iPad, Flash, HTML5, and F2F Social

May 11, 2010 | Life | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Although I'm big into tech I'm not really much of an early adopter. I tend towards buying 2nd- or 3rd gen products right as they're released. My theory is that this is the sweet spot for cost/benefit.

The iPad is different. After watching the introduction video (twice) I couldn't get it out of my head. Not because of how Cool it was, or – as an iPhone owner – because of how a bigger screen would "fix" some of the issues I have with heavy iPhone surfing. The brainworm that the iPad became was very subtle, and had to do with human interaction. Not so much human-and-computer, though there's that, but human-to-human.

You might have a sense of how the iPad changes the game if you live in a house where more than one person has a smartphone with a web browser and you've surfed together after supper at the dining table. Or if you've had a dedicated computer in the kitchen or family room, where people can look something up on a moment's notice and not break the conversation. Having an always-on Internet integrated with daily life (vs. the "computer" as something over there in the office) is just different.

So I pre-ordered the first-gen $499 iPad. And indeed, I still think it's a big deal. It's totally full of 1.0, but none of it matters. It's been available barely a month, all that will get sorted out. And yeah, when they do add a camera it will be better, etc. But the social component is here now. And the way it's changing websites is here now. The Apple/Adobe HTML5/Flash saga is all part of it.

John Gruber's Daring Fireball has had a number of interesting links, as have others. Reading them in in bulk will give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

What iPads Did To My Family

Fred Wilson: I've changed my mind about the iPad.

The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

Non-Apple’s Mistake

The Progress of the Platform

The Adobe - Apple Flame War

Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″

Introducing Scribd in HTML5 (Web geeks, try selecting some fonts....)

HTML5 and the Web

Understand The Web

Try reading all that and not getting a sense that always-on, always-with-you Internet will change your life.

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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.

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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....

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Spirograph

May 9, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

Gwad, I loved the Spirograph.

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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.

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Fully Immersed in Something

February 1, 2008 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

For when you truly have money to burn, Ultra Geeky Home Cinemas.

Instead, perhaps consider this? (All 4:21 are worth it, lyrics and images.)

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Technolust, defined

January 15, 2008 | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Macbook Air

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Small Cars Can Be Safe

November 29, 2007 | Products & Opportunites

A lot of folks think big cars are safer than small cars. Ever wondered what happens when one of these tiny Smart Cars crashes into a wall at 70mph? Have a look! Summary: It's all about the engineering, not the size.

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Ricoh GR II

October 30, 2007 | Products & Opportunites

Well here's a nice material thing to lust over.

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Letter from Steve

October 30, 2007 | Products & Opportunites | Software

As usual, John Siracusa wrote the definitive review of the new Mac OS (Leopard). Upon reading about the continued slide into foolishness that is today's Finder, I sent the following email to Steve Jobs' public email address:

Hi,

Please hire John Siracusa to lead the conceptual design of the next Finder revision.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12

It's worth reading the section "An application divided against itself" in detail, with an open mind.

Thanks,
Michael J.

I received this response from The Man himself:

This person feels strongly about one way of doing things. Others feel strongly about doing them another way. You can't please all the people all the time, but we try our best.

Steve

I replied:

Realizing you don't have time to dialogue on this, I'd just point out that he presents an approach that would allow the current Finder evolution to continue, and still allow a more spatial approach as well. His views have evolved as has OSX. In any case, thanks for the response; Apple rocks, mostly.

And Steve said:

We think we have a much better approach.

Steve

So there you have it. Maybe the Leopard Finder is awesome.

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A Better Clock Radio

October 16, 2007 | Products & Opportunites

Have you noticed how bad most clock radios are? Here is a product that virtually every person in the industrialized world uses every day – twice, actually; once to set the alarm and once to wake up – and nearly everything about clock radios is horrible. Setting the alarm is nutso stoopid or hard. Some don't have battery backup so every time there's a power glitch you're setting the clock and the alarms again. The radio tuner sucks, big time. The volume control has no granularity at the low end, so you either have silent, or too loud. Etc. The problem is even worse in most hotel rooms, where, 1) you have an unfamiliar set of controls, and 2) you usually have an important meeting and you must wake up on time. Talk about your product development opportunities.

