The smell of a good startup

Man, I sure would love to control my thermostat from a web browser. That way, if my dog called me up at work and said it was a bit nippy, I could fix the problem without driving home.

Scoble's job seems to be to promote new startups. The article would have been much more interesting if after his whole "smell" thing, he ended up saying this one smells bad. But because its a positive article, one is left wondering why he couldn't actually come up with something substantive, that the best thing he could think of to say was that the company had a nice aroma.

sounds like in this case smell = (passion + spending money only where it helps things get done)

If you slow down and think about it, this is really the same argument about the difficulties of telecommuting.

Sure, you can do all the hacking in your cocoon, but there's so much more to systems development that just the hacking part.

I want to see the look in users' eyes when they use the software. I want to see how they interact with each other. I want to see all the other things people do as they work with the software. I even want to see their paperwork and whatever else is on their desk/vehicle/work area.

Developing systems take more than just being Stallman/Turing/Woz. You need to be a little Columbo too.

Is he a VC/angel now?

It doesn't have scoble attached to it.