Michael's Biztalk posts

Virtualize, Virtualize, Virtualize

My wife & I are starting a new company with a friend of ours who lives on the other side of the country. Given the logistics of this, and the fact that we will be moving abroad next year, we're looking towards virtualizing as much of this business as possible.

The first thing that's struck me as critical is to eliminate the need for paper/snail mail. I'm looking at http://www.earthclassmail.com/remote-addresses for this.

Accounting. We're looking at quickbooks online. It seems to handle check writing, payroll, and bookkeeping for $50/month, as well as having an option for credit card processing.

E-mail and Calendaring. We'll likely be going for Google for this.

Wiki/Documentation management. Right now we're sharing everything through Facebook, but we're looking at Atlassian's hosted services as a better option.

Web Hosting. I run a web hosting company, so this isn't much of an issue, but if it was, I'd most likely use something easily scaleable such as Amazon EC2 or one of the other upstart grid hosting companies. I'm trying to limit the number of applications we'll be managing to only our core products. Everything else I want outsourced.

I'm sure there's more I'm not thinking of, any tips/suggestions on how to run the least centralized, most virtualized business possible would be helpful.

Custom figurines/dolls for marketing gimmick?

We're playing around with what to put together for stocking stuffers this holiday season, and the main idea we've got in our heads is that we'd like to get some plastic figurines of our logos made up, molded around 1GB USB Keys.. Can anyone recommend a shwag manufacturer that cna do this for us?

Seattle Angel Investors who like Server/Network Infrastructure Startups?

Well, I've pretty much said it all in the Title of my posting. I'm looking to network with local Angels who specialize in datacenter/CLEC/Managed Services startups. I'd appreciate any recommendations.

High density Server cabinets in Seattle with 100mb/s, $5,000/month

1 Full cabinet in our Tukwila, WA Datacenter.

• 100mb/s of bandwidth on redudant Gigabit connections

• Dual 30 amp circuits (48 amps useable @ 120v)

• Remote reboot PDUs

• $5,000 setup

• $4,999/month, 1-year contract. Setup waved with 1-year prepay.

E-mail mhalligan@bitpusher.com for more information.

Public speaking classes in September?

Does anybody know of any good public speaking classes in Sept? My business partner is doing a workshop at a big conference in London in October, and I'd like to bring him up to Seattle so we can both take a class in preparation for it.

Tukwila of all places

I'm in Tukwila all day freezing at my datacenter.. Anybody in the area up for coffee? Is there coffee in Tukwila?

Shameless video plug

We were invited to talk about our company at Google, and last week my business partner did down at Mountain View. The topic of the talk was "Economies of Focus", generally describing our process for managing dozens of disparate technical infrastructures in a process-driven way.

Here's the video : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=348524553464745734

Calculating unemployment taxes?

Can anybody point me to a clear guide on unemployment taxes? So far the "best" resource I've found is http://fortress.wa.gov/esd/portal/unemployment/taxes/taxbook/

This site "helpfully" states that myunemployment costs will be "Industry Average plus 15%", which doesn't exactly say .. well, it doesn't really say anything.

Offered: Linux Systems Administration, Wanted:Feed My Canon Camera Addiction

I'm willing to trade 10-20 hours of Linux Systems Administration consulting for some spiffy gear to feed my DSLR addiction. My resume is at http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/res/373076992.html

On my wish list:

• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens
• Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Ultra Wide Angle Zoom Lens
• 15" MacBook Pro
• Epson Stylus Pro 4800 Color Inkjet Printer

The profile lookup dance..

I'm sure we've all noticed that we can see who has been looking at our profile. What's funny about this, I'm realizing, is the endless loop this creates.. You click on the last 5 people who have looked at your profile.. Then they see that you looked at their profile, and look at yours. In return you do the same, eventually the same 5 people are looking at the same 5 people's profiles, and returning the favor, repeating to infinitum!

Seattle Web Technology August Meetup

Is anybody else going to August's Web Tech meetup? http://web.meetup.com/14/calendar/5999240/ We used to go to the ones in SF (which admittedly were much larger) and they were always a great networking event. I think this one's going to be rather decent due to Gnomedex happening that week.

On my floor, Organizing!

It's time. We've been here for 4 months, and the office isn't still unpacked. This weekend is dedicated to unpacking the 20 boxes left that make up our office, finding places for that worth keeping throwing away that which isn't.

This floor is hard.

Nanny-shares/daytime babysitters/other options in Greenlake/Wallingford?

My wife & I live (and work from home) in the Woodland park area. We've got a wonderful, 5-month old daughter, and are trying to find an affordable, but comfortable daytime babysitting option.

We're open to any suggestions from other small family businesses on how they've solved this problem. Our goal is to find a way to get Linda back to work about 4 hours per day, 2-4 days per week.

Estimated expenses for a post-conference Open Bar?

There are a few conferences coming up that are really ripe for my perfect target customers (Web 2.0 startups, angel-funded companies, etc). The locations for these events are SF, Seattle & London, all of which we'll have a small presence at, and I'm thinking of doing an after-party/open bar for somewhere between one and all of these events.

Having attended dozens of these types of after-parties, but never hosted one, I can only wildly speculate as to costs. My best guess is that between 50 and 250 people will show up (depending on the event), and my cost at the end of the night will be somewhere around $25 * ATTENDEES, so my estimate is somewhere between $2,500 to $6,250 in terms of alcohol tabs, plus any entertainment we hire for the event, marketing materials, food if we have it catered, etc.

I'd be grateful to anybody else who has hosted these sorts of parties who can give me an idea of what to expect, and if it's even worth pursuing. Also, can anybody recommend a good place in Seattle to do such an event?

Idea for a new ISP business.

Let's call it, Extreme DSL (ignoring the actual company of that name, whose service is subpar, btw). I'll pay an extra $100/month for my home DSL. However, if within any 30 day period, there is more than a 30 day outage, I get either a 1-month refund, or 5 minutes alone with the company's CEO.

I think I'm onto something here..

Barring that, can anybody recommend a local dsl provider who doesn't suck? Qwest is out, so is speakeasy.

Setting up a 401k for your employees?

Can anybody give me a good local starting point for researching whats involved in setting up a 401k plan for my employees?

Seattle BizJam

Congratulations to Dan & Lara. Yesterday's event went off very well. We were very impressed at how well organized the conference and the after-party went!

Local insurance broker with a National scope?

We just moved our business from San Francisco, and Seattle. We're a small (5-person) company, and 4 of our employees are now in Seattle (3 months ago, all 5 of us were in San Francisco). We just found out that our broker won't be able to sell us insurance come October, since he's not authorized in Washington.

I'd like to avoid this problem moving forward, since I'm expecting to hire another 2-3 in Washington, and probably 2-3 in Wisconsin or Virginia over the next 18 months, and don't want to run into this again.

Can anybody recommend a good local insurance broker who can sell insurance nationally?

New to Seattle, looking for networking opportunities.

Greetings!

We've just completed the bulk of the work in moving our company from San Francisco to Seattle, and are excited about the new opportunities here. Seattle provided just that right mixture of low power-costs, a good tech labor pool, and cheap datacenter space to steal us away from the money-pit that was doing business in the Silicon Valley.

I'm the CTO of a small (6-person) company now mostly-based out of Seattle. We're moving all of our employees here, and one of my partners is staying in SF to maintain a bay area sales office.

Now that we're finally done with the exhausting task of building our new infrastructure here, it's time to get down to business. I'm looking for as many ways as possible to meet local web-based entrepreneurs. I'm also looking for local colo & telco outside sales agents to talk about referral potentials.