JR says... (whether or not anyone is listening)

Building Buildings in Google Docs

2010-06-15T14:29:00.001-05:00

Everyone who knows me knows how excited I get about collaboration - and how especially excited I was when Google Docs' drawing tool was launched as a collaborative editing surface. On a few occasions, I've initiated collaborative scribbling sessions with 3 or 30 people simultaneously, just for the creative kick we all get out of it (an especially active session was triggered by my favorite web-tech blogger, when her quick ping to her followers triggered a flood of creative participants).

When I saw the quality of content a few others had created when we added drawings to the Google Docs Template Gallery, I was inspired to try some myself. So, for a few moments (ahem) per day over the past week, I ventured on a more soloist approach in an attempt to create some useful and realistic-ish drawings of some great city landmark buildings. I initially set out to draw, in rough form, just the Empire State Building. Hmph... that was easy enough - so I just kept going. Transamerica was a bit more challenging, and the Space Needle required some artistic license. My favorite building (second of course to my real favorites), the Chrysler Building, almost made me cry give up - but I persisted and even got that into a form which (when squinting) is acceptable...

So the template drawing is in the gallery (full preview here) - enjoy it, use it, laugh at it, or make fun of my rare obsessive behavior which resulted in these drawings. Maybe next time I'll invite a few dozen of my closest artistic friends to collaboratively create every other landmark building in a tenth of the time ;)

Google Sites - Hiding Site Activity Links

2010-06-08T22:07:00.001-05:00

Whenever anyone asks me how they can easily create a web site - guess what I say...

"Get lost freak!" (no, not really, but give me an excuse to use a quote from a kids movie, and I take it)... anyway, I say Google Sites! It really is an easy way to get content up on the web quickly - so while I may be biased, I think Sites is the most accessible tool with the right balance of features and simplicity for the average web user.

There's one thing still about our current version of Sites that I've encountered enough times that I felt I should just post about it and point people here the next 5 times I'm asked:

"How do I get rid of that Recent Site Activity link at the bottom of every page?!"

It's not the intention of most Site authors to give people a link to all the "recent activity" on a site - they just want viewers to see the current version in most cases.

Well, it's not the most obvious thing to find... Here's how to change that:

Sign in to Google Sites and open your site
Click the "More Actions" button on the upper right corner and select "Manage Site" option in the menu.
On the left side under Site Settings, click the "General" Option.
The 8th option down (or so) is called "Access Settings" - which has 2 selectors, labelled:

Users who can access site activity: and
Users who can access revision history:

Set BOTH of those options to "COLLABORATORS ONLY"
Click SAVE CHANGES (at the top or bottom of the page)

Hope that's helpful... ping me here if not (and I promise not to use a silly line from a kids movie to dissuade you).

How to TURN ON the NEW Google Docs editors

2010-05-12T22:37:00.000-05:00

You may have heard that Google actually offers a product which lets you create, edit, share and collaborate on spreadsheets, documents, presentations and drawings using only your browser (nothing to download, etc... ) - yeah, yeah, I thought so.
You may have heard that there was a recent update to the product which made the editing experience more realtime, more collaborative and just generally faster and better - yeah, I thought so.
You may have heard that if you are a current user of Google Docs, you need to TURN ON these new editors explicitly - no? You didn't hear that part? Well - it's only temporary... but you do need to do that!

Enough people (more than 1) have asked me this question, that I thought I should just post a quick How To, so I can point people here once... even though this post will be useless soon, when the new editors are standard for everyone...

So, the story is different for spreadsheet and document editing...

For Spreadsheets - very simple... When you are editing any spreadsheet, just look for the "New Version" link in the upper right side of your browser screen. Once you click that, ALL your spreadsheets will open using the new version of the spreadsheet editor (except for a small number of those which use a couple of lagging features which are not yet supported). If you decide you need to switch back, do the reverse, and use the "Old Version" link in the upper right.

For Documents - less simple, but easy still.... Click the "Settings" link in the upper right side of your screen. Then, click the "Document Settings" sub-menu. In the dialog which shows up, click the "Editing" tab - and then check the box which says "Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor. Only New Documents will use the new editor... old documents are currently forced to use the old editor. Just for now...

One more thing to know - if you are on a Google Apps Domain (meaning at school or work or in an organization which uses Apps), you'll only see that new document editor option if your domain administrator wants you to ;) - so ask them if you don't see it.

