EightBlack.

This week is actually an important one. For me at least.

When I finally convince the mere mortals who work with me to fire up the other blog I intend to ruin with my drivel, I will outline what the hooh hah is all about.

This week is the week we get the opportunity to present to VC firms such as Sequoia Capital, Evercore, Globespan and Sutton Hill Ventures. Right in the heart of where the tech money lives - Sand Hill Road.

Win Lose or Draw, it will have been worth the experience. I doubt that these well heeled Silicon Valley money guys will let me take video footage of our chat, but you never know.

I’ll let you know what happens. Now, back to drinking heavily.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.

Our new baby, TaguchiMail has been keeping me busy. And since I’ve closed the chapter on Eight Black (which is now a part of Catalyst), I’ve decided to finish the blog. For now. And besides, when you run out of stuff that interests you, you should quit.

I’m going to attempt to re-invent myself over at the TaguchiMail blog.

When the team tell me its ready, I’ll let you all know. (Actually it is, but I’m struggling to get my stuff pushed higher in the queue!)

For those that have taken the time to engage, I appreciate it.

All endings should be short and sweet. Especially in this digital age. I’ll see you all on the other side.

Well, there goes that opportunity. I don’t know who I am going to bag now.

You see, all those over priced digital agencies who were primarily responsible for those completely irrelevant SWF (Flash Files) are now no longer an easy target. No more lack of total respect by the SEO fraternity.

Those files are now able to be seen by Google (and Yahoo!).

Most SEO practitioners treated flash files with the contempt it deserved. But no more.

Being seen is one thing. Being ranked is entirely another. But at least its a start.

Techcrunch has more here and Adobe’s official line is here.

Bravo.

One of the TaguchiMail board members, Glenn Vardy, sent me this extract (point 4 below) in an email this morning. It’s relevant to us because in a week or so, we head to the US to begin a series of meetings with VC’s along Sand Hill Rd.

I don’t know about you, but asking for money is something that I’m not particularly good at. But in Silicon Valley, there is no embarrassment in this area (either on the requesting side or the giving side).

All I know is that in this market, start-ups in the tech space face an incredibly tough time. One quick glance at Techcrunch will tell you that while money is still around, it is increasingly difficult to part it and its owners.

I’ve seen a lot of local pitches in the tech area. VC’s, either here or in the US, aren’t as scary as most people make out. The most important advice I have received so far is this:

1. 10 slides only (if you need me to tell you more, you need to do more homework). Hint - Google “Guy Kawasaki and start-up advice”.

2. This recent article by David Hornik (there is plenty more on this subject).

3. Anything written by Marc Andreessen, especially is 6 part series on “The Guide To Start-Ups” Start here.

4. And this extract here, written by a serial entrepreneur and proven leader in the Valley - Sam Cece, the CEO of StrongMail. From his blog (Disclosure, StrongMail is a partner of TaguchiMail).

Innovation or iteration? I’m sure that most of you have heard the phrase, “The New, New Thing.” If not, it’s one of those Silicon Valley phrases that is typically asked by an investor, most likely a VC, that is intended to make you stop and think about your company’s next move. Plainly stated, it means, “What new technological (or market, business model, adjacent technology, etc.) innovation is on deck within your company that will leap-frog your competitors and propel your company into the future?” This is a tough question for any CEO.

The problem with forcing “The New, New Thing” onto your organization is that these big leaps are distracting, destabilizing and unrealistic.

I always thought that this was strange - the fact that Vodafone and Optus got the jump on Telstra for the rights to re-sell the much anticipated 3G iPhone.

News yesterday that Telstra had finally agreed to the commercial model between Apple and Telstra’s bean counters.

Now that it’s a 3 horse race in Australia, it will be interesting to see just which carrier gets the jump on the market. My bet is that Vodafone will struggle - their regional and outer city coverage just isnt up to scratch. Optus may surprise due to its dominance in the youth market.

But Telstra has the clear advantage of strength on its side - with the largest customer base, largest business penetration, and best regional coverage.

Apparently, 4th carrier 3 (Three), has spat the dummy and all it can come up with as a strategy is to have all its customers sign a petition demanding that Apple let it sell the iPhone as well.

Yeah. Right. As if Steve Jobs has ever taken notice of a petition. Especially from a carrier with the smallest share in a market of 21 million people.

If Telstra don’t screw up the execution, their iPhone deal might just be the shot in the arm the ailing carrier needs. Lets see how long it takes them to get their marketing department to set up an adwords account and compete head to head with with Vodafone and Optus.

All I know is that its going to be mighty hard to shift all the enterprise customers from their RIM devices to a trussed up iPod.

Time will tell.

This is the start of something to be sure. News today in The Australian that Gmail has just won the tender to supply the entire NSW Department of Education with 1.5 million student email accounts.

Apparently, its one of the single largest Gmail deployments ever, and the work is being done by local integrator, SMS.

Email storage increases 170 fold (from 35MB to over 6 Gigabytes). Which is enough for even the most perverted of students.

What is silly though is that students wont be given access to the chat function (GTalk) and teachers wont be ported to Gmail because some IT drone was worried about bandwith costs between the US and Australia.

