Co-ops, L3Cs, and Hybrid LLC/Co-ops

March 17, 2010 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | Governance | People & Society

I wrote a comment to Don's post, but it was too long for Blogger to accept....

I have a close friend who started one of the first VT L3Cs a couple of years ago, and his intent was to signal that they weren’t out to get rich but to do something interesting and useful that a “traditional” investment wouldn’t normally value. I suppose if somehow they become billionaires that will turn out to sully the L3C pool, but it would be good to get some data on how L3Cs are performing, and what the outcomes are, and then tune the law accordingly prior to rejecting the form out of hand because of, well, I’m not sure what the argument against them is. Innovation is good. Why not in corporate forms?

The challenge for cooperatives, speaking from close experience, is that, due to their traditional rejection of “marketing” (granted, slowly changing in some areas) the public associates co-ops with alternative dirty hippie funny-smelling weirdo food shops from the 1970s. Part and parcel of the whole culture-war thing. So it’s true there are huge swaths of the economy organized as cooperatives, but the executives at, say, a large electric cooperative, don’t have incentive to play up that aspect of their organization because it might lead to more oversight of their own leadership or their business decision trade-offs. Plus, and perhaps less cynically, the AP (for example) doesn’t have much incentive to promote it’s internal organization - there’s no easily noticed benefit to the listener/reader. Great long-term benefit, but our collective ability as a species to connect the dots from short-term actions to long-term impacts is now well-known, and a likely failure-mode leading to our future extinction.

Another challenge, more structural, is that cooperatives, by nature, provide the opportunity – and at the same time *require* people – to self-organize. But we live in a convenience culture. It’s all about saving time and money, everywhere you look. Coops typically take more time (to set up, operate, participate in) and cost more money (lack of economy of scale). It’s great if people want to take responsibility for their own destiny. But it goes against the entire cultural thrust of the infantilization of America. We don’t take responsibility for anything we do!

Finally, it is difficult for the cooperative movement to make affirmative statements about the value of coops because of 1) lack of knowledge, skill, or experience in “attention-marketing;” and 2) they’re not cheaper or faster. Thus, we only hear about coops in reaction to something else: L3Cs, single-payer health care, non-meltdown banks, etc. As a general rule it’s tough to make a positive case when it’s framed as a negative reaction to an external event. (I speak from challenging personal experience.)

Cooperatives have a huge value to offer people, but I think the most likely case in the modern culture is they will rise again to respond to some very large societal problem, or take better hold as worker-coops rather than as consumer coops. Workers have far more incentive to self-organize, it’s a smaller group, and the incentives are aligned. A nice smaller-scale alternative to union collective bargaining. And, if we actually pass health reform, people may have the chance to be a bit more entrepreneurial without corporate health insurance as a friction to leaving their jobs.

And this gets to why I think hybrid coop/LLCs are so valuable (and not a bastardization of the coop form). Having personally started three LLCs, and been an early employee in a couple of venture capital funded startups, I can tell you starting a business is hard. Raising money is hard. Running a business profitably is hard. Moral and social trade-offs abound daily. The idea of a worker coop that can sell up to 40% of it’s stock to long-term value investors has the chance to completely change the perceptions of coops noted above. The investor sees a group of committed workers with real skin in the game (not semi-worthless future-vesting stock options), and the employees attract capital – where the capitalists can get an actual return, even if it’s a lower or longer-term one – rather than being limited to what they can scratch together themselves. This form could be the fuel to push cooperatives affirmatively forward, rather than always looking backwards and saying, “If only they’d considered cooperatives....”

Otherwise coops are going to have to get good at the sort of “hard-sell marketing” that captures a reader’s/listener’s attention and directs it to what the speaker is saying and why it benefits them in concrete, right-now terms. I look forward to the day coops are confident, savvy, marketers of their own brand of humane goodness in this harsh overly-capitalistic world.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Why not to burn bridges

August 5, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Karlyn, via Twitter, asks: "why is it so important to not burn bridges when you're leaving a job? especially if the person you're burning it with already set it on fire"

1. There is no absolute truth.
2. Different people will have different views of a) What bridge-burning is; b) Whether one should burn bridges or not; c) Who is right; d) Who is wrong; e) Who "started it."
3. Future a) Employers; b) Colleagues; c) Customers d) Friends; e) Lovers; will wonder what will happen to them in a possible future "falling out."
4. Everyone reaps what they sow. No need to further the bad vibes.

Apparently they don't teach much about human relations in MBA school. As if managing people were an insignificant part of the job. Not surprising given the quant focus in our business culture.

Just Another Datapoint for my theory that everyone should do four to eight years of weekly depth analysis starting a few years after college (or workforce entry). Would do a society good.

Permalink | Comments (1)

The Twitter Inversion

April 5, 2009 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Perhaps another time I could elaborate further on the profound nature of Twitter's interaction model. There are flaws, but it's wired us together in as many ways as there are participants. Today, by way of illustration, here is a screenshot view into a couple of minutes of my Twitter stream:

The stream actually starts on the bottom, so right off the bat if we want to experience time progressing in the familiar direction we are reading from bottom to top, the opposite of what we expect. Thus, leaving Kansas, we hear from some characters. Context is everything.

Daniel Jalkut owns Red Sweater Software, makers of the fine MarsEdit, the weblog editing tool upon which I sculpted the very words you're reading. We've corresponded by email on a couple of topics. Nice guy. Lives about two hours south of here (in Boston) and I've always thought I should get myself down to one of the various meetups in that area and say hello sometime. His tweets and posts are each of equal quality.

Next up, Howard Rheingold, an old online friend from The WeLL, who lives in Northern California. When I got fully online in 1988, Howard was there waiting, pointing the way. We met during Internet 1.0 at the offices of Caucus Systems, maker of a well-designed multi-user conferencing system similar in interaction structure to The WeLL. I doubt I'll ever forget riding the DC metro with Howard in his bright orange silk suit, hand-painted leather shoes, and white derby. You can turn heads dressing like that. It's unlikely Howard remembers me, but no matter, I love you too buddy.

OM_o is the Open Museum (online), produced by Heritance, where I am a director serving on the board with several others, including friends and founders Maureen and Jeff Doyle. The visual design of openmuseum.org is a fork of the xhtml/css codebase I wrote for GiftEcology.com (nee Handmeon.com). I usually always check the links posted here because the objects are interesting and the stories are good. And they're friends and I'm on the board and I usually have thoughts on the interface evolution and I'll probably see them soon so I want to stay up to date with the project.

And then, look, right there, just above OM_o is Maureen, who lives in Vermont. Always nice to see her. But wait, I don't like seeing those duplicate Tweets – no no, that suddenly feels like PR. I need to email her a link to this blog post, because I want to encourage people to never do this. Don't multi-tweet with pasted text. Adopt a specific identity for each posting account, or simply tweet for yourself, as yourself. Using that imperative to make a leap to the broader issues around 'social media marketing,' I pretty much agree with everything in this 10-minute video by Perry Belcher. (Some language not safe for work.) He's coming from the Internet marketer perspective but watch it anyway, he's right on beat with the social media rap. In another video he claims to have earned in excess of $50 million on the Internet, and also that he has personally paid over $10 million to Google AdWords advertising. If you're thinking about making money online he's probably a good guy to listen to. But whatever you think about that he speaks for me on current business best practices using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Above Maureen is my close friend and all-around great person Meg Maker from New Hampshire. You should go and read Maker's Table, her food and wine blog, right now – this post will still be here when you get back. I've known Meg 20 years, we've worked together in many different roles and structures, and we see each other socially many times a year.

Above Meg is Dave Winer, a brilliant, visionary, hard-working nerd of the first order, who lives in Berkeley, California. Dave was instrumental in creating among other things, RSS, which is what blogs use for subscriptions; podcasts, which are now ubiquitous; and outlining, which is taken for granted but wasn't really in use much prior to Dave's "ThinkTank" and "More" software. Dave also kind of invented the idea of "bullet charts" for presentations, sort of a proto-PowerPoint feature built into More.

Finally at the top, Dan Benjamin, who I've never met or corresponded with, but who I came across because in 2007 he wrote the best-ever articles on Ruby/Rails/MySQL/etc Mac OS X installation and configuration. I think he lives near Orlando, Florida. We've corresponded a bit via Twitter. He posted something about BBEdit and opening projects, and I @replied (quickly) along the lines of, "X doesn't just work?" To which he @replied me something snotty, like "@notio, no, obviously, X doesn't just work." (I paraphrase.) [See update below.] I felt horrible, like I'd annoyed the Master, and wondered if he'd make it so that my specific computer could never read his website again, but then several other people who I also follow @replied him with the same idea, before they saw his response to me. So then I didn't feel like quite such a dunderhead. Dan's a very serious meditator, so I know in my heart that his tone to me was not personal but was just part of his practice.

Now, take another look at that screenshot and tell me: Are these, you know, inane, unnecessary, frivolous, 140-character "messages?" To me, because of the context, not so much – it reads like human conversation. Not transactional messages between humanoids, but conversation between people. If you've ever transcribed recorded conversation literally you know it's really something to read – you can hardly follow it. If I think about conversation as "messages" then most conversations don't pass for quality of messages. But what's nice about human conversation is that it has all sorts of structures and processes and norms and degrees of freedom so we can actually get to know each other and find common interests, aside and apart from the transactional and informational quality of messaging.

In that two-minute snapshot of my Twitter stream I am updated on lives and perspectives, and am provided opportunities to further engage with links to several topics. I can reply if I want, or not. Some people I know well, others only through this medium. It's not email, it's not threaded, you have to be concise, the company is growing quickly and there are a lot of hiccups.

And yes, there are ways to sort-of spam Twitter and people are discovering ways (cough, TweetBlast, cough) to make sales with viral Twitter schemes, but there's one big difference.

If you don't like your Twitter stream content, you can un-follow people, and you'll never hear from them again.

How different from email lists, where names are shared and sold and the spam never stops. Here attention is earned, not demanded. That inversion makes the whole thing worthwhile, because even if Twitter dies, we'll have experienced this form of communication.

This new form is such that the listener is in control of the attention paid to talkers, and once you experience this you will never want to go back to letting the broadcast-era talkers attempt to dominate your attention and listening. This interaction model started with RSS subscriptions, and has now hit the mainstream with Twitter.

The future? Let me know when I can watch the most creative advertising whenever I want. That will be fun.

Update: Dan Benjamin commented below, and due to a problem with my TypePad ID I am unable to write a comment response on my own blog. Gotta get off this platform. In any case, I don't mean to overstate the case – I'm sure whatever Dan said was reasonable, because after reading him for several years I think he's a reasonable guy – my intent was to convey my internal horror of tossing off a flip comment to an expert. Apology accepted, with my own apology added for good measure!

Permalink | Comments (1)

Patrick Byrne at Dartmouth Tuck School

February 16, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Patrick Byrne visited Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business this evening. It was something of a local event, since Patrick and his father, Jack Byrne, both attended Dartmouth. The 90-minute format was was structured such that three '09 Tuck students each asked a question and then the audience asked a bunch of questions. His answers were very complete thoughts with muti-minute responses.

Jack was president of GEICO insurance which was owned by Berkeshire Hathaway, owned by Warren Buffett. Because of this Warren was a regular houseguest at the Byrne's in the 1970s and Patrick grew up hearing Buffett describe his approach to thinking about business. Some Buffett pearls:

On buying companies: "Always try to buy a dollar for sixty cents, forty if you can." Byrne continues, "Sometimes, every once in a while, like now, maybe twenty cents for a dollar."

On buying stocks: "Here's something adults don't understand. When you buy a stock, don't think of it like a piece of paper that moves up and down. Instead, if you buy the stock, and the stock market closed tomorrow and you had to hold the stock for five years, would you still buy the stock? That's the question. Act like you're buying a part of the company that you're going to own. Because you are."

On buying bankrupt RTC real estate in the '80s: "If you're not going to kick a man when he's down, when are you going to kick him?"

After graduation Byrne started a nine-month master's program in philosophy at Stanford. He was diagnosed with cancer, and during the next four years (age 22 - 26) was in and out of treatment. He said he had three rounds of remission and return, each putting him in the hospital for three to nine months at a time. An interesting side-effect of this was that having fallen so far behind his peers he was never trying to keep up or prove anything. After beating cancer a couple of times he decided to live his life in six-month blocks, hoping for the best, and doing things he wanted to do. He went on to obtain a master's degree from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

During this time he alternated between school and various real estate deals, sometimes with his brother. Often this involved buying RTC properties, doing a company turnaround, and selling for decent profits. They purchased a large (one million ft2) mill building in Manchester NH ("a skyscraper lying down") for $3.5 million ("the price of the carpet") and sold it 20 months later for $10 million.

In November 2000 the Wall Street Journal delivered an ego-puffing profile that covers this era pretty well.

Byrne spoke passionately about education reform. He is a strong supporter of school vouchers. He ties this issue directly to our competitiveness in the world economy. Byrne believes Americans are living in a cloud of illusion. We think we're such a great world competitor, but we forget at the end of WWII we had bombed all of our industrial competitors to destruction. We cleared the table and ran the house. But now the world has rebuilt it's industrial and educational capacity, and we have become the consumers, not producers. We cannot ever be competitive in the world with our current 140 year old educational system. We spend $11,000 per pupil per year, significantly higher per capita than other industrial countries, yet by any measure we rank in the bottom quintile of performance. We cannot fix this problem by throwing more money at it. The "guild" (teacher's unions, administrative apparatchiks, etc.) has little left to argue its case except fear of change.

Along the way he had alluded to structural corruption in the American capital markets, closing with an anecdote about a news story in India that presented America as a cautionary tale of capital corruption. At this point a student asked if he could be more specific in his criticisms of the capital markets, and we transitioned into a long segment on financial corruption.

The Wikipedia entry covers the basics, but essentially he claims there are loopholes in the stock settlement system – originally designed to allow some flexibility and elasticity in the case of systemic issues – that allow "options market-maker exceptions to rule 203b1." He joked this could be more memorably named, "The Madoff exception." This is related to changes in Regulation SHO exemptions. The whole ball of wax you may also know as "naked short selling."

This is wicked complicated, and I'm sure I don't fully understand it, but what I gather is: When you buy a stock a seller has sold you the stock. The two of you need to "settle" the deal, where they get cash and you get a numbered stock certificate. Sometimes, for a variety of logistical reasons, the stock certificates cannot be physically transferred at the exact moment the cash arrives. So the settlement company is allowed to write an IOU for the certificates. Most buyers don't take possession of the certificates, so they don't actually know this has happened.

He wrote an infamous slide deck about this called The Miscreants’ Ball.

For a long time the SEC took the position that this didn't matter. People didn't abuse these IOUs! But then in 2007, the SEC changed their mind and wrote:

Regulation SHO's grandfather provision was adopted because the Commission was concerned about creating buy-side volatility through short squeezes if large pre-existing fail to deliver positions had to be closed out too quickly....

That's secret code for, "If we forced everyone to deliver on the IOUs the market would realize those stock certificates had been sold several times over on various small foreign exchanges, sucking $2 trillion out of the system without anyone noticing. We don't want them to notice all at once, so we're going to forgive all the ones we know about and pretend they don't exist."

In other words, what supposedly wasn't happening yesterday is today so bad that if we acknowledge it the financial system would collapse. Again, this is wicked complicated, and I'm sure I don't fully understand it. But I have a feeling he'd agree wholeheartedly with Catherine Austin Fitts.

Long story short, when he took Overstock.com public they were the first company to do an IPO dutch auction – an OpenIPO – Google followed them two years later. They took a lot of flack from Wall Street, and since he had worked there people he knew told him he would be a pariah. He got an unusual phone call from a guy who told him he was living in South America out of a backpack so the Mafia didn't whack him, and Patrick needed to watch out. Byrne didn't believe him, but the guy said, "Watch. What's going to happen is: First these five prominent business journalists will write hack jobs on you or your company. Next you'll find your stock trading on exotic foreign exchanges where you've never listed. Then you'll have a Federal investigation that will amount to nothing but will take a lot of time and money. Finally, you'll find your company on the top-30 list of stocks with fail to deliver positions." Over the next four months all of those things played out, Byrne got in touch with the guy, and they started to piece together how it all worked.

Byrne's blog is Deep Capture, where all this is laid out is long-form detail. It's worth noting that he has critics. After last year's financial meltdown, he feels the intellectual argument is over.

He said he's paid millions of dollars over the past four years on attorneys and economists to gather freedom of information act requests, sue hedge funds and options market makers, and fend off the SEC. He believes the SEC is a "captured" regulator. In this case "captured" doesn't mean "control" but more like "cognitive capture," in that the industry behavior is considered so normal, and so obviously correct – it's a market, after all – that if there's a rule violation they must have written the rules wrong, because this is in fact what the industry does.

Toward the end someone asked about the supply chain he built with Overstock.com, and how it's different. He thinks supply chain theory is the most important and a highly undervalued aspect of retail business. The short version is the normal retail distribution system can't deal with small quantities and odd lots. Overstock built their system to account for this. Their warehouse is "random load" – there isn't a single place where items sit, because the items are always changing. Took a long time to get it right.

Byrne told the story of where the fair-trade worldstock idea came from. Again, the bio covers the basics:

During a vacation in Southeast Asia Byrne found many village artisans were held back by the lack of retail channels, as their production was fragmented and the quantities produced were small. He further realised the Overstock model was perfectly suited for their needs.

In this case "during a vacation" meant cruising the country on a motorcycle, before eventually driving over the edge of a bank and fracturing his arm, 15 hours from medical care, and being carried to a family's hut. When they say, "he further realized," what they mean is, while smoking whatever it was the family gave him to smoke – "I didn't ask" – to take his mind off his broken arm, awake and alone blazing in a hut in Southeast Asia in the middle of the night.

Byrne called it the best idea he's ever had.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Facilitating Online Identity Management

January 26, 2009 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

Companies should make identity management easy within their online services. Specifically, it's becoming more and more desirable to have a "split my identity" feature.

For example, I have a Twitter account. Turns out I like Twitter. (It wasn't always the case.) Eventually I want to split my twitter stream into a personal stream and a business stream. The business stream would be open to followers. The personal stream I'd probably restrict to people I've met in person. When I'm posting about selecting music for vacuuming, that's personal-stream material. When I'm wishing out loud for a feature improvement in Adobe InDesign that can be public.

But what if I decide to split my streams after I have 100 followers, not all of whom belong on the personal list?

The current practice is to start announcing on the existing account that you have a new account – "if you haven't met me in person I'm planning to block you, so go follow me over at this new account." You might announce this every day for a week, perhaps a few times on the last couple of days, then go block everyone you haven't met in person.

Some followers will make the move, some won't. Unless you care a lot you probably won't track who fell off the list, especially if you have far more than 100 followers.

It would be better if I could choose which followers to "move" to the new account. That is, I would choose which followers will follow my new business account instead of my existing personal account – without any action on their part. I move their "following" subscription to another identity. Maybe they get an email letting them know.

That's it: no business rules, no criteria, no searching. Just a list of followers (rows) and maybe two columns of checkboxes – people could be on either or both lists.

This wonderful solution assumes that the service can associate my two accounts with each another. In other words, one person can have more than one account. For many services you are allowed to have more than one account, but many times the service uses your email address to create the unique account.

It's very convenient for developers to use an email address as a login – I've done it myself. It's convenient because it's guaranteed to be unique without any development effort. No downcasing, no uniqueness checking, the user doesn't have to remember lots of different login names, etc. But if every account requires a unique email, then this "split my identity" feature is very, very difficult – potentially impossible – to implement.

To allow each email address to have more than one identity is a very big architectural change if the initial design didn't account for this idea. Changing the one-to-one relationship of a login account to a one-to-many relationship will likely have a lot of "ripple effects" throughout the codebase, so the development cost will be very high. Thus the probability of developing the feature is low. Well-financed services can do whatever they need to do to service their users. Bootstraps and startups usually cannot.

Had the service started out with this idea it would be much easier to design and build, even if they didn't implement it at the start. This is a good example of the importance of key architectural decisions made early in the design process. Sometimes you know what you'll want to do in the future, and sometimes you don't. But it's worth spending enough time in the very earliest design stages to think through the implications of the trade-offs you're making.

In theory this problem is an aspect of what OpenID is supposed to solve, going further by abstracting across websites and services, not just within one service. It's designed by Brad Fitzpatrick, so it's probably the right idea. Reviewing the history you can see why, in general, adoption by developers is slow (but growing and accelerating). But even using OpenID, the service will have to build their data model around a one-to-many login/account relationship. Twitter's growth provides a good example of why the effort might be worth it.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Economics Blogs

January 9, 2009 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

I gave a talk to a local business group about blogs, Twitter, social media and all that, and one of the participants emailed asking for blog recommendations to learn more about economics. Here's what I suggested.

I think Umair Haque is by far the most interesting 'business strategy' writer right now. Strategy has to take account of economics, and he's pointing the way forward.

It would be hard to leave out Paul Krugman, having just won the Nobel Prize and all. I happen to agree with his politics, but he's worth reading even if you don't, simply because he's so dang smart.

Barry Ritholtz called BS on the housing market several years ago, and his irreverent take on things keeps him in my regular reading list. You will learn a lot about how to interpret relevant numbers and statistics from him.

Nouriel Rorbini is SUPER-smart, and was also a contrarian to the bubble mentality. His predictions will probably be scary, and more-so once you notice that he's been right most of the time.

There's the Freakonomics blog which is always interesting for always-different reasons.

Locally, Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth has always had good pointers and a take on things that doesn't always line up with my way of thinking.

Tyler Cowen gets a lot of linklove, and though I don't read him often, it's good to check in once in a while.

The Calculated Risk blog is interesting, as is The Cunning Realist in that they are anonymous, but the insight is obviously deep and worthwhile.

Probably the most important thing to do is follow links in the posts. When you find an author you like, and they link somewhere, it's like a citation to the background source. You'll often find good related blogs this way.

Also, look at blogrolls. These are the links of blogs the author scans regularly, something of a recommendation – "if you like this, you'll probably like that." For instance, the blogroll at Barry Ritholtz's blog is excellent for the econ topic.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Downloading .asx video streams

October 21, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Software

Say there's an online video that is only available for real-time streaming, and you want to watch it offline at your non-'net convenience, like on a plane or on your iPhone. A lot of these streams have urls that end in .asx. If so, here are some (techie, Mac-centric) references that will let you download them and watch them later.

The Major MMS page is a good starting point. You'll quickly realize that the .asx file is just a redirector that has an mms:// url inside of it. In most cases you'll need to figure out what the mms:// url is.

Chris James Martin also had some good pointers, though his curl-based approach didn't work for me. I forget why, but I moved on.

You'll probably also end up at jwz's saving video streams page, no surprise. Short version:

mplayer -dumpstream -playlist url -dumpfile filename.wmv

Unfortunately, even after downloading the mplayer source, configuring, making, and installing it, this didn't work for me due to a "stream not seekable" error, which I could not debug, even with Google. Oh well, got some geeking in. Although it failed, and I didn't have the time to hone my ninja chops to master the source, this is probably the most promising long-term and flexible approach.

In the end, I used an application with a graphical interface to mmsclient, AFSRecorderX. You still have to figure out the mms:// url, and then you paste that into the url field, and choose "mmsclient" from the Tool pop-up menu. There is a "Select" button to choose a destination folder, but it doesn't do anything – everything is saved to the root (/) of your hard drive no matter what you point it to. Sometimes AFSRecorderX will spew a lot of information into the log section of the window, which you can ignore. It will not tell you when it's done; you'll have to occasionally check the file size of the download and eventually when it stops you can open the file and see if you got it all. Sometimes the log stops, and you think it's failed – you might reboot your computer, or even your network, and re-try several times. Only when you leave it alone long enough will you notice that the file size is indeed increasing, and it's working correctly. It's not apparent why the log is sometimes flying by like a 9600 baud modem, and why it sometimes stops dead, regardless of the success of the download. Despite the hackish nature of ASFRecorderX, it worked, and if you want the video badly enough it's currently the most straightforward approach.

Net-net, so to speak: The academic and corporate overlords that want you to watch video only in real-time streams are going to a lot of effort to make them hard to download. But, like all things code, if you're willing to go through your own personal video stream download hellfire, you can do it, because in the end, the data manipulates pixel-bits on the screen, and if you have access to the stream, you can do something with it.

The complete and total fall-back hack, the gawd-am-I-really-going-to-have-to-do-THIS? solution would be to use SnapzProX and make a real-time recording of the video window on your screen. I wasn't willing to stoop that low.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Mostly Twittering

October 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Thoughts are shorter-form these days. Twitter is a good place to follow me. Example:

New Macbook video: http://bit.ly/1xNvDH Awesome emo marketing, utter techporn, richly deserves to be parodied.

So there's that....

Permalink | Comments (0)

The day there was no news

May 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

At least I can dream...

Permalink | Comments (0)

Hubris, Denial, and the Financial Services Culture

May 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Interesting behind the scenes report of the Milken Conference and pervasive "Republican/Chicago School of Economics ideology" in the face of a looming great depression.

via John Robb.

Permalink | Comments (0)

One consequence of specialization is extinction

May 2, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

Sobering reflections from Robert Rich, on making a living as a musical artist in the long tail, based on his life data from the past 30 years.

In reality the life of a "microcelebrity" resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit. After every tour I feel exhausted but empowered by the thought that a few people really care a lot about this music. Yet, a few months later all is quiet again and CD/downoad sales slow down again. If I take the time to concentrate for a year on what I hope to be a breakthrough album, that time of silence widens out into a gaping hole and interest seems to fade. When I finally do release something that I feel to be a bold new direction, I manage only to sell it to the same 1,000 True Fans. The boulder sits back at the bottom of the mountain and it's time to start rolling it up again.

Permalink | Comments (0)

US politics snapshot, all you need to know edition

April 25, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Henninger/Wall Street Journal

Halperin/Time/CNN

Sullivan/Atlantic

Drew/Politico

Ambinder/Atlantic

Permalink | Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

April 15, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Scott Heriferman: "Sadly, no time to really get into Twitter. For me, to stay healthy AND lead a needed meme (meetup to go from 5M to 500M people, ~$10M to $100M+ rev, and 20K to 200K successful meetup groups), can't get sucked in."

Permalink | Comments (0)

Thriving Office

April 12, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

The Sounds of Success:

Home businesses know they must seem successful to become successful. So they play Thriving Office while on the phone. This valuable CD, which is filled with the sounds people expect to hear from an established company, provides instant credibility.

It's amazing what the world has come to.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Renting vs Buying

March 19, 2008 | Business & Commerce

Now that I'm a "homeowner" I think a lot less about all the reasons I thought buying a house was foolish. But today comes Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market to remind me. Ah yes, I remember them fondly.

What's with the scare quotes? Well, the bank actually owns my home, not me – I pay a lot more in interest than principal every month. And if I should fall behind they will take it away, along with all of my current "investment".

Permalink | Comments (0)

A Call for Journalistic Courage

March 18, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Important essay by Walter Pincus on the role of the press in a free society:

Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.

At a time when it is most needed, the media, and particularly newspapers, have dropped the idea of having experienced reporters provide analysis and context and turned instead to retired public figures or so-called experts to provide commentary. It was not always this way.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, I could name reporters and columnists whose experience on their beats or in their areas made them thoughtful and respected commentators. Younger reporters today are regularly shifted around from beat to beat, never really having enough time to master totally complex subjects, such as health, public education and environmental policies. Coverage then depends on statements and pronouncements by government sources or their critics.

Jay Rosen posts a long and thoughtful comment (here quoting Josh Marshall): "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well."

