Over at Pajiba.com, there’s an article titled The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, a list of movies that never got the audience they deserved. I’ve seen only two from the list: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and the deliciously vicious 1994 film Shallow Grave, featuring a pre-Trainspotting Ewan McGregor.
Over at The Tucows Blog, I’ve just posted a podcast interview with CEO Elliot Noss and General Manager of Retail Products Ross Rader in which I talk to them about the Tucows acquisition of Kiko. Go check it out!
(Also: listen to the theme music closely. Yes, that’s me on accordion, playing on top of the GarageBand track Barbecue Blues.)
In both the upcoming podcast interview I did with Elliot and Ross and in a TalkCrunch podcast, Elliot credits me with telling Tucows that the web calendar application Kiko was up for sale, which in turn triggered the acquisition. When I posted it to our internal mailing list, I was thinking “Oh, it’s a long shot, none of the higher-ups will ever consider buying it, but wouldn’t it be nice if we did?”
(When he mentions me in the interview — it’s around the 4 minute 45 second mark — he calls me “a blogger of some renown”.)
Needless to say, I am so bringing this up at my next annual review.
Of course, I had to hear about Kiko’s going up for sale from somewhere or someone, and in this case, it was a someone named George Scriban. I’ve known George since my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University back in 1987, and we’ve been involved in all sorts of ventures together, from playing in the same band and working at Clark Hall Pub (he was a bartender, I was a DJ) to the working together during the Dot-Com bubble at OpenCola and his being the Best Man at my wedding. George IM’d me about Kiko, and I in turn sent a message to the Tucows Powers That Be.
This isn’t the first time that George and I have played “Outside Cop, Inside Cop” with a CEO. Back in early 2000, I was getting VC hints from George over the phone while I was doing dog-and-pony demos with Cory Doctorow in front of Canada’s largest venture capitalists. It put me in very good standing with OpenCola’s CEO, Grad Conn, and eventually landed George a job at OpenCola with the hip title of Iron Chef Business Development.
So George, in the words of Charles Montgomery Burns: I owe you a Coke.
ISPCON is the premier conference and networking event for internet service providers of the wired and wireless variety, hosting providers and VOIP services. ISPCON Fall 2006 takes place in Santa Clara, California at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 7th through 9th.
I’ll be hosting a panel titled What the Web 2.0? What it is, why it matters and where’s the money? on Wednesday, November 8th. I’ll also be wandering about the conference with my accordion at the ready and presumably with some squishy cows to hand out. Perhaps it’s time to call a Silicon Valley geek gathering for one of those nights — the one Ross and I held back in February (with the very able assistance of Tara Hunt and Chris Messina) was quite successful and a lot of fun to boot.
I won’t be the only person from Team Tucows onstage at the conference. My boss Ken Schafer will do his presentation, 30 Rapid-Fire Website Wins, Guaranteed and Fearless Leader Elliot Noss will do a keynote with the Internet’s Adult Supervision, the one and only Doc Searls — it’s called In the Hotseat with Doc: A Fireside Chat.
For more details, check out the latest entry on The Tucows Blog.
[via reddit] Here’s a nifty little trick: do a Google search for the keyword set confidential “do not distribute”. You should get tens of thousands of results for web pages and other documents.
Yesterday, I recorded a podcast that covered the Kiko acquisition in more detail. Right now, I’m editing it and cleaning up the audio; I hope to post it by week’s end.
Just because I can, I’m going to be different and post an outtake from the podcast before posting the podcast itself.
Here’s an outtake of an interview session [486K MP3 file] with me and Tucows’ CEO, Elliot Noss, and my old boss, Ross Rader, General Manager of Retail Services. The question I meant to ask was about “how they managed to purchase an asset like Kiko in a spectacular auction,” and I completely flubbed the line, turning it into a question about how they got that spectacular ass.
It’s the very first thing we recorded in yesterday afternoon’s session. I like getting the bad takes out of the way as early as possible. Enjoy!
For those of you who follow the news about web companies, you’re probably aware that the web calendaring application Kiko was recently put up for sale on eBay and sold for US$258,100. The only clue to the identity of the buyer was the eBay username “powerjoe1998”.
Well, now that all the i’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed, it can now be revealed: it’s us, and by us, I mean the company for whom I hold the title of Technical Evangelist: Tucows.
Want to know more? Check out the article on our new blog: Why We Bought Kiko.com.
I’ve just finished recording a podcast with our CEO, Elliot Noss and our General Manager of Retail Products, Ross Rader. It’ll get posted later this week and will go into more detail about the Kiko acquisition and have a tiny bit about my small but not insignificant role in it.
More about this in upcoming posts.
You try it yourself — go to Kiko.com and get yourself a calendar — or if you’d rather read about it, check out all these links on Reddit.com.