The best clock radio I ever had was a Sony, in the mid-1980s. I bought it because it was a stereo model, though it turned out that didn't matter much. The hidden feature that turned out the be the best thing since sliced bread was the rotary control on the front panel for setting the alarm time. You turned the left knob for the hour, and the right knob in five-minute increments for the minute. As a college student, who had a different alarm setting every day, this was a godsend. I was heartbroken when that unit broke and I had to buy a new one.

Sometime last year I discovered that if I set the alarm before 6 AM, my local NPR station was playing classical music, and I could wake up before the news came on. This turned out to be a real mood enhancer, and I started getting up earlier just to avoid having all that war-mongering in my ear first thing in the morning. Then, maybe six or nine months ago, they started in with the news at 5 AM, but also launched a 24/7 classical station. So I switched over to the classical station and never looked back.

But then about three or four or five weeks ago, the classical station stopped working. Just a hum where there used to be a station. So I ignored it, figuring they'd fix the problem and it would return. After a week, still humming, so I emailed saying, "Hey, did you know I haven't been able to hear 88.1 for a week? Are you closing that down or what?" They never wrote back, but within an hour it was working again. That hum was probably a loose wire, and they were probably embarrassed, and who could blame them – off the air and no one told them for a week!

But then a week after that they switched the old station to a 24/7 news format, and started pitching the classical station as an alternative. Fine. But simultaneously, the classical station got real static-y. Really hard to listen to. I thought, "This is beat."

When radio and television stations first go on the air, the engineers set the transmitter power in an approximate manner. Then, after a while, a few weeks to a few months, they drive around the coverage area taking measurements, and adjust the power patten to fit their license. This is probably what hosed me: They finally got around to precise measurements, and my area had to be turned down for some reason. Hence the lousy static.

Well, boo hoo hoo. Wake up to whatever, Notio.

Yeah, that's more or less what I thought, too. So I just set it back to the news station, loud and clear, and didn't think much about it. Until maybe a week later, when I noticed that I'd had a really bad week. My mood was off, optimism was hard to come by, and life kinda sorta sucked. And then from the depths of what's left of my psychoacoustic memory arrived the thought: Maybe it's the news.

Yeah, that seemed totally plausible. The news is beat. Talk about your lack of depth. So I spent 20 minutes very carefully tuning the crappy tuner to get as close as possible to the least static on the classical station. Move close to the radio, less static. Move away, more static. Adjust so that when near the radio, more static, but when moved away, less static. Lay in bed and see if the static cares how close to the edge of the mattress I am. Finally, I got it as good as it could be gotten, and I went to sleep.

And then for a week I woke up to static-y classical music. Which was better than the news, by far, but it was just not floating my boat. Finally one day I decided, My state of mind is valuable. A lot more valuable than this crappy ten-year old piece of crap clock radio. I will buy a new one.

Fifteen minutes on Amazon and I realized that there are two categories of clock radio: Under $25, and $120 to $250. Are you kidding me? I can't spend, say, $50 or $60 and get a decent clock radio? I have to spend a hundred bucks? And will it not suck, even then?

So I pondered that for a day or two, and decided – well, rationalized really – that in fact, my state of mind is worth a hundred bucks. In other words, I got my head around this ridiculous affluenza pricing, and went back online.

Eventually, I ordered the Boston Acoustics Receptor radio, for about $120. They pitch this thing as having a top-notch tuner, solid controls, and damn good sound. The only missing feature is an aux-in jack for the occasional iPod use, but that's not in my spec, just a "nice-to-have."

It arrived last Friday, and I set it up that night. First impression: It's big, takes some room on the nightstand. But indeed the controls are very, very good. I won't go into the details here, this blog post is long enough as it is, and virtually content-free to boot, but things work pretty much exactly as they should. Someone thought about it, and made some decisions, and the decisions were good. I wish the light dimmer had an even dimmer setting, as the 'dim' is not all that dim, but that's my only real complaint, interface-wise.

On the topic of the tuner, which was the driving force for the buy, the matter is more mixed. Granted, I live in the sticks. But if there's a signal there I want the radio to pick it up. And while messing with the included loose wire antenna, it sometimes did. Problem was, it was never clear why, or when, or how to make consistent the perfect signal quality, vs the crappy static that was sometimes present. I messed with that wire antenna for 20 minutes, and sometimes it was stunning perfect, and sometimes it was no better than the $10 clock radio. Arrrrggg!! Gag me with a spoon.