Related, and best headline of the day: MSM Still In Trouble–Also Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Adjacent Social Objects == Gonzo Marketing

March 4, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Chris Locke, after co-authoring the Cluetrain Manifesto, went on to write a great book called Gonzo Marketing. Wicked unlucky for him, the book was released on October 1, 2001 - kind of a bad season for US commerce. The book gets mixed reviews – sometimes because it's somewhat dated, but primarily for the writing style, which I'll call brash for lack of a better word – but the key takeaway for me was the idea of indirect benefit.

The idea is that a company sponsors an online service/community/project, one which is related in some way to their business, but does no direct selling there. It's all about providing value, for which people thank you by buying your product or service. So rather than pushing mass-market stuff through broadcast, you do something cool to enable people to enjoy using your product.

Today come Social Objects. I've read and thought about this for about a year, but haven't blogged about it, as far as Google knows. I thought I had. Anyway, Rajesh Setty is a smart, thoughtful writer, and today he introduces adjacent social objects. It's a good post.

Ajdacent Social Objects are those that objects that are not directly related to your product or service but are close - they are in the periphery.

Our own example is a site called All About Steak (which is a site that’s all about steak - recipes, grilling tips etc.) which was built in partnership with Kansas City Steaks. All About Steak is an adjacent social object for Kansas City Steaks.

This is the future of marketing. Rajesh coined a good term for it. Gonzo Marketing provides some important background. And you can always stand to read Cluetrain every five years or so.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Economics Worldview Today

February 29, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Credit cards are as dangerous as they are convenient

Economics of the Macropocalypse

Home to house

Will the center hold?

Why the Fed is compelled to lie to Congress

Permalink | Comments (0)

Running Out of Ideas?

January 17, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Software

Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article:

Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas.

Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, "Actually, I do think it's a pretty interesting social experiment." Thanks Pito, for taking a look.

Permalink | Comments (0)

FDA Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe

January 15, 2008 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

NY Times:

After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores.

Tuesday’s decision means cloning technology could move into commercial use a mere decade after the world learned of the existence of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, in Scotland. To create Dolly, scientists took an unfertilized sheep egg and removed the genetic material. They then inserted the genetic material from an adult cell. Machinery within the egg somehow reset the clock on the adult genes, and the new cell, after implantation into a surrogate mother sheep, developed into Dolly.

This technique has since become routine in laboratories, with clones produced in numerous species — not including humans, so far as is known.

At a time when population growth is the biggest driver of all the world's major problems (poverty, resource scarcity, drought, global warming, species extinction, civility entropy, etc) the last thing we need is to perfect and assimilate cloning.

Coming up next: Perfect Twins!! Is it safe to clone your own children? We report, you decide!

Permalink | Comments (0)

The Game Was Completely Up

January 14, 2008 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

The Economist:

In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Handmeon Update

January 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Life

Here's a status (promotional) update (flogging) on (of) my project (startup) to change the world, Handmeon.

We got great press during the holiday season, including the Boston Globe, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and the Valley News (broken link; left here for posterity).

Jeff had an epiphanette while in dialogue at GiftHub.org which we're discussing internally, and this might lead to some ground-breaking organizational structures.

We received some good traffic from the media, and a good round of registrations. People who like it seem to really like it. We're looking for more members, so stop by, explore a little, and see if it's something that resonates with you.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Iowa Caucus Closers

January 2, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

I had my hair cut today, and the stylist told me she supported Barack Obama in the NH primary. We chatted about that, and I asked her if she had considered Hillary Clinton. She said, "Well, it's funny, because when I first heard she was running I got really excited. People came into the salon and we would talk about it — a woman president! Sometimes, I would close my eyes, and just imagine what it would be like, what it would mean, to have a woman president. And I would just feel great — [she relaxes and collapses her shoulders, rolling her eyes up all aflutter, as if in a dreamy dream] — and then I would open my eyes and it would be Hillary, you know? And I just got sick to my stomach, thinking, 'I'd have to listen to that woman for the next eight years.' It was like, 'no way.'"

In honor of Lisa, here's Hillary's closing TV ad for the Iowa caucus:

And here's Barack Obama's:

How about this Obama propaganda ? Marching music? Check. Aspirational imagery? Check. Oratorical escalation? Check. (Still, I'm voting for the guy.)

John McCain is the only credible Republican nominee:

Permalink | Comments (0)

MBA in Guesswork

January 1, 2008 | Business & Commerce | Technology

Good quote from a commencement speech by Bruce Eckel:

Management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It's all guesswork, so if you don't have good intuition you'll probably make stupid decisions.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Shopping As Hero's Quest

December 27, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

To complete my cultural survey, today we went to the mall. Had this been a comparative cultural survey, we would have also gone to this mall, where they have valet parking, which could be quite handy given the size of mall parking lots.

Nintendo has done an amazing job marketing the apparently amazing Wii video game. For two holiday seasons now they have restricted manufacturing, so it is very hard to get. Here in the Daytona FL area, local Wal-Marts are getting 15-18 units each Wednesday, with un-crating and shelving at about 11:30 AM. After a month or two of looking around, my hosts finally got one yesterday. Amazingly, after all that questing, it sits awaiting connection 24 hours later. I suppose there's no rush, but it seems like getting it was more important than using it, a decent definition of excess consumption. I make no judgments—it seems like the first video game I'd be interested in playing. It looks like I won't get to find out before I leave, though I'm sure if I was all that interested we could have set it up yesterday afternoon or this morning.

Today the quest was for 1) lunch (Chik-fil-A); 2) Books-A-Million (really low-vibration experience); 3) Sunglasses evaluation ($180 for molded plastic?!?); 4) Camera evaluation (40D definitely fits my hands better than the XTi). And: Success! We did it! It took five hours, including about two hours of driving. I used the mall stop as an exercise opportunity, getting in three walking circuits before the time was up. Now, a little zoning before supper.

On the plus side, I highly recommend Colonial Photo and Hobby in Orlando, FL. Don't let the cheesy website fool you. They are a true old-time camera shop, with a lot of experienced sales guys who really know their stuff. They sell Leica, where the M8 is $5,000 (body only) and the typical first lens is $5,300. They had the Canon XTi and the 40D in stock, as well as all the lenses I wanted to try, and they were happy to put them on the cameras and let me shoot away. Bring your own CF card and take it home to evaluate. A truly great resource in this era of know-nothing Ritz Camera minimum-wage lackeys. Like most specialized retail, the web has decimated the photography market, so it's nice that Colonial is able to stick around, offering workshops, one-day and weekend photo trips, and generally pricing stuff within reason of the online shops. Yes, a bit more, but they're offering a real service. If I wasn't waiting to see what is released at PMA in January, I would have bought a package there today.

Permalink | Comments (0)

State of the Music

December 24, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

Wired Magazine has done us a public service by hiring David Byrne to report on the current state of the music industry. It results in two feature articles: David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music (with a striking photo!), and David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. Both articles include long audio clips of the conversations, with Thom Yorke, Brian Eno, and others. It's what modern online journalism should be.

In other music news, Daniel Lanois has started a grand experiment, with Red Floor Records. Hi entire back catalog is available for download, with mp3 and high-res wav versions each available for the same $10 price. He has a new movie arriving in March, with the soundtrack available now.

Our first new project available on the site is 'Here is What is'. This music is a direct soundtrack representation of the music that exists in our feature length documentary film also titled 'Here is What is'. For those of you who might not know, the film is a camera following me around over the course of a year, in and out of recording studios documenting once and for all the way it really happens.

I'm very excited by his Omni Series:

For every song of mine that gets released there is an abundance of material that does not. These pieces,  often favorites of mine remain unheard, so Red Floor and I have decided to release this body of work as The Omni Series. At the moment we are planning six cds. Each will be thematically assembled to represent a certain part of my work.

The SSEYO guys, makers of the generative music software Koan (no longer available) have launched two new products via Intermorphic: noatikl furthers the generative music cause, and liptikl does the same for lyrics.

And finally, every year or two I tune into the Brian Eno wavelength, which is best done at the news page of Enoweb. There are dozens of interesting links there for your deep-fringe avant-garde reading pleasure. Good diversions from the family dynamics this time of year. ;)

Permalink | Comments (0)

How the Housing Bubble Worked

November 26, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

If you want to cut to the chase on the "sub-prime mortgage meltdown," or whatever we're calling it these days, tune into this post by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong:

Let’s look at the loan history on this property.... The property was purchased in January 2005 for $1,157,000. The combined first and second mortgages totalled $1,156,730 leaving a downpayment of $270. Let’s just call it 100% financing. By April, they owners were able to find refinancing through Countrywide with a $999,999 first mortgage... Option ARM with a 1% teaser rate... a simultaneous second mortgage for $215,000 pulling out their first $58,000. So look at their situation: They are living in a million dollar plus home in Turtle Ridge making payments less than those renting, and they “made” $58,000 in their first 4 months of ownership.

If you're playing by the so-called rules, it's revolting.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Branding is Dead, part XCMXLLIV

October 10, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

I was thinking today that one reason branding was so important in the industrial age is that there were so many players in the chain. If you had any hope of having your "message" reach the end-user, you had to line it all up clear as a bell. And industrial organizations were so big, too. The chain was something like: CEO, VP Marketing, [several other VPs, including Sales, Finance, Operations, etc], copywriters, designers, vendors for manufactured parts, graphic design, printers, distributors, warehousers, sales representatives, retail buyers, retail sales clerks, etc.

Rules of the telephone game therefore required that you have one message, one value proposition, one identity. But now, in the age of conversation, and especially on the web, it's not clear that any of this matters, at least not nearly as much. Sure, you need a logo, and consistency is nice on all fronts. But you might be having "market conversations" with lots of different kinds of people, partners, and customers. The "value proposition" will be different for each one of them. Reducing all the richness down to a single tag line doesn't seem helpful, to say nothing of being plausible. You may still have to define it, but it may be presented and interpreted differently by each stakeholder.

Doc Searls has probably said all this and more years ago. I'm slow sometimes.

Permalink | Comments (0)

What many people criticize

October 1, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Adam Nagourney at the New York Times on NH's independent voters:

As a rule, they are middle and upper income, college educated, socially moderate, fiscally conservative, anti-Washington and repulsed by what many people criticize as the overly partisan atmosphere there.

This is the first article I've read with any analysis that comes even close to what I observe. Most electoral commentary is completely vapid and virtually fictional. This article at least gets at some depth of the dynamics, even if it starts with oh-so-breathless coverage of the so-called swelling ranks of independents. Democrat? Republican? Does this have meaning anymore? Similar to the recording industry, all this is the last gasp (decades long) of a dying form of organization.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple's .plan

September 11, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

In Unix culture there is the idea of the ".plan" (dot-plan) file. It lives in the user's home directory, and is a place to write updates about your life or work. It pre-dates blogging and Twitter by nearly a hundred years, but was typically updated much less frequently than either. The id software founder and programmer John Carmack had a somewhat famous .plan file for a while, blending both hardware-level graphics programming explorations with high-speed car racing on airport runways.

I think of Steve Jobs' live presentations as Apple's .plan file. What's new, what's up, what they are thinking about. The mainstream press focuses on the "literal" facts of the show – price cuts, happy customers, annoyed customers, new partners, projected earnings, impact on margins, etc. – while the Mac digerati focus on interpretations from the Mac/iPod/iTunes/iPhone ecosystem.

Here's all you need to know about the recent show, though it's still worth spending the 90 minutes watching the online stream if you are a student of design, marketing, or product and business development.

• Ringtones: Apple is making it fun to make ringtones. Customers are not just buying them, they're making them. You can select any segment of the song, up to 30 seconds long, choose the looping, and it automatically adds the fades and syncs with the iPhone. Oh, and, by the way, the price of the song plus the ringtone is $1.98, less than the current phone carrier offerings. Sell to the prosumers, and ignore the legacy carrier approach. [Update: Gruber says there's room for improvement.]
• iPod Nano: Revising the best-selling mp3 player in the world. New shape, and thinner. More memory for same price. The real news in this is that there are some major product design changes are under the hood. Pitched repeatedly as the "enhanced user interface," the new iPods are driven by OS X, the same foundation as the iPhone, and today's Mac OS. This is a very big deal, as an entirely new (and very rich) software platform is will be running on several million devices, offering new features like coverflow, along with potential bugs and the following requisite updates. [Update: Yup.]
• iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: The fundamental change that iTunes brought to the market, from the consumers point of view, was the 30-second preview of every song, prior to buying. Instead of buying something based on a recommendation, you now buy based on what you hear. IOW, a measurement of the industry's product merit was put in place. Prior to that the industry was measured on their ability to market product – now they are judged by whether the product is worth buying. Big diff. Is anyone surprised their sales are off? It's not piracy, gents, its your product. Nuf' said. [Update: Oh, the iTunes wi-fi music store? Accelerates the changes. More below.]
• Partnership with Starbucks: This extends the music preview and buying experience away from the computer and into the retail environment. Moves offline buying experience from music as store, to music as environment. Music stores tried selling coffee, didn't work too well. Coffee stores selling music, this will be a blockbuster. Shows what's playing now and the last ten songs played in the store. Because the physical roll-out will go through 2009, both companies will have incremental yet cumulative increases, and will have another dimension of progress to announce for the next two years. Expect more deals at other retail stores. [Major update: see below.]
• Everything you need to know about Howard Schultz's presentation on the Apple stage: If you sell an addictive product, customers will buy it very frequently, and you'll need to open a lot of stores to keep up with the demand. As the business progresses, you'll make so much money that you'll need to invent brand extensions to consume the cash. Steve and Howard are both old hippies, and they both thank their sweet lucky stars that they get to do all this for the love of music. Thank you very much.

Update: There's one other thing worth noting here. Twice now, this year, Apple has done deals with another very large company, and convinced them to make fundamental changes to their "business operating system" – that is, the software that runs their customer-facing operations – to get the partnership deal. The first was AT&T, who had to modify their cellular telephone network software to create "visual voicemail." Visual voicemail is a fundamental change in how the customer interacts with their device, their carrier, their messages, and therefore their whole cell phone communications world.

The second instance is with Starbucks, who will be installing the capacity to upload to iTunes HQ, in real-time, what song is playing at this moment is each and every Starbucks cafe around the world. This will become an international real-time cultural baraometer, par excellence. It becomes possible to imagine a "flash" hit single, that spreads around the world and could sell a million copies in an hour. In effect, Apple has announced Phase III completion of their re-engineereing effort on the music business. Phase I was the iPod. Phase II was iTunes. Phase III is persistent purchasing, buying whatever music you want, wherever you are.

Much bigger news than the iPhone price cut is this idea of Apple entering the enterprise software ecosystem. Instead of typical enterprise deals where the vendor supplies software or hardware to re-engineer, say, the purchasing department, Apple is doing customer-facing enterprise deals, where they build or specify the software customers use. This is huge. Major huge.

Even better, there's a Sarbanes-Oxley rule where companies have to spread the revenue accounting of a product over two years if the company provides free updates that add features. Apple is doing this with the iPhone, AppleTV, and maybe some other products. This means that the revenue growth will show up slowly, over time, without much notice. Until say, in 2009, when they're still recognizing revenue from your iPhone purchase last month, and you've already bought another one, maybe two.

You can safely go very long on Apple stock.

Permalink | Comments (0)

What is beauty?

July 18, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

This Dove ad should be required viewing for anyone who has ever wondered about "manufactured beauty." (1:30) Dig the photoshop work where they extend the neck, puff the lips, trim the shoulders, lower the eyebrows, etc. She looks totally normal at the start, and a super model at the end.

Update: Sassy Pants points to this great link on the same topic.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Toilet 2.0

July 5, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

If you've been thinking that you use too much toilet paper, the Washlet might be for you. It also claims to increase happiness.

Bubblegen provides a good overview of the strategic challenge.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Compare and Contrast

February 27, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Today in links:

A $1,000 brownie

Brûlee’s "Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis" is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.

Stock markets around the world plummeted today

In percentage terms, it was the worst day for the market since March 2003. In terms of points, it was the steepest slide since the first day the market resumed trading after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

So it goes.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Food Security

February 22, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

When I say that "the food supply is far more fragile than people realize," this is what I have in mind.

It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last two years.

No one knows why the bees are dying. In and of themselves, one species doesn't really matter much (heh, even humans!), but the interdependency of a living system depends on all things living. In this case, bee bye-bye means everything pollinated by the itty bitty bees will be affected. Wichita Eagle:

"One out of every three bites of food we eat is produced as the result of insect pollination, much of it by bees," said Bruce Broynton, a spokesman for the National Honey Board, which this week released $58,000 for research it hopes will lead to understanding the bee deaths.

Here's a wake-up call about what you can do to understand and prepare for the future. Short version: relearning to make everything more local and smaller-scale.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Stop Buying This Crap

February 15, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Rant, defined.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Results of Thinking Systemically

January 11, 2007 | Business & Commerce

Finally found the quote I've been looking for:

"He's the only guy who has applied systems thinking to media," said Paul Saffo, a consumer electronics industry consultant who is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.

Paul is referring to Steve Jobs. Bonus: This is an interesting Google search.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Ryu at Dartmouth

January 11, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org:

And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere ("an ambient way to see your weather") is now being built. Ryu and friends also produced something called MacHeist where they bundled shareware applications and sold them for $49, donating 25% of proceeds to the buyer’s charity of choice. MacHeist raised $200,000. Pogue got it right when he said the future of the tech looks good if it is in the hands of kids like Phillip Ryu.

The story is not quite that simple. Yes, they raised money for charity, but many people are upset that the developers got a fixed price, while MacHeist sold far more than expected and made a killing. The cooperative model would have been to share a percentage of the profits with the developers. For a summary, see this Wired story. For the details, read Jon Gruber's always-amusing posts (1, and 2) at Daring Fireball.

There's no doubt this project was a marketing masterpiece. Ryu and team probably made north of $400,000 in one week. [Yeah, four hundred, not forty.] But that doesn't mean I'm excited to put the future in their hands.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Completely Redefining What You Can Do

January 9, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

I will be one of approximately 143,215,697 people to mention this today or tomorrow, but this is as close as it gets to product-orgasm. Cell phones have sucked forever, and this is a whole new game.

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

The picture is so good you are nearly drooling. [Note switch to second-person voice for a bit of self-revealing distance.] This product is far, far better than I expected, even with all the pre-hype. It's a big year for Apple. See also, no slouch either: AppleTV.

David Pogue comments on it all. Better, this Time magazine article on the culture and attitude that produces an object like this. And, Joshua Allen on some of the potential problems with Apple's approach.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Design Is Good For Business

January 3, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

DETROIT, Jan. 3 — The Chrysler Group was the only Detroit carmaker to report a sales increase for December, while the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda both saw their sales grow last month, figures from the auto companies showed today.

I assert Chrysler gained sales because of design, with a capital-D. Of the US automakers, they are the only one with cars that spark the imagination. Anyone who is practical has done the math and found that Toyota or Honda will be the most reliable. If you are going to buy a car that falls apart it may as well look nice, since it will appear dated soon and you'll want to replace it.

This is the reason why design is good for business. (c.f. iPod.)

Permalink | Comments (0)

Mattresses

January 2, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

How to cut through the marketing gimmicks.

The secret to mattress shopping is that the product is basically a commodity. The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they're pretty much all the same. And that's all you need to know.

Not sure I agree entirely, but it is a confusing market, with lots of re-branding, and essentially the major differences are firmness and price.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneetchcrafted Chocolate

December 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce

Reading this investigative journalism piece about extremely overpriced chocolates made in Plano (Dallas) Texas, you will learn a whole lot about the origins, processing, and packaging of chocolate.

Bonus: The word "Sneetchcraft," following Dr. Seuss. "This collection of four of Dr. Seuss's most winning stories begins with that unforgettable tale of the unfortunate Sneetches, bamboozled by one Sylvester McMonkey McBean ("the Fix-it-up Chappie"), who teaches them that pointless prejudice can be costly."

Permalink | Comments (0)

Rich People Don’t Care About Gas Prices

December 4, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Great essay, with attitude, on why Ford, GM, and Chrysler are sucking eggs so hard.

We’re looking at two strategies here. Toyota: build affordable transportation for the masses at a quality level that slightly exceeds expectations relative to price. GM et al: build oversized, under-engineered and fuel inefficient cars for people who don’t care about money while palming off sub-standard cars on mainstream customers.

Recall that GM has underfunded its pension and Ford just laid off bought out 40,000 workers, and you realize how they've already lost the game. There won't be any decent American cars to buy in a few years. Just government subsidized Yugo-clones that attempt to preserve a national pride of manufacturing. Oh well; we still have the entertainment industry.

Permalink | Comments (0)

One Bank, One Card

November 20, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

Here's a new video for all you U2 fans: One (4:49).

Spoiler: Corporate execs wearing ties in a typical hotel conference room co-opting the song with celebration lyrics of their merger. Funny. Sick. Unbelievable. Horrible. Capital-C Culture.

Permalink | Comments (0)

The World Standard in Studless Winter Tyres

November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment

Glen said, "The ultimate winter weapon is still the Hakk 2's with studs, but if you don't want to run the studs with the noise and the rolling resistance and everything, then the RSi is what people are talking about." Better than the Hakk 2's? "Without the studs; With the studs, Hakk 2's are what you want." Got it. "This is a good tyre, it's quiet—people say it's really quiet—and it replaces the Nokia Q, which was around for ten years, and people liked that tyre quite a lot." How much? "Let me go work it out." [3 minutes of tyre store being] "$109 mounted and balanced." Okay, sold.

Now I just have to get there at 7:15 some morning to be in the first batch of customers. Otherwise it's an all-day affair.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear Boloco

November 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Quality control in Hanover has GOT to improve. Today: Regular teriaki with chicken. $6.25 They forgot the chicken. Then realized that this is normally $5.25 if memory serves. Last visit: Ordered extra chicken. Got normal amount of chicken.

This is the sort of thing where it's way too much of a hassle to go back and complain for a dollar or two. Plus, with a small staff you can get a rep for complaining and then who knows what happens to the ingredients in your next order.

Recommendation: Give every customer a receipt. Put a sign up saying, "If we don't give you a receipt your next order is free." Print messages on the receipt like, "Was your order perfect? How can we improve? www.boloco.com" etc. Monthly drawing for best feedback, etc.

I realize it's a tough staff to manage (high turnover, low pay, tedious work, food service, lunchtime slams, etc) but at this point three of my last four visits were incorrect meals, and one of them seems like it included an overcharge (two, if you count the missing extra chicken).

So I'll give it another shot in December, but it's been kind of a downer in Sept and Oct.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Enormous Copyright Infringement Claims

October 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce

Interesting business strategy analysis of the Google purchase of YouTube.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Children

October 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce

There's a new bead store in town. It's nicely decorated, and my favorite part is a sign on the wall:

Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free kitten.

Hard to believe they'll survive when Hanover rents are a couple of grand a month and a beads cost a nickel or a quarter apiece. But it adds a bit of funk to the neighborhood, and that's nice.

[ Local: In the Five Olde Nugget alley, where Ann Rose Travel used to be. ]

Permalink | Comments (1)

Advice on Work

October 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Paul Graham:

The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to suck to work there and it will be easy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'll be free again.

It's mostly focused on advice for graduating college students, but I especially like the focus of a job as a temporary condition. Another nugget:

Professors will tend to judge you by the distance between the starting point and where you are now. If someone has achieved a lot, they should get a good grade. But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.

If you're self-employed you learn this fast, or you find yourself a job PDQ. More:

You know from an early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyone asks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What they don't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of someone else who's treading water, and that starting working means you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. "Being" something is incidental; the immediate problem is not to drown.

As usual, the whole essay is a good read.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Sonny Boy

October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

The meeting was 15 people, by invitation. Hosted in a very comfortable high-tech room. The guest speaker was from a famous university a few hours south. Worker bees and VPs gathered to talk shop and think big. 45 minute presentation, then lunch is served. We introduce ourselves. Discussion ensues.

Eventually I ask: "What kinds of governance and decision-making structures work for highly complex topics? I have evolved many processes and approaches to working with this, but frequently executives override the advice of their best domain experts, which is bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions."

[Paraphrasing and editing makes me sound better than I did at the time.]

A few people speak. Eventually the VP says, among other things, with a wry smile pointed in my direction, "Those of us who have been around a while know that politics can't be avoided." Smile.

"Yes," I thought, but didn't say, "my point is we need to subvert politics. It's bad for morale, bad for projects, and bad for institutions. How about if we make decisions based on the merits, instead of the patronizing hierarchical power?"

"Those of us who have been around a while...." Those of us who have been around a while.... Those of us who have been around a while....

[I should grow my beard a little longer to show off the gray hair.]

This is your brain on intelligence, honesty, and enthusiasm. This is your brain on politics and power. Any questions?

Permalink | Comments (1)

Just Ignore Any Conflicts

October 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

I'm scheduling interviews for a project and I received the following (lightly edited) email at 10 AM today, illustrating the problems of "groupware."

That works for Susan! If this works for others, please feel free to add it to Susan's calendar (I'm leaving at 10:30am today). Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time.

First of all, I'm not an internal employee (read the email sig much?), so I can't add it myself, she has to do it for me. And, uh, what does an assistant do if not manage the boss's schedule?? In this case, direct other people to add it to the schedule, I guess... Everyone needs someone to supervise.

But further, note the last line: "Just ignore any conflicts that show at that time." So, when the boss looks at her schedule she has to manually filter what she is doing when, instead of just having one item per time slot.

It's no wonder there are so many problems in the world. People don't do their jobs, or don't know what their jobs are, and then somehow people think they can do more than one thing, or be in more than one place, all at the same time. By the time they head home to find out their government is torturing people to manufacture evidence of terrorism to perpetuate it's own power, they're too exhausted to think. Mission accomplished.

Update: I requested that she add it, since I couldn't, and received the following reply:

Sorry, lost my mind. ;o)

Honesty duly noted.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Welcome to the "Soft Landing"

September 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

NY Times (September 25, 2006):

The median price of a previously owned home fell for the first time in 11 years last month, and inventories of unsold homes swelled to levels not seen in more than a decade.

Jason Calacanis (September 24, 2006):

Real estate is a horribly inefficient market and many of the brokers seem to be playing games. Folks are relisting homes all over the place to "reset" the days listed number, and people are not updating their MLS listing with the market down prices. We've been to homes months ago that were shown at 10-25% less than their MLS pages *still* say they are.

Barry Ritholtz (September 15, 2006):

$2.7 trillion in loans will adjust to higher rates in 2006 and 2007. According to Reality Trac, August foreclosures were up 23% over July and 53% over a year ago. Nationally, home prices have not declined on a year-to-year basis since 1933. Recently, however, prices have been dropping in the North East, West and Mid-West.

 

Permalink | Comments (0)

Just The Facts

September 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

There is a weapons system development effort in every congressional district. [Which weapons system to you want to kill, Senator??]

Of the 350 annual megatons of carbon output that Ford is responsible for, only eight of it comes from car emissions; the rest is from factories.

The NSA joke used to be, "No Such Agency;" now it's "Not Secret Anymore."

Ford is not using the Toyota batteries in their Toyota-technology hybrid cars, because the Toyota batteries use child labor that wouldn't pass Ford's human-rights code. But Ford doesn't publicize this because they would be accused of "greenwashing" their terrible overall carbon footprint.

Nissan executives in Japan are working 17-hour days, which includes six hours of drinking with their colleagues every evening. 55-year old men commonly sob when talking about the pressure with their personal coaches or HR.

