Jennlog

I’ve been living in Boulder since early 1999 and every year since, as Memorial Day approaches, I’ve thought that doing the Bolder Boulder 10K Race would be a cool Bouldery thing to do.

Waiting for the race to begin

This year, my mom was visiting and in planning our time together, we decided to enter the 30th Bolder Boulder and join the “2 Hour” walking waves. We finished and my time was 1:43:21.78 (averaging a 16:39 mile) — my mom’s was around the same.

We’re planning on entering next year’s race and improving our time.

Wow, so this is my first post in March. I’ve been meaning to post but I’ve been busy with Statuspalooza and a number of other things this month.

I ended last month in California, working on a contract in Sacramento. I returned to Boulder on March 1.

The next week was a very busy event week for Tech/Start-up folks in Boulder with Open Coffee, Silicon Flatirons’ IP Law Panels at CU and the NewTech Meetup all occuring on Tuesday, then the Tech Cocktail event happening at The Foundry on Thursday.

On March 13th, the Boulder County Business Report published an article about the Boulder TechBootstrap project Patti Miller and I have been developing.

Statuspalooza took a fair bit of my attention and energy this month, because not only did I need a new work visa, but I needed a new passport. With the exception of a very grumpy US immigration agent (who felt I had misrepresented my experience to the US government in 2000 and therefore demanded that I re-substantiate my claim to work in the US on this application or be denied entry), it all went very smoothly.

Statuspalooza Tour 2008:

1. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Arrive Toronto
2. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Photos taken
3. Wed March 19, 2008 - Morning: Passport Application submitted
4. Thurs March 20, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Picked Up
5. Mon March 24, 2008 - Afternoon: US Visa Application Approved
6. Mon March 24, 2008 - Evening: Depart for Denver

I spent the week at my parents’ place. It was nice to relax for a while and visit over Easter, which I haven’t done in years.

There’s a Yallery update that’s about half finished that is meant to standardize our css implementation. I hope to create a more formal document structure that will enable an easier fix for Windows browser issues (mainly font sizing and layers). I’ve also spent some time looking into IE6 fixes and workarounds and concluded that there will never be an IE6-compatible version of Yallery, so upgrade your old nasty Windows browser.

Lastly, Billie the neighbor cat has gone missing. He hasn’t been by to visit in over a month and a half, so it’s been pretty lonely without my keyboard-hogging head-butting bud around.

This post answers the questions I was pondering in my Foreign Entrepreneurs and US Visas post last November.

In November, I was working full-time on Yallery dev, writing our pitch and talking with angels and VCs with one eye focused on fundraising and the other towards applying for an Entrepreneur (investor) visa as my TN-1 visa status expired in March 2008. I was also entertaining the notion of returning to Canada after nine years in the People’s Republic of Boulder if the fundraising and visa situation couldn’t be worked through.

Well, a lot has changed since November.

A couple weeks ago I created Boulder Tech Bootstrap with Patti Miller — a Wiki + Forum community resource and information sharing site for people starting and operating new tech companies in the Boulder-Denver region.

On the Yallery front, Michael and I removed the “Invite Wall” — and now anyone can view the art or create an account and share their own art (my personal Yallery Collector Dashboard is here: http://yallery.com/jennr). I’m considering it to be in a soft launch state while we continue development.

After a lot of great feedback, I accepted that Yallery was not going to interest investors until there was a demonstrable membership base and revenue (no matter how much I believe in the value and novelty of art relationships). Yallery is still a “project” and the revenue is still a far ways away — removing the Invite Wall will improve the membership base situation.

I also accepted that I could no longer afford to support myself while I worked full-time on Yallery and started to put out my feelers for consulting work. And so, next week, I start some product development & advisory consulting for a company just outside of Sacramento. It’s a short contract that may go longer-term if we gel.

What this all means is I’ll be re-upping my TN-1 for a year due to my new Management Consulting gig in California and will be sticking around in Boulder while I work part-time on Yallery.

And now that this has been sorted out, I can set some milestones for the year:

My Yallery milestones for this year will be to get it working correctly on Windows browsers, implement the revenue generation components of Yallery, grow the membership and start operating the marketplace features.

My professional milestones for this year will be to add the most value I can to my client’s products.

My personal milestones for this year will be to get out of debt, restart saving again and get out and enjoy friends, life and love more than I did while I was in startup mode.

It’s going to be a good year.

Here we go with another one of my New Year’s Resolutions. This one is personal, and one that took me almost a month to face — It’s time to focus on me.

I can honestly say that I’ve given everything I had into Yallery, and then whatever else I could find — so I could give it a full-time effort. My standard of living has gone from pretty darn excellent when I left my last full-time engagement in August 2005, to pretty darn close to where it was when I was touring Canada with bar bands and living in my recording studio in the late 80s.

It’s with a heavy heart that I step back from having Yallery as my life and start looking to rebuild my health, repay debts, and exercise the other parts of my experience that are of some value to other founders — other companies.

I believe that there is a place for Yallery as a community and as a useful service for the artists and collectors who will find us. Michael and I are not giving up, we’re moving it to a part-time focus until we may spend more time on it once more. We’re going to continue to develop; We’re going to continue to support; We’re going to continue to evangelize the site to both artists and collectors as a place to share art; We’re going to continue to seek out cleaver minds and bright hearts to help us make our vision a reality.

My next post will detail some Yallery changes occuring in the near future. In the meantime, if you are looking for some executive assistance of the technical persuasion, ask me for my resume — my email address is jenn@jenn.com.

One of my 2008 resolutions is seeking out and developing more partnerships with people and companies.

I’ve been operating websites since 1994. Not as long as some, but early enough that I have acquired a few domain names. Most of the names below were registered as "Web 1.0" projects that came and went as companies or projects that were started, acquired or dissolved.

During the last year, I’ve developed (I think) a more cooperative view about the creation of websites and Internet-directed efforts. I have witnessed the excitement in spontaneity and strength of teams as people join and participate in Startup Weekends around the world. I have servers, I have domain names and I have some experience with Internet stuff — let’s talk about creating something new.

Yallery is my primary focus and has been my full-time job for almost two years. While it is still a few months away from an unrestricted launch, I’ve been working on tour.net and ShowMedia to figure out and learn some technical and programming stuff to bring back to Yallery. I would love to work with others on turning the domains below into useful, prosperous products and/or services. Email me at jenn@jenn.com or leave a comment below. (Truth be told, I’m also interested in speaking with developers and designers who may wish to get involved at an equity level in Yallery, tour.net and ShowMedia.)

This post is an invitation to start a dialog with marketing and technical folks about working together on new ideas. This post is not an invitation for “domainers” to tell me about a great google/yahoo ad parking scheme.