins for Office, it can be tough to figure out where Visual Studio is storing your settings file (*.dll.config) or any of the other files that it is generating when you Debug your program. 

I’ve solved this problem about 6 times, and I don’t ever want to have to solve it again.  So here’s the easiest way to find out where your plugin is ACTUALLY being run from:

MessageBox.Show(this.GetType().Assembly.Location.ToString());

And the actual config file is usually in:

C:\Users\UserNameGoesHere\AppData\Local\Microsoft_Corporation

This post was really more of a reminder to myself than anything else.  Sorry if it’s boring. 

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Image by Kansir via Flickr

As we continue to develop Baydin, I have been very surprised at how many people complain about “missing features” in Windows Search and the Outlook 2007 search bar, like the ability to search for messages from a specific person or to find only attachments. 

As it turns out, Windows Search and Outlook Search include those features (and a bunch more), but Microsoft borrowed a page from Google and hid them behind a plain-looking search bar.  Read through these tips, and in about five minutes, you’ll be an expert at finding even the most deeply-buried files. 

Just type these keywords into the Windows or Outlook search bar that you’re using now – it’s in the Start menu for Windows 7 and Vista, and it’s in the taskbar as a text box in Windows XP (if you don’t see it, right-click the taskbar and choose toolbars to turn it on.  If it’s not there, you can install it for free from Microsoft’s Windows search download page).  Just type them straight in, and you’ll be ready to go. 

1. The from: keyword

Want to find all the email addresses from your friend Jim?  Just pull out the from: keyword, and you’ll have them.  Just type from:jim (space or no space) into the search box, and you’ll only get communications from Jim. 

Of course, you might have six coworkers named Jim, so you can also use an email address.  Just type from:jim@gmail.com, and you’ll only get email messages from the right Jim. 

You can also use full names if you put them in quotes: from:”jim halpert” will make sure you only get messages from Jim Halpert. 

2. Find only attachments

If you’re running Outlook 2007, you can already search inside the text of any file sent to you as an attachment.  But sometimes you want to limit your search only to files you know someone sent you, or emails that included attachments.  In that case, you can use the has:attachment and is:attachment keywords. 

For example, to find all of the invoices you have received as attachments, just type invoice is:attachment into the search bar.  This is especially powerful when you combine it with #1.  For example from:”jim halpert” is:attachment wedding would find all the attachments, sent by Jim, that include the word wedding in their text.

Perfect for Pam! 

3. Easy-to-remember Date filtering

In general, I’m way too lazy to filter information by date, especially in one of those awful boxes where you need to enter a start date and an end date and time.  But Windows Search has a couple incredibly easy to remember commands for finding just the files you recently changed. 

If you type in date:thisweek into the search box, you will find all the files and emails you updated this week.  date:thismonth will find all the files and emails you updated this month. 

The only downside is that all the emails or attachments you received today will show up too.  So on to #4, where you can fix that!

4. Filter by Document Type

It’s easy to restrict your search to only specified documents or only local files.  The kind and store keywords are the way to do this.  Typing store:file into the search box will pull up only your local files, whereas store:outlook will only look through messages, meeting invitations, and other Outlook items. 

The kind keyword complements it very well.  Typing nepal kind:docs will limit your search to documents that talk about Nepal, whereas nepal kind:pics will limit it to pictures with Nepal in the filename or in the metadata.  

5. And, or, not

If you just chain a bunch of keywords into a string, the default behavior is to combine them with and.  So kind:pics from:john will only find you pictures sent from John.  On the other hand, if you type kind:pics OR from:john you can find all the pictures and all the emails and attachments from John. 

Not is equally helpful; if Pam wants to find all the emails talking about her wedding sent from people OTHER than Jim, that’s an easy command: wedding kind:email NOT from:”jim halpert” will pull them right up. 

Search even better.

There are a whole lot more commands and keywords described on Microsoft’s Advanced Query Syntax page.