General Hayden, formerly head of the NSA, now head of the CIA, was variously described by People Who Should Know as one of the most kind, loving, humanistic, and caring people they had ever met. [Triangulated from four discussions.]

Ford will offer buy-out packages to every single hourly production worker, and every single salaried worker over 50. In the next two years they will cut 40% of their management positions. [Can you spell "ripple effect?"]

Just three years ago Nissan's internal projections assumed an endless supply of oil and stable gas prices.

The Director of Sustainability at Ford spends 50 - 70% of his time educating colleagues. Most people still don't believe climate change is real.

There are 40 million cubicles in American workplaces.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Kids Don't Use Mail

September 11, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

If you think email marketing is going to work forever, you might want to think again.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Link Roundup

September 10, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Miscellaneous tabs still open from last week:

• Robert Young on the fat belly of the Long Tail.

• Kiko threw in the towel and put the company up for sale on eBay. It went for $250K. Tucows explains why they bought the technology.

• Another excellent minimalist layout a la Craigslist and Facebook. More good content, too.

• Useful: How to Have Better Conversations.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Crony Capitalism at it's Finest

September 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Industry Note: The Rot at the Core, Special Disney Crony Capitalism Edition

Of course, neither move - coypright extensions or side payments to politicians in the form of propaganda - are in the least good for the economy, because they destroy more value than they create, through the stifling of potential innovation, competition, and new capital formation. This is crony capitalism at it's finest - we make your propaganda, you protect our assets; this is the kind of anti-capitalism that ends up destroying economies (hi Japan).

Right on.

[Background]

Permalink | Comments (0)

Facebook Mini-Review

September 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software

Well, I had a demo of Facebook, and it's a very nice web application. [Previously: Attention Metastream. Today: Fred Wilson on the changes (good comments thread).]

(I have removed names from this screenshot.)

It's hard to get a sense of it from the picture, but I can tell that if I were a college student it would be easy to live here and check in frequently and see what my friends are up to and post about my life. There are nine million Facebook users, so they're doing something right.

I also note there is zero "flashy design" on this site. Note the one-color plus black palette, the simple obvious layout, the single ad in the left column, the simple unobtrusive logo in the upper left. It's a beautiful minimalist approach. This has the beneficial side-effect of lowering the server load and bandwidth costs for high-traffic sites.

It seems like the most popular websites either have bad design, or minimal design. You might want to think about that the next time you spend two hours getting the rounded corners just so in your incremental design update. Better to hire a good writer, or to think about your use-cases and user-centric design. As always, design has to support the message and function, not overtake the purpose of the effort. Facebook is a good example of What People Want.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Commodity Fetishism

September 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Thanks to Tom Matrullo I am now aware of the term commodity fetishism:

In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social relationships are defined by the values that are placed on commodities. The term is introduced in the opening chapter of Karl Marx's main work of political economy, Capital, of 1867. It replaced the Young Marx's theory of alienation.

Georg Lukács based History and Class Consciousness on Marx's notion, developing his own notion of commodity reification as the key obstacle to class consciousness. Lukács's work was a significant influence on later philosophers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation", that is, among consumers. Baudrillard is especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identity.

It doesn't get much better than that on a Wednesday afternoon.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Attention Metastream

September 5, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

I don't yet have access to Facebook, but this TechCrunch review notes the key element in successful web applications:

Facebook clearly gets the idea of an attention metastream, where page views aren’t the currency that matters but rather how effectively the service allows users to communicate. Facebook users will now have a much easier way of staying up to date on what their friends are up to. It may mean less page views for Facebook in the short run as users rarely have to leave their home/admin page to see what’s going on with friends, but if it makes users love Facebook more (is that possible?), it’ll pay off in the end.

Whether for business or pleasure, information, passion, and interaction are key.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Complex Problem Solving

September 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

Very interesting diagram of complex problem solving processes. Mousing over almost anything brings up more depth. Rewards exploration at the expense of obscuring details.

Permalink | Comments (0)

WoW Update

September 5, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software

In June 2005, I wrote about World of Warcraft (WoW):

Conservatively, there was a one-time revenue stream of just under $100 million dollars, and an on-going monthly revenue of just under $26 million (just under $312 million annually). They are opening the game up in China soon, where there are 500,000 players in the open beta period. It's not hard to imagine cumulative revenues of over a billion dollars, or perhaps two.

Today's NY Times brings news that indeed, they are on track for a billion dollars this year:

Less than two years after its introduction, World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., is on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year with almost seven million paying subscribers, who can log into the game and interact with other players. That makes it one of the most lucrative entertainment media properties of any kind. Almost every other subscription online game, including EverQuest II and Star Wars: Galaxies, measures its customers in hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands.

The Times also addresses the employee head-count, which I had guessed at 350 a year ago:

Since the game’s introduction in November 2004 the company has expanded to more than 1,800 employees from around 400. Almost all of the additions have been customer-service representatives to handle World of Warcraft players, helping them with both technical advice and billing concerns.

That's $555,555 of recurring annual revenue per employee, for the business modelers out there.

And why do people play this game? First, it's easy for beginners to get started, but it also has a lot to engage long-term players. But the most important aspect can be gleaned from an interview with this 3,000-hour player:

“Think about it: I’m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I can’t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I’ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I’ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don’t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.”

People want to be engaged—some might say entertained—and they want to extend their networks. Yochai Benkler might call it social production.

Please make a note of it.

Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Mailbag

September 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce

Here's a hot one, in its entirety:

Dear Friend,

I need a partner for $14 million deal, for more details please contact me immediately .

Thanks, Mike Wilcox.

I'm on it.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Trapping Telemarketers

August 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce

Rather cruel for the telemarketing employee, but genius nonetheless.

A little while ago I put together a little application on our phone system so that when a telemarketer calls in, I can transfer them to this extension and annoy the hell out of them. I thought about it a bit more and decided to make it a little more interesting, so I can get them to hold on the line as long as possible.

Previously: TeleZapper. I have one of these and it definitely makes a difference.

Update: The author admits it was a joke, not a real telemarketer. Totally lame.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Rail Trail to Twigs

August 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Most readers of this blog will be shocked to hear that I rode my bicycle 14 miles yesterday. I have owned this bike for ten years, and on yesterday's one ride I probably doubled it's total lifetime miles.

One of the draws was the Rail Trail, a reclaimed railroad bed turned into a flat, well-maintained activity trail, with beautiful "behind-the-scenes" views of neighborhoods, covered bridges, lakes, rivers, and streams. Compared to riding around near my country house, with its steep hills, both short and long, the rail trail was a breeze, and that made it more fun. Lots of people had been telling me to get out there, for at least a year now, and I'm glad I did.

But the big news is the absolutely amazing Twigs cafe in Enfield, NH.

It's at the ~7 mile mark riding from Lebanon, and I expected yummy carbo treats, but in addition to all that they have fantastic sandwiches. I had a turkey wrap with sprouts, tomato, mustard, and, get this, real roasted turkey, like from Thanksgiving dinner. It was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had, no kidding.

Cool decorative atmosphere, river views, free wi-fi, what more could you want? It's really worth the ride.

Just opened next door is Stecco, an upscale Italian restaurant with a menu that looks great. Downtown Enfield is coming into its own. There was talk of training this winter and next spring to ride the full length of the rail trail (45 miles) to the Thai restaurant in Concord, NH. Some of you have just spit out your coffee; I apologize.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Now In Clogs

August 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

On May 10 I cracked a sole on my Birkenstock Chicago shoes. No biggie, they were six years old, and it was my second pair. The first pair failed the same way at about the same time. Not so bad: Spend $200 on shoes and wear them almost every day and they last six years. They were also super-comfortable—I could go to a trade show in NYC and walk on concrete for 16 hours and my feet were fine.

So on May 11 I went to the local store to buy another pair, and I found they had discontinued the Chicago model. Okay, what's the replacement? I ended up in the Wexford, which looked a little more business-like, but had a thinner sole and the Footprints low-arch footbed. I like the high-arch footbed, but this model didn't allow the swap. Oh well. $195 later I'm out the door.

The following week it rained. Not hard pouring rain, but a steady drizzle. And walking down Main Street, my feet got soaked. Not because I stepped in a puddle or anything, just from the rain. Bad sign; the Chicago's never did this.

The week after that I noticed that my feet were killing me, and I was mostly just walking to work and sitting all day at the computer. Another bad sign: the Chicago's never did this either.

So I stopped in the store to see if anyone had had similar problems. Of course the store hadn't heard anything.... so I went on my merry way thinking, "No way am I wearing these for six years. I'll last the summer, switch to winter boots when it snows, and then buy some Rockports in the spring, and put Birkenstock insoles in them for the high-arch comfort."

Then this morning I went to put my shoes on and the right one was completely blown out on the side. I hadn't noticed yesterday or last night, but there was a six-inch tear in the seam between the leather and the sole. When did I buy these again? It appears to me that they've either cost-cut this thing to the point of worthlessness, or I got a real bad apple.

I stopped in the store on my way to work, and the owner, who sold me the shoes, was there. He was genuinely surprised. His brother has worn these for the past two years without a problem. We talked about the history as related above. Long story short, not wanting another pair of Wexford's, I'm now in some stylish Alton clogs. Comfy, easy on and off, a firmer sole, and a high-arch footbed.

We haven't actually sorted out the money yet. He wanted to talk to Birkenstock, but if they didn't "do something" he would. I said that weighing 160 lbs, with only three months of use, I didn't really want to eat it, but I'd trust him to sort it out in the next couple of weeks. I'm a 15-year Birkenstock customer, so I'm assuming that they'll do the right thing here.

Meanwhile, for business shoes, I'm headed for the waterproof Rockport with Birk insole option.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Continuing Examples of Music Industry Stupidity

August 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

This is worth a lengthy quote:

NY Times: Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing

Lauren Keiser, president of the Music Publishers’ Association, says guitar tablature Web sites reduce the earnings of songwriters.

In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others.

“People can get it for free on the Internet, and it’s hurting the songwriters,” said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers’ Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.

So far, the Music Publishers’ Association and the National Music Publishers’ Association have shut down several Web sites, or have pressured them to remove all of their tabs, but users have quickly migrated to other sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, an Internet statistics service, Ultimate-Guitar.com had 1.4 million visitors in July, twice the number from a year earlier.

The publishers, who share royalties with composers each time customers buy sheet music or books of guitar tablature, maintain that tablature postings, even inaccurate ones, are protected by copyright laws because the postings represent “derivative works” related to the original compositions, to use the industry jargon.

So, let me get this straight. There are 1.4 million web surfers addicted to guitar tablature. And there is an existing legal arrangement where the publishers share royalties with the artists.

Listen up bubba, this right here is what we call a strategy: The publishers should license the websites to use the material and find the natural market price point.

D'oh, he said.

I mean, come on! This is not rocket science. Charge $0.99 a song for guitar tablature PDFs and see what happens, fer cryin' out loud! There might be varying degrees of sophistication among the PDF products, and maybe some tabs are worth $1.49, or even $2.99 per song. Maybe some are only worth $0.49 or $0.29. Who cares? Internet distribution removes friction. You can make money at any price by scaling to the market.

Instead of shutting them down they should be creating a new market.

I can't even believe people are this dumb sometimes.

So here's your Web 2.0 startup solution: Define a standard XML format for guitar tablature, and a server-side translator to take this XML, render it through template(s), and generate PDFs on the fly. Optionally, develop and support some sort of digital rights management scheme that is not ridiculously onerous. Tie this into a mass-customized MLM marketing, e-commerce, and community-driven web interface, and get started in the indie low-budget music scene. Build an audience, and a revenue stream, and sign on the heavyweights. At some point they will realize that while it might be worth reverse engineering the software and building their own system, they can't replicate the community.

Then you have your liquidity event, as they say.

Permalink | Comments (2)

What Is Lingr?

August 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

Coming soon...

Now live: "Lingr is the place for chat on the web. That's it, seriously- nothing could be simpler."

Permalink | Comments (1)

Declaring First Use

August 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

I want to take this moment to claim first use and moral rights on the following trademarks.

• Governance for Design and Technology™
• Feed-Forward Governance™
• Strategic Website Leadership™
• People, Process, and Positive Feedback™
• Feed-Forward Methods for People and Process™
• Proportional Budget Matrix™
• Factor-Based Peer Review™
• Weighted-Factor Competitive Review™
• Concentric Roles™
• Fast-Feedback Design/Build™
• Polyrhythmic Iteration™
• Small-Multiple Deliverables™
• Loosely-Coupled Timeline™

All of the above have zero Google hits as of today.

Permalink | Comments (5)

That's Odd

August 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Sticker found on bananas: "Eat five a day for good health." Five bananas a day?? Wow.

How do you know it's early August? You receive the Eddie Bauer Holiday Preview catalog in the mail. That is so, like, in sync! I have been thinking about Christmas gifts and winter clothing recently, haven't you?

The world is a very odd place.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Bogus Mail List Data

August 4, 2006 | Business & Commerce

Today in the mail I received three identical computer catalogs from Hewlett-Packard (Holliston, MA office). The interesting thing was the people they were addressed to:

• Ms. Roxanne Waldner, Executive Director
• Mr. Bill Bitzer, Executive Director
• Ms. Beth A. Milardo, Manager

So? Well, I don't have any employees, first of all. But those names are familiar. They are clients whose names appear under their testimonial quotes on my professional website. Totally bogus. Either there is a software robot scanning the web for names and addresses to add to direct mail lists, or someone deliberately (and fraudulently) is beefing up the size of their list by intentionally adding whatever names they can find attached to any addresses available.

The worst thing is that these names are now in circulation in the list industry, and will be rented and sold over and over again. More bad data in the infosphere.

The vertically stacked coding numbers on the label were: 0120 — 0046 — [ 012/013/014] — 4294, in case anyone cares where this data came from.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Small-Scale Music Marketing

August 3, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Last weekend I recorded my friend Chris and his band, testing out the new gadget. I sat in the second row and held the recorder in my hand on my thigh. Considering the situation, the recording is surprisingly good.

I gave Chris copies of the audio and the .wav file, and encouraged him to post it online. Of course, the band needs to make the decision as a group, and they might want to break it into tracks instead of one 56 minute piece, but the idea was to put it out there.

Chris responded:

I don't think I'll post the whole thing -- our playing isn't up to our snuff throughout -- but definitely snippets.

My internal reaction was, "What if the Grateful Dead or Phish had only put out their perfect playing?" Rarely did a full Dead or Phish show contain flawless playing. We never would have heard anything but official recordings under this criteria. It's also worth noting that I listened to the recording the day after the performance and didn't hear a single error—not that they don't exist, just that the typical listener is not working from the score to easily hear or find mistakes.

Chris' music is much more formal and structured, so you could argue that this style should have a higher quality standard than rock 'n roll. But I would retort by pointing to the boatload of lame classical releases which pale in comparison to the premiere performances of any given composition. Chris' response got me thinking about what I would do if I had a band and wanted to spread the music (assumption alert: they may not want to spread the music). Here's what I consider the basics of small-scale music marketing.

On the website, have a music archive page, and put up mp3's of every show, or at least put them up on Archive.org and point to them there. (This is what Oshe did before they broke up.) Then, sell compilations of the best cuts. Create CD-length "albums" that you can buy (or download from iTunes) that have good flow, that put things together in a new way, that are built around a theme, whatever.

The basic idea is to give away the full-length works for the hardcore fans, for people who went to the show, for people who are going on a long drive and want a full-length work, etc. Then sell the "best of" discs/downloads as the consolidated snapshot. List these at the top of the music page. Feature them on the home page of the website. "Lead" with them, as they say in journalism. Encourage your hardcore fans to buy the compilations to support you, even though they already "own" everything. Present it as a new experience, the Band's Choice, as it were.

This is the model that the Grateful Dead pioneered in the '60s and '70s. Use the free trading to drive people to the live experience. Give away full performances, because what people want to pay for is a unique experience, either live in person or via the "official" CDs. The advantage of putting up everything comes later on, when someone discovers your music and wants to dig deep. Now they've got a huge archive to listen to, and while they're focused on you for a few weeks or months they'll tell their friends, who will go check it out too. If there's just a bit of music posted, you can't create the depth of engagement. And that depth is what will hook people.

Now, having decided what they should do, it might be good to ask them what their goals are. Oh, wait, did I reverse the order?? Sorry, I was acting like a manager, getting all tactical first, not a consultant, starting with the goals. Oh well, this is only what I would do after all.

Permalink | Comments (0)

A Cooperative Solution

August 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

An excellent 3,300 word article in Strategy + Business on the cooperative advantage. A very good read.

Cooperatives are often assumed to be merely local affiliations of small and midsized companies, and therefore limited in scope and reach. But their deep roots in their countries of origin — as well as their surprising pervasiveness and stability — are exactly what puts cooperatives in a strong position in the new global economy. Through their highly participative governance models (involving both members and employees in making decisions), the cooperative system is particularly well suited to combining entrepreneurial and social objectives. Because it encourages internal checks and balances and general transparency, cooperative structure also makes it easier to avoid the ethical and legal lapses that have brought down the management of many investor-owned companies.

Also quotes my SoL colleague Arie de Geus, former head of Royal Dutch/Shell scenario planning and author of The Living Company on the value of cooperatives for being people-based and long-term focused. (Thanks Chris.)

Permalink | Comments (1)

RMA Please

July 28, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

Dear Andrew,

I'd like an RMA to return the microphone stand purchased on order #L23298760, invoice #6098612.

The reason for the return is that the metal boom of the stand, when delivered, had two stickers on it, put there by the manufacturer. One was a white paper UPC bar code sticker. The other was a long silver foil sticker with a purple stripe that said, "On-Stage Stands." As it turns out, these two stickers make a difference.

The paper one tore off in tiny pieces that took nearly five minutes to remove—though, granted, using only my fingernails and sailor slang—leaving a sticky glue residue. The second one peeled off easily leaving only a lightly tacky film of glue.

I attempted to remove the glue using the spray cleaner called Fantastic and a paper towel. Much to my surprise, the UPC glue came off easily, but the foil glue became stickier. I then used Windex, which helped loosen the glue, but did not remove it. Additional elbow grease was applied and had some minor effect. Bringing out the heavy artillery, I used Clorox spray cleaner with bleach. Nor did this powerful agent have any impact on the glue.

I guess what it comes down to is that when I buy something I don't want to spend ten minutes taking stickers off the thing, and I especially don't want to own something on which the sticker glue cannot be removed using only everyday cleaners commonly available in the average kitchen.

Does anybody at On-Stage Stands ever purchase their own products and try to use them as a customer would?

It is unacceptable to me to use the stand with the glue residue as it is. It seems like my only other alternative would be to re-order the stand and use it with the stickers attached. But I don't want to use the stand on-stage (har har) with the stickers—especially the purple stripe one; the UPC one is kind of ironic and cool—hence, best to return it.

This is the sort of thing I can buy at the local guitar store and not pay for shipping. It's too bad I had to spend $15 shipping (plus return) to figure that out.

Thanks,
Michael J.

PS: If you have a staff contest for best return requests, I hope that this letter at least merits an entry. If not, please forward some examples for my study and self-improvement.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Dynamic Scenarios

July 26, 2006 | Business & Commerce

My friends Anika Schriefer and Michael Sales have published an article describing their work at the intersection of systems thinking and scenario planning, which they call dynamic scenarios. I have watched them develop their thinking over the past 18 months, and have contributed ever so slightly to some conversations along the way. I find this an excellent process for handling multiple interacting variables and focusing leadership thinking on managing outcomes.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Tesla Roadster

July 26, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Now here's an electric car worth waiting for. Lots of new here. It will be sold over the web starting next summer. According to their blog they have engaged Lotus for key contract engineering skills.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Good Work If You Can Get It

July 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce

It's all good, for BP:

The company announced a profit of $7.27 billion in the second quarter, 30 percent more than the comparable period a year ago and the equivalent of more than $55,000 a minute.

Now that's some profit! Simply amazing, this world we live in.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Perfect Music Marketing

July 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

This whole weblog thing is pretty amazing. I wrote that post the other day on finding music – it was a toss-off, essentially, a cool service that made me think about how I used to find music and how much harder it is now (for me). Then, in the comments, this:

Hello Michael J.

I liked your post on finding music. It's funny how more options means more hassles. But here's another way to find new music. Have it come to you. My name's Kevin Griffin. I'm a singer songwriter out of Boston. I noticed you like Paul Simon. He's been one of my favorites for many years. My music's even been described as if Paul Simon and Johnny Cash were sitting around a campfire singing eachothers songs, that's me.

Anyway, I'm still not good at this self promotion stuff but I have a new song that was just named a semi finalist in the International Songwriting Contest and I'm trying to get new ears to hear it. So here's my link to Itunes so you can check it out.

Here´s the link to ITUNES and the lullaby.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=157683341&s=143441

Thanks and I hope you like the music. If you do, let me know.

Kevin Griffin

Now, it would be easy to say, "Yo, no self-promotion on my blog!" But that's not what I feel at all. What I feel is, Cool! Why? Kevin notes my post. He references my previous post on Paul Simon. He connects himself to that lineage. He has social proof in the form of an award. He clearly states he's trying to get more people to listen to the song and his music. He thanks me. He signs his name.

Kevin, rock on buddy. Perfect music marketing. The opposite of music industry PR spin. The opposite of hype. You didn't tell me I'd love it – you said you think it's like some other things I love and maybe I'd like to check it out. You link to iTunes, the default mechanism for easy previewing. You link to your website so I can explore more.

How did Kevin find my post? Who knows? I have somewhere between insignificant and non-existent tracking systems in place on Notio. He's never commented before. I don't know if he dropped in on that post or has been following along for three years. It doesn't matter. He respects the medium, and is using it effectively. I'm happy to promote that comment to the top of the fold. Well done.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Things Managers Say

July 20, 2006 | Business & Commerce

I can't exactly read what it says on that flip-chart over there but I disagree with it.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Modern Business Realities

July 19, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

Lunchtime banter:

You can buy better but you can't pay more.

This [$300] pen works as well as the cheap ones.

We're not happy until you're not happy.

The food was bad and the portions were much too small.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Finding Music

July 18, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Finding enjoyable new music is hard. [Is that "is" of predication or "is" of identity?] Radio gave up the ghost years ago due to industry consolidation. Now all we have on the dial are programmed playlists driven by payola. I can drive for hours and hear the same manufactured songs over and over regardless of the city, state, or region. So let's agree: Radio is a cultural wasteland, only slightly better than TV. Yes, there are exceptions, especially around colleges, but even then a lot of them suck.

The iTunes Music Store is a bit better, if only because I can drive my choices, and I can bail out of the 30-second preview whenever I want. Plus you get the browsing-helpful "customers who bought X also bought Y." And, one-click instant gratification. What's not to like? Well, Apple's DRM I suppose, but it hasn't gotten in my way so far, and the terms are reasonable IMO.

Today comes MusicLens a graphical dashboard which allows you to set musical parameters and then returns a list of songs that match your criteria. You can preview the songs, and I suppose there's some way to buy them. I like this better than Pandora because I can change the settings, myself, on the fly. Worth playing with.

Update: Fred Wilson posted today about music discovery too. Must be in the air.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Strategy is a Commodity

July 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Umair on strategy and creativity:

In a world where strategy is a commodity, creativity becomes the vital factor from which value flows. When everyone can think strategically about everything, the locus of value creation shifts from out-thinking everyone to out-creating them. The prime mover of value creation becomes putting the ability to create (goods, services, processes - even strategies) at the heart and soul of the firm.

The low cost of building web applications means creative startups have many golden opportunities in front of them.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Nine Lives Is Nine Too Many

July 13, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Technology

If the Internet turns into this, then I'm switching it off. Please, god, no.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Examples of Categories

July 11, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software | Technology

Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.)

Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation?

Culture: On media elitism and the "derivative" myth

Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit...

Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart

Permalink | Comments (0)

Make Something People Want

July 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology

I hesitate to point to every Paul Graham essay that comes along, but these links are useful for future research. Excerpts:

The idea of building something popular then figuring out how to make money from it was born in the Bubble. It sounds irresponsible, but it works. Requiring founders to have a carefully worked out plan for making money is not hard-headed business sense. It's what hackers call "premature optimization." The really important thing is to make something people want.

Startups will be ever more common because they're now so cheap to start. In most of the startups we fund, the biggest expense in the first year is simply food and rent. It costs little more to start a startup than to hang around doing nothing. And instead of having to go work in a cubicle in some office park, you get to work with your friends on your own project. If you succeed, you get rich.

We look for two things in startup founders: brains and commitment. One thing we've learned in this past year is that commitment matters more than we thought, and brains less. The founders can't be stupid, but as long as they're over a certain threshold, the most important thing is commitment.

A sense of design is also a big advantage. Big companies treat design almost as if you could paint it on after the fact. A hacker with design sense is really dangerous, especially as a startup founder. We don't care too much about the initial idea, except as evidence of brains and commitment. The idea will change. What matters most is that the founders really want to do a startup.

A lot of the most characteristically lame startups of the Bubble were that way because they were started by business guys, who then went looking for hackers to implement their ideas. That model may have worked in 1960, but it didn't work so well in 1998, and it gets more obsolete every year. I think the future belongs to the hackers. Technology is an ever larger component of business, so of course power is shifting to the people who are experts in that, rather than management or finance.

As always, there's more via the link.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Nano-Enabled Advances

July 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Email from Amazon alerted me to this new book: Nanotechnology Applications And Markets, by Lawrence Gasman, $79.

Discover nanotech opportunities the smart way with the first "down to business" market analysis that separates commercial reality from hype and gives you the tools you need to forecast nanotech’s impact on any company. This professional-level book spotlights the most viable R&D now taking root, what nano-enabled products will likely emerge in what industries first, and what timeframes you can expect before market rollout. You get a rich understanding of technical, business and legal essentials, and a solid framework for assessing commercial potential without either overheated expectations or overcautious pessimism. This indispensable resource focuses on the best nanotech-driven opportunities arising in the computer/electronics, medical/biotech, and energy industries — from nano-engineered microchips and fuel cells to nano-enabled drug discovery and delivery. You see where the "low hanging fruit" will be and won’t be in each field, and how nanotech will change each industry. The book also highlights nano-enabled advances taking place in such diverse industries as textiles, specialty chemicals, automotive, aerospace, agriculture, and building materials. What’s more, a unique and well-detailed "impact assessment audit" helps you identify how nanotech may soon change your company’s products, R&D, and production processes, and what new opportunities or threats to your business may emerge as the result of nanotech. Rounding out the coverage are extensive resource lists for further research in this up-and-coming sector.

This is going to have a major impact on society over the next 10 to 30 years—in other words, in our lifetimes. Bigger than personal computers.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Should Exist

June 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

A craigslist for op-ed. Talk about a flow machine.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Internet Economics 2006

June 28, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

Would you like to tune into a wavelength describing state-of-the-art Internet business models? If so, Jason Calacanis has what you want.

You see, Battelle's model is predicated on Rafat and Om deciding to stay in phase two or keep their relationship with Federated in phase three--which they are obviously not willing to do. That's why we canned the Federated Media /BlogAds model when we started Weblogs, Inc. We started out with the reveune share/repping model and Brian and I quickly decided that owning the IP/brands was a much better play. [Background.]

It appears easy to get $1 million to fund a web startup right now.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Truly Making a Difference

June 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Dave Pollard often gives detailed and passionate voice for my intuitive and information-overloaded thoughts. Today is no different.

So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since in the meantime the corporate and political elite will be busy dismantling, rolling back, bribing their way out of, and circumventing laws and regulations, a much easier process than getting them passed, and enforced, in the first place.

