Start-up taps CEO: A name you can trust

Hey, have you heard what Paul McNamara is up to? No, not me. And, no, not my shiny new blog. I’m talking about another Paul McNamara – known hereafter as The Other One – a Silicon Valley veteran, most recently with El Dorado Ventures, who first crossed my radar when he was an exec at Red Hat in the late ’90s.

Hey, have you heard what Paul McNamara is up to?

No, not me. And, no, not my shiny new blog.

I’m talking about another Paul McNamara – known hereafter as The Other One – a Silicon Valley veteran, most recently with El Dorado Ventures, who first crossed my radar when he was an exec at Red Hat in the late ’90s.

The Other One has taken the CEO reins of an El Dorado-backed start-up temporarily called Versai Technology, which is holed up stealthily in what the company’s new blog – www.charterstreet.com – calls “an industrial section of Redwood City (one of the few remaining industrial sections in Silicon Valley).” Versai was founded by CTO Greg Olsen, whose previous venture, Extricity, was a business-to-business integration specialist that was acquired for $168 million in 2001 as part of a buying spree by Peregrine Systems, itself snapped up by HP last year.

The Other One sent me an e-mail recently to let me know that his company’s blog was up and running. “We plan to use the blog to talk about issues in the software and Internet space and hopefully give people some insight into our thinking,” he says.

Naturally, I asked The Other One for details about Versai:

“Here’s what I can tell you: We are a software-as-a-service company with a twist. We empower businesspeople to easily create and use custom-tailored [software-as-a-service] applications. In some ways we will be competing with Salesforce AppExchange, but our approach will be different and our appeal will be broader. I’ll need to demonstrate this last point to you once I can talk more expansively about the product.”

In the meantime, you can definitely get a sense of the angle from which The Other One is coming at the opportunity by reading his blog essay entitled “The Software Complexity Racket.” (The piece is so well written I don’t mind seeing my name on it.)

The first time I spoke with The Other One was in 1998 when he was at Red Hat and I was writing a story that carried the headline “Linux cynics.” My byline and his quotes promised such confusion that we felt compelled to explain the lack of any relationship in an editor’s note. Hope everything is clear now.

Pay for podcasts? . . . Sure, why not.

My experience with British humor begins and ends with Monty Python (my wife and I have tickets for Spamalot in Boston next month). And I don’t own an iPod.

Nevertheless, it heartens me to see a British comedy podcast called The Ricky Gervais Show now being made available on a subscription basis via Audible.com.

“Their irreverent brand of monkey-based comedy has seen the weekly half-hour podcast storm to the top of the iTunes charts and stay there,” says one online account.

Don’t ask me what “monkey-based comedy” means, but it has been available for free on iTunes previously and will now cost $7 a month.

That’s good news if, like me, you believe that people ought to pay for good stuff on the Internet because the people who create it have to eat. It’s a self-centered ideal, obviously. So monkey-on, you British cut-ups.

Meanwhile, back at Buzzblog

Week No. 3 has been going well. Traffic is up, in no small measure because of the rising tide created at networkworld.com by hundreds of thousands of visitors streaming in to see my colleague Adam Gaffin’s Times Square photograph of The World Largest Windows Error Message. Believe it or not, this photo has produced more traffic than anything in the history of our site.

There’s still time to get yourself listed on the low-volume Buzzblog Brigade e-mail distribution list. Just send me your address.

Spamalot reviews and other commentary should be directed to buzz@nww.com. And don’t forget to check out Buzzblog.