amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

Even though changes are afoot at MOSH mobile I’ve still been slammed with a plethora of things that need done.

We’ve got a new podcast coming soon to Startup Hero that I’m pretty excited about and I hope to be sharing details about in the next several days with everyone.

I might have some news tomorrow in regard to the whole career aspect of my life. I’ll try to let you all know about that as much as I can as soon as I can.

I did get married recently so I’ve been busy entertaining Mrs. Angel and between everything I just haven’t had a lot of free time to myself.

More to come when I get the chance.

Over the past few weeks things have been looking incredibly up for MOSH mobile.

Our contract with our current provider was coming to an end later this month and we had begun looking at taking our service nation-wide with the help of a major carrier. We’d been negotiating with this carrier for the past several weeks and finally had come to what seemed to be a really great deal for both sides.

I’ve been asked to specifically not go in to the specifics of the companies involved nor the details of the agreement but I can tell you that this company was entering an agreement with another provider at the same time we were in talks with them.

Today we received the message that they would no longer be able to work with us as it would compete with a future product they are working on already.

Normally, we’d take this setback and keep going. This however has been another setback in a long line of them that like Nate Westheimer simply shows me and the team here at MOSH mobile that it is time to rethink what we are doing.

Instead of just closing up shop and throwing away all of the hard work that we’ve put in to this startup we’ve decided to rework the majority of software we have and roll them in to future projects and companies and move forward in a different direction with MOSH mobile. While I won’t go in to details on what specifically will be done I can say that the software will be put to good use and that the demand for what it does is already quite high.

As for our current beta testers service will continue for a short period of time but since the group that was allowed to use our service was small and the phones were simply being borrowed we will be sadly discountinuing that service in the near future.

In the near future MOSH mobile will announce the new direction it will be going in.

I’d like to thank the countless people who have offered support to myself and the team on this project. I know that many of us will be continuing to take the company in a new direction and that some of us will be heading off in new directions.

We’ve all learned a great deal of valuable lessons and they will be applied to anything new that we move forward with.

I hope that you’ll continue to follow me here on the blog, via Twitter or by friending me on Facebook as the journey is not yet over… it is merely just beginning.

The trackball on my Blackberry has been cutting out a lot lately. Apparently this is a normal issue and cleaning it seems to be the solution. What happens though when even taking it apart and cleaning it doesn’t fix it?

Anyone who knows me knows that I live and die by my phone. I use it constantly, nonstop, and it never leaves my side. I go through a lot of phones for the simple fact that I use them so much.

I’ve had my Pearl for about four months and love it. It does everything I want and I knew eventually the trackball would stop working.

The fact that it gave out now could not have come at a worse time. I’m in the middle of texting, calling and messaging people for Startup Weekend and a deal for MOSH mobile.

So what does the CEO of a cellphone company do? Grab a new phone out of our stash and trash the old one?

That would be simple… but just plain stupid.

Knowing that some of our customers may run in to the same issue I’m going to expect my people to be able to find a solution that works best for our customers.

Replacing the trackball for them for free is obviously the best solution.

That is exactly what we will be doing.

So I figured I should learn how to do it myself before I start having other people here at MOSH mobile doing the same thing.

The trackball parts from RIM are very costly so we also had to consider how we would best acquire these parts and then cover the labor to actually replace them.

Thankfully the labor involved is very minor and can be done the same day… if you have the parts.

A few phone calls later and we’ve worked out getting the actual parts for under 13 dollars a piece in bulk and as far as putting them together we’ve armed ourselves with a good technical manual.

So this week when our first shipment of replacement parts arrive I’ll be the first one to replace my trackball and then others will be trained so that we can best serve our customers.

So this bad situation has spun in to a more positive one.

Now if the part would get here faster I’d be set.

In the meantime if you need to get in touch with me I suggest email as answering my phone is a bit more difficult, answering texts is nearly impossible, and Twitter… well forget about it.

I’ve been pretty busy with the awesomeness that is Startup Weekend so I haven’t had a lot of time between that and MOSH mobile to get a post up here recently.