I gave up on MoveOn et al a long time ago. Those organizations are good in the crunch-time of an election, but real change isn't going to happen there. And the Democrats are hopeless, look at the mess Bush is creating, in many—not several, but many different areas—and they still have no core to rally around. It's completely depressing.

The two big opportunities to make a high-leverage change are education and business. Help increase funding for local public schools. Help raise the literacy and numeracy level of our kids. Encourage parental involvement in education. Encourage deep study in science and math and music and art. Learn enough to make a direct contribution yourself. Consume less. Vote with your dollars. Start your own business or partner with a small team. Create instead of consume. Look at the bigger picture. Spend your time volunteering instead of shopping or watching TV. Engage in something outside your own self-interest. Make a contribution of time and mental energy, not money. Be the change you want.

Do all that stuff Dave tells you to do in his article, because he's thinking about this a lot more deeply than you or me.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Finally, an Innovation in Newspapers

June 22, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Great idea from Guardian called G24:

...which allows readers to download and print out a rolling version of the newspaper that is updated every 15 minutes. G24 is an eight- to 12-page PDF covering either general news, international news, economics, sport or media stories. The new product is aimed at the lunchtime and evening commuter market who may want an updated print product to read on the train or bus.

I would love it if my local paper published, once a day, a PDF of all the local stories and the op-ed/letters section. I would pay for it, or they could run ads. I dislike getting the physical paper everyday, throwing away the sports and classifieds sections, skimming the feature stores for the occasional piece that targets me, and only reading the local news. So I rarely buy the paper.

The Guardian is charging about $12 a month for the service. Before I looked that up I decided I'd pay $5 a week or maybe $15 a month for my local paper in this format. It turns out they charge $16 a month for a printed, delivered copy—so this would lower their costs dramatically (after an initial capital investment) and be a real win-win for both of us.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Making Money on the Internet (cont.)

June 12, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Video blogging is hot. Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for PodTech.net (whose servers are so overloaded they can't even load a homepage).

And then, he mentions this:

Yesterday I was talking with Amanda Congdon, one of the co-founders of Rocketboom. Her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. That's, what, a year or so old? Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week? That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft.

Rocketboom is pretty idiosyncratic—if they can make $85K a week, lots of other people can too.

Permalink | Comments (11)

Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" About to Ship

June 6, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Very interesting thread on complex bookmaking. Start around March 9 to pick up the recent info. He's self-published 1.2 million books since 1983, and the detail with which he prints these books is unbelievable. Highlights from the link above:

• We await a test printing of some of our color tints (e.g., hows does 2% yellow compare with 3% yellow?).
• We'll start printing April 25, with some 29 press OKs....
• On the first form printed, we'll set the color of the type (the density of the black used for the type, separate from the black used in images) that we'll be aiming at throughout the book. (The separate blacks for type and images allows independent adjustment of type and image while on press.) There remain some difficult color issues despite our pre-press tests and that is why we do all our own OKs. The press OKs will pretty much take all my time for the next 2 weeks.
• Form 6 is being "perfected" in the printing jargon, with both sides printed in one pass on a 10-color work-and-turn or perfecting press, so that in one pass of the paper through the 10 presses, 5 colors are printed on one side of the paper, the paper is turned over, and 5 colors are printed on the opposite side.
• Major issue now is the carton for mailing single books; the total weight of book and carton is just over 3 pounds, which is a substantial break point on shipping prices. We found a lighter shipping carton that works well to protect the book, but of course it is made in Switzerland.

The colophon should be fascinating. You can order the book here. My pre-order might arrive before I return home!

Permalink | Comments (0)

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

May 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

Fast Company on changing your behavior:

If you want to change something in your life, it's common to try to stop the behaviors you don't like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple - it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates a vacuum it will fill it with anything it can find - usually the very behaviors you're trying to stop since they're so familiar. Instead of stopping certain behaviors, try focusing on what you want to create - and the new behaviors you need to get there. Eventually, with practice, new behaviors will develop enough muscle to naturally replace the old ones.

Good advice.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Nike+iPod

May 23, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Technology

Amazing advance in product sophistication. Apple partners with Nike on a blockbuster idea. Buy special (Nike) running shoes with a sensor in the footbed. The wireless sensor talks with a small receiver pluged into the dock connector of the (Apple) iPod. A special version of software takes over the display, and adds voice feedback cues over your music. When you get home, the iPod syncs your stats into iTunes and nikeplus.com, where you can get all kinda bling charts and razzle-dazzle trending of your sweat sessions. Of course, coming soon are Nike Sport Mixes, Workout Mixes, and informative podcasts from the iTunes online store. Rocka Rocka or what?

Permalink | Comments (1)

They Call It A Brand

May 20, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

In contrast to privacy and civil rights, US consumerism continues to be healthy. Friday saw the opening of a 20,000 sq. ft. Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It's open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The entrance is a remarkable glass cube, which you enter to descend down to the underground store. Here's a short video of the countdown to opening, following the very first customer as he moves through security, shakes the hand of Steve Jobs, and walks down the staircase to raucous applause. You can watch time-lapse photos of the first 24 hours outside – the place was packed at midnight. Here's an interview with Steve Jobs working the media.

Permalink | Comments (0)

What Filmmakers Do For Fun

May 19, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Here's a novel idea: Make a film, and charge people $1 to be listed as a producer. The result is a one-second film with 90 minutes of credits.

THE 1 SECOND FILM is a 70mm non-profit collaborative film bringing thousands of diverse people around the world together to create film history: 'The biggest shortest film ever made.' Virtually anyone can help produce this film by donating $1 or more. Our end-credits are estimated to last 90-minutes and will include a feature-length 'making of' documentary. All profits raised by our finished film will benefit the Global Fund for Women.

It gets better:

The one-second film consists of 12 giant frames (9ft x 5ft paintings) made simultaneously by hundreds of participants during an all-night event.

These Internet denizens sure know how to have fun.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Flying Carpet

May 14, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites

Great idea:

This project consists of an aerial view of the Sacramento River that is woven into a carpet for the floor of a pedestrian bridge connecting the terminal to the parking garage. This image represents approximately 50 miles of the Sacramento River starting just outside of Colusa, California and ending about 6 miles south of Chico.

This is a beautiful way to connect people with the beauty of nature in a manner and location they don't expect. I wonder if this was expensive or really hard to do? I have seen architectural magazines with advertisements for putting your own photographs onto laminated ("formica") countertops. And I think you can have your own wallpaper made. So this completes the interior design customization palette.

Of course, better to just get yourself outside, but still.

Permalink | Comments (1)

I [Heart] My Clients

May 11, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I have the best clients in the world. I just agreed to a large project for the summer that I had initially turned down (wherein I would participate but not lead) because the client wanted me to lead it so much they moved their deadline to fit my existing commitments. There are a lot of players involved, including other vendors in the collaboration, so this is a significant vote of confidence. Thank you.

Permalink | Comments (0)

We Put On Gloves and Dug In

May 7, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life

Lynne and I went for a walk down the road today. Ran into neighbor S., who, like Lynne, is a massage therapist.

S: I went to a two-day cadaver workshop last month!

L: Oh, excellent!

S: There were about a dozen of us. There were four cadavers, two up, two down, cut wide open. We put on gloves and dug in. It took a few minutes to get used to it, and then it was okay.

L: That sounds awesome.

S: This one was on the sacrum and hips. The same guy is doing one next month on the neck.

L: Oh, that would be really cool.

I didn't faint, even though I have in the past hit the floor from far less explicit conversations than this.

[Note to CIA/NSA/DIA/DHS/TSA: A really good immobilization strategy for me is to describe details of the gore, or perhaps the neural sequences the pain of a specific injury would cause.] [Updated the post for clarity.]

Permalink | Comments (4)

Opening Space for Ourselves and Each Other

May 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

Chris Corrigan posts some (great) current thinking on the Four Practices of Open Space. I hope he and Michael actually do get a book written about their experiences. Spending three days with them was life-changing, in many subtle but persistent ways. One example: staying in touch with Ashley, and thus seeing posts like this.

Permalink | Comments (1)

A Downside of Email Marketing [#000001 in a series]

May 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I just got an email from Netflix that began:

Netflix is proud to announce the opening of its new and improved Previously Viewed DVD store!

Good idea, I thought. Sell off the low-traffic movies. So I clicked over to check out the new section. Looks just like Netflix, you browse, you search, you rate. Nice.

Then I remembered I had wanted to downgrade my account because I don't watch as many movies in the summer. So I clicked over to my account, and went from the 2-at-a time plan to the 1-at-a-time plan, reducing my monthly expense by $2. Then I realized that the action I took – decreasing their revenue – was the direct result of their marketing spam email. Ha! Thanks for the reminder guys!

$2! Two!! Dollars!!! Two Dollars!!!! Twooooooooooo Dollllllllllaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrssss!!!! Puttin' one over The Man!!!!!!

Permalink | Comments (0)

An Anti-Traction, Mobility Denial Material

May 2, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

New Scientist describes a patent for a "riot slimer."

Riot police or troops would wear a back pack with three cylinders – one containing compressed air, another filled with plain water and a third containing a supply of very dry, finely ground, polyacrylamide powder. A nozzle, resembling a shower head, would blasts two separate jets, containing the water and the polymer powder, in the general direction of an ugly crowd.

As the two jets mix in the air, after clearing the nozzle, they create a slimy mixture that covers the ground and causes everyone in the area to fall down. Even vehicles should be unable to get a grip on the goo, the patent says. And because the gel is non-toxic, it should cause no permanent harm, besides a few bruised bottoms, that is.

Oh, hehehe, that's such a clever ending!! Okay, now then, very well; let me ask: How exactly do the riot slime backpacker police themselves stay standing, or control the crowd, or move laterally once the slime goes down? Wasn't there a scene in Ghost Busters just like this? ("I've been slimed!!") How can you get a patent on something that was in a movie 22 years ago?? Has that patent clerk not seen Ghost Busters?!?!

Just one more example of the Bush administration's incompetence.

Permalink | Comments (1)

.NET on OS X?

May 1, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology

Can someone confirm this rumor I heard last night: Microsoft is porting the .NET runtime framework to Mac OS X. [Note: Currently just a rumor!]

If this is true it's a pretty big deal. With Apple currently offering dual-boot software to run Windows XP on Mac hardware, and the likelihood that they will offer virtualization software to run Windows side-by-side with the Mac OS next year, we are apparently headed for a cross-platform world where the OS actually acts more like an application.

At least on the Mac, that is. In this scenario Macs will run the cool, well-designed, elegant, and stable Mac apps, on the best-designed hardware available today as well as whatever Windows apps you want to throw at it. And if you buy a Dell? Well, you'll get the same hacker-target OS on the same flakey hardware with the same lame customer service you've come to expect – you won't notice any difference and you can continue feeling superior that you're running with the big dogs on the best-selling platform and you won't have to spend an hour or two learning how to do things in an easier and more obvious way on OS X. Windowz Rulz!

Why would Microsoft support this? Well, because they are so large and mature they are really just a cash-machine, and all the Mac users would have to buy a copy of XP or Vista (cha-ching!), and their developers will be happy to have a larger base of users buying their apps.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Refreshing Authenticity

April 30, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Meanwhile, in looking to see if Umair had posted on the dumbest move this week™, I saw he pointed to this.

What a riot! Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, who was in the running to be the new Fed chairman, issues a parody video set to "Every Breath You Take," poking fun at Ben Bernanke, who got the job.

This is the opposite of the Times move. First, it's riotously funny and very well done (as opposed to vaporware). Second, it pokes fun at the author, the subject, and the band (instead of thinking it's going to actually matter). Third, just how many professionals would be willing to take this risk, to be this authentic, to speak in a human voice without press releases? Certainly not the Times. I have several academic clients, all constrained by the institutional voice. I've seen this up close, at the point of decision.

Oh, if only more organizations could act with the spirit of carnival that this video demonstrates.

Breaking Update: We received an electronic communiqué from Doug, saying CBS.Chick.2007 is reporting that the star of the video is a student, not the Dean. Whoops, bad reporting on Notio's part. Wisdom of the crowd in action, right there. But still, the fact that this video is going out under the banner of the School is admirable. And worth another laugh, even with the student actor. He's a grad student, at least.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Disintermediation Denial

April 30, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software | Technology

Dumbest move this week™.

Microsoft and The New York Times unveiled software on Friday that would allow readers to download an electronic version of the newspaper and view it on a portable device.

With Microsoft's new Windows Vista software, to be available in January, virtually any newspaper, magazine or book can be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off. The software would allow The Times to replicate its look — fonts, typeface and layout — more closely than its Web site now does.

I agreed with Dave Winer's comment, ("Bill Gates helps the NY Times turn the clock back.") but then I thought about it some more and went further.

This is so lame.

First, there's this thing called the "Web" – maybe you've heard of it? It has a structural markup language called HTML, and a styling layout language called CSS. If you use this, your stuff can work nearly anywhere, Mac, PC, Linux, mobile phone, TV display, etc. The Microsoft/Times approach is so 1996, and probably has more to do with DRM than anything else. This announcement is very disappointing, and indicative that the Times is not thinking clearly about digital disintermediation.

Second, there's this other thing called PDF. It's been around for years, and it's pretty well debugged (unlike the yet-to-ship Vista, nee Longhorn, with it's constantly slipping schedule and on-going feature-kill). Even better, PDF currently allows "virtually any newspaper, magazine or book [to] be formatted into an electronic version and read online or off." [Is there an echo in here?] Only one problem, it's from Adobe, and Microsoft would never think of using that!

Instead, what they should be doing is figuring out how to engage the army of bloggers to use Times stories as a focal point for their efforts. Who freaking cares if the formatting looks good offline? I'm reading most of my news in generic text via NetNewsWire anyway. It's very train-friendly already.

Hint: The advertisers care. Therefore realize that the "customers" of the Times are advertisers, not readers. What the readers are is not clear, though "consumers" might fit. I'm surprised Umair hasn't written about this yet, perhaps because it's such a dumb move that it's not worth commenting.

Face it. The Times is going to be very distracted for the next year. They've moving into a new building late this year or early next (I forget) - the whole staff, moving a new place for the first time since the 1800's or somesuch crazy-long time. They're building the building, so you can imagine the impact on your "core competencies" if you've ever built or renovated a house. The Bush administration is going to sue their ass off for the NSA spy leak; you can see pretty clearly that it's going to get ugly. And they're still hamstrung by the myth of objectivity. They (along with everyone else) still print whatever the Administration says, even when it's a blatant outright lie (c.f. anything Cheney has said for the past several years).

Imagine instead if the Times had a Blogger Research Program. It would work like this: Bloggers would sign up, and there would be a nominal annual fee to separate out the serious from the hasslers. Say, $20 a month. For that you get access to a password-protected RSS feed of story drafts in development. (You might also include a subscription to Times Select.) You submit your thoughts, corrections, research notes, and op-ed comments to a private forum or blog, where there is one topic/post per story. Every time the Times uses one of your quotes or research in a published story you get paid a nominal amount. Say, $5. The goal for bloggers would be to earn some income (eBay style). Maybe some people are occasionally invited to write an op-ed piece for full publication. Maybe some longer pieces are commissioned based on the blog posts. Maybe the super-pros rise to a full-time gig at the Times. The goal for the Times is to get hundreds of people competing for pixels and ink in a national pub. Their quality would go sky-high. The online dynamic would change too – bloggers would write for broad appeal and re-use, not just for venting. The Times would be hungry for their blogger army contributions because they could never pay for such a large and well-distributed research staff.

The details need more thought than the 15 minutes I've put in. But this is what comes off the top of my head, and IMHO it's a hell of a lot more pragmatic and clear-thinking than what Sulzberger and Gates came up with. [How's that for ego inflation?]

To my loyal Times employee reader: I would love to help implement something like this, and guess what? I'm already an experienced consultant working in the field! How convenient is that?

Have your people call my people and we'll do lunch.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Neil Young Gets It

April 28, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Neil Young has a new album, Living With War and he is working the digital network to best effect.

"Living With War will stream on NeilYoung.com beginning Fri, Apr. 28th. The album will be available at digital retailers beginning May 2nd. CDs will be available in stores early May."

Listen to the whole album free.
The Blog.
The MySpace profile.
The YouTube video.

The video interview on MySpace is fantastic. He gets key ideas of liberty and freedom onto national TV. Spread the word.

(Greendale is a masterpiece, by the way. You should really see the movie.)

Permalink | Comments (0)

Secret Doors

April 27, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Tilting stairs, rotating bookcases, disappearing wall stashes. Fully installed starting at $10,000 and DIY kits starting at $1,500.

Creative Home Engineering is a registered contracting company that adds value to homes by integrating silent, automated hidden passageways.

A Hardy Boys fantasy come true.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Fun While Flying

April 26, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Travel

Chris Pirillo mimes the airplane safety instructions. Hilarious. [via Scripting News]

Permalink | Comments (2)

From The Mailbag

April 25, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

The life of a consultant....

Notio: Were you out of town this weekend?

A: Well.... that's a pretty good story, actually. After waiting for a half hour to be picked up at the Asheville, NC airport for a Fri-Sun retreat I started to have anxiety about standing outside the wrong airport. Nope, that wasn't the problem. I was at the right place at the wrong time! Their retreat is NEXT weekend. Yikes. I was able to get home (call it a mutli-hundred, 13 hour, 6 airport lesson in attending to details). The sad part is that I'm booked next weekend and will now be helping [these] folks from a distance rather than in person. So, I was home this weekend, by surprise. Then was hit by allergies and overall exhaustion from a full day of nonstop travel.

Notio: That's highly bloggable.

Name withheld to protect the detail-challenged. Let this be a lesson to us all.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Subtle Changes Over Time

April 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Photohistory of the Netflix mailer, from 1999 to the present.

2000: Customers are asked to peel off a sticker to reveal Netflix's return address. The design is eventually deemed too complex.

A well-captioned tour through iterative product design – what is the most convenient, cost-effective, earth-friendly, practical DVD mailer? (Remember that you want to send 1.4 million DVD's a day.)

Permalink | Comments (0)

April 24 New Yorker

April 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Just a mention that the current issue of the New Yorker has a number of great articles around the theme of "Journeys." Especially fantastic is Anthony Lane's European Journal contribution on low-cost air travel. It's literally littered with witty asides that resonate with anyone who gets on a plane more than once a year. I was laughing out loud the whole time.

The article is not on the web, and the contents page doesn't have a dedicated URL, so no links to all that.

One thing that is online is editor David Remnick's comment on Al Gore, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Stuff You Don't Have Time To Read Either

April 17, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (book, wiki, free pdf).
• Collaborative Thesaurus Tagging the Wikipedia Way (abstract, pdf, author's blog).
• Integral Communication (review, master's thesis pdf).

They all look great. Wish I had time to read them. Maybe next year.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Kunstler Interview

April 15, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Continuing the video theme, The Orion Online posts a five-part video interview with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Each video segment is six or eight minutes long. If you want a summary of the book, Rolling Stone excerpted it just before publication.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Regulating Sliced Bread

April 14, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

I am tired of buying pre-sliced loaves of bread that have an odd number of slices. WTF? What do you do with one slice of bread? Is this some sort of industry handout for the songbirds or something? There oughta be a law.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Quality of Life

April 6, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

I read an alumni profile recently of someone who graduated in 1950, and is quoted as saying,

"I worked there from sophomore year through senior year. The work paid much of my way through college."

He worked as a waiter at the college-owned restaurant. I wonder if you could pay your way through college today, on campus, as a waiter? An Ivy League college?

These are questions that define quality of life for me. It's not about the vastly increased bling, or the so-called time-saving machines and so-called paper-saving computer equipment. It's about affording the basic building blocks of progress. Shelter costs, educations, literacy, numeracy, consciousness. On these measures it's hard to argue we're better off than in 1972, when my Dad bought a nice house near the center of town for the price of a department manger's one year salary. Today that same house is easily double the cost of a similar salary. Maybe close to triple.

Our education system is largely a factory producing people for last century's jobs. 17% of Americans are illiterate. If there were rising numeracy then Bush wouldn't get away with rampant spending amidst top-tier tax cuts. And we know consciousness is not evenly distributed. I guess we live longer, if you can afford health insurance.

And.... and.... what are some other ways we're better off, as a society, since 1972? ("We have blogs" is not a valid answer!)

Permalink | Comments (2)

N-Dimensional Web 2.0

April 5, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Science | Site Maintenance | Software | Technology | Travel

Many people are trying to define "Web 2.0" – what it is, what it means, how to build Web 2.0 apps, what makes a company a Web 2.0 company, etc. All of those efforts fall short, because Web 2.0 is n-dimensional. Web 2.0 is "reflecting more complex multivariable situations.¹"

Today I learned of a new dimension to Web 2.0. Chris² invited me to join a beta of CollectiveX, a new Web 2.0-ish social widget. To invite someone you have to set a temporary password, and when they log in they change it to whatever they want. Chris set my password to "ratdoggy." Ha! Now that's a good one. This made me laugh out loud, and when I told Meg³ she lost it too. What's so funny?

Well, it creates a strong but secret connection between the title of a recent post I wrote – wherein "maybe too much information" was offered⁴ – and an unrelated client task. Chris' password was an acknowledgment that he read the post. Maybe even he liked it. And he certainly knew it would make me think of that post in the middle of the workday. But in any case "ratdoggy" is not in frequent usage (Google: "Did you mean: ratdog?") and his reference expanded its sphere of influence.

Which is like a link, just not a web hyperlink. It was a link from one mind to another, from one blog post to a work moment, from a concert review to a social software login, from my original post written on a couch in the lobby of a cinderblock hotel in Charlestown to my colleague's laughter at the password in an office building in Hanover, from all that to this post which you are reading now. Links, links, links, everywhere you look. Which makes me smile.

And that seems to be the common element of a Web 2.0 app – that it makes you smile, somehow, in some way that maybe you never have before.

---

1) An Introduction to Chemometrics. A report given as Session F of Educational Symposium No. 17, The Use of Statistical Methods in Formulating and Testing of Rubber at the 130th Meeting of the ACS Rubber Division by Brian A. Rock, Ph.D. in October, 1985.

2) Blog updated according to a complex precision timing schedule involving the highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.

3) I did not invoice for this minute of laughter, nor did the client utilize any official company time or resources in reaction to the laughter event.

4) Plausible Story, personal communication.

---

Now, how many new links can you find in the above footnotes?

Permalink | Comments (5)

Slices Through The Banal

March 29, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce

Brilliant culture hacking: The Bureau of Workplace Interruptions.

We harness interruptive technology to expose the secret possibilities of the workday. As a time-stealing agency, the Bureau of Workplace Interruptions works directly with employees to invisibly insert intimate exchange into the flow of the workday. Our promise is to create interruptions that challenge the needs of our users and the social and economic conditions of the modern workplace.

Listen to this "highly scientific survey" with Karen. The funny thing is it could be a real business as well as an art project. People would pay for this!

Permalink | Comments (2)

Ambient Advertising

March 26, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Elegant in-bathroom advertising. What can one say? It's probably just the beginning. via Wealth Bondage.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Photoshop Compiler Conversion

March 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

Being a software engineer working on Photoshop doesn't sound like a lot of fun these days. I'd say they have a good long 9- to 12-month slog in front of them. And at the end of it, who knows what they'll have. It's a complete re-write of a very large desktop app. Good luck y'all.

Update: A Microsoft developer in the Mac business unit posts his experiences. The between-the-lines interpretation of these two posts is that Apple's tool set, Xcode, has been focused on small developers to help them get lots of applications out for OS X. Now, they're scrambling on making Xcode suitable for hundred-person development teams and very large applications. This is the heavy lifting of software engineering and makes most Web 2.0 app development seem like child's play.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Expectation Hacks

March 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software

Classic software development conversation at the 37signals Campfire:

File upload limits were discussed and a simple solution was figured out… Ryan: what are we trying to avoid with a limit? won’t a gigantic file just time out anyway? Jason: thats’ the problem. “Why didn’t my file transfer work?” “What happened to the file I uploaded” “Why didn’t the upload finish?” Ryan: less software idea..we could just say there’s a limit. and then if people try something bigger and it works, then good for them Jason: I like that best. done.

We do stuff like this too. I call them expectation hacks because people don't expect something to work (especially when it's simpler than they expect), but it does, so they feel like they got away with something. That cuts you some slack on real support requests.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Required Competencies

March 24, 2006 | Business & Commerce

I was invited to collaborate on a bid for an organizational learning consulting project, filling in for a staff leave of absence. In reviewing the job description I was interested in the competencies they required:

• External Awareness
• Professional Confidence
• Working Across Boundaries
• Organizational Awareness
• Achievement Orientation
• Focus on c/Customer

It would be easy to make fun of those phrases, but they pretty well summarize the attitude of a modern team-oriented quality-focused collaborator. The company is well-known as an excellent place to work, with good products, consistent growth, regional and national awards, and a generous employee profit-sharing plan.

The JD mentioned Microsoft Office skills, oral and written communication excellence, and a few other specifics, but only in passing. In other words, "we expect you to be smart and use the typical tools of the trade, but what we really want is the right outlook." Kudos to them for recognizing and rewarding orientation as well as knowledge and skills.

Permalink | Comments (2)

In Case You Were Wondering

March 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Technology

Do you happen to know if there's wifi available in the Lebanon Coop?

There is not. I have asked for it a few times over the years. Being board president doesn't pull any weight on this, believe it or not (due to a personality-minimizing governance structure which is long-term good and specific-issue annoying).

Permalink | Comments (2)

Top 'O The Morning

March 21, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

I like the brand-new Google Finance for its page layout and information density. Lots of Ajaxy goodness throughout – check out that slider under the long-term graph!

Billmon exposes the hypocrisy that is John Snow, Bush's Treasury Secretary, standing in for arrogant overpaid CEOs the world over. Not that every CEO is arrogant and overpaid, but certainly some are, don't you agree?

Danah Boyd on the differences between MySpace's success and Friendster's failure. Required reading for online community builders. Also has some notes about the impact high-profile social software failures might generate in the legal or regulatory space.

Michael Crichton on a federal circuit court's decision that thinking can violate a patent. Patently absurd.

A 20-year study determines that whiny, insecure kids usually grow up to be conservatives, while confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. Admit it: You thought to yourself, "No surprise."

Katrina went to a Television Preview Screening. She found it sickening; let this be a lesson to you.

The Economist on open source collaboration. Makes a point I have mentioned in the past: Open source is very good at optimizing existing technology, but not necessarily good at innovation – might require a few more years to play out, but that's the current thinking. Linux is a very good replacement for a plethora of Unix; Wikipedia is optimizes human knowledge editing. Open source is an excellent process innovation but that is not the whole game.

Adaptation offers two excellent articles on the personal economics of a post-hydrocarbon century (1, 2). These are important and valuable contributions to the planning for "powerdown." Summary: You should worry less about losing electricity and growing food than losing your job and home.

Finally, from email: I am blessed with wonderful, generous, and appreciative clients, as well as thoughtful, helpful, and supportive friends. Plus, the sun is shining and I have a clear, open day with no appointments. My time is my own. If I can't have an upbeat productive day today then I don't know what it will take.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Official Phone of 37signals & Ruby On Rails

March 19, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology

The next Internet trend: Ruby and Rails geeks buy the Motorola PEBL phone because David and Jason both raved about it. Less Phone, that sort of thing.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Not So Much To Release The Sorrow As To Embrace It

March 17, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Nature & Environment | People & Society

Dave Pollard posts a letter from organizational development consultant Roger Harrison, "A Time For Letting Go" – parting thoughts on the occasion of his retirement. Via Jon Husband.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Oil Barrels Price Translation

March 16, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Nature & Environment | People & Society

This is freakin' awesome!