Eventually I went downstairs to the big rig stereo, and disconnected my $75 Terk AF1 Q powered, amplified, tunable antenna and cleared yet more space on the nightstand. Nearly unbelievably, this too required messing around, turning it this way and that on the nightstand to optimize the sound. But when I hit the spot, oh man, now that's a clock radio!

The sound is clear, and deep, and spot-on tuned in. The volume control works well throughout the range (hello log potentiometers!). It gets loud, and it plays well soft. I can easily set the alarm to a different time every day. I wake up to a much fuller sound of the orchestra, and I'm certainly much happier in the first hours of the day. It's definitely rockin' good, and I'm glad I bought it.

So if you're willing to spend $200 on this combination, you too can have great sound, a solid tuner, and well-designed controls. It's absolutely crazy that it takes $200 to get a decent clock radio that works in the woods, but I suppose that's late-stage capitalism in action.

Just thought you'd like to know.

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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.

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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.

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Introducing Handmeon

August 31, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Products & Opportunites

Okay, enough with the hints. In January I started a new company with two co-founders, and today we released the second major revision to our first product, Handmeon. To quote some draft marketing material:

Handmeon turns giving into a shared creative experience. Inspired by ancient circles of exchange, Handmeon lets people create renewable resources of expression through gifts endowed with history and trajectory, humor and thought. Rejecting material consumption and accumulation, Handmeon seeks a return to giving as a vehicle for human connection.

The basic idea is to take an objet, perhaps something small, perhaps something beautiful, perhaps something with an interesting background, and create an online presence for it. You upload a photo, write an inscription, and make blog posts regarding the object. Eventually you give it away, and the new keeper can write posts and enjoy the objet's sojourn with them. As the object moves between people, you can see the travels with integrated Google maps. After 4 hops, or 20, or 40, the object develops a rich history, accumulating stories online.

In other words, we're playing with the integration and separation of the real-world and the Internet. These objects are passed from one friend to another – when you hold an object you received it from a friend, and you'll give it to a friend, perhaps in person, perhaps by mail. And they'll give it to a friend, perhaps one you haven't yet met. The object becomes a connecting thread between a line of people, all connected one friend to another. I'm hopeful that it will expose the connections and therefore the interdependencies between people who haven't ever met.

You can take a tour, or explore the site to get a sense of what the early adopters are doing. For instance, Kathryn wants to learn more about meditation. Trippy the Frog wants to travel. The Roller just completed a sojourn with Jer. John wrote a post about a brush with celebrity. Jeff went meta, right out of the gate. And so on. You can create public, private, and secret objects.

To make money, we'll sell the permanent tags that turn objects into Handmeons and give them a URL. So the creator buys a tag, and everyone else can claim, post, and release the object for free. Speaking of free, right now the tags are free – so go register and order some! Make some Handmeons! See what it feels like to imbue something with meaning online, and then give it away. Experience the gratitude that this act of generosity engenders. You can create the online Handmeon before your tags arrive, so you can get started right away.

Eventually we'll charge money for the tags. Pricing is not set, but we want it to be affordable, maybe three tags for $12.95 or something. We have to model the object's long-term pageview cost and whatnot, and we haven't finished that yet. Three tags for $19.95 is probably the highest price we can imagine right now.

Of course, there's a blog, newly minted. We're going to try for one solid software release each week for a few weeks. Comments are on over there, and we are actively looking for feedback and enthusiastic participants. Come over and play in this new interaction space!

Oh, and, as a self-funded startup, we're looking for links! Tell your friends. ;) Thanks.

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Shipped

August 8, 2007 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Our project went live an hour ago.

I'll tell you all about it in a couple of weeks, after vacations. For now, just marking the date.

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FontBook

July 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Products & Opportunites

I'm trying to hold back, as a nod to the budget, but I'm not sure I'll be able to resist much longer. (FontBook)

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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.

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Fake Steve on the iPhone Launch

June 29, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Products & Opportunites

I'm just going to post the whole thing, to save you the effort of the click.

Today we make history. Today we change the world. Today we put a dent in the universe. Today -- June 29, 2007 -- we release iPhone. It has taken years of work from all parts of Apple. First advertising, of course. Then feng shui consultants, and design and engineering and manufacturing. Countless emergent designs, countless meetings, countless all-nighters to make every part of the iPhone, from its custom-made integrated circuits to its sleek glass screen and metal case, absolutely perfect. To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I've fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I've taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You've sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it? For the rest of your life, you'll be able to say that you were working at Apple when the iPhone was introduced. You were here on the day when the course of human history was changed forever. Plus, you'll get a free 4-gigabyte iPhone, a $500 value. Not bad, right?