Of course, the best way to search for documents and files is to not have to search at all.  That’s where Baydin comes in: it analyzes your email, and proactively discovers the files you need to know about. 

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Techstars opened up applications for their 2010 classes a couple weeks back.  If you’re thinking about quitting your job to start a company, or you’re already working on a company but haven’t got all the kinks worked out yet, you should apply. (Full Disclosure: Baydin is a TechStars alum from Boston’s 2009 program)

I’ll be putting up a couple additional posts over the next couple of weeks (then a couple more to follow on in a couple months) about my experience in TechStars, what to do while applying to the program and before it starts, and a few thoughts on how to make the most of it for the teams who are getting started in the program. 

For now, I want to shill a little bit about how valuable and helpful and exciting the program was.  There are three reasons a startup should seriously think about TechStars – all more valuable, in my mind, than the ramen-level-funding and the investor access. 

Mentorship

TechStars is mentorship-driven.  As soon as you arrive at the office, you’ll start connecting with 60+ mentors, most of whom have been in the trenches at least once, and understand how the sausage gets made.  They’re eager to help, excited to teach, and even more excited to learn. 

Both Boston and Boulder have amazing entrepreneurial ecosystems.  There’s a really strong culture of “giving back” to the entrepreneurial community after running a successful startup (or funding a few).  And the recent buildup of “valley envy” in Boston means that the community here has closed ranks and is serious about helping first-timers. 

That means you’ll get tons of help figuring out novel business strategies, tons of folks who will give you product feedback, and a lot of help avoiding common pitfalls, like not knowing who the CEO is or building your product until it’s finished inside a vacuum, with no feedback from customers. 

Eran Egozy, one of the founders of Harmonix (the folks who made Guitar Hero and Rock Band) told us our product was too slow and hooked us up with an ex-Microsofter at Harmonix who shared some tricks for optimizing it.  Warren Katz, founder of VT MAK, taught us about SBIR grants, a nondilutive grant program for commercial technology research run by NASA, the Department of Defense, and a few other agencies.  David Skok from Matrix Partners came in to teach us how to build a sales and marketing pipeline on the web – and what to measure to find out if it’s working.  And that’s just the beginning – Richard Dale met with us almost every week to keep us on the straight and narrow. When nobody else would even think about installing our 3-week old protoype crap software inside MS Outlook, Will Herman ran it every day.  He also helped talk me through some of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. 

When things are going smoothly and everything is working right, mentorship is a nice-to-have.  When the crap hits the fan (and it pretty much always hits the fan at least a few times for a tech startup) that mentorship is the difference between a company in the Deadpool and a company that is still fighting.  You want these folks on your side. 

Camaraderie

TechStars called the relationships that form between the companies during the summer “cooper-tition” in one of the handouts to the mentors.  For a kind of cute phrase, it’s amazing how accurately it describes the way we interacted during the summer. 

We all helped each other out and we were all there for each other pretty much anytime.  If you need some help figuring out where to find good interns, one of the companies will know.  If you are trying to figure out how to reach an elusive blogger, someone at one of the other companies will have been there.  If you need to know which version control system makes the most sense, someone from one of the companies will be able to get you started.  Because we were all in the same boat, we all understood, and we all had valuable information to share. 

And if things are going crappily (which they will), you just waxed an important blogger’s data, or you can’t get any customers, or one of your most promising potential investors just said no, there’s someone right there who’s been there too. 

At the same time, when you’re seeing the LangoLab folks still working until 4 in the morning and the TempMine guys in the office before the crack of dawn, and one of the TechStars community interns crashing in one of the “conference rooms” after an all-night marketing blitz session… it inspires you to work harder too.

Plus ping pong, a medium-well stocked beer fridge, lots of free food, and a handful of pretty awesome gatherings. 