Amazing feats in collaboration (in nature, not technology)

2010-04-15T11:32:00.001-05:00

The Atmosphere conference at Google's Mountain View, CA campus this past Monday was exciting and fun and attended by hundreds of interesting CIOs/CEOs and interesting people - there was even a great set of announcements from our own Google Docs team, which was of course a highlight for me. But, whether or not you believe in cloud computing or have any interest in the technology side, if you have any interest in collaboration, you must watch this video from the conference. This presentation by Janine Benyus, the President of the Biomimicry Institute, was, for me, the most educational, intriguing and awe-inspiring presentation of the whole day (yes, even more than seeing several people edit the same doc or drawing at the same time ;).

It turns out, that as much as we think we're innovating in the area of collaboration, we're actually just catching up and still, perhaps, way behind the collaborative systems present in nature.

Is Twitter today's CB Radio? so what...

2009-10-14T21:10:00.004-05:00

If you were born after 1975-ish (younger than 35-ish), chances are you won't get this post - but if you were a kid (or a trucker) during the 1960's and 1970's, you might relate. It struck me that the CB radio was basically Twitter - just on a different channel (quite literally) - using audio airwaves rather than the character-based internet. "Citizen Band" (CB) Radios were primarily used by truckers to keep in touch with each other and with a base station - maybe a dispatcher. The CB was their practical tool to communicate. Then, kids and geek hobbyists got a hold of them. I got one as a kid - probably in 1973 - when my dad finally gave in to my persistent begging. My dad certainly made me pay for it - but he risked his life on the ladder to install the antenna... I clearly remember him dropping the antenna once as he almost fell off the ladder. But, even bent, the antenna hooked me up to a world of tweets... voices of other people and truckers with whom I purposelessly interacted (that sound too familiar?).

Then, on a long car ride to Florida, the value of the CB became clear. We took the CB in the car and formed several temporal voice relationships with some truckers on the same route - down i95. On more than one occasion, we were warned of trouble, radar traps, accidents - and the previously useless banter became useful - almost necessary in hindsight.

Some other characteristics of the CB which seem analogous:

We had "handles" - names that represented who we wanted to be... sometimes fun, sometimes close to our real personas. The only one I remember was my uncle's: StoneMan. You figure it out.
We had our own language, which I think follows police radio language... like 10:4 ("ok") or 10:20 ("location") or "smokey" (policeman). wow... tricky.
We had Channels - similar in my mind to #hashtags - but much less traceable.
Short Tweets... after all, you could only hold that little button on the side of the mic for so long...
CB's were trendy! (tweet tweet!) There was even a hit song by CW McCall called "Convoy"

This loose analogy between Twitter and the CB radio is not very enlightening, unless you want to believe that Twitter will face the same fate. So what was that fate? I'm guessing that hobbyists found more interesting and extendable platforms (not to mention the Internets ;) and truckers still use the CB in it's original form. If it were searchable, linkable, with more traceable social structures and usage patterns and without any locational limitations, maybe CB radios would have kept growing.... or maybe they did keep growing, right out of that stupid box in my room as a kid and into a chat room, then into that phone in my pocket and then into Twitter.

Maybe someone reading this post will take a hint and help those truckers still using CBs by launching a product that has the familiar, voice-based interface of the CB, but with the added the practical advances of Twitter! Traceable, linkable, bit.ly-able, followable CB Radios! ...
Hmmm. Maybe not.
10:4 good buddy.

Amazon and Rice - an unexpectedly good recipe

2009-09-21T13:04:00.007-05:00

I know Amazon is not just for books, but even I was surprised at this recent purchase made by my "use the web for practical things", non-geek, wife. I came home to find two seemingly unrelated things... First, there were six boxes of our favorite Rice on the counter - previously though to be extinct in this hemisphere due to the fact that our local grocer stopped stocking it. Nice surprise, but where did they come from? Second, there was a medium-sized Amazon box on the floor (you know, in that spot where husband might eventually remove it, but often takes much longer than necessary to do so). "What'd you get?" I innocently asked. "The Rice". The Rice? The Rice came from Amazon.com? whoa.

I know this doesn't constitute a "whoa" if this was a toy or a camera or even a pair of shoes... but Rice?