Already, around the United States, thousands of Apple faithful are lining up outside our retail shrines, waiting for iPhone. Some will approach on their bare knees, like pilgrims approaching the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Peru. Just a few minutes ago we received a report that Apple faithful are also lining up outside retail shrines around the globe, even though those stores do not have iPhones and will not have them for months, maybe years. The response is, in a word, stunning. We are saving the satellite photos showing the clusters and will use them as part of our promotional material. Apple employees, view these photos and see what you have done, and then go home and tell your children -- those smallish people who live in your house, the ones you haven't seen in a couple of years -- tell them, You see those people suffering outdoors, enduring the heat and rain and monsoons just so they can get a cell phone? I did this. This was my work.

To those Apple customers who are already congregating in thousands outside our retail shrines, I say: Thank you, much love, and namaste. You have endured taunts and jeers and the incessant attention of a media starved for material in the midst of a slow summer news cycle; you've been spat upon, abused, attacked by police with firehoses and nightsticks and guard dogs; you've peed into bottles and lived on junk food. But you stuck to your principles. You remained true to your beliefs, the core one being that yes, you are special, and you deserve to be among the first in the world to obtain a device that combines telephony, Web browsing and music playing. Yes, we'll still be selling these devices a week from now, and the week after that. But you want yours now. You're making a statement. The world is hearing you.

Let's be honest about why this is happening. This is not a fad. This is not some phony hyped-up astroturfing Microsoft campaign. This is a genuine outpouring of love and enthusiasm and excitement from people whose souls have been stirred by the wonder of technology and the ability to communicate with other human beings in ways that have never before been possible. That's what this is about. It's about communicating. It's about connecting. It's about bringing the world together in common cause. It's about saying, Look, I realize there's something bad happening in Darfur, and there's some kind of AIDS epidemic in Africa, and there's some crazies who want to blow us all up, and there's a war in Iraq where thousands of people are dying for no reason -- and yes, those things are important, and someday we may take to the streets to say something about them, if we can think of anything to say about them, but for now we Americans take to the streets for this cause. Right here, right now, we take a stand. This is our moment. From pole to pole, from north to south, from east to west, let the message go out. We are Americans, and we have values. Hear us, world. Hear us and say, Wow.

The iPhone stands for something very simple -- freedom. Apple faithful, you march today in the tradition of the marchers at Selma, in the tradition of Gandhi at the Salt March to Dandi. You have made your point. There are some things, you said, that are worth suffering for. I am proud to have given meaning to your life. I am proud to have invented iPhone and designed iPhone and brought iPhone to the world. I feel, in a way, humbled by your adoration. But in another way not humbled. Anyway. My whole life has built up to this moment. I believe that this is what I was put on the earth to achieve. I thank you all for sharing this historic day with me.

Namaste. Much love. Peace out.

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Hot Apple News

March 6, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Products & Opportunites

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

The iLaunch, as the new product is called, was then raised up from below the stage, prompting the audience of technology journalists, developers, and self-professed "Apple fanatics" to burst into a five-minute standing ovation.

Microsoft announced they are working on a similar competitive product.

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Stop Buying This Crap

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

Rant, defined.

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Panasonic Lumix FX-01 Digital Camera

February 8, 2007 | Products & Opportunites

I took the Panasonic Lumix LX-1 to Europe last year and loved it. But it was too big for my front pocket and I wanted to downsize to a consumer-grade point 'n shoot. So I bought the FX-01 and loved it even more. Since then I've recommended it to several people (Chris, Jeff, Marc, Graham, Sarah) and they all love it. It's small, fast, high-quality, and easy to use. The two big reasons it's great is that 1) it has a 28mm lens, very wide for a cheap camera, and it's good for indoor group shots of people as well as outdoor scenic shots; and 2) it has optical image stabilization, so you can often turn off the flash indoors for more natural photos. Currently $229 at Amazon.

In getting the links, it turns out that the LX-1 is now the LX-2, and the FX-01 is now the FX-07 or the FX-30. The 28mm lens is the must-have feature. Everything else is gravy.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Wesabe

December 12, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Software

Been meaning to post this for a while: Wesabe. There's a good tour describing the app.

Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members' personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

Really interesting approach, requiring great trust, with potentially strong benefits to the participants.

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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.

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What's a Wovel, You Wonder?

November 30, 2006 | Products & Opportunites

Brilliant: The Wovel wheeled snow shovel.

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Getting Connected

October 16, 2006 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Classic Steve Jobs quote:

Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

The guy sure knows how to give good media.

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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.

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Best Seminar Chair, 2006

September 23, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites | SoL | Travel

I sat in these chairs 32 hours last week. I would not want to work full-time in this chair, but it is, by far, the best seminar or workshop chair I have ever experienced. Very comfortable. They deserve an award for designing a chair that fits the body, and Ford deserves an award for purchasing decent chairs for large group meetings.

The Notio award for Best Seminar Chair, 2006, goes to the arper Pamplona, designed by G.Terin & G.Topan, made in Italy.

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The iPod Suit

September 14, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Products & Opportunites | Technology

From Eleksen, the iPod suit:

The Bagir suit jacket integrates Eleksen’s ElekTex® smart fabric touchpad technology, which transforms a lapel into a five-button electronic control panel. The ElekTex-enabled iPod Suit is both fashionable and functional. The suit is machine-washable and wrinkle-resistant, making it the ideal choice for today’s music-savvy and style conscious business professionals.

My life is now complete.

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Quote of the Day

September 14, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Technology

John Gruber, on Steve Jobs:

Remember his on-stage demo last year [of the Motorola Rokr] iTunes-compatible phone? His contempt for the device was palpable; when he failed to successfully switch from song playback to accept a call, he seemed poised to just toss the thing off-stage and cry out that it was a piece of garbage.

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Users GOOD, Groupware BAD

September 12, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Software

I read this Jamie Zawinski essay last year, but it's worth another look.

The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance.

The reason I landed there was because yoga classes are starting all over the Upper Valley, and I thought, It would be monster cool if there were a website where yoga studios could enter their class schedules, and publish them to a centralized (and, natch, localized) calendar where I could view them all together. And it would be even cooler, if that web app could generate iCal-format downloads that I could import into my desktop calendar. Ten seconds later I realized that yoga classes were a specific example of a much more general use-case with very realistic and widespread needs (school sports come immediately to mind, in addition to live music).

What I want: A consumer-grade website where I can "login," and "create," "edit," "delete," "search" or "browse" for one or more "topics" "within X miles" of "zip code," view that in a "list, week, or month-view calendar," "select items of interest," and "generate iCal" (and other standard) format downloads of that selection.

If you know of such a service please tell me so I stop designing it when I have client work to do. Related and useful: hCalendar and other assorted microformats.

Update: Doug asked about standards. Here are the links that probably matter most. I'm sure there are other standards, I'm just taking an open-format Mac-centrc approach.

• CalDAV on Wikipedia.
• CalDAV resources from the OSA Foundation.
• Calconnect consortium.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Drivemocion

August 24, 2006 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

I have wanted something like this for years. (Horrible website alert.)

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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Guitaring

July 22, 2006 | Arts & Culture | Life | Products & Opportunites

On Thursday I picked up the guitar for the first time since at least January. The last time I had callouses on my fingertips was at least a year ago. Around that time I had wanted to build a positive feedback loop with my playing, and rented a gadget that connected to the computer to record my guitar doodles. But it was too much setup hoo-ha—get the computer out, fire up software, close down other apps, plug the box in, set the levels—I just wanted something physical where I could press a button when I was hacking around and immediately capture the moment. So I didn't buy the gadget and didn't get a feedback loop in place.

But Thursday I had a lot of fun playing, and I removed some disincentives by setting up the guitar processor on top of the stereo and keeping the guitar plugged in. And then I remembered a new gadget I saw a few weeks ago. The Edirol R-09 is about the size of a deck of cards, and records high-quality sound on SD memory cards. I was able to borrow one for the weekend (thanks Chas!), and last night played around.

Here are some of my experiments, about 20 minutes total. Most of these songs don't go anywhere, they're more like chord explorations and emotional states. I'm pretty happy with them, especially given a first effort. I've sequenced them into something of a flow, for those that dare listen to the whole set.

