ETech, Sandy, and more soon...

As many of you already know (because I'm running to you in hallways!), I'm chairing the O'Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego this week. There's so much intelligence, creativity, and fun in this place. I always swore I'd still run the ETech program even if I left O'Reilly: and, for the 6th year in a row, I'm thrilled and honoured to be involved. (Now if I could only be in all those sessions at the same time.)

Of course, I have plenty to tell you about — namely, Sandy and her debut at Under the Radar last week — but will have to wait till I have more than three minutes at a time in front of the computer. More soon...

Merlin Mann advises

I'm thrilled to announce that Merlin Mann has joined the Values of n advisory board.

Merlin is the inventor of the Hipster PDA, the reason you even know what a Moleskine is, and the one-person productivity guru behind 43 Folders,

You could say Merlin and I met during his well-podcasted wrestling with a book titled, ironically enough, "Productivity Hacks." (I was the guy behind the "very nice man from Cambridge — our editor [Brian Sawyer]—... whose life we temporarily ruined"; I was series editor of the O'Reilly Hacks series and Brian was my associate editor.) Yet it wasn't until some time later that Merlin and I actually spent some time together. And we've spent a goodly amount of time since, going through the ins and outs of Stikkit present and future, always homing in on that fine line between getting things done and getting in the way.

If you've not yet read anything by Merlin, I highly recommend his fabulous "Inbox Zero" blog-series. It should be required reading for anyone even considering an inbox of their own, let alone anyone who has already moved in and now wants out.

Merlin's unique blend of determination to get things done, ability to find the silliness in even his most trying attempts, and willingness to share it all in an inviting manner is a true gift.

We're honored to have Merlin working and playing along with us and making Stikkit all the better for it.

Salutations, gentle stikkiteers.

Today's build of Stikkit brings a couple-three enhancements we thought you'd like to know about.

• Stikkit salutations mean Stikkit will only respond when spoken to.


• A new "magic words" cheatsheet is just a click away.


• Streamlined signup brings immediate gratification: sign up and get sticking in mere seconds (without need of first confirming your email address).

(Feel free to skip the nitty-gritty and watch Stikkit salutations in action.)

Stikkit salutations

Our team is constantly improving and tweaking the Stikkit "magic word" parser: the machinery tasked with picking events, to-dos, peeps, bookmarks, tags, sharing, and more out of your stikkits and doing something useful with them. The key is being smart (doing only the right thing, otherwise keeping out of the way), not clever (thinking we know what you mean and stepping on your toes).

This is decidedly not artificial intelligence: Stikkit relies upon your actual intelligence, providing a pidgin — a simplified language with rudimentary grammar and vocabulary (what we call "magic words") — that's easy for you to remember and Stikkit to understand.

There are times, though, when you'd like Stikkit to stop listening. To turn Stikkit's parser off, simply prepend your stikkit with !! and it'll completely ignore any magic words in your note. Or you can point out particular paragraphs or words for Stikkit to ignore using !, as in "! Can't touch this." or "Please don't !share with rael." (Stikkit thoughtfully hides these exclamation marks when displaying your stikkit.)

But what if you want Stikkit to only respond when spoken to?

A new feature we're calling "Stikkit salutations" does just the trick. Prepend any line or paragraph with Stikkit, and Stikkit will start paying attention (until the end of the paragraph, i.e. next blank line). The rest of your stikkit is completely ignored. This is especially useful when you're pasting in extended notes for a meeting and only want Stikkit to notice the date and time for the meeting itself. Or when forwarding an email message to Stikkit, you can safely call out a line or three without having to chop out what you don't want Stikkit to misconstrue.

Here's an example of Stikkit salutations in action:

Marketing Meeting

stikkit, schedule a meeting on January 20th at 4pm.