A web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. When a user loads a webpage, the script inserts converted prices into the page. as the cost of oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise & fall in real-time. 'OilStandard' illustrates a potential future when oil will replace gold as the standard by which we trade all other goods & currencies.

Via information aesthetics and Meg Maker (email).

Permalink | Comments (0)

Short-Term Economic Future

March 16, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

If you want to know what the big driver in the upcoming recession will be, start here, and then read the follow-up. Summary: During the next 20 months, over $2 trillion of adjustable-rate mortgage debt will be up for interest rate resets. And those rates will go up. Consumer discretionary spending will be cut by about a trillion dollars over two years. That will have a significant impact on our entire economic milieu.

And I bet you thought we were out of the recession, getting ready for a growth spurt! Nope, we've had the growth spurt, and you probably missed it – you had to be a corrupt lobbyist or defense contractor to have made any real dough in the last few years.

The only good thing is the timing. This will have started by the time of the mid-term elections this November, and will have hit big-time by the next presidential cycle. The special sauce is that we spend $10 billion a day on military spending, which is totally unsustainable. So hopefully the fat-cat "tax cuts drive growth we need to protect America" militarist crowd will be thrown out on their bums and we can start to rebuild our democracy.

And I agree with these two guys on the state of play, in that regard.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Me want, not.

March 14, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Baseball’s Best Burger: "A thick and juicy burger topped with sharp cheddar cheese and two slices of bacon. The burger is then placed in between each side of a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut.... 'We are excited to work with the Grizzlies this season on Baseball’s Best Burger,” said Tina Bryan, Vice President of Marketing for Sweet Traditions, the local area developer for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. 'Our doughnuts have been used in such things as wedding cakes, bread pudding, fondue, and now a hamburger bun. What a fun and unique way to offer our signature Original Glazed doughnut to Grizzlies fans.'”

Permalink | Comments (2)

Usefulness and The Banality of Business

March 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Umair hit one out of the park with his post on Usefulness and The Banality of Business.

There's this curious notion in America: everything must be useful. This is why, at heart, there's little, if any room, for thinking; for the long-term; for the creative.

It's the naive culture of the market taken to an absurd extreme: the old economists' notion of utility. By itself, utility is deeply insightful. It lets us understand decision-making and the microstructure of value creation in powerful ways.

But it's no basis for a society, or a culture. The useful, too often, is the banal. Strip-malls, freeways, suburbs, fast food, sitcoms - all these things are useful; but they're also deeply banal.

What's "useful" to the too often myopic and narrow discussions that happen in boardrooms has deep, pervasive hidden costs; in America, these are the death of social and cultural capital. Put another way, usefulness is the enemy of creativity.

And, ultimately, it is creativity that is going to be the single source of tomorrow's strategic advantage. Utility is the enemy of strategy in a world where coordination is cheap; a world where the cost of bringing new products and service to market is melting, where global hypercompetition is accelerating, where global supply chains can be accessed and reconfigured in hours - not years.

The whole piece is good reading.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Hot Tip For Online Electronics Buying

March 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I ordered a new CD/DVD player this weekend. I'll spare you the ridiculously obsessive materialist consumerist research process, even though it might make for a good blog entry. The bottom line was, once I knew what I wanted, and the eBay bidders outbid the value of a used one, and the authorized B-stock eBay sellers ruled themselves out due to their spotty feedback rating, I was left with the authorized e-tailers, who offer real factory warranties, and sell at full price.

But two years ago when I purchased my preamp from OneCall, I used the real-time chat system to ask for a discount. That worked really well - in ten minutes the rep and I had negotiated a price reduction and free shipping, simply because I asked.

So this weekend when I saw the Crutchfield site had this feature, I took another shot. Here's a slightly edited transcript (which they kindly emailed me when we finished) of the entire 3-minute chat:

Agent: "Welcome to the Crutchfield Sales Chat. How may I help you?"
Customer: "Are there any deals right now on the Denon DVD-2910B? Can I get this thing for less than $700?"
Agent: "I'll be glad to help you."
Customer: "Cool"
Agent: "I do have one in outlet stock for $629.99."
Customer: "That sounds good - Is that refurbished or new."
Agent: "The box has been opened since it left the manufacturer. Same warranty, guarantee and 30 day return just like the new one. It has not been refurbished."
Customer: "Okay, I have one in my online cart now. Do I need a code or anything?"
Agent: "Does it show the discounted price?"
Customer: "No, it shows $699.99"
Agent: "Let me send you a link to it."
Agent: "This should show the discounted price." [URL removed]
Customer: "Okay, that seems to work. Thanks!"
Agent: "You're welcome. Have a nice day."

As I recall, that's exactly the situation I had with the preamp. They had "an open box" of a new unit, with full warranty, full return policy, and free shipping. I wonder if "open box" is code for "we're not allowed to discount, except for outlet stock, so we'll happily open the box for you in order to give you a discount." I like these chat systems for expensive online purchases.

And, note, it's worth asking for what you want.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Server Down?

March 13, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Technology

That's the sort of email subject line people like me dislike seeing first thing in the morning. After verifying that, in fact, the servers are unreachable, suddenly you have a fire drill. Whatever morning plans you had are shot. Yoga? I don't think so. Finish that systems diagram from last night? Maybe later today.

Instead, shower, fast breakfast, drive to work behind every slowest car in the region. Have plenty of time to consider that I have been threatening for two years to move these servers out of my office and into a secure managed hosting environment. Decide that this is the year it happens. Traffic slows as I pull into town. I could scream. Navigate the construction scene around my parking lot. Walk down Main Street, turn the corner to my building - still standing, that's good. Walk a little further - neighbors have lights on, so there's electricity, that's good. Approach the outside door, which is locked - good. Get to my interior door, also locked and not broken into, good. Servers on? Yes. Verify server problem - still can't get to them. Okay, reboot router and firewall, wait for reset. Check again. All set. Send out email notices.

Now, on with the day. What was my day plan again? Whatever it was, it's probably a good time to verify the data backups.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Mail Bombed

March 12, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Site Maintenance | Technology

Notio is getting emailed bombed, or something. In the last couple of hours I've received over a thousand emails like this:

From: Philomena Astle
(Every return address is different.)
Subject: Re: POtharamacy news
(Lots of variations on this.)

Hi,

Do you want to j O l V f E d R r P k A c Y for your u M k e j d o i e a r c x t b i b o j n n s?

Nothing like you need it, l S f a r v v e over g 5 d 0 r % with http://wiqo31.selterrote.com

They come in batches of 200 or 300. WTF? They pass through the server spam filter and get pulled down via POP3, where they pass the local spam filters and I have to wade through them trying not to miss a real email.

Thanks guys. And the point is?? Do you think you're going to get rich or something? Sheesh.

Permalink | Comments (1)

ActiveSalesforce

March 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

Wow. Salesforce.com is now offering a connection adapter for Rails.

ActiveSalesforce (ASF) is a Ruby on Rails framework connection adapter that provides direct access to Salesforce.com managed data via AppExchange Web services API and Rail's ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes, simplifying the creation of applications that use data from those entities. ASF also includes a Salesforce.com aware scaffold generator that leverages layout metadata to generate list, show, edit, and new views and a corresponding controller that closely match the look and feel of their native Salesforce.com counterparts.

Salesforce has nearly 400,000 paying customers, and apps developed with their suite of connection adapters (including PHP, Perl, etc as well as the new Rails kit) can be offered to the entire customer base. This is a big validation for Rails, and a huge market opportunity if you're into the business collaboration/workflow space.

Permalink | Comments (0)

A Good Example Of A Dilettante's Progress

March 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life

I Googled "dilettante" to find the correct spelling (used in the phrase above) and in the right column I found a sponsored ad that eBay purchased for that word!! They don't think their customers are dilettantes, do they?

Permalink | Comments (0)

Hotel Marlowe, Cambridge, MA

March 2, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL

While I was in Boston (Cambridge), I stayed at the Hotel Marlowe; first time. The Marlowe is part of the Kimpton Group boutique chain - "Every hotel tells a story" - found in all the upscale cities you'd expect. It is very close to the SoL offices, and attached to the Cambridgeside Galleria mall. I had heard from SoL staff that people either love it or hate it, and I can see why, and I love it. The reason I love it is that they are going after an aesthetic. Success or failure, you judge, but they have attempted Hotel As Art.

Things to like:

Leopard-style carpet. How cool is that? Probably done to cope with their pet-friendly policy, but it's a lively change from boring brown.

Cool Leopard-style robes. Use in the room, and optionally purchase upon departure for $120. Wore mine every night and morning. Warm, weird, different.

Free wi-fi throughout the entire building, plus Ethernet in the rooms. This was great, and easy to set up. My only criticism here is that throughput was a paltry 20-30K/sec. Things were kinda pokey; they need a speed upgrade.

Four sampler CDs on the in-room stereo. The labels said, Please enjoy during your stay and leave in the room for the next guest. Hey, no problem, I got iTunes right here. 20 minutes later I have four promotional samplers of music including "Frequent Flyer: Buenos Aires," (2 discs), "Suite Life volume 1," and "Rosa (zipper)." All have multiple bands, and they were all found at Gracenote, so I know that the songs are!

"Om Away From Home" - an 8-panel 4"x4" full-color guide to hotel yoga, produced with Yoga Journal. There's an in-room tee-vee channel with all-day Yoga instruction. They provide a free Yoga Basket for in-room use that includes a mat, strap, block, and free issue of Yoga Journal. You can buy the basket, or have it shipped to your next destination. The guide shows five simple postures that can be done with typical hotel props like a blanket, a side chair, an empty wall, and a carpeted floor. They encourage you to take this with you, so I dropped it in my suitcase and will find it the next time I'm away. Sometimes all you need to get started is a starting point. I found this and the CDs a brilliant way to provide me some real value and remember this chain in the future.

Free wine bar in the lobby from 5-6 PM every day. A red and a white featured wine. Gathering spot, learning moment, socialization opportunity.

"Wines of the World" - a 16-page 3"x6" guide to wines presented by the Kimpton Wine Club. Wine expert Leslie Sbrocco provides comments on two wines per month, which are featured at the free evening wine bar. So now I have this kicking around on the kitchen table, and if any of them catch my interest I can try to track them down. The guide provides URLs for each vinyard, and Kimpton has their own monthly by-mail wine club with three price levels ($29/month to $125/month for two bottles.)

"Kimpton Style" - a style guide cum catalog, where you can buy accessories that style each of their hotels. The catalog is organized by hotel, showing a room and then keying the products to what's in the room. Candles, robes, linens, lamps, pillows, beds(!), plates, glassware, etc. 24 pages, full color.

So I'm walking out of there with four new mix CDs, a hotel yoga guide, wine notes on 24 interesting wines, and a catalog of stuff to buy to reinforce the lifestyle. That is some modern marketing think applied to business-class hotels. These guys have done their homework, and are thinking about the experience beyond the basics.

Anything I didn't like? Well, paying $22.80 for a bowl of oatmeal, three bacon slices, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of green tea is a bit much, don't you think? The $18 hamburger and coke was a stretch too. Their 'net connection was too slow, as noted above. $20 a day for parking is the going rate, but it's annoying.

I was there three nights. Two of those were paid by my hosts. My one night expense, with incidentals for three nights - parking, two meals, taxes - came to $291.07, which can take your breath away. Maybe I'll feel better about the price if I buy some stuff out of their catalog. I'm certainly digging the new music.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Herman Daly's "Beyond Growth"

February 26, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Interesting post from Catallaxis on the limits to growth, the ecological dimension of economics, and the reconciliation of sustainable and physical growth.

As I see it (Figure 3), the physical dimension of the economy, which can be measured in terms of the scale of material, energy, chemical, and biological throughput, does indeed comprise an economic sub-system of the world's physical biosphere, which includes the sources and sinks for the economic throughput. This is the partial truth in the ecological vision of the economy and it affirms the existence of certain physical limits to the scale of economic growth--but, strictly speaking, these limits only apply to physical economic growth.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Three Things About Pivot

February 21, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software | Technology

Very exciting. Chris Boone wrote a brief review of my website management system, PivotCMS. [Man, do I need to do some marketing work – the product far outshines the marketing, especially the currently-lame website.] He calls out three important design decisions we made early on, and learns how they impact his day-to-day work with clients. Thanks Chris!

Permalink | Comments (1)

Monday Biz Links

February 20, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

A couple of interesting items from lunchtime browsing:

Stowe Boyd: Advisory Capital: A New Basis For Strategic Involvement. Argues for a new model of funding startups. Makes sense to me – the VC route is filled with potholes and speedbumps.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the tech community about the changing needs of Web 2.0 tech startups. When the underyling economics of innovation have shifted so drastically -- cheaper high-powered servers, open source LAMP stack, accelerated development tools and techniques (AJAX, Ruby, Php, etc.) -- more and more companies can bootstrap from pocket change, and be up and running in less time than it takes to secure capital. As a result, going the VC route is increasingly seen as a brake on this class of tech innovation, not an accelerator, at least in the very earliest stages.

I still think Co-ops are a fantastic way to bet on the upside for software startups, but until I put my lawyer dollars where my blog bits are, it's all just recreational typing.

Jeff Jarvis: Edgeio and the Distributed World. Good preview of Mike Arrington's upcoming Edgeio. Useful riffs on classified ads, owning your own listing information, and unemployed middlemen.

Edgeio as it stands is pretty simple: You tag a post on your blog “listing” and Edgeio will spot it and add it to its data base. You add more tags (e.g., “for rent” and “vacation”) and your post/ad will appear in the appropriate categories. Edgeio will allow you to come in and claim your blog to be able to get direct communication from respondents and, eventually, to upgrade your ad via typography and graphics and preference (I hope I got that right). This is just a start but it is a proof of concept of a new world. I’ve been waiting for someone to do this. Arrington has.

Anyone who has thought about online yellow pages or local search will understand that services like this are going to be the future.

Also note Arrington the Brand: He came out of nowhere last year with TechCrunch, reviewing web 2.0 startup companies. Now, with solid street cred he introduces his product and gets immediate coverage from A-list (and C-list!) bloggers. Good moves.

Permalink | Comments (2)

37signals Launches Campfire

February 16, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

It took me a while to realize it, but the essential business plan of 37signals is taking modern technology tools and specializing them for business. They do this by 1) stripping generalized options and leaving only the core functionality; 2) creating a good UI that's obvious (low training and support) and fun to use (easy flow-state); 3) pitching the user benefits instead of the features; 4) having a free trial for every product so you can see how it works directly; 5) having reasonable pricing plans that provide clear value and are dirt cheap for most businesses; 6) improving on the basic tech idea with business people in mind. So, you get:

• Basecamp: Blogs for project management.
• Backpack: Personal or small group wiki.
• Campfire: Secure and archived instant messaging.

Along the way, they also created two completely free products, Writeboard (shared document editing) and Ta-da List (shareable to-do lists). And coming up soon is Sunrise, a CRM for small business, which I expect to be a mini-Salesforce.com.

They have a blog, full of attitude; they publish their ideas; and they release open-source software at the core of their apps. No VC money - all funded through cash-flow. It's a good model, and they're firing on all cylinders.

Permalink | Comments (1)

GTI Project Fast Phase 3

February 15, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

The final installment of the VW Project Fast marketing campaign has landed:

To those who participated in GTI Project Fast, we thank you for your input. Through our research, we learned a great deal about your fast, including what it looks like. If you haven't already seen it, be sure to visit projectfast.com:

http://e.vw.com/a/tBD8lCNAQU8iiActCSXAHVDnp7H/fasturl

And while you're there, be among the first to configure your own GTI Mk V and take it for a joyride.

It was just an engagement opportunity; no personalization. Cool final presentation though. They've got a mascot for "fast" and everything. If you're into a high-performance small car that guzzles gas for fun times, this is probably your best bet.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Corporate Spin, I Mean, PR, Defined

February 14, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Software

Here are some excerpts from an email Sleepycat Software sent to me this evening.

I'm pleased to announce today that Sleepycat Software has been acquired by Oracle. [They showed me the money!]

By joining the leading database company in the world, I expect that we will be able to serve our customers and the open source community better. [Oracle is well-known for their killer support - NOT!] With the additional expertise, resources and reach of Oracle, we'll be able to accelerate innovation, offer you greater choice, and provide more complete solutions. [Huge autocratic companies are excellent for innovation - that's why they buy companies like mine!]

I assure you that we will continue to deliver the products and services that you are used to receiving from Sleepycat Software. [As long as I'm here - when I get frustrated with the big company hassles I'll buy a nice boat and you can sort it out with your new account executive.] There are no plans to change our dual license model, and we will continue to serve both open source and commercial users. [We can worry about plans later, if need be. For now, all systems go!] Oracle will honor the terms and conditions of existing Sleepycat agreements. [But please see below for important information.]

100% of Sleepycat's employees are expected to transition to Oracle, so we retain all our deep technical expertise and community relationships. [They didn't show the employees any money, so they have to stay.]

Regards,
Mike Olson
Vice President, Oracle
Former President and CEO
Sleepycat Software

The above is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into a contract.

Emphasis added. Now, you tell me, do they really believe I will trust all that hyperbolic PR crap in the letter, when it concludes by saying they won't commit to any of it? Gimme a break.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Advertising on Notio

February 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Site Maintenance

Well, I have to make a decision:

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I represent the CPays.com affiliate program. We promote 16 online gambling brands.

I would like to advertise at least one of our gambling brands on your website - either with a text link or banner.

We can sort out a CPA commission plan (one time payment for player) or we can work on a revenue share basis (commission from the players' net loss)

What do you say?

James

I have investigated putting AdSense ads on Notio, but I haven't gotten around to it. Focused blogs can pay the bills this way - I know someone who has a blog focused on TiVo and the like, and he makes about $1,000 a month from Google AdSense. But Notio is hardly focused, in case you haven't noticed. I could probably make a dollar a month or something. Maybe ten. Gambling ads have got to be more lucrative than that.

Let's see, do I care about gambling morally? I have no idea; I've never thought about it. The one time I was in Las Vegas it was weird and disorienting. We didn't play anything the whole four days. Certainly the worst of the gambling downsides are bad - and seeing a thin, pastey, leathery-skinned grandmotherly woman with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, one hand holding a beach bucket full of quarters and the other a Bud Light, playing slots at 5:30 AM first thing off the elevators is pretty gnarly - but is it bad in the main? Probably not, but maybe, though it's not my cup of loose-leaf green tea. Who was that guy a couple of years ago railing against gambling until he got caught bankrupt from it? Some extreme right-wing hypocrite intellectual (I know that doesn't narrow it down much). He thought it was bad, except he lost his shirt doing it. I'm not nearly that conflicted. I hardly have a horse in this race, yet.

If I say 'sure,' then do I want a one-time payment, or a cut of the player's loss? In gambling the house always wins, so there will certainly be a net loss most of the time. In both cases, you have to trust them to keep good records and pay you honestly. Hehehehehehehehehehehe.

Aesthetically, no, I don't want a banner ad above my beautiful photos. But it probably pays better than the text link, and it might have some irony value.

If I'm operating from my heart, then I'd have to say No. But what if the money is good? What does the heart say to that?

So let's think like a mercenary: How much per month would I have to earn to ignore any personal issues? What's my price? (I should run a survey, to see what y'all think my price is, that would be interesting!)

One incentive would be if they can get the spambots to stop filling my comments with online poker spam - then it would certainly be worth having an ad instead. Good business model for them - flood bloggers like me with comment spam, then offer to turn it off and get a cut of the proceeds. They'd call it a win-win.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Recent Email

February 9, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Site Maintenance

We get letters:

Subject: Regarding your website (www.notio.com)

I would like to advertise at your website.
Please get back to me ASAP, I really want to close a deal today.

(Name, company, and email withheld, though it does appear to be from an advertising firm.)

My response:

Sure, anything's possible. What did you have in mind?

It will be interesting to see where this goes.... FWIW, Alexa ranks Notio as the 5,611,319th most popular site on the Internet. That's gotta count for somethin'.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Fear Is Everywhere

February 8, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

On the lowercase cover of mtj: massage therapy journal ("keeping you in touch"):

4 tips for a safer practice, p88

how to protect your business, p64

You don't have to look too far for fear.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

February 8, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL

A business colleague whom I met at a SoL gathering emailed asking if I or anyone I knew would be qualified and interested in presenting his seminar for 5-7 days in May and June. I sent a bio, CV, and selected projects list. The response (in part):

Wow! Talk about diversity! Clearly you are virtually undefinable.

Taking it as a compliment, I asked if I could use his quote in my media kit. What the heck - if people can't figure out what you do, you can at least have good marketing.

Question: Correct use of 'whom' in the first sentence? Answer: Yes. Details in the comments.

Permalink | Comments (4)

Making Oil Consumption Tangible

February 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Nature & Environment | People & Society

I heard a story the other night - unconfirmed, so this is just hearsay really - that during the winter months, each morning at 6 AM three oil tanker trucks pull into our local institution of higher learning and unload their contents into the the steam heating plant holding tanks. Every day! Three of those big oil rigs you see on the highway! That is some oil consumption bubba.

Permalink | Comments (2)

What Google Knows

January 31, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society | Technology

John Battelle, author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, asked Google:

1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?"

2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?"

To its credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is "yes." Just FYI.

Good to know. The answer is likely the same for Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Of course, if you are innocent in the eyes of the Administration, you have nothing to hide. If, like Martin Luther King, you have any issues with the strategy or tactics of the Administration, then you might want to turn off browser cookies, as a minimum measure.

Permalink | Comments (0)

GTI Project Fast

January 26, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Volkswagen has launched what must be an online viral marketing campaign for the new GTI.

Dear Michael J.,

You have been chosen by the Volkswagen GTI Mk V research and development team to take part in a nationwide research experiment exploring the psychological and social concept of "fast."

To take part, please visit:
http://e.vw.com/a/tBD2TOmAQU8iiAcPMnoAHVDnpah/fasturl

NOTE: We ask that you please DO NOT share this link as it may skew the results of this experiment.

I can't believe they want to keep this secret! That is a guaranteed method to get the link passed around. Go check it out.

My brother is a Volkswagen GTI owner - the perfect car for commuting into Manhattan every day, apparently - and last year he got a call from a market research firm to participate in a study for the next-generation GTI. A couple of people showed up at his house one evening, and spent a couple of hours asking questions and showing various design studies for car shape, front grills, taillight designs, interior options, color selections, etc. I'd be interested to know how many of those study participants buy the new car because they feel they had a say in the design decisions. That's an expensive way to "buy customers," but television ads are very expensive, and if you took the total television budget and instead spent it on personal qualitative research, it just might be far more effective.

Permalink | Comments (5)

Transparency and Decision-Making

January 23, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society | SoL

On a long conference call today 19 of us were discussing group process in decision-making. Specifically, how to assign consultants to incoming work requests. The issue is fraught with flaws that undermine community. For instance, central decisions might be made too quickly, based on who knows whom, using old bios, overlooking a more qualified newcomer to the group. If you want to build a community of practice, a closed process will result in a metaphorical blue screen of death.

My contribution, which seemed to generate murmurs of agreement - hard to tell on a large multi-contient teleconference, with lots of people muted - was that if the process were transparent, then decision-making could be self-correcting. That is, focus on the transparency aspects, then when a decision has to be made quickly, or by a small team instead of the whole group, there is trust and openness and the occasional error can be addressed and used as a learning opportunity to tweak the process.

So, focus your initial effort on transparency, and implement the simplest decision-making process possible. It's easy to evolve an open decision process, but hard to make a closed process open.

Compare to the US President when he says, "I'm making good decisions!" but they are made in secrecy, and no records are released. Trust, but verify. That's what a transparent process provides.

Permalink | Comments (0)

70 Years Ago Today

January 6, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | People & Society

Terry Appleby, General Manager of the Hanover Co-op, of which I am proud to be the current board president, wrote:

On January 6th, 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, 17 families from Hanover, New Hampshire and Norwich, Vermont gathered to discuss the creation of a society of cooperation to meet their common needs. According to founding member Charles Bagley, "at the close of the meeting they signed the register, paid the initial fee of one dollar and became charter members." They thus formed the buying club that later in the year would be incorporated into the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, and joined with consumers in Berkeley, and Hyde Park in Chicago and many other places who were also inspired by the idea of the transforming power of cooperation.

One of the first purchases by the club was for fresh citrus fruit from Florida, scarce in Northern New England at the time. Hanover Co-op still celebrates that purchase with an annual citrus sale in January. Here's hoping you'll join in a symbolic toast (of orange juice!) to the visionaries at each of our co-ops who have kept alive this dream.

Cooperatives present an alternative model of providing goods and services. They are member-owned, and organize around serving member needs. Sometimes members are workers, sometimes the members are customers – sometimes they are both, thereby tying together the combined self-interests of producers and consumers. In an era of so-called "customer-focused organizations" with un-navigable voicemail menu systems, cooperatives provide an honest alternative to greed.

If you're interested in learning more, or even starting a new Co-op, there are some good resources listed in the "Cooperatives" topic on this weblog, particularly around July 2003.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Crossing a Car with a Motorcycle

January 4, 2006 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Volkswagen introduces the GX3 – the first new idea in cars or motorcycles in years, if not decades. A two-seater, three-wheeled "motorcycle" that drives like a high-performance car, and gets 46 mpg in the city. The photos are amazing. Seems to be designed for commuters. Not sure if you can get winter wheels for the thing, but it sure looks like fun!

Permalink | Comments (0)

Chaotic Growth

December 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Michael Arrington tackles the Web 2.0 definition:

Web 2.0 is not a marketing slogan. It is the slogan of a people’s army. Our army. They are words that help us explain the explosion of conversations on the web, and justify our enthusiasm for innovation. Web 2.0 is why I came back from my exodus at the fringes of technology, to explore the frontier of the new consumer web.

Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that something amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.

Dave Winer contrasts this with The Tim O'Reilly and John Batalle school of Web 2.0.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Competitive Pre-Pay

November 22, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Interesting news: "CUPERTINO, California—November 21, 2005—Apple® today announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of NAND flash memory through 2010. As part of these agreements, Apple intends to prepay a total of $1.25 billion for flash memory components during the next three months."

Flash memory is used in the (wildly successful) iPod nano and Shuffle products. So Apple is going to spend, in three months, $1.25 billion - for memory deliveries over the next five years. I wonder if they're buying most of the available production as a way to limit competition, as did the inventors of liquid soap:

The original liquid soap was introduced in 1980 by Minnetonka Corporation. Minnetonka cornered the liquid soap market by buying up the entire supply of the plastic pumps needed for the liquid soap dispensers. The Colgate Company acquired the liquid soap business from Minnetonka and renamed the product Softsoap in 1987.

Eventually Minnetonka had competition, but they were prepared for it, on their own timeframe, after they had cashed out to the conglomerate. Textbook study of business strategy (it was a bet-the-company move, since they could only pay for their supply agreements out of projected future sales), and for Apple it's a worthwhile use of the $3 billion cash horde they keep on hand.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Jetta GLI Winter Wheels Redux

October 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

As I've said before, the winter steel wheel you want for your 2004 1/2+ Jetta GLI 1.8T is a Macpek X41657. Not mentioned previously is that the tire size is 205/55 R16.