Sweeping Birds.mp3 (1:22)

Interior Waves.mp3 (3:20)

Minor Grunge.mp3 (4:46)

Tangerine Mining Company.mp3 (4:17)

Eee Space.mp3 (4:03)

Swoop.mp3 (1:08)

The Edirol recorder is pretty sweet, and the built-in mics are better than decent. It's a complete splurge, but I think I'm going to buy this on Monday instead of returning it to the store. Add in some stealth mics, and there might be some undercover recording returning to my future.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Should Exist

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

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

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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.

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The World Now Has a Lot More State

June 27, 2006 | Products & Opportunites

Another good Paul Graham essay, recently delivered at RailsConf.

Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were indications of character rather than talent-- as if having a stupid idea made you stupid. There's a huge weight of tradition advising us to play it safe. "Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent," says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).

Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze Age Palestine. There conservatism would be the order of the day. But times have changed. It might still be reasonable to stick with the Old Testament in political questions, but materially the world now has a lot more state. Tradition is less of a guide, not just because things change faster, but because the space of possibilities is so large. The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable it is to be willing to look like a fool.

Filled with wisdom and funny asides. And good approaches to business.

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Will Desktop Affordances be Useful?

June 24, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Technology

Computer technology demos are always interesting, but sometimes you wonder if it would actually be useful in real life. And the opposite is true: Blogging doesn't demo well, people have a hard time understanding why, but it turns out to be valuable. This week's impressive demo is BumpTop, showing "physically-based casual interfaces and pen-centric interactions."

Well, it's totally cool. The seven-minute movie is worth your attention. It makes your computer desktop look archaic. But I tend to agree with Merlin that I'm not sure I'd use it for that purpose.

See, here’s the thing: once your computer (and your related world, writ large) has excellent indexing, search, and access via something like Quicksilver, this kind of “physical” interface metaphor starts seeming quaint, if not downright exhausting. I guess I just never find myself shuffling and re-organizing large numbers of files in a way that isn’t more than satisfactorily addressed with sorting, Smart Folders, icon views, and searching. I throw stuff into the most general piles I can stand, then let Quicksilver and Spotlight do all the heavy lifting. Maybe that’s me, but this seems like a recipe for non-stop fiddling.

Reminds me of David Gelernter's project called Lifestreams, which looked cool but ultimately hasn't taken hold. It was core research, however, so maybe something will come of it someday.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Who Knew? [episode MMMDCLLXXXVIII]

May 3, 2006 | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites

Yesterday the mailpeople delivered a random new item to my box: The Produce News, "National News Weekly for the Produce Industry Since 1897." Headlines include "Industry groups release lettuce safety guidelines," "At Gourmet Garage, the centerpiece is produce" (here's a photo I took there in December 2000), and "Idaho-Eastern Oregon Onion Committee unveils new logo, campaign."

This newspaper is 104 pages! Advertisements for everything related to produce, including "The #1 Executive Search Firm in Produce." What a country!

Anyway, I browsed it over a late breakfast (turkey burger with Cabot cheddar, cantaloupe, banana, water, vanilla ice creme with chocolate sauce, cinnamon Altoid). Found an interesting product called the Mosquito Patch that uses a transdermal patch to deliver 300mg of B1 (thiamine). Apparently research beginning in 1969 showed that most biting insects dislike the smell of B1.

Insect season is almost here – choose your weapons!

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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.

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.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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A New Kind Of Showerhead

March 8, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

I'd like to make a new kind of showerhead, one that has more impact. As a simple example, who decided that showerheads are useful only for cleansing the body? There are many other things a showerhead could do for you. For instance:

• If you never wanted to shave your legs again, or somewhere else (get your mind out of the gutter), then you could set it to "RH" (remove hair) and run the water over the part of your body you want shaved. That's all there is to it!
• Let's say you wanted more hair on your chest, or maybe fill in the slight balding on the top of your head. No problem, set the showerhead to "GH" (grow hair) and run the water where you want more hair.
• A very popular feature would be the "LW" setting (lose weight). Want a little off the belly or bum? Choose the correct setting and run the water where you want the slimming.
• There's also "AW" for adding weight. This is good for when you're going to holiday dinner and you're tired of hearing, "You look too thin dear. And you eat like a bird! Have some more pie." Take a quick AW rinse around your mid-section to add some weight in the morning, and just take it off the next day.
• The "TD" setting (tanning darken) saves you from going to the tanning booth. So you can stay home and read books on winter break, but still get that Bermuda tan.
• The "TL" setting (tanning lighten) offers the pale white goth look. Perfect for trips to city art museums.
• The "FS" setting (firm skin) is less invasive than a lift or tuck, and you can use it on your whole body as your aging skin starts to sag all over. You'd be surprised how useful this turns out to be for the AARP'ers.
• Advanced models could reshape your nose, add "length and girth," change your chest, or remove the tattoos you got during your mid-life crisis.

