Bickel Blog

We were so lucky to have Peter, Kesuma and Saingiore visit us from Tanzania last night.  Peter founded the Orkeeswa School  in a rural Maasai village.  My daughter, Allison, taught at the school last year.  It is an incredible place, filled with smart, enthusiastic students. The big discussion topic last night was people's rights in primary school (Orkeeswa is a Secondary School - only 7% of Tanzanians get to go to secondary school).  Kesuma holds the belief that it is OK for the teachers to cane students.  This is a very common practice in Tanzania, and reminded me of stories of my Catholic School friends.  It sounds a bit harsher and more frequent in Tanzania.  Kesuma believed that it was the right of the teacher, and it made the students do better. Saingiore held deep reservations about this practice.  He has started to help as a teacher in a primary school, and he does not use the stick.  He did say there was some peer pressur...

I am working with two other people on launching a new company in a couple of months.  I've been thinking a lot over the past several years on taking some of the lessons learned in open source and implementing them with a cloud based model.  We are going to try something that is a bit new... The Old Open Source Business Model.  Red Hat spawned the basic idea that most open source companies have used.  Come out with a great open source project that gets used by a lot of people.  Then develop some proprietary value-add, wrap a service layer with that and sell it as a subscription.  A percentage of the free users will find the value-add useful and pay you for it.   Freemium Model.  This is a slight deviation on the open source model.  Don't share the code, but offer up a free version with a for pay version with higher value and a service offering of support. Enter the Cloud.  So far the Cloud has been viewed as a simple exte...

I've long been a big proponent of open source - supporting it at companies like Bluestone, HP, JBoss, Hyperic, and Spring.  I still am as witnessed by some of the open source RunSignUp is contributing like our mobile timing app  and our Open API . However, there is an important shift happening with the emergence of cloud services.  The new idea has two parts when it comes to cloud middleware, or PaaS: Wiring together services to develop apps Portability across PaaS so you don't get locked in I wrote about this choice in 2011 and how CloudBees was going to approach it.  The graphic at the right is from that blog. CloudBees has been following this methodology, and had an important announcement with Cloud Foundry today.   As GigaOm put it: So you want to build your software in CloudBees but want to run it elsewhere? With new integration, you can put that application on Cloud Foundry (as well as Google App Engine.) This is the basic mantra of t...

I signed up for the $99 23andme genetic test a couple of months ago and got my health results last night!  Genetics is very interesting to me, and if I were younger it would be my career path.  As research progresses, understanding genetics and applying it will have a huge impact on society over the next 100 years.  For a quick tutorial on genetics, watch  https://www.23andme.com/gen101/genes/ . For the rest of this write-up I am going to focus on the genetics part of things.  Of course environment plays a huge role, we all know that eating healthy can reduce my risk of stomach cancer, etc.  So I will leave that caveat off the rest of this... My Health Results The good news is that I have good health genes.  As the video shows, I have my family to thank for that.  I have several family members that have lived past 100 years old and all of my grandparents were healthy people. The results are pretty interesting.  They are broken into...

Codenvy formally announced their spin-off from eXo and new financing of $9M today . Codenvy does for developers what Google Docs did for Word users - open things up to the Cloud.  That means better collaboration, closer integration with Cloud Services like Github and the PaaS vendors like CloudBees, CloudFoundry, Amazon Beanstalk, etc.  It means faster set-up and team enablement.  It means editing on a Tablet NOW instead of waiting to get back to my desktop and Eclipse.  It means more freedom and more control. The background on this started several years ago Benjamin Mestrallet , the founder of eXo Platform, saw the need to easily create the new wave of applications - easily tying widgets and back end data sources.  He had a crackjack team of developers working on this, and the idea kept expanding.  Last year he realized that this technology was too important to keep bottled up inside eXo.  About the same time, Tyler Jewell joined the com...

To try to keep my streak alive ( 2011 , 2010 , 2009 ), here is the latest installment on what I was up to during 2012.  And as foretold in those earlier posts, the focus continues to be in the Cloud! While there were a number of important steps forward in all of the businesses I am involved in, there was one major change worth talking about up front.  I sold my half of the Moorestown Running Company to my partner, Dave Welsh, in November.  As I said earlier , this is a very good thing for Dave, the store, the employees and our customers.  I'm really happy that the store has accomplished all of the goals we set out for it nearly 6 years ago listed on the right.  And Joe, Ralph, Ed, Colleen and Dave will ensure it keeps going strong into the future! One of the reasons for selling the store was that I was not spending the amount of time and effort on it as I thought I would 6 years ago.  In 2012, a big reason for my distraction was RunSignUp.  We s...

Six years ago I approached Dave Welsh, the owner of the Haddonfield Running Company, about the idea of creating a Running Store in Moorestown.  He was willing to take a big risk - he didn't know me, he didn't know if having a store in Moorestown would negatively impact sales at Haddonfield, and he was a fairly new owner himself.  But we took the plunge, and signed a lease at 115 West Main Street in January, 2007.  Joe Halin joined us as the store manager.  Ed Scioli waundered into the store and was part of the opening team.  We opened in May, 2007.  Ralph Harris joined us soon after opening. This core team grew the business over the next 5 years by delivering what runners want - great products, a good price and simply outstanding, caring service. After 6 years of partnership, we have agreed that it makes sense to move all of the stores to the next level.  Instead of the Moorestown Running Company operating separately as a franchise, we are going...