Jambo

D Magazine (the monthly mag for everything Dallas) featured Jambo in its January 2007 issue. Laurie Dent said Jambo was “GPS for the Lonely. A girl walks into a bar - and her next boyfriend gets a text message about her arrival. . . . The application . . . alerts users when someone they might be attracted to is nearby.”
People can use Jambo to solve all kinds of needs (reconnecting with friends, meeting group members nearby, etc.), but it sounds like the dating angle could make bar hopping a lot more fun! So, when you find Mr./Ms. Right through Jambo, please send us your stories, we would love to feature them on our blog. (If you find Mrs. Right, please keep it to your self).

Yesterday we gave a talk at a UVA class on Entrepreneurship, and had a lot of fun. The interesting thing was that we were in Dallas when we gave the talk. We assembled a poor man’s teleportec, compliments of Skype Video, an isight/ibook and a roll of paper towels. We simply ran my isight cable through the paper towels for a makeshift tripod and then connected to the class via skype - we could see all the students and call on them if they raised their hand to ask a question. The professor on the other end, projected his laptop in the lecture hall so everyone could see us, and ran his audio through the classroom speakers. Here’s what the rig looked like on our end:

I ran into Blake Burris at a STIRR event in San Francisco last week and we started brainstorming about creating an office space/apartment for startups to stay in and work out of when they travel to Silicon Valley. For the price of a last minute ticket and hotel, you could almost afford an apartment in the Bay area. So, perhaps there is an opportunity to sell fractions or memberships in an office/apartment for non-valley startups to share when they have trips out there. Check out Blake’s post to learn more about how something like this could work.

We closed out 2005 with a nice bit of recognition. Charles and I were honored as two of “The Most Important People in Mass Customization 2005-2006″. That’s very cool and we’re very honored to make such an exclusive list.

You’ve gotta love the global nature of the Internet.

Jambo in so many ways, is about mass customization. (as well as massive customization!) Customization of information about the people around you. I was so pleased to check my email this morning and receive a kind email and post from a complete stranger in Ireleand who writes about mass customization at Made For One and loves what we’re doing.

Read the post here. Its reading stuff like this that get’s me out of bed in the morning! I’m putting his last two paragraphs below:

“In the opinion of this website, Jambo.net could become the online world’s biggest success story over the next 1-2 years. It is a system of personalizing opportunities for human contact. It is a way of transferring the advantages of online tools like discussion groups from the virtual to the real world. With these advantages will no doubt come new concerns about personal privacy and safety. However, if past experience is anything to go by, convenience and benefit will outweigh reservations. A few years ago, some people raised concerns about privacy in relation to website cookies. More recently, Google’s Gmail program was criticised for targetting advertisements to users based on the content of their emails. However, none of these things actually halted the widespread acceptance and use of the technologies in question.

Normally this website is cautious in its predictions about the future, but in the case of Jambo.net, it must be said: It’s gonna be huge.”

As a startup, you have to be flexible - in every regard. We’ve gotten to be extremely flexible with how and where we make conference calls. Pick a random hotel lobby - mezzanine levels tend to be good, empty meeting rooms are better. Or go onto a campus and find an empty classroom. Library study rooms are superb. Nothing though, beats the privacy of your own conference room on wheels.

A couple of weeks ago we came out of a meeting, and had 10 minutes before we had to jump on a conference call to Shanghai, China. So we drove over to the parking lot of a Border’s bookstore, sat in the car and hopped on their WiFi network, firing up Skype on Charles’ laptop. Laptop speakers are much better than crappy cell speakerphones and the quality of Skype rocks. Plus the price is right - 2 cents a minute to China. The WiFi network can extend out pretty far into the parking lot, but try to park as close to the door as you can. Of course, it works after hours too! No doubt there are other parking-lot Skype people out there, its a nice solution. You get the privacy of your own meeting room (your whole car!) with the advantages of cheap VoIP calling. I like it.

But I think this one is even cooler (and I have to give Charles full credit for it). We were heading down to Austin the other day, and we had a conference call w/ some folks in California. We both have these HP 6315’s that are on their last leg. His speakerphone doesn’t work at all and mine is quite muffled. The solution? One of these babies. An old-school casette adapter. Pretty low tech, but precisely what we needed! The HP’s have a headphone jack and so now we had a graphically-equalized, six-speaker conferencing system, as we were racing down I-35. Full-on stereophonic/telephonic integration for like $12 bucks at Radio Shack, plus it works in rent cars. Brilliant.

The Jambo Team is psyched to announce that Amazon.com’s former Chief Scientist Dr. Andreas Weigend will be Jambo Networks’ Chief Scientist. At Amazon.com, Andreas was responsible for personalization/recommendations and helped customers identify new items based on their own past behavior and the behavior of others (i.e. if you like this book, you may like this one too. . . ) His expertise is in machine learning, data mining, and discovery algorithms.

At Jambo, Andreas will focus on personalizing the user experience and on enhancing the algorithms matching users. These recommendations matching people together locally is one of the most important aspects of what we do. Andreas has already started working with us, so we will be releasing some exciting new features over the next few months that I can’t wait to tell you about!

Here is a link to the press release: PR Newswire or Jambo website.

We’ve enlisted the help of friends and family to promote Jambo. My brother-in-law and his friend Pete are up in Nantucket, spreading the Jambo gospel. Here are a couple of pics taken over the weekend of our grassroots marketing campaign as it sweeps the country.

If you believe in Jambo and want to help out, go here! We always welcome people that want to help out! Feel free to put up some flyers wherever you want to find other Jambo users - on campus, at your conference, or in your hotspot. Have fun!

Jambo will be in NYC this weekend through Tuesday. If you are interested in meeting up with us, send us a note. Also, if you are going to be in La Guardia Airport on Tuesday afternoon, download Jambo from Jambo’s website . or from the Concourse WiFi Hotspot Welcome page at La Guardia Airport if you want to try it out with us. We have Jambo running all the time on our laptops, so if you happen to be nearby, we can discover one another through Jambo and hopefully meet up.