Validation

Paul Graham said in one of his essays that in many cases, the most valuable thing companies get from Y Combinator is the kick in the ribs to abandon a stable job with a salary and take a chance on really making the startup idea work. 

TechStars validating our idea and our team was critical to starting Baydin.  Without that kick in the ribs, it probably would have remained a weekend project and never really gotten off the ground.  It’s totally different working on a startup full time.  And you’ll find out, a lot faster, whether or not it’s the right product and the right company if you go full time. 

If you get into TechStars, or even become a finalist, you’ll get feedback on where the strengths and holes in your business idea fall.  You’ll know whether this is the right startup to take a chance and commit with, or if you’re better off figuring something else out, or if you’re best off bootstrapping this idea on nights and weekends. 

Either way, you’ll get that feedback just for applying.  Plus, the application process will force you to crystallize your idea and make it stronger. 

So go get started!

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As I mentioned during my talk at Defrag 2009, the best corpus of sample email data we have is the email data dump that the federal government released after Enron’s collapse.  The corpus includes over 400,000 real email messages from Enron employees, and it’s ripe for analysis.

The data is available on the web in a ton of different formats, but none of them are especially conducive to just picking them up and starting analysis, especially in Windows – the original data actually is posted in a format that has filenames ending in periods, so they’re completely invisible to the 93% of us who are in Windows.  It took me about 2 days of solid work to get something running before I could actually work on analyzing the data.

I’ve created a VirtualBox image that includes the Enron data, the tools to gather a large sample of Twitter data, and some sample Python scripts that take almost all of the work out of accessing the data for analyzing the email or Twitter data.  I think this is by far the easiest way to start analyzing the Enron email corpus, and a pretty darned easy way to get started collecting and analyzing Twitter data.

It should take you less than half an hour of hands-on time (plus a little time for zip files to extract) to go from nothing to running the sample scripts and generating histograms of message length.  Good luck, enjoy, and feel free to email me or leave a comment with questions.

Getting Started

1. Download and install Sun’s VirtualBox.
2. Download my VirtualBox Image file, which runs Xubuntu (a streamlined Ubuntu installation optimized for slower hardware – perfect for a virtual machine!)
3. Extract the VirtualBox Image file into a directory you can remember.
4. Run VirtualBox and create a new Image.  Name it whatever you like; the OS is Linux and the version is Ubuntu
5. Set the memory to at least 512 MB (if you have 3+ GB, I recommend 1.5 GB so that you can load the entire enron messages table into memory).
6. Leave Boot Hard Disk checked and choose Use an Existing Hard Disk. Click the folder icon next to the dropdown, click Add, and navigate to the EnronTwitter.vdi file extracted from the download link above.
7. Highlight the EnronTwitter.vdi file and click Select.
8. Click Finish.  Select the new VM and click Start.  Wait for the image to boot.

Everything you need to get started is in your home directory in the data folder.  Double click the Home icon on the desktop, and double click the data folder inside that directory.  To edit the files: Right-click and choose Open With Mousepad or use a text editor of your choice.

To get to a Terminal: Double-Click the Terminal icon on the Desktop or click Applications at the top left, click Accessories, click Terminal.  You will need to type cd data to get into the directory with all the sample scripts.

Linux login info: enron/enr0n
MySQL login info: root/enr0n

Enron Data

There are two sample scripts in the directory – enron.py and enronrecpients.py.  The enron.py script generates a histogram of the message lengths of all of the emails in the corpus.  enronrecpients.py counts how many emails from the corpus are multi-recipient.

One caveat – these scripts load the entire database into memory before they run.  For that reason, enron.py is currently set up to run on only the first 200k messages.  If you chose to provide more than 1GB of memory, you should be OK to load the full set of messages, so just remove the LIMIT 200000 from the SQL command.

To run the script, open a terminal, cd into the data directory, then type
python enron.py

You can modify these scripts to analyze additional message data.  The comments describe what does what as well as providing instructions on how to figure out what else is inside the Enron data using the MySQL client.

