My friend Jared Brandt and the Zentact team--led by serial--and parallel--entrepreneur Eric Marcoullier--just announced this new service,.

This social-network conscious contact management system allows you to identify and tag people associated with email addresses or social network profiles and then helps you manage your connections to them, prompting you to send them story links and other data it reads on the web pages you are browsing.

In other words, if you were linked to founder Eric Marcoullier and you'd tagged him with MyBlogLog, Boulder, 'Gnip, Florida, angels, VCs, techstars, and San Francisco, you'd get a prompt to send him a note if you cruised pages with these items--especially if you hadn't sent him anything in a while. Even better, the system tells you the last time you sent that person anything, so you can manage your communications.

I used Zentact in the alpha and my biggest problem with it was the speed it which it operated--a crawl--or slower. I've also had problems tagging people (this is probably because I added more contacts that the system could process quickly in either their javascript front end or their look up table, not sure which). Surely, this will improve as they prepare for more real customers.

Unlike some social network tools, which I try and then promptly abandon, I'd like to keep using Zentact till I get a good feel for how it really works. It's promising. Very.

I'm working with some very cool people on a new start-up we will launch on Q1 09. January is crunch month, February is beta and we're going into regular operation (we hope) by March.

Seeking the following for unpaid positions, 10-20 hours per week:
1) Blogging/editorial interns: Bloggers or journalism students or others interested in writing and researching on on-going basis. Must have clips or blog to show and must have work history showing responsibility. Will be writing and researching, with credit.
2) Research/analyst types to work on some analytic projects, create charts and graphs for web site. Prior experience with web, doing research and crunching data preferred.
3) Social markerting/marketing/biz dev student to work on outreach, distribution, and business side. Good experience for MBA still in school.

Company is based in Oakland, CA, but you do not need to be local. You do need to want to help make a cool new project happen and get credit for it. Would like a 3-6 month commitment.
 
Will bring on 1-4 people, send expression of interest, resume web links to smernit gmail. Phone interviews, in person if you are here. Sell me why this is a good fit for you (I realize I am tellling you very little about the focus, sorry....more if you make it to next round.)

I've been at TechStars for about 36 hours; the program started Tuesday night and it's Thursday morning now. My hopes when I accepted the spot we were fortunate enough to be offered was that this would be both an accelerator for building our company and launching our idea, and a good school to learn about being a CEO and co-leader of a small business.

After 36 hours, my sense is that it is going to be both of those things (more all all that in some other posts), but it is also going to be a major journey of transformation.  After 3 months of this program, I am going to be significantly altered in what I know and what I have experienced--and that seems amazingly exciting.

Two of the themes that have started to emerge at TechStars are: "Find amazing mentors" and "Early stage VCs fund people, not ideas."

TechStars director David Cohen (who is wonderful) is the proponent of the first statement and what it means to him (and therefore to all us eager students), is Find people you click with, who have knowledge you need, and listen deeply, learn from them, and build those relationships."  We have about 50 mentors who are part of the program, mostly local (or seriously passing through) and a big part of the focus is meeting with them.  But we're also encouraged to reach beyond these folks, into the local community and into the world, letting the TechStars team help make connections, if needed.)

Brad Feld, another founder (and a bold and interesting VC), is the person who talked about how early stage VCs fund people, not ideas. According to Brad, much of  the judgments about early investments are based on feelings about the founders, the team and whether the person can deliver. Because ideas morph, both to meet budgets and timelines, but also because of user feedback on your early releases, So while having a business plan, a sense of where revenue is going to come from, and some solid data are all important, the relationships are core(at least for Bard and his circle.)

For me, this implies that part of the TechStars experience is learning how to develop ideas and run companies; while getting the right focus for our big idea and truly defining what problem we are solving--and then iterating a product solution to address these solutiuons --is key, so is absorbing this wisdom so we can do it again and again--and that feels amazingly transformative.

In two weeks, I move out of the Silicon Valley area for a brief stint and head for the next great adventure. The work it's taken to get to this moment and the degree of focus getting a start-up into even a semblance of operating mode is considerable, and I feel like the longer, more reflected and crafted pieces I wanted to--and occasionally wrote and published--on this blog, have suffered.

Instead of commentary on social media, it's been tasks, chores, logistics, errands, recruitment, funding, operations, moving--all the time, pretty much (with some writing specs and planning).

Even my reading has narrowed down alot more into the startup stories--Hacker News is my new best friend.

So starting this week, I'll be doing more blogging about where leaving Yahoo has led me--to starting a new company--and about the start up experience in general.  My intent is to chronicle what happens to us over the next four-six months. I want to capture the experience of pulling a team together, creating a plan and a product, and share some of the stories of winding our way through the funding and focusing process, getting to alpha, and making real quality execution and value happen.  I've started alot of businesses, run my own consulting company, and been an exec building value at a number of big companies--but this is my first run at a true start-up--and the engines are reving now.

Meanwhile, I know many other people have knowledge and experience to share. So, iff you have great reading, great resources, or stories to share, please post in  the comments, or ping me directly...thoughts, comments, etc. welcomed.

So we're creating this start up, see. And my co-founder and I live in different places.

And while we're be together for a chunk of time very soon, we're not now. So we have these looonnnggg telephone conversations about everything: the product, the use cases, the solutions, the tech innovation, the coders, how we will make money, what we will build and in what sequence, why we'd do it that way, why we wouldn't do it that way, and on and on.

What is interesting to me is that three things are happening as we hammer away at all this--really, as we hammer away at everything.

A) We're norming one another to a common view of our business and our products; ie talking it out makes it clearer and we speak the same words/share the same vision.

B)  We're learning how to communicate on a deeper level--we've been friends for a while, but we've never done something this bit together--and we're still getting one another's styles.

C) We're figuring out what's the  right story, the right set of paradigms to describe what we are making, who is is for, and what problems we want to solve.

And C is just the most interesting place to linger, because it's where we align our vision with what we want to tell others, with the competitive landscape and with the paradigms and metaphors that will make our story come alive.

The story we're telling isn't unified yet, which mean it isn't completely right, but it's exciting as hell to get the process (along with about 90,000 other things) truly going.

So, now that I am starting a company(more specifics on that later, and with a great partner), I've got an amazing number of things to balance. There's the ideas, the plans, the people to work with, the timetables, the costs. And then, on the other side, there's the budget, the funding, the roadmap..all those things that take resources and dollars.

In my usual fashion, one of my ways to learn is to talk with people about their experiences starting companies (thanks, you know who you are), what they learned, what they wouldn't do again. And then there's my time honored exercise in reading as a means to knowledge. I've been rooting around, looking at entrepreneur's blogs, founder's blogs, VC's blogs, and all sorts of other resources.

And here's what I learned: There's a hellofva lot I am going to know six months from now, I don't know today. But if I don't find a way to manage the info flow, I am going to a) drown and b) interrupt all the stuff I really have to do to get our idea going.

How do you balance getting critical things done/momenteum with absorbing information? What's your style? Comments here, or elsewhere, welcomed.

Mashable has a post tonight that Jajah has done a deal with Yahoo! to be the first client to use their Managed Services suite (based on a story by Alec Saunders, here). I've been a fan of this company since I first talked to them in late 2006, and it's good to see they finally have the Yahoo! deal they've been dancing around for a while. As Alex says : "JAJAH's network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN."

In other words, they've been building out considerable capacity and capabilty for a while and this deal gives them the large scale, name brand partner to take growth to the next level, and improve the revenue streams.

Nice.