Things are going great in life. I’ve been having a lot of fun talking and meeting people for Startup Weekend and getting some new weekends lined up for everyone.

Things on the front at MOSH mobile have also been exceptionally busy as we have some things coming down the pipe in the next two weeks that required my attention.

I’ve cut down my days at MOSH mobile that I’ll actually be spending in the office so I can focus on Startup Weekend and properly balancing my life/work balance. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I can work on both projects from my balcony outside if I so wish as the weather warms up and I must say I love working outside. This is a nice change of pace for a few weeks so I can get outside, enjoy the warm weather and focus on everything going on.

I recently posted on my bad experiences at Walmart and Dawn posted about a sour experience at a loan location.

What makes companies feel that bad customer service is the right customer service?

In what I’d like to think of Blogworthy news I’ve decided to take on a new hat for my ever growing hat rack.

This time I’m putting on a new primary hat that allows me to be the new CEO of Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking, unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in Boulder, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, Boston, DC and more.

At the most recent Boulder II Startup Weekend Andrew tried successfully to launch a new format that involves even more launches per weekend, more dedicated teams, recruiting by already established companies, and even no requirement to incorporate a company at the end of the weekend.

The new format has been a stunning success and Andrew has once again proven his forward thinking will keep Startup Weekend ahead of the curve.

I promise that I’ll bring that same forward thinking, drive for success and determination to each and every Startup Weekend that we organize and evolve as the new CEO of Startup Weekend.

The format Startup Weekend is using works… and I’m not going to change that. The low price point works… and I’m not going to change that any time soon.

I’m merely going to build on the MASSIVE level of success that Andrew has had with Startup Weekend and be working WITH Andrew to continue the trend of Startup Weekend success.

Andrew isn’t going anywhere. He is merely rolling back his role as he pursues some new projects and ideas that I’m sure because of his revolutionary nature will be hearing about soon and I’m hoping (and even trying to force him for his health) to take some much needed rest.

Startup Weekend is a unique and ever evolving idea and I hope that you will join me for the ride with even more upcoming weekends scheduled in great cities such as San Antonio, Portland, Memphis, Ann Arbor and more.

I also hope that you’ll join me in celebrating the great job Andrew is doing and offer him a much deserved congratulations on being a revolutionary startup enthusiast who has proved time and time again his ability to create, launch, manage and grow successful new ideas.

You might have noticed my lack of entries this month in comparison to the past two months.

I’ve been sorta AFK. I’ve been on the computer but I haven’t had the time to get over here to my own blog and post some of my thoughts and what not on all of the stuff that has been taking place because things at MOSH mobile have been os busy the past two weeks.

I have some blog posts coming up about Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 beta 4, my experience with Linux thus far, a story about why I HATE my local Walmart, my attendance at a Hillary Clinton rally (who would have thought!!) and much more.

June is coming… and that means my wedding is quickly coming.

Wedding registries have been a big part that Tiffany has been working on. Recently we went to Kohls and took care of our registry. We have a lot of friends that LOVE LOVE LOVE Kohls and we both admit they have some great merchandise that we wanted to have on our wedding registry.

So we drove an hour away to our nearest Kohls store and setup a registry account.

The Manager asked for our drivers licenses for collateral so we could take the scanner and select the merchandise we wanted for our registry.

Four hours later we finally had completed our albeit short list. We double checked that the items we wanted were appearing on the scanner and then went back to the desk to get our IDs back.

About twenty minutes later because they had “missplaced” our licesnces (aka lost them!!!) we finally get our IDs back and after another series of interogations about finding everything we wanted they said it would appear online in about an hour.

We went out for dinner and drove the hour long trip back.

We spent about 8 hours of that day working on the registry. I actually took the day off for this specific task.

Leave it to a HORRIBLE retailer like Kohls to destory and waste all of that time.

Earlier today Tiffany called with an almost panic in her voice.

She went online to check our registry as she had prepared the invitations with information about our registry at Kohls.

When she got online what did she find… our wedding registry was totally and completly blank. Not a single item on it.