Twitter Data

The relevant Python data analysis script is twitter.py and the relevant data collection script is datacollector.php.  The twitter script uses simplejson to access the fields in the Twitter JSON stream and counts the number of multi-reply (@ to multiple people) as well as multi-retweet (multiple RT in one tweet) messages in the sample data.

To run the Python analysis script, open a terminal, cd into the data directory, and type:
python twitter.py

There’s only a tiny amount of Twitter data in the image as-is.  You’ll need to run the datacollector.php script to pull data from a Twitter streaming API called the “Gardenhose” –a medium-volume feed that provides a pretty good way to get a bunch of data fast.  The script pulls from what is called the “spritzer” stream, which is just a random, undirected sample.  I got this script from this streaming api tutorial.   You’ll get about 25,000 Tweets per hour.

To run it, you will need to open datacollector.php and replace twitterusername with your Twitter account’s user name and twitterpassword with your Twitter password.

Then open a terminal, cd into the data directory and type:
php datacollector.php

After you’ve run the script long enough to get all the data you want, I recommend that you cat the files together into a single file so the Python script can digest it in one pass.  Do this by typing
cat 20*.txt > tweetcorpus.txt

There’s a lot more information about customizing the stream coming out of the Twitter streaming API, including using search on the front end to restrict the stream at Twitter’s Streaming API Documentation page.

Getting Data out of the Virtual Machine (into Windows)

VirtualBox helpfully provides the ability to share a folder between the guest OS (the Xubuntu image) and the host OS (whatever you’re running, in my case Windows).  To do that as of 11/23/09, click the Devices menu entry at the top of the VirtualBox window, and select Shared Folders.  Click the Add button on the right, click the dropdown under Folder Path and choose Other. Select the folder you want to share, and give it a name (I shared my Desktop, so i just called it Desktop).  Click OK on both dialog boxes.

Now you need to mount the shared folder, so you can access it in the guest OS.  Open a Terminal and type the following (replacing Desktop with the name you chose for the folder you shared):

> sudo mount.vboxsf Desktop /media/windows-share

Now, double-click the File System icon on the Desktop in the VirtualBox image, and double-click the media folder.  The shared folder you selected will appear there as windows-share, and you can exchange data with your computer’s regular file system using that folder.

Helpful Links

I already set up the VirtualBox image with all the scripts and data you should need to get started, but here are some links in case you need to repl
icate some of these steps or if you need to find the original Enron source data.

• My Slides from the Defrag 2009 Conference (Slide 15 links to a bunch of great papers)
• How to load a MySQL dump into a database
• VirtualBox Shared Folder information
• Accessing MySQL from Python (annoying 4-page format, but great tutorial)
• Original Enron Source Data (don’t even bother if you’re running Windows; the folks who put this data up ended all the filenames with a period, so you won’t be able to open any of them)
• Enron Data as a MySQL dump (this is what I loaded into the image)
• Enron Data as an Outlook .PST file (thanks to Pete Warden, founder of Mailana, one of Baydin’s fellow TechStars companies that is also focused on email)
• A bunch of other Enron Data links

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I presented the following slides at Defrag 2009 last week in Denver.

I wanted to take a quick look at the different use cases for email vs. microblogging and make some predictions about how the email experience will be changing over the next handful of years.  To do this, I performed some analysis on the Enron email corpus and a half-a-million-message Twitter corpus to illustrate the differences in the way people use these services.  I used that information and some trends about Twitter’s growth to make a few educated guesses about which Web 2.0 features we’ll watch make their way into email clients and servers.

There are a ton of useful links and papers on Slide 15.

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Defrag is *awesome* so far – so much to learn! I’ll be posting the virtual machine image with the Enron/Twitter data I used, plus information about how to process it, right here this weekend. Check back Monday, and if you’re at Defrag, say hi!

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