We'll be talking about the marketing materials deadline of March 8th.

stikkit, share with susan@example.valuesofn.com

Forwarded email message:

> To: jj@example.valuesofn.com
> From: olivia@example.valuesofn.com
> Subject: Marketing materials deadline
>
> JJ-
> Let's meet about that marketing materials deadline.
> -O

Stikkit salutations come in four delicious syntactic flavors (I'm partial to the third):

stikkit,
stikkit:
s,
s:

Of course if you don't use any salutations, Stikkit does what it has always done and pays attention to the entire stikkit.

"Magic words" cheat-sheet

While there's really not much you have to remember when using Stikkit, we thought a cheat-sheet would come in handy. Click the help link at the top of any Stikkit window and it'll pop right up. (Thanks for the suggestion, Ev.)

Streamlined signup

In the course of our Stikkit home page redesign it turns out we left out one seemingly-innocuous yet forehead-smackingly obvious UI element: on-screen signup confirmation :-\.

Most of you were nice enough to assume you'd just missed a pop-up and happily clicked the the emailed link, leaving you signed in and none the worse for wear. But we were beginning to wonder about the few who took the time to sign up never to be heard from again.

We took the opportunity to not only repair the bug but completely rework and streamline Stikkit signup. New signups can now dive right in and start sticking stikkits without need of first visiting their email inboxes. The only restrictions on what you can do before email verification — necessary to prevent misuse — are that you can't share, set reminders, or log back in should you log out. These restrictions are instantly waived the moment you click the emailed link and log in.

We always appreciate hearing what's working for you and what's not behaving as expected, what you'd like to see in Stikkit, how you're using it, and anything else that's on your mind. Please do pop by our forums and get involved in the ongoing discussion and future direction of Stikkit.

net@nite: "The people behind Stikkit"

I had the pleasure of hanging out (virtually, at least) and chatting with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte on their weekly podcast net@nite. Uber-organizer and pal Merlin Mann was kind enough to demo Stikkit on a forthcoming episode of Leo's Call for Help show and they were taken with it enough to invite me to chat about some of the ideas behind our work.

You can listen to the podcast at TalkShoe (Episode 7: "iPhone?"; I pop on at time index 27:47).

Finance class project looks at Stikkit

Livejournal user Justin (aka sushicrusader) promoted Stikkit (and Values of n) as HPV (high potential venture) in his Entrepreneurial Finance class. I look forward to hearing his findings.

First Round and Rob Hayes join the team

I'm thrilled no end to announce the addition of First Round Capital to Values of n's first round (led by Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures in October of this year).

I was lucky enough to spend a goodly amount of time with First Round's managing partner Josh Kopelman early on in Stikkit's life and came away bolstered by Josh's firm grasp—early though it was—on what we were building, why it was interesting, and thoughts about where our little yellow notes might lead us.

As if this weren't enough, this investment brings long-time (at least in Stikkit-time) and always-on supporter Rob Hayes to our board.

Rob and I met at PC Forum earlier this year where we fell into easy conversation — one that continued late into the night and has been ongoing ever since. He suggested I spend some time with Di-Ann Eisnor and the folks at Portland-based startup Platial, that we'd be a good complement to one another: he was right and we've been sharing an office in Portland's vibrant Pearl District ever since.

Rob's experience building simple, intuitive, integrated applications for the small screen at Go Corp and Palm means he is intimately familiar with what we're trying to accomplish with our "small page" approach to personal productivity (and we don't have all that pesky handwriting recognition to worry about). While he's never needed to ask why we're building Stikkit, Rob is never shy about asking how we mean do it. His active, engaged participation, strong business focus, and expectation of at least deep thought if not absolute answers to the tough questions has meant a lot to me over the past months and I welcome his continuing that role in an official capacity as a member of our board. (Not to mention his irreverent sense of humor and devilish grin–as seen on Flickr.)

(I've previously referred to Rob in this blog as "one of the early sausage makers" behind the scenes in Jerry Kaplan's Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, the book that started me on this entrepreneurial path back in 1994.)

Rob and First Round join our already stellar group of Silicon Valley- and Portland, Oregon-based angels brimming with encouragement, inspiration, and just the right mix of hands-on and light touch.