The post generated a lot of comments at the time, and now that winter is coming I'm getting another round of email on it. Amazing really – I was just venting about how hard it was to find the right wheel, but then I found one, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and it seems like every other person with the same car and the ability to use Google wants to talk about it. Which I can understand – the VW dealer network isn't known for their attitude or service. Here's a quote from one correspondent:

My dealer experience is on a par with yours. Basically no help.

Confidential to VW: I offer high-resolution qualitative market research and product strategy consulting services that would be a good fit here. Happy to help if you'd like; just give me a call.

The question is: Where do you get this fabled Macpek X41657? You can take a look at the Macpek website, but it won't help much. There's no part listing, and the inventory tab is behind a password. One strategy would be to call them and find a distributor in your region, then call the distributor to find a dealer. Welcome to supply chain management, where a rewarding career awaits you.

I happened to find my wheels at RH Scales in White River Junction VT. You can call them at 802-296-7203, but I have no idea if they ship of if it's local pickup only. This is a real honest-to-goodness industrial parts jobber with one employee, so don't expect the same level of service you get from LL Bean. RH Scales has offices all over the east coast, so there might be one closer to you. This page from an unrelated search has a lot of the RH Scales offices listed. If you drive up here to by a set and you're coming from more than two hours away, send me an email and I'll buy you lunch before you drive home.

Tire Rack has gotten better this year. Here's a search page for winter tire and wheel packages for the 2005 Jetta GLI 1.8T. The 16" package starts at $125 per wheel. That's probably the easiest choice – Tire Rack is well-known, they seem to have the winter wheel package ready this year, they ship all over the country, and their prices are good. OTOH, they don't list any steel wheels available, only alloy ones, so then you're back to finding a Macpek if you want the cheaper steel wheel option, or if you're a Rolling Stones fan.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Milton Glaser

October 12, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Chip Kidd interviews the designer Milton Glaser. Highly recommend.

On parental influence:

CK: How did your parents feel about your wanting to become an artist? I assume that’s what you always wanted.

MG: Yes. I tell the story: At the age of five I made that decision. In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

On retirement:

CK: Any plans to retire?

MG: Oh god, no. There is nothing I fear more than the idea of having to retire. I fear retirement more than death.

CK: [Laughs]

MG: I think the worst scam that was ever performed on the innocent American people is this idea that retirement is desirable. It’s only desirable for people who really hate what they do.

CK: Yes.

MG: But for us, who basically are in the activity that is so interesting and compelling and has the ability to sort of enter into the world, by God retirement is the absolute last thing I would dream of.

On designing the I Heart NY logo, and social change:

MG: Well, it was the mid-seventies, a terrible moment in the city. Morale was at the bottom of the pit. I always say you can tell by the amount of dog shit in the street.

CK: Dog shit.

MG: Yes. There was so much dog shit because people didn’t feel that they deserved anything else, right? I mean you were just walking through all this dog shit day after day, in this filthy city, garbage, and so on. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: There was a shift in sensibility. One day people said, “I’m tired of stepping in dog shit. Get this fucking stuff out of my way.” And the city began to react. They said, “If you allow your dog to crap on the street, you have to pay a fine of $100,” and within a very short time it became socially untenable to allow your dog to shit on the street. Now, I don’t know what produces those behavioral shifts, right? From one day where it’s OK, and then suddenly the city simultaneously got fed up and said, “It’s our city, we’re going to take it back, we’re not going to allow this stuff to happen.” And part of that moment was this campaign. More than anything else it was a device to encourage tourism.

Permalink | Comments (138)

[SoL] Cynefin Case Study: Managing Complexity

September 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | SoL

Dave Snowden was present, but only addressed specific detailed questions. The presentation was done by the lead researcher/practicioner, Bruce McKenzie, and the client's liaison, Dr. Robert Kay, who is the Head of Strategic Thinking, and has published widely in the areas of autopoietic and social theory.

The client: Westpac Banking Corp. 8.2 million customers in Australia and New Zealand, 27,000 employees.

Project revolved around strategic risk management:

• Dealing with uncertainty
• Surfacing assumptions
• Mapping knowledge flows
• Strengthening the resilience of the organization (in the face of uncertainties)
• Strategic insurance for plausible events

Organizing companies/teams is in essence about establishing a network of knowledge flows. Corporate restructuring destroys existing flows and lowers the resilience of the company.

Can be very subtle. Gave an example about a large company where people with newish cars were concerned that people with oldish cars were not respecting the new cars (opening doors fast creating minor dents, etc). They put a policy in pace where parking was now assigned based on car age, with three categories (new, middle, old). Well, it turns out that the three top dogs at this company had been arriving at work more or less the same time every day for years, and had walked into the building together, riding the elevator, and catching up on the business they didn't have time to discuss during the day. The informal knowledge that lubricates organizations and keeps people in tune with the various distributed aspects. It also turned out that the three of them each now had to park in a different place: One had a new sedan, one had a family van, and one had a clunker. When the parking was reorganized they lost their "glue" time each day, and all three noticed that they felt disconnected from what was happening at the company. It's very hard to consider all of the side effects, and so reorganizing any aspect of an existing structure should be undertaken with great care.

The challenge and responsibility in managing complexity is moving from analyzing the past to imaging the future. The key is: Don't try to be right, try to not be wrong.

Companies have to change their cultures to move from "knowledge is power" to "sharing is power." One advantage of the acceleration of culture and technology is that knowledge becomes outdated sooner, reducing the "holding power" of individuals.

At this point there was a series of amazing charts, graphs, software screens, and analysis methods from the project that would be impossible to capture in ASCII diagrams. I believe they are going to post session materials, and if so I'll update this post with a pointer.

• Conversation maps.
• Narrative collation.
• Soft systems.
• Uncertainty/Impact matrix.
• Wind tunnel matrix.
• Knowledge interdependency map.

I think this was the most amazing aspect of the work: They have a series of processes, and custom software to support the capture and analysis of qualitative data, that generate complex yet comprehendible information. It's clear to me that if most executives were faced with the information Westpac Bank had, they would change their decision-making process to support these plausible future scenarios.

That's another thread of the work. Previous work with scenarios tended to end at the scenario generation, with the hope that line managers would Do The Right Thing. Here, tied into the management of strategic risk, the leadership team could together figure out The Plan, and use it as a focal point for implementation, modifying as they went based on changing conditions and employee feedback.

Much of the data was gathered not from sitting in the corporate boardroom brainstorming, but through interviews with front-line staff (like tellers and loan officers) and customers (who had both good and bad experiences). Hence, the scenarios and plans have a tangible, practical, "rings true" quality that you don't see from most top-down initiatives.

This work feels far from incremental, but rather a quantum lead from any type of consulting process or software support system I've ever seen. The Cynefin website doesn't do it justice, but we're told to visit again in a few months as things start to roll out. Many kudos to making such visionary work practical and tied to real-world problems, generating tangible results.

Note: Snowden is spending much of his time working with governments on the public policy aspects of this work, such as "weak signal analysis" of existing information flows looking for terrorist signals. Intelligence agencies in both the US and Singapore are engaged in this work.

Permalink | Comments (0)

[SoL] Dave Snowden and Cynifen Centre

September 23, 2005 | Business & Commerce | SoL

This was the most interesting plenary session for me, and also my most interesting parallel session (see next post). I am planning to attend a training course on this material later this year or early next. I found it a very exciting blend of quantitative analysis and phenominological source material.

www.cynefin.net

"Open source Consulting" and "Noble Networks" When you join the network (by attending training and then entering a mentor program) you have Creative Commons license to the software and process models the group is developing. It's more complicated than this, but that's the gist of it.

He drew a distinction between discovering new knowledge vs. discovering existing knowledge. Academic research vs. understanding and acting on what's present.

Magic quadrant of where they're working:

                   Computational    |     Cynefin
Complex            Complexity       |     Sense-making
Output             "simulation"     |     "ecology"
                                    |
                --------------------|-------------------
                                    | 
Simple             Process          |     Systems
Output             Engineering      |     Dynamics
                   "machine"        |     "organism"
                                    |

                     Simple                Complex
                     Input                 Output

Similar to how many people confuse correlation with causation ("which is rampant in management consulting") many people also confuse simulation with prediction.

Three ways of sense-making:

1. The way things are (ontology).

   • Ordered: Predictable cause and effect
   • Complex: Cause and effect retroactively coherent
   • Chaotic: No cause and effect at unit level

2. The way we know things (epistemology)

   • Explicit: Documentation, databases
   • Narrative: necessary ambiguity
   • Experimental: How do you ride a bike?

3. The way we perceive the world (phenomenology)

   • Information processing
   • pattern processing
   • Ideological patterning

Gave an example of a radiologist, who has learned ~40,000 typical possible patterns of bone breaks. They scan the x-ray, and use a "first fit" data match. They are "satisfying," not "optimizing."

Hard to label the next two quadrants, but basically I think he's showing the move from the "input" of sense-making, to the categories of sense-making.

                   COMPLEX          |     HIDDEN
                   UN-ORDER         |     ORDER
                    C & E coherent  |      C & E are 
                    in retrospect   |      discernible
                                    |
              ----------------------|-------------------
                                    | 
                   CHAOTIC          |     VISIBLE
                   UN-ORDER         |     ORDER
                    No perceivable  |      C & E are 
                    C & E           |      ordered

---

                   COMPLEX          |     COMPLICATED
                    probe           |      sense
                    sense           |      analyze 
                    respond         |      respond
                                    |
              ----------------------|-------------------
                                    | 
                   CHAOTIC          |     SIMPLE
                    act             |      sense
                    sense           |      categorize 
                    respond         |      respond

An example from the book, "The Geography of Thought:" Here are three words. Which one in unrelated?

• Cow
• Chicken
• Grass

If your ancestral roots are from one region (I forget / didn't write down the regions) you will answer "grass" because it is not an animal. But if your roots are from another region, you will answer "chicken" because the cow and the grass have a relationship. FWIW, I choose chicken.

Four aspects of narrative work:

1. Storytelling: Communication with structure and form
2. Resonance: Does it fit my existing patterns
3. Displacement: A mechanism for sharing failure without blame. Story forms evolved to tell of our failures so others wouldn't follow.
4. Ambiguity: precise vs. partial

Oral history and ethnographic research. Fascinating, not least because a recent client project of mine used virtually the same process he described, which he called "pre-hypothesis" research. The role and position of the "expert" influence the study. "Knowledge portals" fail, but storytelling works. Emergent meaning and serendipitous search. Problems to avoid: more than two interviews per interviewer (to me this seems really hard or expensive to avoid) and auto-suggestion (which is solved through training and in-the-moment discipline.

Snowden and Cynifen are trying to bring understanding to complex systems, going beyond simple or complicated systems, and avoiding trying to understand chaotic systems (which generate red herrings). In the parallel session the next day they did a case study of a significant project at a bank in Australia and New Zealand applying these techniques. All in all, a thrilling integration of quantitative and qualitative work. Cutting edge thinking on managing complexity in the real world.

Permalink | Comments (0)

[SoL] Comments on the de Vulpian Presentation

September 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Cooperatives | SoL

Following de Vulpian's talk at the SoL conference, we heard remarks from Anne Murray Allen, the director for Knowledge and Intranet Management at Hewlett-Packard, and Arie de Geus, a former Royal Dutch Shell strategist and SoL co-founder.

HP is an interesting case study for what I call The Web as Organizational Mirror™. In the 1990's HP shifted from a decentralized website to a centralized website, to present a unifed face to the world. This, just as the world was discovering the joys of decentralization. They once had a decentralized team culture too, now they are trying to get it back. The web changes foreshadowed the organization changes. I salute HP for being a corporate member of SoL, and I wish them all the best – at one time HP was one of the most important scientific organizations in the world, like Bell Labs – but, like Bell Labs, I fear the financial engineers have taken over, and the best may now be historical.

HP does appear to be doing some interesting things with regard to internal social networks. In particular, two things stood out from Anne's talk. First is that they are trying hard to measure ROI on social connection systems. This is valuable work for those of us who work in the field, who have to make decisions or recommendations for clients. But, as mentioned above, the fact that you have to justify ROI on the value of sharing information with colleagues indicates that the finance types have run amok.

She also mentioned the idea of "finability" as an important aspect of the ROI work that they are doing. I perhaps misjudged the tone, but I got the sense that this was presented as a new idea, perhaps even one that HP invented. I am going to assume I misinterpreted this, because "findability" has been in regular use within my online circles for years. It might have even been mentioned in the O'Reilly information architecture book from 1996.

de Geus pointed out that people change and they change society which changes people..... This sounds obvious, but taken to the end it says that you cannot directly control the direction of societal evolution. Societies change very slowly, and the rules are set by legislation, which is sometimes referred to as today's writeup of yesterday's solution to the day before's problems. This slow wavelength change also has important impacts for corporations (some of which de Vulpian mentions in his article).

Also of note: Only people in a society can change a society. You cannot change a system from outside it. Outsiders have no possibility, and perhaps no right, to make changes to the systems of others. Another way of stating this is, Learning has to be done by the learner.

de Geus then went on to talk, of all things, about cooperatives as a mechanism of distributing power to the "ordinary people." He talked about Mondragon (wikipedia entry) the largest worker-owned cooperative, and about how the most successful management consulting firms (Booz Allen, McKinsey, St. Lukes) all created new mechanisms of power and profit sharing different from the traditional partner hierarchy. Visa International is the ultimate example of this, fully documented in Dee Hock's book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age." (Dee Hock and Arie were both instrumental in the foundation of SoL.)

There was a short table discussion that followed, around: What one question do we want to ask the presenters? Our list was:

• What are the failure modes or danger signs for societies?
• How do we change corporate governance? The vested interests have no incentive, and the "common good" has no truck today.
• How do we represent who holds power?
• Is there a limit to personal satisfaction? Or, perhaps, should there be limits? Or is society simply the sum total of all individual personal desires?

Permalink | Comments (0)

Politics vs. Goverance

September 18, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

Let me suffer the inadequate Internet connection just once more to comment on how surprising (yet welcome) it is to see opinions such as this from Newsweek.

...Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.

People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years...

Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest...

Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call. It is time to get serious. We need to secure the homeland, fight terrorism and have an effective foreign policy to advance our interests and our ideals. We also need a world-class education system, a great infrastructure and advancement in science and technology.

For all its virtues, the private sector cannot accomplish all this. Wal-Mart and Federal Express cannot devise a national energy policy for the United States. For that and for much else, we need government. We already pay for it. Can somebody help us get our money's worth?

Thanks to Laura Rozen for the pointer.

Permalink

Transformative Questions

September 14, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | SoL

This morning I and three colleagues (from Singapore, Denver, and Boston) presented at the SoL Global Forum. The topic was "Extraordinary Leadership; Shape-Shifting and Transformative Questions as a Genesis for Change." The session was held inside the Leopold Museum, and it went well. Just over 70 people attended, out of 400 conference participants, and with ten other parallel sessions held at the same time!

Here is a panorama of the group reflecting on the characteristics of transformative questions (full-size):

Here is another panorama of the group in world cafe discussing their reflections (full-size):

When I get the session notes written up I'll post them here.

Permalink | Comments (4)

Over 13% in Three Weeks

September 1, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

About three weeks ago I filled up my car at the gas station and hit $30 for the first time. This is a 2004 VW Jetta, not an SUV-sized gas tank. I almost blogged it, but never got around to it, and it borders on the trivial anyway.

Today, with a tank fuller than that day, and with gas at $3.03 a gallon, the fill-up was $34.10. That's over 13% more than three weeks ago! I'm sure that's not the end of it either.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Evolution of an idea

August 22, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software | Technology

Back in the day, memepool was one of my very favorite websites. It was more or less anonymous, had a biting wit, posted very unusual links, and updated frequently so it made for a good daily browse. It was just a guy or two, sharing their cool links with whoever found them. The design remains unchanged to this day.

In 2001 I clicked the "comments" link at the bottom of the page and emailed:

I'm wondering what you use to maintain the site. It has a very nice combination of chronological order on the home page and subject categorization. When I look at 'weblog' tools they seem very overblown if all one wants to do is keep track of 'net flotsam and jetsam.

The entirety of the response was:

I wrote it myself. Memepool predates all those tools and even the notion of "blogs"

I remembered memepool today, for the first time in years, and took a visit. At the bottom of the page now there are two names listed. One of them, Joshua Schachter, has a home page here. As it turns out, Joshua wrote del.icio.us, the social bookmark manager, otherwise known as a way to keep track of your 'net flotsam and jetsam, and share it with the world.

Now does that complete the circle or what?

Here's what Paul Graham had to say about Delicious recently:

The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.

If you follow the timeline, Joshua graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1996. Memepool has been running since 1998. It's likely that Joshua started memepool around the time he started high-school. Then at college he studied electrical and computer engineering. Then, either over time or in a fit of creative output, Delicious was born. Perhaps it wasn't "based on" memepool, or perhaps it was designed to address a different set of goals, but it's interesting that at its core there is still a good idea: That people find and collect interesting things (in this case, links) and want to share them with others.

What's most personal is most general. That's the collective unconscious in a nutshell. Observing that Memepool morphed into Delicious is a great example of how an idea evolves.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Any Questions?

August 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Software

jumping_in = {
  'bandwagon'            =>  'true'
  'initial_impression'   =>  'good'
  'brain_candy'          =>  'yum'
  'project_ideas'        =>  'too_many'
  'time_for_this'        =>  'false'
}

Permalink | Comments (1)

Entertainment ruminations

June 15, 2005 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Software

World of Warcraft, the "subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game," by Blizzard Entertainment, now has 2 million subscribers. Each player has purchased the CD-ROM for $49.99. In addition, there are three monthly payment plans: The month-to-month subscription plan costs $14.99 per month, the three-month plan costs $13.99 per month, and the six-month plan costs $12.99 per month.

Conservatively, there was a one-time revenue stream of just under $100 million dollars, and an on-going monthly revenue of just under $26 million (just under $312 million annually). They are opening the game up in China soon, where there are 500,000 players in the open beta period. It's not hard to imagine cumulative revenues of over a billion dollars, or perhaps two.

Blizzard has 250 game designers and developers, so figure maybe another 100 in marketing and administration. Annual revenue per employee is therefore around $1.1 million. A standard rule of thumb for a normal business is that you need $100,000 per employee to break even. $200,000 is excellent. At one point Microsoft was doing around $500,000 (I don't know what they do today). By this measure, in 2003, the top 10 software companies ranged between $340,000 and $788,000. Point being, online gaming is profitable.

Compare to movies: The top-grossing film of all time was Titanic in 1997. They took in a little over $600 million dollars in eight years. The #100 top-grossing movie was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (who knew?). Since 1991 (14 years) The Prince has taken in $165 million - just about the annual revenue of World of Warcraft.

Of course, it's nice to be able to spend (or squander) that level of resources on entertainment. In a few years, as the price of oil goes from $50 a barrel to $60, then $75, then $100, and suburban salarymen are living in their SUVs at the office four nights a week to save gas money on commuting, we'll all fondly remember these glory days of "robust economic activity." I wonder where our food will come from?

Permalink | Comments (2)

Couldn't ask for more

June 9, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life

The Big Presentation for an Important Client went Very Well today.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Small is the new big

June 5, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Seth Godin: Small is the new big:

"Today, Craigslist (18 employees) is the fourth most visited site according to some measures. They are partly owned by eBay (more than 4,000 employees) which hopes to stay in the same league, traffic-wise. They’re certainly not growing nearly as fast.

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.

Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big.

Don’t wait. Get small. Think big."

Permalink | Comments (0)

All revved up with no place (worthwhile) to go

June 5, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Imagine the difference it would make if these people put their energy into the long-term problems of the world (energy, food security, poverty, human rights, corporate malfeasance, and political corruption) instead of the rather simple game of business.

Excerpt: "Apparently none of these friends got the word that Silicon Valley's best days are behind it. So fervently do they believe in their collective imagination and potential that they routinely invest in one another's endeavors -- $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 a pop, creating an informal high-tech investors' club that serves as a kind of market index of Internet startups. None have to work another day in their lives, yet they still routinely work 60 to 70 hours a week -- except those who sheepishly confess to working 80. [....] 'We are not ready to stop changing the world.'"

Oh, the sadness of human insecurity, from fashion victims to wealth and power addicts. They think they are changing the world, when actually they are just money changers. Glad it's fun for them. I certainly enjoy my business. But it's not that important in the overall scheme of things.

Permalink | Comments (0)

The tough sell of honesty

April 3, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Good post from Jeffrey Veen on his design process.

Rather than figure out how to design for your audience, design for yourself after becoming like your audience. At that point, I find, snap decisions become good decisions.

The problem, of course, is doing this commercially - doing it on cue. How do you write a proposal that suggests that I'm going to "do a tremendous amount of homework, then just wait for the answer. Oh, and it's going to be really, really painful as we wait. Really painful. Sorry."

I know exactly what he means.

Permalink

Welcome EVDB

March 30, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Brian Dear, a former regular on The Well has launched EVDB, the events and venues database.

EVDB, Inc. helps people find relevant events and share their discoveries with others. We're building a worldwide repository of event and venue data that the whole world can use. Our goal is to help people discover all kinds of events they might have otherwise missed, and to profitably be the best at what we do.

It was intro'd at PC Forum on March 21, a chic private affair. Shortly thereafter, they closed funding.

Note to entrepreneurs: See how they closed the $2.1m Series A VC round, at the same time that they completed their "seed funding" with well-known insiders? What this means is that EVDB gets to pick the brains and meet the friends of these high-network people because they're invested, literally, in EVDB's success. For their "effort," they get in at the "pre-money" valuation, meaning that if EVDB is successful, their (customary) $50,000 investment will be worth millions. I know of someone who put $50,000 into Ask Jeeves (because a friend said, Hey you should do this) and it turned into $7 million. Why do the Series A VC's put up with this? Hey, everyone is friends here – it's not about the money, we want to get the right experience on the team. Etc.

So, how did they get the "pre-seed" funding which actually built the product? I think Brian financed it, in the usual guerilla manner. Great job, and I'm excited to see it bear fruit. It happens to be a domain I'm interested in, but I also enjoy observing how products come to life inside the gritty capitalist machinery.

Also note their approach to "release early and often" explained in the first blog first. Hey, check that out: They have a product blog linked right from the main menu, right there with the FAQ and the Privacy Policy. Are blogs ready for prime time? Well, no – this is a tiny three-person startup, not GM. Oh wait, GM has a blog. Anyway, what the geeks are doing now, you'll be doing soon. And what the geeks are doing is releasing products that are not "done" to get actual customer feedback, and telling you openly about the problems and current status, without the usual pablum from the corporate communications office.

Permalink

How do zip codes work?

March 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

I'm back from vacation. There's prolly some stuff to write about from the last week. In the meantime, if you ever wondered how the US zip code system works (or like cool data-driven Flash apps) check out Zipdecode. Oh, and turn on the zoom function.

Permalink

Free Month of Netflix

March 10, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life

If you've been thinking about trying Netflix, here's a free month offer for new customers:

- - - - - - - -

1 Month FREE DVD RENTALS

FROM: Michael J.

EXPIRES: 3/23/2005
(Quantities are limited.)

Michael thought you might enjoy the Netflix DVD Rental Service and
has sent you an invitation to try Netflix free for one month.
To redeem this special offer, just use the link below.

http://www.netflix.com/Default?mqso=80000124

- - - - - - - -

And after you sign up, visit Hacking Netflix for info and tips.

Permalink

A Product for Everyone

March 9, 2005 | Business & Commerce

I don't even know what to say.

Permalink

Catallaxis

March 1, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

Daniel O'Connor recently launched "Catallaxis - The Integral Economics Weblog." Today's post, A Crisis of Vision, is a draft introduction to his forthcoming book. It's a very good summary of the current economic dialectic, and seems quite reasonable and balanced. Long, but worth the read.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Ev surfaces

February 25, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, today resurfaces with Odeo. [NY Times profile. Odeo blog.] Product will be introduced later this morning at the TED conference. Because of founder celebrity, and meme-full intersection with "podcasting," expect blogosphere cacophony.

Tech note: Odeo is built using Ruby on Rails, previously mentioned on this very weblog. Did I say this was going to be big, or what? (Yesterday, Rails had a major update to v0.10.0.)

Permalink

Future Of Apple

January 14, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Well, with all the discussion about the Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle, iLife '05, iWork, and other miscellaneous Apple-related announcements, you may be interested in this intelligence from DigiTimes.

Taiwan contract manufacturers for Apple
Product	Contract maker	Estimated shipment volumes for 2005	Delivery date
iPod shuffle	Asustek	400k-500k/month	Available now
iPod/iPod Photo/iPod Mini	Inventec Appliances	Combined shipments of the three items totaled over 10 million units in 2004 and are expected to increase substantially in 2005.
iBook/iBook G5	Asustek	1.3-1.5 million/year (combined shipments of the two series)	iBook G5 to start shipping in 2Q 2005
PowerBook G5	Quanta Computer	30k-50k/month	2Q 2005
Mac mini	Foxconn	>100k/month	Available Jan 22

Source: compiled by DigiTimes, January 2005.

As usual, the MacWorld keynote address by Steve Jobs is a state-of-the-art marketing event. (Read: Uncanny ability to manufacture techno-lust – are you sure you don't need a Mac mini?) Spend an enjoyable two hours watching the streaming video here.

Perhaps they actually meant to type "G4" up there instead of "G5?"

Permalink

Avoiding Software Fear

January 6, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

We had a social lunch today, seven people, all involved with web or application development. At one point, someone asked something along the lines of, "What is your obligation to customers to use 'standard' technology that will be around when they need to update their app?" Another person mentioned the ease of getting Java programmers; shouldn't something like that be one criteria?

I casually tossed off: "Well, if it's a small company, that attitude will cause failure, because it's not entrepreneurial." The topic deserves a more thoughtful response. My bias is that effort should be focused on potential, not risk. Risk is something to manage once you've decided to reach for a potential. There are a few intermingled threads that occur to me:

• Any custom software will require on-going maintenance. Any customer who doesn't know this should be fully informed. Some very successful business-people will refuse to believe it, because they don't know anything about software. Actually, it's not about the software, it's the fact that they haven't looked closely, over time, at their business. The business requirements change, hello; therefore, business processes encoded in software will have to change too. The cost of software platform maintenance pales in comparison to the cost of determining and implementing the business logic. Non-software business people who are overly concerned about cost are usually the ones who cannot describe exactly what they want. That is what drives costs, not the platform. The business people who come to you with a written specification usually already know the ballpark cost, and you're immediately discussing the project at a much higher level – feature trade-offs, deployment risk factors, strategic opportunities for version two, etc.

• "New" technology becomes "mainstream" technology through the momentum of use. If no one uses something, it dies off, orphaning existing software. This isn't quite literally true, because the software will continue to work virtually forever, but eventually the business logic changes (or you have to patch Windows) and then you have to update the code. It could take years for this occurance, but it is a downside risk to consider. So custom software developers rarely use something brand spanking new on a customer project until it is proven somehow.

  But what does "proven" really mean? It is important to consider the case where something new takes off fast. At lunch we were specifically discussing Ruby on Rails. Two of us thought it looked pretty good, and one person was thinking about a small test project to check it out. Ruby on Rails has the opportunity to take off quickly because Basecamp was built on it, and everyone who's used it knows that Basecamp is an awesome product. When they find out it was developed in two months by one guy they cannot believe it. Why only two months? Ruby on Rails, supposedly. Sometimes "new" becomes "mainstream" very quickly. It appears that this could happen to Ruby on Rails this year. That brings with it a host of potential problems, but obsolescence isn't one of them. [Update: The Ruby on Rails author has commented on this post.]