If we could make this showerhead for the same price as today's showerheads, would you buy one or what? Don't tell me: You would put one in every shower in the house, wouldn't you? You'd insist that your health club install them in every shower stall. You'd tell everyone you knew. Mark my words: This is a killer app for the shower! And, I don't need to tell you: Nearly everyone showers nearly everyday! This product could touch every single person alive. That's what the MBAs call a market!

Of course, there are a few details to work out. You'd have to have a "velocity" setting, so that if you had a lot of weight to lose, you could set it high, but if you just wanted a trim you could slow the process. Otherwise you might over-do and have to constantly switch between the AW and LW settings until you got what you wanted. You could turn out lumpy.

You'd also want child-proof locks or some other parental control system. Your 14-year old daughter is probably not the best judge of whether she's thin enough or not.

And, I suppose, you'd want all this to work while you're cleansing. Most people are way too busy to take a shower and then take another one just to lose 10 lbs! Get real.

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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.

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Getting Real

March 2, 2006 | Products & Opportunites | Software

37signals has released their new eBook on web application development, Getting Real.

Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it's a book of ideas.

I've bought a copy, and I'm sure I'll agree with a lot of it. $19.

Also, continuing to break out of the box, they have new business cards. Weird-shaped business cards are cool, and they make a great first impression, but having experimented with this, and having received many non-standard business cards over the years, I think the humble standard card is the best long-term approach. Odd-shaped cards are easy to lose, hard to store, and soon end up looking dated.

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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.

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Product Recommendation: 3x5 Blank Index Cards

February 18, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Somehow, I ran out of index cards at both my house and my office. Life nearly shut down there for a day. The index card has got to be one of the best organizational inventions ever made. I keep a stack next to the phone and another next to my desk. I keep some in my outdoor jacket pockets. I keep a some in my suit coat pockets. I have a nifty leather holder for swank events so that if I take a quick note it looks formal and official.

A 3x5 card is perfect for an errand list. It's great for taking a phone message or leaving a note to someone else. They work pretty well for quickie screen designs, or mini-outlines of project issues. You can hand them out at group events to capture ideas, unless you need stickies for posting. Torn in half it is a great bookmark, and you can use the other half to bookmark the endnotes at the back of the book. Folded in half it fits perfectly in your front shirt pocket or in with your folded paper money in your front pocket. They fit nicely in your passport holder for important notes and numbers you don't want to lose.

If you buy them in bulk they cost about a tenth of a cent apiece. Even at Staples in a pack of 500 they're still less than a penny apiece. I probably use about a thousand a year, so the cost is cheap and the waste is minimal. I prefer the blank ones, freeform on both sides. They look better out in public, and in any case the lines go the wrong way - if lined I would want them horizontal in portrait orientation, not landscape.

If you want to feel truly organized, you can download the free D*I*Y Hipster PDA, which is a series of templates that print calendars, to-do lists, etc on index cards. Hot tip: If you like the 5.5" x 8.5" format, he's got a fantastic set of free templates for that size too. Both of these incorporate ideas from Steven Covey's Seven Habits, and David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Let us celebrate the humble index card! Understated, practical, polyphonically useful multitasking assistant extraordinaire.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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GTI Project Fast Phase 2

February 9, 2006 | Products & Opportunites

Round two is even weirder than round one:

We are now beginning phase 2 of Project Fast. According to our records, you chose not to participate in phase 1, but we still value your input. To take part in phase 2, please visit:

http://e.vw.com/a/tBD65E4AQU8iiAcrAzLAHVDnpLm/fasturl

I did participate, but maybe I didn't give them my email?

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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'.

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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.

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Product Recommendation: Champion Chip Cookies

February 1, 2006 | Life | Products & Opportunites

Possibly the best mass-market cookie ever: Newman's Own Organics Champion Chip Cookies. Specifically, the Double Chocolate Mint Chip. (Mint Flavored Chocolate Chip Cookies with Chocolate Morsels.) At just two inches diameter - they're so cute! - you can eat dozens and not realize it. Great for all-night blogging!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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'
}

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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?