Logistics and partnerships have quickly made Amazon purchasing one of the most powerful forces in the product distribution space. Any product - even Rice - has a place in Amazon's warehouses and, optionally, on their website. It's been going on for a while - but now that it impacts my grocery list - I'm way impressed. Who cares if my grocer stops carrying stuff? I bet I can just scan all my groceries at home already and... well... you know...
By the way - you MUST try this rice.

You see photo, I see template

2009-08-14T08:54:00.003-05:00

I've always been excited about the templates gallery we have on Docs - but over the past few days, I could probably be more aptly described as *crazy* about templates - presentation templates in particular. It's the "submit your own" thing that pulled me in and got me thinking that practically everything around me "would make a great template". And I really like the way the embedded template summary/thumbnail looks in a blog post or on a site - like this:

It started with the billboard...

That was just a cool way to show simple messages, and it seemed like something others could make use of. I suddenly started seeing other things around me which could also be good backdrops for simple message slide shows - like the side of a barn, a laptop screen, or even a mobile phone! I even went through my own photos and started pulling other things out to make into templates - flowers, shells, frogs - anything with some topical relevance.

Here's instructions on how to make your own (using one of my templates, of course):

I'll try to improve that presentation with screenshots and more detail if people ask... but really - the hardest part is finding and editing the right photos... some might say that I failed at that ;)

Twitter search results are more useful in a spreadsheet

2009-06-12T16:04:00.005-05:00

I know I've overstayed my welcome in this utterly boring space of Twitter API data in a spreadsheet - but I just have to share one more... This time, it's something that might actually be useful (omg, did I just admit that all the other stuff was useless? uh huh).

Let's say, for example, you are a product manager (hey - i know one of those) and you want to know who is tweeting about your product... You do a twitter search! Cool! It's really easy to see recent tweets about your product. You can page through the results, and, in some tools even see a quick info box on the specific Tweeters listed (like location, number of followers, etc). But - let's say you want to calculate the total "reach" or, as @psychemedia called it in a recent tweet, "amplification" of the tweets which match your search?

"There's an app...err... a spreadsheet for that" !

Here's what this spreadsheet does:

- Pulls the most recent (up to) 400 tweets which match your search terms (there's limits in the twitter search API how far in time that will go back) into the spreadsheet.

- It includes: the tweet text, author, date/time

- For the most recent 50 tweets, it pulls the number of followers for the person who tweeted somethhing that matched your search terms... and it adds those up and give you a "Distribution for the most recent 50 tweets". In other words - the number of people following the people who tweeted about the thing you searched for.

- For the most recent 50 tweets, it filters those which are ReTweets (RT) and sums the followers for the authors of those tweets - giving you a distribution of RTs of that concept or tweeter (this is meant mostly for searching for a tweeter's screen name to see the distribution of RTs of that persons tweets).

This is not rocket science (I realize) - but it forms a basis to allow you to:
> get a sense for the amplification of a specific term or product name or tweeter
> focus on the tweets in a search result set which were authored by highly-followed tweeters (if you are a PR/marketing/customer-service person in particular)
> do further stuff with this data that I haven't thought of or had time to do...

Like the other twitsheets I've done - this is just meant to be a starting point for people with a purpose... so if you come up with something useful from this, let me know!

Twitter says: Coldplay follows the unpopular, Oprah doesn't

2009-06-06T10:11:00.009-05:00

Coldplay follows 2,624 tweeters on twitter - who, on average, are only followed by 10 people each. Oprah on the other hand only follows 14 people, who, on average, are followed by 709,350 people (as of this post on 9 June, 2009). I know - I spent the past 14 weeks counting! Nah... actually - there's a cool way to do this in - yes, you guessed it - a spreadsheet.

In tweaking the TweeterScore and other TwitSheets I've discovered that using xpath, you can quickly summarize data from an XML feed into a spreadsheet... that is, you don't have to do the adding and looping yourself.
In one command, you can summarize data across all the entries in any XML feed.
For example... the twitter XML data for "friends statuses" (the recent tweets of all the people you follow) can be grabbed with a URL like this:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/whatsername.xml - and you can do that for any tweeter, to see the statuses of (and other stuff about) all the people they follow...