  We should remember that everything mainstream today was once brand new. How did Java, or MySQL, or Perl, or, for that matter, C and C++, actually take hold? Enough people used them and told their friends.

• If there is legacy code, a good software engineer will just deal with it. I've had the opportunity to work with several world-class software engineers in my career. And universally, what top-notch engineers say is, I'll learn what I have to learn to do the project. So if a customer ends up stranded, what they need is to find a good engineer, who will either work within the existing framework, or re-factor it for the future. So they're paying $125 an hour instead of $75. Or $175 instead of $125. Whatever. It's insignificant compared to the cost of the business logic. If the customer is bothering to update the application, then by definition it has value and is worth doing. If you're simply obsessed by cost, then you're probably investigating outsourcing anyway.

• If it's a big company, then they deal with re-factoring and changing platforms all the time. They have engineers on staff, and it's a constant part of their job to deal with some piece of crap code that's 20 years old but is core to the operations. It's brittle, and dangerous to work on because if it breaks some huge part of the org shuts down, and only the most senior people go near it. Hospitals are famous for this. Hospitals are also pretty famous for technology decisions made by administrators who are not well-informed about technical details, therefore choosing the wrong products and platforms for the wrong reasons, but I digress. (No links provided so as to protect the guilty.)

• If a small company is choosing their developer based purely on a pre-conceived language specification, they are operating from fear, and will not succeed. Entrepreneurs look for opportunities, not optimizations. (N.B.: These comments apply specifically to companies whose core product is not software. Software companies deal with these issues using more advanced methods.) Basically, the buyer is placing themselves in the hands of the developer, and they need to have a solid relationship – the relationship trumps everything else. If the developer is going to walk the customer down a dead-end, it won't be because of technology – though that may be the vector – it will be because the developer is not accurately or honestly solving the customer problem.

Conventional wisdom says that customers need to know that the developer isn't going to invent something new to build their app – use mainstream technologies like PHP or Perl, Apache, and MySQL, and no one gets fired. But that's not what happened at Basecamp. The developer of Basecamp invented Ruby on Rails in order to do a good job building the customer product. No doubt the customer paying for Basecamp was fully informed, but then again, we're back at the relationship. Innovation is not as clean as a technical specification might make it look. They took a risk, together, apparently leading to mutually-assured success.

Focus on the upside potential, and manage the downside risk, in that order. That's where the innovation is.

Permalink | Comments (3)

Your Brain Wants To Participate

January 6, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

It's all about the conversation!

Fantastic post on writing style and reader engagement by the authors of the "Head First" series of books. Great stuff!

Permalink

Four Hot Applications

January 5, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

It's too late to say anything cogent about folksonomies, but this paper does pretty well.

Check out the following four web applications and look at how they're allowing users to tag and browse content. It's a wonderful new wave of innovation.

del.icio.us – Social bookmarks.

flickr – Social photo sharing.

Books We Like (Howard Rheingold example) – Social book recommendations.

43 Things – Social goal setting.

And, if you're looking for an interesting framework to build your next-generation web application, you're going to hear a lot more about Ruby On Rails this year. Basecamp is a damn fine product built on it.

Permalink

Revolution In The Valley

December 30, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science

I had intended to read The Wisdom of Crowds, but I woke up with a severely frozen neck and upper shoulders, which was pretty bad for concentration. I cannot look up, and my left to right mobility is about 10 degrees, max. It's hard to tell how this happened, since I have exerted approximately zero physical effort all week, but perhaps I slept in an odd position all night or something. I could certainly use more exercise, and I'm doing my best to interpret this as just another helpful signal along those lines.

Anyway, today instead of reading anything that required brainpower, I read Andy Hertzfeld's book, "Revolution In The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made."

It's something of a coffee-table book, with a square format, lots of photos, and a strong visual design. Based on a series of essays written at his Folklore.org website, the book tries to present a balanced internal view of the wild, intense, and stressful birth of a groundbreaking new product. It would appear to describe, with as much accuracy as any one person could, the events of 20 years ago that led to the revolutionary Macintosh personal computer. The essays were vetted at folklore.org, so any obvious errors or misperceptions were caught early on.

Following on Hackers & Painters, it describes some similar development ideas, made considerably harder since Apple had to tool hardware, print manuals, and hold elaborate press events that were scheduled months before the code was shippable. As Graham points out in H&P, web-based apps are the biggest opportunity since the birth of the personal computer, and you can launch one for less than $1,000 – far less than 20 engineers working for four years on a huge new computer bet.

At the time, the bet was that people would respond to 1) a mass-market personal creatvity computer, and 2) a graphics-driven display. At the time, DOS and CP/M were the "mass-market" operating systems, and they were character-based. Some readers may have never used such a thing, but you can think of it as a brain-dead Unix command line interface. Unix happens to be elegant, powerful, and joyful to use, none of which can be said about DOS or CP/M.

One of the big product development lessons was the iterative nature of the project. This is not news to modern developers, but big companies remain committed to extensive planning and Gantt charting and schedules and deadlines and all that goes with it – primarily high-ceremony over high-productivity. Hearing about the simultaneous bootstrapping of hardware (disk controllers, graphics cards, boot ROMs, serial buses, the mouse) and system software (QuickDraw, desk accessories, clicking, dragging, folders, windows, icons, the desktop) and applications (MacPaint, MacWrite) is simply amazing.

It reminded me of the recent U2 release, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (iTunes download). There is a bonus package that has an included DVD with a 25 minute interview segment and some studio footage. At one point Adam Clayton, the bass player, recounts the development of a particular song. Paraphrase: "Larry [drums] doesn't want to commit his part until the vocals are done; I can't really fit in and support the rhythm until the drums are somehow happening; Bono doesn't want to finish the lyrics until the last minute and he hears what The Edge [guitar] is going to do; and Edge will continue to evolve the song until everyone else hs their part down. It's kind of an all or nothing affair." (I'm sure that's a very rough quote from memory, but the gist is there.)

For the Mac project, every element was new in a commercial product. There had never been a 3.5" floppy drive, there had never been a mouse pointing device, there had never been a bit-mapped display. The level of invention and innovation required to produce the first Macintosh was beyond most anything I can think of today. I especially liked the series of Polaroid photos that showed Bill Atkinson's evolution of the user interface. Proportional fonts – a big deal! Fast bit-blits to move images around on screen – amazing! Primitive halftone images – first time ever seen on a personal computer! Overlapping windows. Title bar on the botton of the screen and not the top. Title bar for every app (as Windows still remains) instead of for the whole screen. How to cue the user to move the window on the screen – Tabs? Borders? Title bar? It just goes on and on. Sure, Xerox PARC figured out a lot of this stuff, but they never shipped anything! It was all research, and no design. The Mac project was all design, and research meant building something to see how it worked, and then building it again when someone had a good-enough idea about how it might work better.

What today we take for granted was 20 years ago a struggle just to figure out what the use-cases were, much less determine the correct approach to handling them! When Steve Capps developed MacPaint, he happened to put a row of tool icons on the left side of the screen. The lasso, the box, the circle, the paint bucket, etc. Today, you can buy a copy of Adobe Photoshop that costs about 50% of the original price of the Mac 128K, and the tools are still right there on the left.

Ultimately the idea of the Mac has won, hands down. Although they command only 4% of the total market, but perhaps 65% of the creative services market, every single personal computer using the fundamental concepts that lie behind the Mac.

Interestingly, I didn't realize that when Apple sued Microsoft for "stealing" the Mac interface they did not lose the suit based on the theft. They lost because in 1985 John Scully, in order to get Microsoft to renew their Applesoft BASIC application, gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac interface. The suit was about the interpretation of that agreement, not that all the ideas all came from Apple. Ladies and gentlemen, hire good lawyers if you're going to play this game! This was easily the second-most serious business blunder in the information age, second only to IBM buying a non-exclusive license from Microsoft for DOS, creating the competitive market that IBM ultimately lost to the likes of Dell and Compaq. Had Scully hung tough, foregoing Applesoft BASIC (obsolete in just over a year anyway) the Mac interface might have been the dominant computer in the world.

Over the weekend my brother showed me The Cult of the Mac, which I found to be weird and boring. People with Apple tatoos? People who have no life outside of Macintosh obsession? If you're going to be that obsessed about something, make it something you're creating, not consuming. Between Hackers & Painters, and Revolution In The Valley, you should have a good idea of what you're aiming for if you decide to build something that other people will use. And who knows, it might even change the world.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Hackers & Painters

December 30, 2004 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Science

I read Paul Graham's book "Hackers & Painters" the other day. If you're reading weblogs, you're probably interested in technology, society, or both. If so, you'll enjoy this book. Subtitled "Big Ideas from the Computer Age," the writing is lucid and insightful, and I was filled with ideas while reading. Aaron Swartz thinks it should be called "How to Think Like a Computer Millionaire."

Most of the essay's (along with others unpublished) are available online, though revised and edited for publication, so you can get a taste of the work. You could even avoid buying it altogether, but I like the book format because, well, it's a book. It has nice typography, you can read it on the couch, etc.

If you're a business-person, the important thing to know about Paul Graham is not that he has Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard, or that after grad school he studied painting at RISD and at the Accademia in Florence. No, the important thing to know is that he and Robert Morris started Viaweb in 1995, and wrote what was probably the first web-based application – to build online stores – and three years later sold it to Yahoo! (June 1998) where it became the Yahoo! Store. The Yahoo! Store is the largest online store builder, with over 20,000 users. The code was written by three people, and the company had about ten employees when it was bought ($49MM). That's a nice effort/reward ratio. Yes, it was Internet Bubble pricing, but it delivered a lot of value to Yahoo!, and doesn't seem unreasonable compared to other Bubble-era acquisitions. Yahoo! has 20,000 people paying between $30 and $300 per month for the service – how much would you pay for the technology behind it?

The book starts by getting inside the mind of nerds – you know, those unpopular kids in high school who got beat up and had their lunch money stolen. Kids like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, Larry Ellison, etc. Probably a helpful chapter for parents and teenagers alike. He then offers a defense of free speech, explaining why programmers think the issue is so important, and why societies live and die on their acceptance of heretical ideas. He discusses the opportunities of web-based software applications, and even though I've been offering such services for over five years, I still learned a few things (which things exactly are trade secrets). Well, okay, here's one:

At Viaweb, one of our rules was, run upstairs. [...] What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground.

The last part of the book is about programming languages, especially Lisp, and you might be tempted to skip over it, but if you're at all technical – or work with or supervise someone who is technical – then it's recommended reading. He's trying to describe why the choice of language matters, and how it impacts your ability to succeed in business. Not everyone will agree with his reasoning, but it is hard to dismiss it, if for no other reason than his personal success with this approach.

In the middle is an excellent chapter on "How to Create Wealth," and since this one's not online it's reason enough to buy the book. If you're wondering how exactly the computer enables wealth-creation, this is the place to start. Reading it got me interested in starting another startup – even though I swore it off three years ago, after having started two companies myself and been an early hire at two others, and seen the inside of a venture capital-funded businesses twice. Like making sausage, it's not the for faint of heart.

Finally, the last chapter on Design and Research provides a quick overview of how design matters to people, and the factors that matter to design. Along with Taste for Makers, which argues for an objective standard of tasteful design, you can get a sense of his aesthetics and how to apply it to "virtual" products like software code, and software interfaces.

Lynne started reading this yesterday, and seems pretty engaged in it too.

Next up on my reading list is James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, which is all the rage right now. It should be an interesting comparison, since Hackers & Painters is about small teams producing something excellent that affects large groups, and Wisdom of Crowds argues that: "Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant – better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future." The Battle of Big Ideas awaits!

Permalink

Moveable Type 3.1.4 -- How?

December 28, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Would it be too much trouble for Six Apart to include a "readme" file describing how to upgrade their software? Apparently so. Here's what I see when I download the new release:

What am I supposed to do with this? Ironically, I open up the "docs" folder, and there isn't even an "index" page? Where do I start with that guys?

I realize that MT is a power-user product, and indeed yesterday I spent a few hours hacking Unix so I can handle it, but really – do I have to wade through the full manual to perform what is supposed to be a simple upgrade? The manual, by the way, has outdated version numbers in it, making me wonder if the instructions are accurate for this release. And anyway, do I really need all the files? Can't you just give me the changed files and I can install those?

If it's such an important upgrade, and you encourage all users to upgrade, how about making it easy for us? Even complex free-software projects maintained by volunteers have readme files. This is an old idea, but still, after three years, not standard practice for non-free commercial software from Six Apart.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Wealth Inversion

December 12, 2004 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

What I love about this inversion, is that it changes the notion of wealth from "what I have" to "what we all have." And also from "what I accumulate" to "what I save."

In this whole world, there is nobody more generous than the miser — the man who could deplete the world's resources but chooses not to. The only difference between miserliness and philanthropy is that the philanthropist serves a favored few while the miser spreads his largess far and wide.

If you build a house and refuse to buy a house, the rest of the world is one house richer. If you earn a dollar and refuse to spend a dollar, the rest of the world is one dollar richer—because you produced a dollar's worth of goods and didn't consume them.

Even some hard-core economists seem to think this is a good idea.

Permalink

Digital Innovation Continues Apace

December 11, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Totally hot new service offering: Amabuddy. ("Don't buy not knowing.")

You are in a bookshop or a record shop. You found something that interests you.You can't decide whether to buy it now or later online. What you need is a price check and a quick review, perhaps some ideas of something similar that others might recommend. Amabuddy can help!

What is Amabuddy? You dial a number that allows you to then enter a book's ISBN number or a CD's UPC number. Amabuddy then runs to the Amazon site and gets the various prices (including those from small independent sellers) and average customer review. It then speaks it into your ear. Better still it recommends what else might interest you so you can browse other items whilst in the store. Also you can bookmark books so that you can come back and make sure you want them.

There is a weblog that supports the service. Amazingly, they say they have a prototype SMS service working that will return text to your SMS-enabled cellphone. (But this costs real money, and they'd need a sponsor.)

Built with VXML, Python, MySQL, Apache and Amazon API.

Think about it. Two guys built this fantastic service in a few days. It has the potential to completely change the retail shopping experience. For example, they say:

What else? If we can convince someone like Amazon or someone else who has a large database of clips of music, you could listen to clips from music albums whilst your in a record store that doesn't have listening facilities. With 3G you could do the same with Video/DVD as well.

Whatever will they think of next?!

Permalink | Comments (1)

Surviving vs. Thriving (Retail Edition)

December 4, 2004 | Business & Commerce | People & Society

We're renovating a basement office for my wife's business. The south wall has a bank of windows that measure eight feet by four feet. We need blinds, or shades, or something, to block the glare on sunny days.

Cellular shades are the way to go for good-looking light-blocking and filtering. A few months ago I shopped at the designer home decor shop in town and priced two for our bedroom. The quote came in at over $400, so instead we spent $40 on two pull-down shades. I was expecting this bank of windows in the office to run at least $600, and probably more. Because it's a space where Lynne will spend many hours a day, we wanted it to be comfortable — pulldown bedroom shades are a bit ugly, but you only use them when you're sleeping so who cares. You can always hide them with curtains.

Lynne noticed an ad for JC Penny offering "50% + 30%" off a particular brand of cellular shades on Wednesday only. We went in and took a look. The helpful salesperson oriented us to the options, then told us that on Friday (yesterday) there would be a sale on ALL brands for "65% + 10%." Further, there was a coupon in the mail to catalog shoppers for an additional 10% off, and if we opened a Penny's charge that day we could take an additional 10%.

Wow, let's do some math. If the shade costs $100, this Friday sale would mean that with all the discounts we'd pay $25.52. That's a 75% discount. We liked the selection better on the Friday sale, so we waited and went in yesterday.

First of all, the original price for this 8' by 4' bank of windows was $590. Because the windows are so much bigger than our bedroom, it means that Penny's is a LOT cheaper than the designer home decor shop. I'm sure there are quality differences, but this is an office, not a showroom. We'll take the trade-off. Second, we never got the coupon in the mail, but the salesperson had one we could use. That's pretty helpful, and I'm sure it happens all the time, and I wonder if Penny's executives realize it, or perhaps even encourage it. In the end, our final price was $167.27. That's simply a damn fine discount, and I'm wondering how they can make any money on the sale.

What's going on is identified in an article in today's NY Times: "Worried Merchants Throw Discounts at Shoppers." Apparently post-Thanksgiving sales were dismal, and everyone is panicked, so the discounts are thick right now. A few quotes:

At the start of November, "everything was coming up roses," he added, [John D. Morris, a retail analyst with Harris Nesbitt] "and suddenly there's a foul smell in the air."

[Michael J. editorial note: Hmm, I wonder what event in early November caused a change in mood? Perhaps the 55 million people left out of the Bush mandate are concerned about the future? If 48% of the country slows consumption, you're going to notice it in a lot of painful ways.]

Mr. Flickinger said he thought there was still time, though not much, for the merchants to end up happy with their holiday receipts. "They only have 5 to 10 days to turn it around or it'll be too late," he said. The way to do this, he said, is to advertise, he said. "They should be advertising in four-color supplements and on drive-time radio."

He added, "The ones that discount the deepest, the fastest will have the most success."

Okay, so what is success? Here success is not losing your shirt, so to speak, on unsold inventory at the end of the holiday season. With 75% discounts, merchants are giving up any hope of profit on those sales in order to get people in the door and make it up on other products. Or, if they can really make money with 75% discounts, then consumer goods are vastly overpriced and once customers figure it out the entire retail landscape will change. Implied in the analyst's statement is that receipts are more critical than profits. At this point, things are dire, and they better just get some revenue and deal with net earnings later.

In dramatic contrast, this week I received the annual report for Neiman Marcus. (Here's the JC Penny annual report for comparison.)

Tangent: Regular readers may wonder how or why I'm an investor in Neiman Marcus. In 7th grade (mid-1970s), as part of a class project, I bought a share of stock in Warner Brothers and a share of General Cinema. My stock broker, the late Richard Mansel, was very kind to humor me in this educational exercise. By the end of the school year, General Cinema hadn't moved much, but was still in the game. On the other hand, Warner had moved from around $7 a share to something like $53. I was a local stock-picking maven. Everyone asked me, "How did you know?" to which I replied, "I bought things I was interested in." But I digress.

As I matured, I came to understand that GC was really a financial engineering vehicle. For instance, they bought a Pepsi bottler. Then they sold the Pepsi business, and used the profits to buy Harcourt Brace Javonovich, the textbook publisher. Eventually they sold that and bought Neiman Marcus. These guys made hundreds of millions of dollars at each turn; it was very interesting to watch. So today, due to splits and dividend re-investment, I own perhaps 3 shares of Neiman Marcus.

The point I'm getting at: Neiman Marcus is not JC Penny. Neiman Marcus is not offering 75% discounts on anything. If they can't sell it at full price, they take it out of the store and unload it on the wholesale market where the customers don't notice. To wit:

We have never been more focused on the needs of these customers or our commitment to enhancing shareholder value. We delivered on both of these goals last year, reinforcing our market leadership, while generating record sales and earnings in an improving, but still tentative, economic environment. Total revenues increased 14% to $3.55 billion, compared to $3.10 billion in fiscal 2003. Net earnings grew 87% to $205 million, or $4.19 per diluted share, compared to $109 million, or $2.29 per diluted share, the prior year.

Dig: "Generating record sales and earnings in an improving, but still tentative, economic environment."

Through our team’s intense focus on full-price selling, disciplined inventory management and rigorous expense control, we achieved a record operating margin of 9.7%, far surpassing our previous high of 8.5% in fiscal 2000. SG&A (selling, general and administrative) expenses as a percentage of sales declined more than 120 basis points to 24.7%, our best performance in six years. Importantly, we also generated a return on equity of 16.3%, compared to 11.3% in fiscal 2003.

Dig: "Intense focus on full-price selling."

Many factors contribute to our optimism, including the continued growth of the affluent consumer demographic and the increasing economic power this segment represents. We believe no one understands luxury customers better than The Neiman Marcus Group and we will continue to differentiate ourselves in the market by developing new ways to engage, inspire and delight them. In our view, the best is yet to come.

Dig: "The continued growth of the affluent consumer demographic and the increasing economic power this segment represents."

There you have it. The bifurcation of retail success matches our societal makeup. If you are selling to people with money to spend, things are pretty rosy. If you're going after middle-class consumers, you're pretty nervous.

I haven't shopped at Neiman Marcus since I lived in Dallas in 1987 — and even then I wasn't their target customer. But I'm guessing that shopping there this weekend would be a very different experience from what happened yesterday at Penny's.

Permalink

Customer-Made

November 29, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites

Customer-centric development is the most important product trend in a long time. The Trendwatching folks present a great write-up summarizing the issues and opportunities.

Product development today is all about listening to feedback loops. The broadcast mentality of "message, message, message" is dying. [Doc Searls: "There is no demand for messages."] Instead, product developers will need to learn how to listen to multiple constituents (not just their boss), ask questions (not try to tell people what to think), evaluate the context of suggestions (not take everything at face value), and figure out how to engage customers in an on-going conversation (customer service is an asset, not an out-source). The discipline of market research is already changing, thankfully, from quantitative to qualitative methods. There's still room for statistics, large samples, and cool charts and graphs, but more important is the narrative that customers and developers co-create.

And, to be clear, everything is a product. Products are the dominant way that people in capitalist societies determine and exchange value. Even the local land trust "sells" a "product" — participation in preserving land. How do your customer-centric activities and budgets compare with your broadcast message operations?

Permalink

Jetta GLI Snow Tires

November 23, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites | Products & Opportunites

If you own a 2004 1/2 VW Jetta GLI with the stock 18" BBS wheels and you have to drive in the snow you'll want to read this post to learn what steel wheels will fit on your car for snow tires. Everyone else can read along to learn about how complex products requiring complex services can lead to disastrous customer experiences.

In April I bought the half-year upgrade of the Jetta GLI. It's basically a Jetta with nice-looking wheels, better brakes, stiffer suspension, and a six-speed transmission. Nothing too fancy, it's just a Jetta after all. But I live in northern New England and normally put 16" steel wheels and aggressive snow tires on for five or six months of the year. Don't give me that business about "all-season radials" — I live on a dirt road up a hill and it snows like the north pole some years. Santa recommends Nokian Hakkapeliitta 2 snow tyres on all four reindeer hooves.

Normally I have my snows on by now — it might snow any day — but I'm running late this year. The 225/40R18Y high-performance tires that are stock on this car would literally be a death trap in even 1/4" of snow. You might as well have Teflon tires in the snow. I have to go to Boston Monday, when the first storm might hit, and I was getting antsy. Last week I had stopped in to see my buddies at Interstate Tire where my family has been going for 30 years, and they checked it out and said they'd order wheels. We go through this every time I buy a different car, so I didn't give it much thought.

Hadn't heard back, but they're busy this time of year, so I stopped in yesterday. Turns out they hadn't yet found a wheel to fit. The normal 16" wheel for the standard Jetta won't clear the larger brake calipers on my car. Ruh roh. There's a guy that works across the street with the same car and he called Tire Rack, who generally know what they're doing, and had them ship the "right" set of wheels, which turned out didn't fit either. So Interstate tried a "multi-fit" wheel, with 10 mounting holes instead of five, and that also didn't fit. They were running out of ideas. Hadn't ever seen anything like it. Told me I should probably check with the dealer to see if there's a VW part.

At this point I could insert a long story about how difficult it is to deal with Miller Auto, but let's not bother. When Glenn said that about going to the dealer I groaned, and he apologized. I sighed. Everyone knew what this meant.

So I immediately dropped everything and drove over there, because I was really edgy about it. None of this sounded too good. When I got there, the VW service desk sent me to the parts department — immediately the worst-case scenario.

The parts person was friendly, but didn't know much. Took the information and went to the back, where she and the service manager multi-tasked me with floor orders and tried to figure out what wheels to order. Here's the summary outline of the customer experience:

1. "No problem, here's the wheel to get. 3-4 days." I said, "Don't be so cocky, no one in town can figure out what fits this car, Tire Rack isn't sure, and the last time I ordered a wheel from you guys it took four weeks instead of four days and cost me a lot of money for a rental car." It would be a special order, and if they didn't fit it was credit only. Two questions: What happens if it doesn't fit; and where is it located and how fast really will it arrive? She goes away to look into it.

2. "They're in NJ and can be here Monday. If it doesn't fit we'll keep trying until we get it right." Sounds good, doesn't it? Except that I have just one shot to get this right before the snow, and they still can't be sure it's the right part. My pitch: Order them without a deposit, and if they fit, I'll buy them. I've been getting cars serviced here since 1988, you won't have any trouble with me." She goes away to look into it.

3. "If you're willing to pay our technician rates, we'll pull wheels off the lot until we find the right one, and then order those parts for you." Hmmmmm. So you want me to pay you to figure out what wheels fit on the car? How about instead if you get VW to pay you to figure it out, since they are designing, manufacturing, and selling the car? I explained that it really wasn't in my interest to be the first guy to pay to figure this out, since everyone else will get the information for free. It's in THEIR interest to figure it out, so they can sell us all the right wheels. So, I'm willing to give up my car for a day, a hassle for me, so you can figure it out, but I'm not going to pay you to do that. She goes away to look into it.

4. "Sorry, can't do it." Okay then, give me a call if you happen to figure it out.

I spend the rest of yesterday afternoon surfing for new cars, figuring that I might actually have to trade in the car if I can't get winter wheels for it. If I wanted a car to park in the garage all winter I would have bought a BMW. The Jetta IS the winter car! Then I realized that the car was only worth $18,000 to $20,000 used (10,000 miles) and I paid $24,000. That's a serious cash hit if I sell it this quickly. (And, by the way, the next time I think about buying a new car remind me about the depreciation.) So I decided to be depressed and angry about it for a while.

Today I drove around from place to place, looking for the car hot rodders in my area who could give me a clue. The motocross racing place didn't have any ideas, but while buying the new U2 CD I asked the owner and he pointed me to the car electronics place. They don't sell wheels, but they did explain how I need a "negative offset" wheel to clear the brake caliper. They said to try the tire place in Enfield. I drove over there, listening to the new CD, and they didn't have any wheels, and didn't plan to get any more this year. "Can I order any?" "No." "Can you help me figure out the spec for the negative offset so I can find one to order somewhere?" "No. The only thing I can tell you is to try R.H. Something-or-other in White River Junction." He said the name, but I don't remember it right now. I got directions and drove over there.

Prospect Street; industrial neighborhood. Place next door repairs 18-wheel tractor-trailers. Went inside and there's a guy with a german shepard working in a concrete floor office, with a big bay next door full of wheels. All they sell are steel wheels. He's juggling phone calls, Thanksgiving plans, keeping the dog down, etc. Highly caffeinated and on the edge of gruff. Nice guy but just really busy. Tell him my story, he looks it up, specs a part number, shrugs. Has a few out back, more coming in tomorrow. Took another phone call while I looked over the catalog. Told him I was skeptical, hard to get, blah blah blah. We went out back and he picked one up to show me the width. "The book says it will fit. It will fit."

I drove over to Interstate tire. They were skeptical too, but if I had time, go back and get one, put it on their account, and let's try it on. Went over an picked one up. As I was leaving I said, "So, if this wheel doesn't fit I'm screwed, huh?" And he said, "Yeah, I deal with the two largest wheel manufacturers in the US. If that wheel doesn't fit, you're getting on a plan to Germany to find yourself a wheel."