If they were worried about, why not ask Google to pony up for the money. You can be sure they’d listen, especially if it meant ousting Microsoft from every other state based education department.

The deal is going to save the NSW Government around $24 million.

According to TechCrunch;

The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how the students react to contextual based advertising within email, how many continue to use their Hotmail or Yahoo accounts or simply how many kids just don’t give a stuff.

I’m convinced Google will be very keen on the data that they will be able to pull from the deployment.

If you are a parent with young children, you will understand where I’m coming from with this.

Sometimes I walk around the house in my underwear, yelling loudly “It’s good to be the King, It’s good to be the King”.

I want my kids to know who’s in charge.

However, not long after this act of bravery started on my count, my 5-year old daughter came up to me and said in a stern voice, “Daddy, you may be the King, but you’re not the boss”. I looked at her in disdain and gruffly demanded just who is then, if it’s not me.

She says matter of factly,  “Mummy is”.

Sort of a bit like Jerry Yang. He used to be the King at Yahoo!. But he’s no longer the boss.

I wrote a while ago that I honestly thought “the deal” would get done (between Microsoft and Yahoo!). I’d seen Steve Ballmer talk at last years Web 2.0 Expo and as soon as Battelle mentioned the word Google and Search in the one sentence, he started jumping up and down like a 9 year old boy who swallowed 4 and half litres of Ritalin.

Or something like that.

Microsoft desparately wants to win at the search game and thought Yahoo! would have at last, let them get closer to their arch rival, Google.

Anyway, I’ve never been a huge fan of Yahoo! so I sort of really didn’t care either way. I’ve never had a Yahoo email address, rarely use Flickr,  wouldn’t know what Yahoo Groups is/does, and never use Yahoo as my search engine.

And I think Yahoo! are so far behind in the whole area of search marketing, it’s not funny. The only people who have less market share than Yahoo in this space in Australia at least, is Sensis. And they would have better luck selling an STD to someone before they sold a search marketing solution.

But I digress.

I think Jerry Yang’s days are numbered. Carl Icahn is not the sort of person you need circling above and as the Yahoo! stock price heads south, the Board and their major shareholders just might ask Jerry to step aside. He may be the founder, but he may not have a choice.

One thing is clear. Yang hates Microsoft. I don’t reckon he wanted a deal done with the devil at any price.

And Ballmer for once played a game of patience, made his offer, didn’t budge and waited Yahoo! out.

The biggest sign of trouble though has nothing to do with the share price. Nothing to do with Google and Yahoo! getting into bed. And nothing to do with Microsoft.

It’s got to do with the mass exodus of talent leaving Yahoo’s gates. Look, the really smart bastards had already left, and the next calibre of people probably had already been trawling through the Google jobs board.

But when these guys leave, the crack becomes a gaping hole and pretty soon the proverbial damn will burst and there will be no stopping the thing. According to one source, over 50 top executives have left since January 2008, 9 of them since the Microsoft bid collapsed just over a month ago.

You can’t innovate without talent, doesn’t matter how much money the company has. Yang is in it deep now and if there is any hope for Yahoo!, he needs to step aside and take drastic measures to stop the brain drain. Before its too late. And it might already be…

However, if he wants to be like me, and continue to walk around in his underwear in a state of delusion, yelling out “It’s good to be the King” he can go right ahead. It’s just that pretty soon, there’ll be no one left in his Kingdom to preach to.

Which reminds me, I need to ask my wife if I can stay out late tomorrow night…

I’ve been a client of these folks for 8 years. Have a read. Particularly the last line of the email.

Good Morning Simon,

Just advising you of an overpayment that we have received for TaguchiMail for Invoice 280/10213. There was already a payment of $289.00 with an outstanding amount of $31.64 made on 6th May 2008.

You have now paid for that $31.64 from the payment made on 23rd June 2008. The Credit of $289.00 has now been put towards the invoice was is due tomorrow Invoice 280/10339.

The only amount outstanding for invoice 280/10339 is $0.41 which is due by tomorrow.

Kind regards,

Candace Shepherd
Operations Manager

All I can say is this. Idiots.

Perry outlines 10 critical steps.

And obviously, we agree - especially given the fact that TaguchiMail helps even further with this process.

Any marketer who is emailing and doesn’t know what his or her sender reputation is, doesn’t have a suite of reporting and delivery tools and cant dynamically optimise the content of their email broadcast, falls even further behind.

Perry’s one of the smartest online marketers I know. And for good reason. His clarity of thinking is way above the majority of the market.

Well, sort of.

I was in Sydney yesterday and caught up with Rick Webb, one of the original founders of BlueFreeway. He’s clearly a very intelligent guy and we had a decent chat - all of which was off the record.

Which is a pity.

The BlueFreeway story needs to be told from both sides.

My feeling is that we haven’t heard the last of Rick.

Nor is the saga at the digital camp by any means over.

The good news is that the stock price recovered somewhat yesterday (if you could call it that) and is now trading just above the 7 cent mark. Macquarie bailed on all its holdings last Friday - hence the 6 million or so shares that hit the trading floor.