The actual XML data - in brief form - includes something like this (shortened massively):
<users>
  <user>
    <id>1010101</id>
    <name>Whatsher Name</name>
    <screen_name>Whatsername</screen_name>
    ...
    <followers_count>1031</followers_count>
    ...
    <status>
      <created_at>Tue Apr 07 22:52:51 +0000 2009</created_at>
      <id>1234567890</id>
      <text>brb - going to get ice cream now</text>
      <source><a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">TweetDeck</a>
      </source>
      ...
    </status>
  </user>
</users>

So - for the given tweeter (that you gave as the tweeter-screen-name.xml file name) it gives information for every other tweeter that person follows. A cool way to get the raw data for every person they follow. But the best part is the ability to summarize across all the entries... and XPath lets you do that.

Example: Let's say I wanted to know not just all the names of the people that Oprah follows (no idea why i picked her) - but I wanted to know the average number of people who follow the people she follows. That would tell me whether Oprah is following her fans (unpopular) or other celebs (popular, with lots of followers themselves).
I can do that in a spreadsheet in one command (almost).

I use the ImportXML() command with an XPath command string of "sum(/users/user/followers_count)" to get the total number of followers of all the people being followed by this tweeter... so for Oprah, the spreadsheet formula looks like this:
=importXML("http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/oprah.xml","sum(/users/user/followers_count)")
Divide that by the number of people she follows, and you have the average...
I'll leave it to you to check out this sample spreadsheet which does a whole bunch of this xml manipulation to compare 10 tweeters.

Show-n-Tell gadget in honor of GoogleIO

2009-05-27T02:51:00.009-05:00

Find out more about this gadget... or, If you see nothing above this message, or you just don't get this whole post... please excuse me and move on to your next critical task for today. ;)

TweeterScore: a Tweeter report card

2009-05-19T23:06:00.016-05:00

I made some enhancements to that original Tweetquency spreadsheet I posted, and turned it into something a bit more useful (an overstatement, for sure). While it's fun to look at the profiles of tweeters on Twitter, to see how many people they follow or follow them, it might be more interesting to understand their tweeting habits. How often do they tweet? How often do they reply or include a link? I created this "Tweeter report card" to help do this easily for any Twitter screen name.

We can't use the typical subjects seen in school report cards (thank goodness), so I had to make up some of our own. Here's what you'll see on the TweeterScore report card which spans the past n tweets (which you can set between 5 and 500):

Tweetquency, viewed as a chart (this version, btw, lets you change the charting buckets, in case you want more detail for those tweeters who are too concentrated in the long or short end of the duration curve (sorry - sounds like wall st.).
Follow factor - which is a simple measure of the "cost of getting a follower". It's just a ratio the number of followers one has for each person they follow. A super high number here usually represents a celebrity of sorts.
Quietness - which rates high for the less tweety of us in the crowd (included, quite simply, to make me feel better about my tweetlessness), an inverse measure of the next one...
Chattiness - which is the average number of tweets per day. These inversely represent the same data which is in the tweetquency chart, but on average. The most chatty will have numbers above 20 or more (hi Tara!)
Link-i-ness rates the percentage of recent tweets which contained a link
@Reply-ness shows the percentage of recent tweets which contained at least one @reply.

Beyond pure fun, the usefulness of these measures might arise when, for example, a small business wants to know the habits of another tweeter whom they feel is doing things "right" on twitter. See some examples included here - such as CNN Breaking News - which hardly ever includes a link, has huge followfactor (they don't need to follow others to get people to follow them) and they only tweet on average about once per day (rounded, but still surprised me). Then look at Orli Yakuel, who is constantly pointing people to great products and sites, including links in 62% of her recent tweets. Matt Cutts and Tara Hunt (missrogue) just have huge followings, but one doesn't follow many people and the other does - so their followfactors are quite different. I have some ideas for how the trends seen across types of tweeters would make an interesting thesis either in business or social research... for example, Techcrunch (not shown here) had a Linkiness score of 100% over the 250 tweets I collected. Sounds like a Blogging business trend we might have predicted. I also bet the general shape of a tweeter's Tweetquency chart can be indicative of...(yawn)... ok - I'm boring myself now... on to the next project ;)I'll write more about how this was all done in a future post - and then describe a more useful way to use these mechanics.... but for now, if you want to score a few tweeters you know - Get your own copy of TweeterScore... and find me on the first day of 140tc or at GoogleIO next week if you have questions about all this sheet ;)

Finding the most popular tweeter tools

2009-05-17T16:32:00.003-05:00

I've become a little more interested in Twitter lately - and finally started looking for something to use for tweeting and searching beyond what's on twitter.com. Of course, I began by starting a list (yes, a spreadsheet) of the tweeter tools available - but that list too quickly grew to well beyond 100 choices. So, while interesting, it was too daunting to analyze or try each tool in detail.

