Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:

• Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled
  mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
• Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
• Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
• Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
• And more…

Today I became a Facebook developer and released my first Facebook application. My application is called “Trump Quotes” http://apps.facebook.com/trumpquotes. It is a collection of quotes by Donald Trump that you can paste to your Facebook profile and spread around the social graph. It’s nothing earth shattering, but a start. I wanted to get a feel as to how these apps work. The documentation on how to make a Facebook app is not so great at the moment so it actually took quite of a bit of experimentation to figure this all out. The app is build using Ruby on Rails, RFacebook, FBML and Mysql. If you are on Facebook, please connect with me if you have not already, and add Trump Quotes if you want.

I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com.

Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks!

For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.

A friend of mine asked me to write about how I am starting my new software company with (almost) no money. The answer is very carefully, remotely and with some open source. Here are some resources I am using on almost a daily basis: craigslist, rentacoder, and elance. I am not saying these sites are full of great programmers. In fact, I have had plenty of horror stories in the past with off shore resources I found on those places. But when you have little money, you don’t have much choice but to try. And I have a few friends who claim to have had success finding resources on these sites. I would love to hear any success stories people have had and best practices on these sites. This process reminds me of the show “Junkyard Wars.” I did manage to connect with one really good logo designer recently on eLance, so if you need a good logo I have just the place for you.

As of yesterday, I have started fundraising for my new startup. It’s interesting so far the conversations I have had with people since just putting this word out, and what I am learning. A really freaky coincidence happened to me today too which maybe is some sort of omen or just randomness. A client of mine needed me to deliver something urgently to them at a top VC firm on Sand Hill Road where they were making a pitch. If I wrote the name of the firm, and if you follow Silicon Valley news, you would probably recognize it. I don’t get asked often to come to these places, so I spent some time in the lobby of the firm looking at the memoribilia they displayed of their successful investments and it was cool.

I am attending Mashup Camp 2 today and tomorrow at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View. This is a really amazing event with almost 300 developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, etc. What really strikes me is how this is in effect a free, open source-style conference similar in spirit to open source software. There are no pre-planned sessions. The participants come up with the sessions the day of the event. The facilities, wi-fi, and the food are completely provided by the sponsors and donations. The event free to attend which amazing compared to high-tech conferences like SuperNova and Web 2.0 which cost many thousands of dollars to get into. These “camps” like FooCamp and BarCamp have been going on for a while, but this is the first one I have attended. I’m impressed, and in fact, there should be more events like these for things other than Web 2.0 technology. If these camps take off, it is bad news for commercial conferences and I don’t think I am going to be paying to go to too many more of them.

I am looking to hire a Rails developer for a new project. Please contact me if you are available, or know someone who is. Thanks.

I was talking with my friend Ellen today who just launched a new website this March called “Bits du Jour.�? This is a one day discount site where you can get incredible deals on software. It is similar to the popular woot.com, except that Bits du Jour is focused on software. Bits du Jour got mentioned last week in the Wall Street Journal. Ellen has done a great job on bringing up this site. I love the look of it. If you want some great deals, or have downloadable products to sell, check it out!

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who quit her steady, high paying job to be an independent consultant and coach based the methodology and teachings of Marshall Goldsmith. Wow, I thought, I had never heard of Marshall Goldsmith, apparently one of the world’s authorities in “helping successful leaders get even better”, and I am big into self improvement and coaching. My friend is a serious person, so I thought this must be powerful stuff.

I am blown away. I just spent two hours looking at some free documents on his site http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com and watching a few videos. There is a wealth of information there which will add tons of weight to my already massive reading list. This guy has 20 books. I found the following interview “Be Happy Now�? published on June 8th, 2006 really great. It is only 10 pages. If anyone else has done his training I’d love to hear about it. And if you need a coach in this area, I got someone I can recommend.

Several people who have come to my new office have admired this product I found while surfing OfficeDepot.com. I think it is great. I love whiteboards, and I needed a couple, but I didn’t want to put holes in the wall of the office that I am subleasing. Voila with 3M Post-it Super Sticky Whiteboard Sheets you can create an instant whiteboard! Just unroll them and post on the wall wherever you want a whiteboard. Available in sizes up to 48″ x 30″. The only downside is that they are not magnetic and they don’t have trays where you can leaves the pens at the boards.

I’m now located in Los Altos. I subleased some office space here two weeks ago at a friend’s law office. I’m really enjoying this location and being out of the house. It’s given me the ability to focus better and get stuff done on my consumer Internet start-up. I’m here temporarily as I get things further off the ground and eventually move into my own office space again. Anyway, there are a lot of really good places to have lunch around here so if you are in the area let me know!

While I was researching some facts for by business plan, I stumbled upon the following from the U.S. Census Economic Bureau. It turns out that in the from the last US Ecomonic Census in 2002, Legal Services is almost a $200 billion dollar industry while Sofware Publishing is only about $90 billion, and Internet Service Providers and Web Search Portals about $20 billion. I found this quite disturbing, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

For over the past year, I have been a Blackberry user, and last month I got a new 8700c. One of the really great things about this device is Cingular’s new EDGE network which makes browsing the web in real-time finally possible. I’ve used it on many occassions to great effect including….

This weekend I went shopping with my daughter at the mall. She wanted to show me the Onyx ultimate hair straightener from herstyler.com.

It’s a great product, which retails for $175. The salesman at the kiosk was very helpful and mentioned that we could buy it right now on sale for only $119 plus tax! My daughter really wanted it too. All might have been good for him except that I pulled out my 8700c and started cruising the web to get info on the product. I pulled up the company’s website. I googled the product, and most interestingly, I found one on eBay closing in 1 hour for only $32.99. I told my daughter, let’s take a walk as I entered a bid using the Blackberry’s web browser. When we got home 1 hour later, I had won. My daughter remarked to me, “It’s so interesting that we went shopping at the mall, and ended up buying on the Internet.” Indeed. This is the future, and not such great news for retail shops. More details to follow.

The last few months I have been listening to a variety of podcasts. Some of them start out strong and then totally fade out of my attention, e.g. 43 folders. Even though there are plentiful tools to self publish easily on the Internet (like this Wordpress blogging tool I am using), it is really hard to create compelling audio or video content. And I think it is way harder than text based content.

There is one podcast that I have been listening to every week. It’s consistently good and inspiring even after almost 30 episodes. Venture Voice — Entertaining Entrepreneurship. The interviews on this show, and the entrepreneurs they cover, are absolutely worth listening to. There are some other podcasts I like too, and I will list them here in the future. If you have a favorite podcast that is consistently worth listening to, let me know.

AOL Buys Weblogs to Boost Blog Presence - Yahoo! News

According to this article, AOL paid $25M all cash for Weblogs, Inc. This is pretty amazing, and shows how blogging is heating up. I happen to know that about half of their traffic comes from engadget.com, so figure that one site engadget turns out to be worth about $12M.