plaxoed!

First, if you’re a Mac user and you aren’t using Quicksilver, you’re missing out.

What does Quicksilver do? With a quick keyboard shortcut (I usually define mine to be ctrl-space), a little window pops up. You simply start typing the name of the program or file you’re looking for and it finds it automatically. So, instead of hunting around to find the program you want to run, you can use the keyboard shortcut and get to it in less than a second. It also learns your frequently used shortcuts to make it even quicker. On my computer, if I want to run Firefox, I hit ctrl-space, type ‘f’, and hit enter. Much quicker than the mouse.

So, one of the things I had missed when using Windows machines is Quicksilver, which is a Mac only program. I longed for the quick access to all my programs. Then one day, on lifehacker, they did a quick post about Launchy and my dreams were realized. Quicksilver for windows!

Anyways. If you’re a Mac user, download Quicksilver. If you’re a Windows user, download Launchy. Your computer use will never be the same

Austin Edgington of Airfoil PR invited me to join their table at the Churchill club event last night, The 9th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. I had no idea what to expect (and maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I had never heard of the Churchill club before either), but the list of speakers was quite impressive:

Speakers:
John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Roger McNamee, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
Joe Schoendorf, Partner, Accel Partners

So I went with Joseph to check it out and we were thoroughly impressed. First, the event was huge - there were probably 1000 people in a huge ballroom at the San Jose Fairmont. Secondly, the topic was actually very engaging. Basically, each of the speakers were able to give a few of their predictions for the near future and they were able to back them up pretty well. They talked about mobile, green technology, and global economic shifts.

For those who are in the tech industry, a lot of the predictions are pretty much already done deals (i.e. Jurveston predicted that memory would continue to follow Moore’s law while logic chips would go through some refactoring), but it the most interesting part wasn’t the predictions themselves, but rather the way each VC approached and discussed the issue. All four were very informed on all the industries discussed and it was clear that they had an impressive ability to cut through tons of data and plot the trendline of technology advances.

I wish I had brought my laptop and my camera, but alas, I left them in the car and at home 

Bottom line: Thanks to Austin and Airfoil for inviting me to the event, and I’d love to get a chance to work closely with these VCs sometime

Woohoo, we’re getting close to releasing a major revision to Plaxo and we’re now collecting a list of people for our early access preview. If you’d like to check out what we’ve been working on, click through to Rikk’s latest blog post on the Plaxo blog.

What’s included?

• A completely new version of Plaxo Online
• Localized for various languages
• Expanded list of “sync points” (including Google, Yahoo!, and Hotmail)
• An innovative new online calendar
• A few other surprises

Hope to see you in the beta

If you use Yahoo Mail for personal e-mail (like me) and Outlook for your corporate e-mail (like me), you can now sync your data between the two with an easy web interface. Plus, you’ll also be able to access it from a completely revamped, AJAXy Plaxo online.

So go ahead and send an e-mail to privatebeta@plaxo.com and we’ll let you know when we’re ready to let people in

They all got on my bad side at some point, and I blogged about it (buy.com, 24 hour fitness, msn messenger, q-cup). No big deal I thought, but then I noticed something interesting: I was getting a lot of comments on those posts, and I kept getting them, even entries that were almost 2 years old.

So I looked at my referrer logs in StatCounter (a basic, but free web metrics service) and saw that a lot of people were getting to my blog from Google searches. Actually, 90% of my web traffic was coming from Google searches, so I did some investigation and here’ s what I found:

Whoa. Top placement on a Google search. That would explain why I’ve got 85 responses to my buy.com sucks entry. Check it out.

Turns out, I must have a bit of Google juice becuase I’ve got top placement for “24 hour fitness membership deals” and “MSN messenger memory leak” as well…

And my tirade against Q-cup a few weeks ago is on the first Google result page for “q-cup cupertino” as well. Not top placement, but not bad

Something tells me these companies aren’t using blog search tools…

Here at SXSW, they’ve got a big plasma screen showing the following Twitter page (there’s me in the screenshot ):

It’s a collection of all the twitter messages that people post up after they join a special SXSW group. Great bootstrapping promo for the service; I wonder if this will be when it starts taking off? 

I’m flying out to Austin tomorrow for SXSW. It’s not my first time in Austin, but it’ll be my first time at SXSW. If you’re there too, drop me a line and we’ll meet up at a panel or something. Also, check out the cool new business cards we got printed up:

Find me if you want one

You’ll notice on the back that I’ve got a cool MyPlaxo page at http://markjen.myplaxo.com. Soon, all Plaxo members will be able to get one (and it’ll always have your latest info). Basically, the first step in replacing the traditional business card which gets outdated all the time anyways. Hey! That’s what Plaxo was created for