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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."

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Appropriate Automation

June 4, 2005 | Life | Products & Opportunites | Software

Last night MacFLAC 2.1.2 (OS X) was choking on filenames of this form: dmb2005-06-01.akg483.v3.d1t01.flac

I suspected the additional dots in the filename were the problem, and there were 19 files to fix. Should I do it manually? Nah, let's learn something instead. I fired up the new Apple "Automator" application for the very first time, and literally in ten minutes I had created a set of actions to 1) multi-select the files; 2) copy them to a new place; and 3) find the offending string and replace it.

I searched for "dmb2005-06-01.akg483.v3." and replaced it with "dmb2005-06-01-akg483-v3-"

And less than a minute later 19 files were moved and renamed. It was absolutely amazing. What a dream. It Just Worked. And, I was tired (right before bed), had never used it before, etc. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but Automator made it a breeze.

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Will probably get fired for this

April 22, 2005 | Products & Opportunites

An Apple employee will probably get fired for this series of Slashdot posts on future Apple technology. But thanks - it all sounds very amazing! First post, Second post, Third post. Follow future posts at this link.

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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.

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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.

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Sloppy work

March 30, 2005 | Products & Opportunites

This is why people distrust Quark XPress on Mac OSX (via Macintouch):

[Kalani Patterson] Our tech dept has verified the following: Installing Quark 6.1 on a 10.3.x system (I can't speak for other versions) results in thousands of changed permissions. We captured a logfile from such a repair, which weighed in as a whopping 9.9MB plain text file... opening the file in Word resulted in over 4,000 pages of corrections!

It seems the idiotic Quark installer manages to reset every single program on the drive to world read-write-executable (chmod 777). Ditto after installing the 6.5 updater. Lesson learned: With Quark, repair your permissions before and after each installation and update!

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The Supremes: MGM vs. Grokster

March 29, 2005 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

In the next 24 hours, there will be a lot of press coverage about today's argument at the US Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case. Let's just see if any corporate or commercial or mainstream media coverage is as good as this blog entry. For some reason, I doubt that "objective" journalism will be nearly as comprehensive, or interesting.

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Seasonality

March 21, 2005 | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites | Science

Here is yet another fantastic software application from a small (one-person) firm. Seasonality from Gaucho Software is a $25 desktop weather application.

Who cares, you say. After all, weather.com does that for free. But weather.com is slow, and filled with annoying chartjunk and ads. You have to load lots of pages (read, advertisements) to get the info you want.

Seasonality is a small, tight, targeted application designed for users – not for advertisers. It has a four-day forecast, sunrise and sunset, and radar maps. Best of all it has temperature and windspeed graphs looking back from one day to one year. You can set multiple locations and see them at a glance. The UI is clean and obvious. It's a really nice 1.0 release. I'll play with the 30-day free trial for a couple of days, but on first glance I'm almost certain to buy it. Congratulations to Gaucho!

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Why Feel Righteous About All The Bad In The World?

March 8, 2005 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites

I heard someone was annoyed that tsunami relief collection boxes were being taken down too soon. And I thought of a product opportunity!

We should make a big electronic wall-sized display of the Top 100 "current disasters." It can be ranked by number dead, with arrows up and down for increasing or decreasing trends (like the Billboard chart). Then, people can swipe their ATM cards and punch a button (like a vending machine) to donate to that relief effort. We could have a couple of video screens, one with looping multi-camera views of the disaster itself, another with endless talking heads about just how bad it really is, and a third with exposes on on how fraud and corruption are taking away from each effort. Then, we could have web links for browsing and comparing THIS disaster to other ones that might be similar by location, number affected, type (hurricane, avian flu, earthquake, etc), relief effort ($), etc.

Oh wait, I just described the Internet and cable TV!!

Seriously, there is so much to worry about in the world. Could we focus on our local situation, with the poverty, heroin, homelessness, and crime that locals seem to deny? Why are all the bad things so far away? The problem with instant relief efforts is that it keeps people reactive. Sigh.

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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.)

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Ajax web applications

February 25, 2005 | Products & Opportunites

Jesse James Garrett explains how Asynchronous JavaScript + XML ("Ajax") is changing the face of web-based user-interaction design. Canonical example: Google Maps. Web applications are changing rapidly for the better.

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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?"

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?!

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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?

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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.

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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)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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