Then I realized that I could see what tools people use for tweeting pretty easily - so, if I trust that popularity might be some indication of value, I could at least find a narrow set of popular tools for tweeting (won't help me with search, but hey...)

So - on three separate days this past week, I took a sample of 1,000 tweets - that's 3,000 in total - and counted which tools were used. Not necessarily a statistically significant methodology, but not bad. See my results in the spreadsheet embedded here. I left most of the collection and math to another post - but figured other people might want the results sans all the formula rigor anyway. The "Follower Score" takes into consideration the number of followers of each tweeter - so that a tool used by a heavily followed Tweeter will rank higher. For now the chart just uses the pure Tweet Count to tell me that I should use TweetDeck, TwitterFeed or TwitterFon, if I just want to follow the pack.

I'm starting to collect a few interesting spreadsheets related to twitter these days... more to come on this...

Stock Screen Revisit - howz that doin' anyway?

2009-05-08T22:26:00.006-05:00

I posted back in February about a stock screen I ran using Google Finance - to pick stocks which seemed to have gotten beat up in the market while still having no debt and consistent income growth. (if you look at that link now - it will show the current stocks which meet the criteria I set, not the same stocks as on Jan 27th when I originally ran it).

I realized today that I hadn't revisited that to see how that list of stocks has performed against the market...
Well - here's the deal.

On Jan 27th, 2009, the Dow was at 8174. The S&P 500 was at 846.
On May 8th, 2009, the Dow closed at 8575. The S&P was at 929.
That's a total increase of: 4.9% for the Dow and 9.8% for the S&P 500.

On Jan 27th, 2009, my list of stocks was valued at: $21,929.
On My 8th, 2009, that list of stocks was valued at: $27,351.
That's a total increase of: 24.7%.

oh. ok. So now what? I'll just hop into my time machine - go back to Jan 27th and actually invest? nah. I'm so tired of that time machine. I think it's time to try that same screen a few times... basically it says that stocks that were beat down, which still have some fundamental value and no debt, MIGHT perform better than the market as a whole... Or, at least it did in this one instance... by a healthy margin.
(and, again, I'm not giving any financial advice here, and if historic results were any indication of future results, you might get lucky once or twice, but in the long run you'd lose your shirt most likely).
[Update: here's a link if you want more info on the spreadsheet itself]

My Dad would have loved this... he would have played with it for hours and then he'd go check in on his friends at Silicon Investor to see what they thought... and then he'd make some pretty great trades. I only mention that because I'm thinking about him all day today, this 2nd anniversary of the day he left us to toil away in the markets (and this life) without his incredible love and guidance. Damn.

Chart your Twitter Tweetquency

2009-05-02T09:57:00.005-05:00

I follow a few people on Twitter who pretty much make me feel like I'm with them every step of their day... and I follow some who tweet so infrequently, that I feel lucky if I catch what they say between all the other blabber. That made me think that it might be interesting to see a chart of how frequently we tweet - our Tweetquency. As many of you know, I just can't help myself sometimes - I have to do everything on a spreadsheet.

Click the image to see a view-only version of this spreadsheet.
You can also click here to get your own copy of this spreadsheet which you can edit and play with.

I expect to be playing lots more with this, but here's how this simple version was done... I created a spreadsheet with two sheets. In one sheet (the second one in the file), I used the Twitter API to pull in what's called a user timeline - the same thing you see when you click on a user's screen name in Twitter. This is done using the =ImportFeed() function in Google Docs. The actual formula looks like this:

=importfeed("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.atom?screen_name=" & B1, "items", true)
- where cell B1 holds the user screen name I want to grab.
[note - I also tried to have a count - to pull in a certain number of tweets, but that doesn't seem to work - so this spreadsheet actually is totally dependent on puling in 20 tweets at a time right now - and does the formula 5 times to get 100 tweets to play with. Look at that second sheet and scroll down a bit to look for the repetitive formulas and you'll see this hack.]

Then I have a second sheet (which is actually the main/first sheet you see) which is basically the user interface - it allows you to enter a screen name and shows you the chart once the data in that other sheet is collected.