Brought the wheel back to Interstate Tire. The guy from next door already had his car on the lift, same exact car, so they popped the wheel on, tightened it up, and it fit! Cleared the calipers! No one could believe it. I was a wheel hero (Elmer Fudd pun intended). So I reserved the first four, and made an appointment for Wednesday to put them on.

The winter steel wheel you want for your 2004 1/2 Jetta GLI is a Macpek X41657. (Quote from Glenn at Interstate: "An X41?? I've never heard of such a thing!")

Brief de-construction: VW sells a car in a cold climate that would be unsafe in the winter. VW has not informed their dealers of an appropriate winter wheel that will fit. The local VW dealer wanted me to pay them to figure it out. The typically excellent mail-order parts companies haven't figured it out yet because this is the first winter anyone is driving this new model. The local tire place is blown away that VW built a car that doesn't take a standard wheel. The industrial parts jobber, with zero marketing, zero atmosphere, and zero customer service training, had extensive product knowledge, supreme product confidence, and immediate inventory. No friggin' guesswork — take one and try it. In science they call it an existence proof. In car parts it's a rare occurrence.

Permalink | Comments (6)

Beware eBay Identify Theft Scams

November 22, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Life

This is a long post with images to clarify just exactly how easy it is to be scammed into giving up your eBay information and much more.

I received an email with the subject "Your account at eBay has been suspended." The text looked like this:

"We regret to inform you that we had to block your eBay account because we have been notified that your account may have been compromised by outside parties...."

That sounded pretty serious, so I clicked the link to go fix it, and got to this normal-looking eBay login page:

At this point, I hadn't noticed the address in the URL, but this would be your first clue. For future reference, "signin_ebay_com_account.barami.co.kr" is not a safe URL!!!

If it doesn't say "ebay.com" as the last domain, you should NOT proceed. I know that's not very specific; you have to know how to read domain names and addresses. I'll try to find a pointer to help describe this better.

Anyway, I didn't notice, and I pay attention to these things. So I "logged in" and got to this page:

(I put two screenshots together, that's why you see the funny scroll bar there.)

Realize that at this point they had already snagged my eBay password, from the previous screen. Here they ask for my email, an alternative password, mother's maiden name, date of birth. Then I got suspicious and look what else they want: driver's license number, social security number, credit card, bank account. Can you believe it? Had I filled in this form, all of that data would be in the hands of someone else, and I probably would have had my identity stolen.

That's a damn fine looking form, and I almost got taken for a ride.

The first thing I did was log into eBay (using the just-compromised password) and change my password. The next thing I did was write this blog entry. Now I'm going back to work.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Iterative Development

November 21, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science

New Dog Old Trick has an interesting post called The Train is Leaving the Station about date-driven vs. content-driven software releases. Actually, the New Dog's post points to and is titled the same as Ed Sim's post on the same topic. Excerpt from Ed:

There are a couple of different ways to manage engineering releases.  One engineering release is date driven, the other is content driven. In a date driven release, the team knows when the next release is out but does not know exactly what will be in it.  The release runs like a train schedule, whoever makes it to the station on time is part of the release.  The other release is content driven; the team knows what is in the next release, but does not know the exact ship date. The release runs more like an airplane shuttle, it takes off only when full.

Both Ed and New Dog prefer the date-driven approach. And if I were running Microsoft, or a company trying to be Microsoft, then I would too. Date-driven and content-driven are both from the "waterfall" school of software engineering. Here's a description of the benefits from Builder.com:

Waterfall development makes it easy to keep your project under control. It limits the amount of cross-team interaction that occurs during development, it’s relatively easy to estimate, and it allows for greater ease in project management since plans aren’t constantly being revised.

Yeah, that's what we need in software: less cross-team interaction, and less revision. Instead, let's focus on ease of estimation and project control. [/end sarcasm] Waterfall, it's been nice, but your time has passed.

As a commentator to Ed's post indicates, the problem of date-driven vs. content-driven is much less relevant in software as service businesses. Software as service allows a much more nimble market-driven approach variously called Feature Driven Development or Agile Development. I like the Iterative Development label, which emphasizes the on-going prototype-test-release aspects.

With hosted software, such as the poster child Salesforce.com, fixes and features can be rolled out continuously without requiring customers to install new software. This means that if the vendor finds a bug, they can simply fix it, test the fix, and update a single server (or cluster) and the customer gets the fix on their next login.

In fact, most content-driven releases fail because too much content is loaded into the release. If management or marketing Just Has To Have a certain set of features in time for the trade show, the annual magazine ranking, or the sales conference, then engineering is set up to fail. It's just one manifestation of the larger problem of team silos, lack of organizational teamwork, disconnected management, and departmental competition.

In the iterative model, you might not release for every single feature, but you specify, develop, and test feature-by-feature, and package releases into smaller chunks that can be rolled out whenever you want. Sometimes a significant customer has a great idea, and you can please them immensely if you release that feature a week or two later. That sort of service buys a LOT of word-of-mouth and loyalty.

A very big advantage of iterative development, and one that is not often discussed, is that customers can assimilate software improvements more easily when presented in small chunks. Every new release of Microsoft Word generates a thrash due to the long list of changes. Every time Salesforce.com adds a new feature or three, customers say, Wow, great new features! Then six weeks later there's another release with a few more bite-size features. Customers prefer software improvement via incremental updates over monster releases that require a productivity hit while they learn The New Way.

If you need any final encouragement, you might look to Adam Bosworth. He's a serious engineer, who built DHTML and Internet Explorer for Microsoft, played a key role in defining the XML standard, built the web services infrastructure for BEA, and just recently moved to Google to work on software services like their email product, Gmail. If he says that software as service is the way to go, even if limited to "normal people" apps instead of "power-user" apps, then it's probably a good time to get on board, if it's not already too late.

In summary, if you're going to force your customers to install software, you're probably going to use a waterfall method. My sympathies. In that case, the date-driven approach is probably best. If you are developing new software and it's not delivered as a service, you better have a good reason. And if you've got this great new distribution method called hosted applications, there's no need to be tied to the development approach that drove the IBM 370 team in 1970. Choose a modern iterative method instead, and focus on your ever-changing customer requests and market forces.

Permalink

Viruses could be good

November 11, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Science | Science

Computer viruses are bad. There's all manner of havoc they can wreak on unsuspecting users. Spyware, adware, popups, data loss, drones, hidden ftp sites, etc. etc. etc. And the talent required to write some of these viruses is astounding. Yes, there are some "script kiddies" who just cut and paste, but original virus authors are often brilliant and insightful programmers.

So what if the energy that creates computer viruses could be put to good use?

For instance, my colleagues and I have spent the last week debugging the HTML and CSS code from a relatively straightforward website design. CSS is great but the various browser implementations are not. Fix a problem for IE 5.x, watch a new problem appear in Firefox. Fix a problem for IE 6.x, watch your Netscape 6.x support tank. To be blunt: This is a major drag on productivity and lessens the utility of CSS. Plus, it totally sucks to work on problems like this — it feels like a waste of human potential. From the client's perspective it was very expensive to get this right. Most clients can't afford this level of detail.

Further, even if the latest browsers and offer good standards support, the installed base of existing browsers is vast and few will ever be updated. My parents are not ever going to update their home computer browser unless I show up and do it for them. Most users won't deal with it. Looking at the web traffic logs for a small northeastern college, I see that Netscape 2.0 hit for 1,574 sessions (out of a total of ~600,000) — and Netscape 2.0 was current in 1995!?!?

But what if you could write a virus that patched browsers and fixed the incompatibilities? What if a virus writer was clever enough to figure out how to patch the dreaded 4.x browsers to update their HTML/CSS rendering engines to bring standards compliance?

This would be a real win, and welcomed by the web design community. The virus writer who pulled this off would be a hero, and could write their own ticket at any computer programming job in the world. It could be the basis for a hugely successful commercial product. Thousands of hours, worldwide, every month, would be saved by this work. The art and practice of website design could advance to greater creativity because instead of spending 40% of the design budget working around browser bugs, that effort could go toward better visuals, more usability testing, or better photography.

If you are a virus writer wasting your time figuring out how to steal bandwidth to store p*rn on someone's computer, instead consider figuring out how to infect every computer in the world with a good HTML/CSS rendering engine. You'll end up on the cover of Wired, web design babes (and/or dudes) will fall all over you, and you'll have enough money to buy Fiji. I kid you not, this is a real opportunity.

Permalink

Multi-pass processes

November 11, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Life | People & Society

If you're testing something (software code, a web page, whatever), it's often helpful to use multiple passes to accomplish your task. The first thing you want to know is: Is it grossly wrong, or basically okay? Then, once you know that it MIGHT be working as expected (as opposed to "definitely not working"), you can take another pass at the next level of detail. And so on. In two or three passes it's obvious whether you should continue on into the details or stop to fix something wrong at a higher level. The is the fastest path to completing testing, and many other forest & tree activities.

In a way, this is like the trick that excellent math students use to add a column of numbers. People who are "good with math," when presented with a column of numbers to add, will go from left to right, adding all the big numbers first, and adjusting them as the smaller numbers overflow.

For example:

 4,238
   678
 3,217
 1,829

We're taught in school to add the right-most column first (8+8+7+9). Carry over the digits greater than 9, and move on the the second-right-most column (3+7+1+2). But math experts all seem to add the left-most column first (4+3+1) and then move to the second-left-most column (2+6+2+8). This "most significant digit" approach is exactly the opposite of what we're taught in school, and it's very similar to a multi-pass testing regimen. The general idea is to start with the most significant information, and then move to the next-most significant information, etc.

The next time you start a task, survey the situation and try a multi-pass approach. Most likely, you'll be done faster, and with greater confidence in your results.

Permalink

Accountable once a decade, at least

November 8, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Governance | People & Society

This year I've personally observed just how hard it is to fire someone in academia (newsflash!). Some people turn out to be non-productive — that's to be expected. Much worse if they're toxic to the people who are ARE productive! But somehow they stay forever. (Note to clients: I'm not talking about any of you folks, don't worry. But I bet you know someone LIKE who I'm talking about.) Meanwhile, colleges and universities take MONTHS of committee review time to hire anyone, at any level - flying people in from out of town for jobs that are 99% sure of going to an internal candidate.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to hire people quickly and if they don't work out, fire them quickly? Or, at least, if you're going to take a long time to hire someone, at least be able to fire them easily. The process of taking forever to hire someone, and then also taking forever to fire them seems like the worst of both worlds.

Perhaps the problem boils down to what Edward L. Ayers wrote recently in EDUCAUSE Review (vol. 39, no. 6, November/December 2004): "Higher leadership is generally transitory, amateurish, and constrained but is the only force providing any coordination or direction to many otherwise disconnected scholars, departments, and disciplines." Of course, the senior leadership I personally know are thoughtful, engaged, and committed. But none are formally trained as managers of large multi-tiered specialist staffs.

Meanwhile, I was thinking recently that one solution to academic "coordination or direction" issues (i.e. slow adoption of technology, interminable faculty meetings, imponderable decision-making, general cat-herding behavior) is to have standard tenure be ten years in length. Lifetime tenure would require a special appointment after at least one (or possibly two) ten-year appointments. That way, you'd have to be accountable at least once a decade.

Of course, current faculty would be grandfathered in under the existing rules....

Permalink | Comments (1)

Opportunity: VW-branded biodiesel

November 8, 2004 | Business & Commerce | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites | Science

Here's an example of an important new product opportunity.

Volkswagen has a turbo diesel engine called the TDI. It's available in the US and Canada in their Golf, Beetle, Jetta, Passat, and Tourag cars. It runs on diesel fuel, and depending on the model gets up to 50 mpg. It's also really fun to drive; diesel creates very high torque at low RPMs, so it's quick off the line and sporty. The best part is this: Without modification, it can run on biodiesel fuel. (official industry trade group, Hawaiian producer, Veggie Van, make your own) For instance, you can run used McDonald's fryer grease, or vegetable oil. These are extreme examples - biodiesel is a term that can mean a lot of different types of fuel, but they're all renewable, in the sense that they're grown, or recycled, or whatever. They're not fossil fuels.

Another piece to the puzzle: Volkswagen is having a rough time right now. Profits are down, and they're stretched thin between making "people's cars" and reaching into the high-end $70,000 luxury car market. They have a difficult labor-cost structure, and they've had some quality problems. They need an image change, representing not just a new slogan, but a new focus.

What VW should do is hire me to lead an effort that would introduce VW-branded biodiesel into the market. This might take the form of VW filling stations, a co-branding effort with an existing fuel marketer, or simply "greasing the skids" and moving this idea forward in the industry. This would be a complex product development project. A fuel supply must be ramped up, a distribution chain must be created or tapped into, a brand created, advertising, word-of-mouth, etc.

And the results: Volkswagen would own the mindshare of "locally grown fuel." Or, "normal cars, renewable fuels." Or, "German cars, fueled by American corn." Etc. You get the idea. This could spark a major interest in VW TDI cars. The only other mass-produced consumer diesel is the Mercedes.

VW is in the perfect position to capitalize on the immediate need for new fuels. In Europe, the TDI engine is the best-selling engine, and is available in five configurations. They've got the production capacity to ramp up and own this market. Further, these new fueling stations can be the link to all sorts of other services. Think "Apple Store for your VW."

This would be a positive development in the world, and I'd be happy to contribute my talents.

Permalink

What do you want to create today?

November 8, 2004 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | Life | Products & Opportunites

Ten or twelve years ago I was talking a lot about the choice between being a "creator or consumer." Today, I re-affirm my choice as creator.

This is about more than "being creative," whatever that means. It's about making things, making connections, making artifacts, making a difference. It's about playing my small role to improve life; to create instead of critique.

We have some significant opportunities for change, and there's no reason not to participate.

Which is another way of saying, We've got some major problems in the world, and we better get going.

Yes, I am depressed at the election results. I am depressed that a 3% majority is considered a "mandate" that "earned political capital." There are lots of things to be concerned about, and if we focus on "fixing what's wrong," we'll fail. The game's too swift, the target is always moving, and it's defined by someone else. (OTOH, if the information in those links turns out to be true, we've got a major problem on our hands.)

No, we must decide how we can contribute. We must choose how to apply our energies. We must figure out how we can "be the change we want."

Here is one possibility: During my career, I have created, co-created, or been the team leader on nine commercial products. I'm a "1.0" product guy. For a long time, and maybe again soon, my slogan was "from concept to customers." The 1.0 product launch needs a wide variety of skills and insights: customer research and requirement analysis, engineering capability and sequencing, prototyping, creating marketing materials, building lots of relationships, raising money, pitching pitching pitching. I do all that, working with other smart committed people, pushing the 1.0 out the door, and then help find specialists and experts to keep it rolling.

Now I'd like to take this entrepreneurial attitude and work on products that have a larger impact. That mean something to the world. How about alternative fuels? How about medical products? How about innovative education products? How about products that might build shared understanding, common ground, self-awareness, a sense of interdependency and wholeness - in any arena?

I own and operate a professional services firm with expertise in organizational learning and product development. I'm looking for introductions, conversations, collaborations — fuel for the fire. Let's stay in touch. Tell me about the opportunities you see, the changes you'd like to create, and let's see how we might work together. Or at least, let's keep each other in the loop. It's a big world out there.

Permalink

Cost-cut me baby

November 5, 2003 | Business & Commerce

So, what just arrived at my door but an upgrade for the Adobe "Creative Suite." This software bundle includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Acrobat.

But guess what? No friggin' documentation. PDFs on the disc apparently. Just exactly how should one go about using complicated and intricate and advanced software without a reference manual? Oh, go buy the Adobe books for $35 each? No thanks, for a $1,200 product I want printed manuals in the box.

I'm sending it back un-opened. RMA requested.

[Thursday Nov 6] Update: It appears that the individual upgrades ship with manuals. Since all I really need is the InDesign upgrade, I'll order that after I get credit for the whole suite. This represents $580 in lost revenue to Adobe, and even though I can afford it, why bother if they're going to treat their customers that way. Instead of buying the whole suite "just because" I'll buy what what I need when I need it.

Also, this means that I can continue to upgrade individual components. With the suite, the upgrade policy is that you can only upgrade the whole suite, not, say, Photoshop alone. I'm not sure what the advantages of the suite are, exactly. The price break wasn't that much, the upgrade rights are restricted, and you don't get printed manuals. I should have investigated in more depth before ordering. Of course, the box contents are not listed on the website, so I wouldn't have known about the manuals anyway.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Charles Handy

October 20, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Save The World has a great pointer to work by Charles Handy, one of the first management gurus, who's been talking about "villages of like-minded individuals, bound by a common purpose and managed by reciprocal trust" for a long time now. Great thinker; important today.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Margins: Gross vs. Net

July 28, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Point of interest: Gross margins refer to your sales (revenue) minus the cost of goods sold (COGS). So if a store buys beer at $4 a sixpack and sells it at $6 a sixpack, the gross margin is $2, or in this case 33%. Net margins are what's left after paying for everything else: salaries, rent, electricity, etc. Net margins = profits. It's what you get taxed on.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Music backup strategy

July 24, 2003 | Business & Commerce

One last post before vacation. Cringely has an interesting new business model for a music distribution business. He envisions a publicly held company where the shareholders mutually own a library of 100,000 music CDs, and they are allowed to download backup copies of these songs at the bandwidth cost of $0.05 per song or $0.50 per album. Totally legal under current fair use copyright law, though as he points out the RIAA would mount a campaign to legislate this out of existence.

He continues with a detailed ananlysis of the IPO market capitalization, which would be of significant, if secondary, benefit to the shareholders. In all, he makes the case that this new business model will accelerate the change that is washing over the music industry. Mr. Charlie would be proud.

Permalink

SBIR Grants

July 22, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Attended a session today on Federal SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grants held by the VT Technology Council, et al.

Key links:
ZYN.com
ThinkVermont.com Web Resources

These are research and development grants, not loans. 10 federal agencies are required to set aside 2.5% of their research budgets for SBIR use. That's a lot of money available on a competative basis. Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Transportation, EPA, NASA, National Science Foundation. Money must be used for research, not commercialization, scale-up or marketing. You can outsource up to 50% of the funds to sub-contractors and consultants.

Applicant must be a for-profit business with less than 500 employees and min 51% US owned. Sole props, corps, partnerships all welcome.

Phase I grants are for feasability studies and are typically $70K to $100K for a six month project. Approx 10% of applicants get Phase I grants. If you know how to write a good proposal and carefully target your efforts you can hit 20-40% success rate. Over 60% of Phase I recipients have fewer than 25 employees.

Phase II grants (the real R&D) are typcially up to $750K for a two year project. About 40% of Phase I recipients are granted Phase II grants.

From 1984-2003, 49 VT businesses were awarded 144 Phase I grants and 52 Phase II grants, worth nearly $36MM. That's a lot of money flowing into a small economy like VT.

Basic process is that you are reviewing (via the www.zyn.com/sbir website) Pre-Solicitation Announcements and trying to find a strategic fit between your long-term research interests and what the gov't agencies are looking to fund. Call the agency SBIR program manager and talk about your interests. They are helpful, friendly, and answer their own phones (mostly). Sometimes if they like your idea they will write a PSA based on it.

You write a ~25 page proposal, including detailed budget and work plan. There is a technical review and an administrative review. Follow the admin rules carefully. Review successful grant apps online to see what worked in the past.

It takes 4-5 months to find out if your app was accepted. Some agencies have deadlines every four months, some only annually. This is not a short-term funding solution.

They do fund grants for social programs, including such things as rural economic development, educational initiatives, etc. Lots of grassroots potential here if you have the attention span and ability to tell a tale in words. You don't have to be a business to apply for the grants, but have to become a business before they disburse funds. Moonlighters welcome.

Permalink | Comments (0)

For-Benefit Organizations

July 21, 2003 | Business & Commerce

There's a real resonance between many of my latent thoughts on humane business organization and the Tutor's quest to foster "a life well-lived." Witness the output generated in 12 hours of full-time blogging yesterday. Today, he points to the Fourth Sector Network, grouping organizations into "for-benefit" class of business.

Quote: "For-Benefits are a new class of organization. They are driven by a social purpose, they are economically self-sustaining, and they seek to internalize their social costs by being socially, ethically, and environmentally responsible.

Like non-profits, For-Benefits can organize in pursuit of a wide range of social missions. Like for-profits, For-Benefits can generate a broad range of beneficial produc ts and services that improve quality of life for consumers, create jobs, and contribute to the economy. For-Benefits seek to maximize benefit to all stakeholders, and 100% of the economic "profits" they generate are invested to advance social purposes. Because of their architecture, For-Benefits can embody some of the best attributes of other organizational forms. They strive to be democratic, inclusive, open, transparent, accountable, effective, efficient, cooperative, and holistic.

For-Benefits represent a new paradigm in organizational design. At all levels, they aim to link two concepts which are held as a false dichotomy in other models: private interest and public benefit."

Their taxonomy includes co-ops, esops, socially-responsible investing, open source, and the whole cultural creative/LOHAS market.

This is a great lens to view the emergence. I do hope, however, that we can soon move beyond defining ourselves and get to work. Granted, some of this delay is caused by all of us just now waking up that we are not alone, that in fact we may be a silent majority, and that many of our friends, neighbors and colleagues might choose this path if they felt safe enough to do so. Having a big mortgage and a local community reputation to maintain can keep a status quo employed for a whole lifetime.

There's an election cycle coming up, if we need a deadline.

Permalink | Comments (1)

Business Names, Lesson 1

July 21, 2003 | Business & Commerce

I love business guys – they have such a sense of humor!

If you were a company called Powergen and you had a subsidiary that operated in Italy, what would you call that company's Web site?

Probably not http://www.powergenitalia.com

Permalink | Comments (0)

The WSJ has a sense of humor

July 18, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Big news today is that the recession is over! (link) In fact, it ended 20 months ago!

I think the Bush administration should start to make a big deal about this news. After all, then they can declare victory on the economy too. Oh, wait, then it would show that they're disconnected from ordinary people who see no evidence of the recession being over. Well, at least they think growth will be over 4% for the second half of this year.

Interesting, if true.

Permalink

Overriden

February 10, 2003 | Business & Commerce

I just re-discovered this great collection of contract riders for touring performers. Touring is hard work, and the last thing you want after a long day on the bus is a cheapshit wine supplied by the low-budget promoter. But it's pretty funny reading when it's listed contractually. If my domestic arrangements were spelled out this way people would make fun of me too.

Permalink | Comments (7)

Low costs or high quality: pick one

February 8, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Allan Karl checks in with a sickening story about how Clear Channel, the radio broadcasting megamonolith, has developed a database-driven "DJ" that can be programmed to deliver different song sequences to different geographic regions, reducing costs and satisfying FCC "local audience" requirements. They digitized a bunch of words and phonemes and can create sentences on the fly. Allan's got some other good background essays posted on the topic of radio today.

Permalink

Persuasive websites

January 23, 2003 | Business & Commerce

GUUUI - Business-centred design - Designing web sites that sell

Permalink

SMBmeta and spatial web searching

January 12, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Dave Winer points to Trellix's introduction of the SMBmeta file format. From their introduction: One of the major drivers of the US economy are small and medium businesses (which we'll call "SMBs"). [....] This document describes a data file format and associated services designed to help those businesses in their use of the Internet. The file format is also available.

Comments from David Weinberger, Paolo Valdemarin and JY.

I've thought about the business issues surrounding spatial searching and how the web could help small, local buinesses for a long time. In addition, I've worked with a couple of skilled engineers who are deeply experienced with developing spatial searching within relational databases, and have discussed this idea with several other engineers who have worked on related services. It turns out that up here near Dartmouth College, Hanover and Lebanon, NH are something of a hotbed in geo-spatial data, with Geographic Data Technology (Polk), Vicinity (Microsoft), Etak (TeleAtlas) and others all located here.

At the base level, you want to be able to go to Google and say, Drycleaners near me, or, Resturants open for lunch. This is a handy way for the locals to learn about new businesses, as well as relocated people to get oriented. Obviously business travellers are always trying to find out about products and services when they are on the road (because you can only eat at so many TGIFriday's before you want to jump off a bridge).

At the second level, what if you want to find a new car mechanic? First, a listing of, Mechanics within 20 miles might be nice. But then it would also be handy to have an ePinions-like service to get local customer reviews: These guys are great, Those guys are slow, That one mechanic they have really knows how to debug funky engine noises.

Finally, after all that is in place, we can have the infrastructure for consumers to post their desired-service lists -- a file that would help marketers target people who actually might be interested in what they're selling. This file would say, Talk to me about what you offer in X area, and I'll listen. This is a bit of an improvement over the existing carpet-bombing techniques of the direct marketing community.

The Yellow Pages are a very profitable business, and this scheme could virtually replace it, with many value-added network-effect features unavailable in print. I'd be interested in working on this if the opportunity arose.

Permalink

Five senses of shopping

January 6, 2003 | Business & Commerce

Douglas Ruskoff wrote a well-researched riff on shopping mall design for CBS Sunday Morning in December. "The science of retail design ñ what the industry calls ëatmosphericsí ñ was born by accident in 1956, with the very first shopping mall, ìthe southdale centerî in Minnesota. This realization of an ìindoor main streetî provided laboratory conditions for the study and influence of shopping behavior."

Permalink

If price != transparent, then

January 6, 2003 | Business & Commerce

So, my online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is up for renewal. I don't visit their site much, getting most of my commodity news elsewhere, and getting OpEd news via blogs and NetNewsWire. The renewal price was $79, and I decided that it wasn't worth it to me. Maybe if they had RSS feeds, but I'm rarely surfing their site.

It turns out that you can't cancel online, you can only renew online. So I called customer service and when asked "Why?" I said, Not really worth it at $79. The rep immediately said, "Well, okay, what if I renew you at last year's rate?" And what was that rate? "$59." Oh.

I said, I guess it's worth more like $40 to me. (The print subscriber's online rate is $39.) He said, "Well, how about if I extend you two months free, so you can think about it? I don't want you to have to make any quick decisions, and if you decide to extend we'll do it at last year's rate." Okay, thanks.

They're going for a 34% price increase in this challenging economy, on something so cheap to distribute that they're willing to give me 17% of the year free to decide. And unless I was a very dilligent customer, I wouldn't have noticed the major price increase.

Spread the word.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Subscribe to Notio

• RSS 2.0 Feed

Topic Archive

• Arts & Culture
• Business & Commerce
• Cooperatives
• Governance
• Life
• Nature & Environment
• People & Society
• Products & Opportunites
• Science
• Site Maintenance
• Software
• SoL
• Technology
• Travel

Recent Photos

Recent Entries

• Co-ops, L3Cs, and Hybrid LLC/Co-ops
• Why not to burn bridges
• The Twitter Inversion
• Patrick Byrne at Dartmouth Tuck School
• Facilitating Online Identity Management
• Economics Blogs
• Downloading .asx video streams
• Mostly Twittering
• The day there was no news
• Hubris, Denial, and the Financial Services Culture
• One consequence of specialization is extinction
• US politics snapshot, all you need to know edition
• Quote of the Day
• Thriving Office
• Renting vs Buying
• A Call for Journalistic Courage
• Adjacent Social Objects == Gonzo Marketing
• Economics Worldview Today
• Running Out of Ideas?
• FDA Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe

Monthly Archive

• March 2010
• October 2009
• August 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
• April 2005
• March 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 2003
• November 2003
• October 2003
• August 2003
• July 2003
• March 2003
• February 2003
• January 2003

Search Notio

What Is This?

Michael J.'s Notio is a personal weblog. It does not necessarily reflect the views of our family, friends, or clients.

Photo: Michael J. in 1971.

Weblog powered by Movable Type

© Copyright 2003-2005 Michael J.