Yup… that is right… we wasted eight hours, I took a day off from work, we got our IDs nearly stolen by Kohls and we had our invitations already printed with information about being registered at Kohls only to find out Kohls has no information.

Moral of the story: Don’t waste your time with Kohls.

P.S

I’m forwarding information about this blog to Kohl’s. Will see if I get any response (highly unlikely).

P.S.S

We will NEVER shop at Kohls again and I’m taking the day off tomorrow to go register at Target.

I’ll be changing some stuff around. If you are linking to my blog on your blogroll please be sure your links point to www.amassedlust.com and NOT entertainment.moshmobile.com/rayray

I won’t be using my work servers anymore

Over the past few weeks Patrick and I have been talking about a plethora of business things.

He will be doing a presentation at SXSW this year to promote his book and he asked me if I knew of any good places to go for business cards.

I can now safely tell him two places to not go.

The first one is Overnight Prints. I just had a long-time friend use them and the cards were horrible. The print on them was misaligned and they needed these cards for a meeting with a VC. So yeah… not cool.

The second place is my own experience. Before heading off to Startup Weekend I realized that I was nearly out of business cards. In a bind I visited the online arm of Staples and saw they do business cards that you can send the design for online and then pickup in store.

So of course knowing I was in a tight spot with under a week I ordered 200 cards online. The quality can’t be that bad… could it?

I WAS DEAD WRONG.

I know that it is my fault for the most part seeing as how I could have ordered cards in advance and got them done somewhere local (more on that to come) but I’ve been really busy as of late working on closing something major for the company and haven’t had time to watch my “business card stock levels” very closely.

Onward with the point of this post though… which is to show you the “quality” you can expect at Staples.

I didn’t get the more expensive card stock because the site actually recommended the regular stock. I assumed the stock wouldn’t be all that bad… it isn’t… but it isn’t that great either.

The cards are TERRIBLE. Staples is TERRIBLE. The cards had the most piss poor cut I’ve ever seen.

See that white line at the top of the card? Yeah that is the way they cut it, boxed it, then sold it to me. Not all cards are like this but out of 200 cards a great deal of them had quite simply piss poor cuts.

I suspected the cutting would be terrible so I specifically asked for black card stock. That way if the cut was a terrible shitty cut it wouldn’t stick out as much.

If they were going to make the cards on white stock then why even bother offering the black stock?

The printing and cutting was horribly aligned on almost all of the cards, the color was inconsistent from one card to the next,  and when I ordered online I paid for 200 and it said they were giving me another 100 free because of a promotion. Did I get the extra 100 free? Nope… and when I asked later for them they told me that promo only applied if I asked for it when picking up.

Think about this for a second… if I asked at pickup they would have had to make the extra 100 cards. Does that make any sense? Why not just make the extra 100 instead of making just the 200 and then if I want to actually get what the site promised me not make me wait another few hours just to get another hundred cards.

Shit.

I’m going to tell EVERYONE I know that Staples for business cards is the BIGGEST mistake you can make. Even in emergency situations where you just need something to get you through they make the shittiest of the shity cards.

If you’ve been following the MOSH mobile blog you may have already seen this but for those that aren’t I’ll share.

This weekend myself and the MOSH mobile VP James Fintel will be attending the Bloomington Startup Weekend.

Bloomington Startup is an ad-hoc organization serving as the local organizing entity bringing Startup Weekend to Bloomington, Indiana.

On February 8-10, 2008, Bloomington Startup will host a Startup Weekend at City Hall at Showers. This event as has been organized by area residents and will be facilitated by a sanctioned representative of Startup Weekend LLC. Dozens of local entrepreneurs, technologists, business people, marketers, and local advocates will gather in downtown Bloomington to create a new startup company from scratch. The founders decide what to make as a team, and earn an equal share of stock in the developed business.

We got our tickets purchased, our hotel booked and our travel arrangements made. I know we are both excited at the prospect of meeting other visionaries from Indiana that could even possibly lead to recruiting of new talent in the end.