It's fun to enter a name of someone you follow, just to show you something visually that you already know - that they either blab all the time, or hardly ever ;)

For now, this only looks at the prior 99 tweets... but I'll likely be posting some updates and new versions of this TwitSheet... so let me know if you have other ideas or watch this space...

The ultimate "How Come?"

2009-03-12T21:59:00.004-05:00

In 1995, my father started writing weekly on a site he called "How Come?". It's what I like to think of as (optimistically) one of the first blogs. Even back then, I remember thinking how cool he was for that.

It struck me recently, that if he were still writing "How Come?", he'd have certainly written about slithering Bernie Madoff. In fact, he'd have a whole series on that... and for different reasons than the simple, raw disgust the whole story raises. No, it would be for a much more personal reason than that. It would be driven by the kind of shivery feeling you only see in movies when the main character looks a murderer in the eye. It would be motivated by the same sort of nausea you get when you see tapes of September 11th. It would be about how he had such proximity to this seemingly normal Far Rockaway High School kid, and member of his swim team, who turned out to be so evil that it's practically impossible to accept. It would have sickened my dad deeply to know that he probably treated someone so evil with the natural respect and friendliness he treated everyone he knew. And it would have sickened him even more perhaps to re-read the words written in his high-school yearbook by someone who would prove to be so inconceivably unethical and bad. It gives some measure of relief to know that this criminal never became anything more than a High School acquaintance in the following 51 years... but so unfortunate that others who knew him back then probably became his victims.

On this day, when loathsome Madoff is imprisoned for the rest of his life - and the life of anyone who ever knew him - if my dad were here to write his blog post, he would have certainly quoted one if his favorite albums:

"In all my years of judging, I have never heard before of someone more deserving the full penalty of the law" - Pink Floyd, The Wall.

...and he, of course, would have ended the whole story of this horrible deception with:

"How come?"

Maybe simple product names aren't all they're cracked up to be

2009-03-09T16:49:00.003-05:00

Given the confidence I have in my spam filter, I read my emails in order (or reverse order) using the nifty "open bracket" shortcut in Gmail ("[" = archive and go to previous)... so when a cold-call email comes in, it means I somehow have a connection to the sending company or sender - so I read it.
Today I got one that I had to stare at and read about 4 times before I realized I didn't care about it - which was exactly the opposite of the goal the sender presumably had.

Subject: "Role of Managers in enabling Architecture Center of Excellence(COE) for Business Differentiator"

Huh?
This was the title of a training webinar (I figured out after looking a few times)... Was it the goal of the organizers to create such a complex name that I would feel inadequate about not understanding it and attend the webinar just to be sure I wasn't missing something important? Am I missing a new marketing trend here which says that super-nasty names get twice the attention as simple ones?

uh... yeah - I guess they are right... I never would have blogged about a training class named "Managing Architecture Projects"... (but I might have attended)

Stock screening and watching for now

2009-02-21T22:11:00.007-05:00

I figure there are some stock market bargains out there - somewhere - if you can find companies who's stock price is beat down but who have solid fundamental business measures... and, of course, if you'd otherwise be in Vegas, but can't afford to get there given the economy... So I tried something fun that seemed worth sharing...

I used the Google Finance stock screener to look for companies with:
- stock down more than 50% in the past year.
- Price/Earnings ratio between 0 and 10 (well priced (?), but still positive).
- Positive 5-year Net Income growth rate - still growing earnings.
- No Debt (debt to assets ratio of zero)

It's a really fun thing to do - since you can slide each of the screeners and see the number of companies change in real-time - and you can add criteria from a pretty large pre-selected list of data points.
Here's the exact stock screen I used.

On Jan 27, that screen produced 28 companies...including some old favorites like Ann Taylor, Build-a-bear and Garmin, amongst the others.

I copied and pasted the data into a Google spreadsheet (you knew that, didn't you) - and added a few columns to see what would have happened if I bought a bit of each...
For this first test, I didn't bother trying to weight the different stocks according to anything, not even to even out the amount invested - I just went simple and theoretically bought 100 shares of each... theoretically investing around $21k... and then I added a column to pull the current stock price of each of those 28 companies.

(see the whole spreadsheet here)
Results so far? Well - since Jan 27 through Feb 20, I'd have lost around $1,400 - or 6.5% of my investment... In that same period, the Dow lost 9.9% - so, as Bill Murray says, "uh, I got that goin' for me".

I just like the process - not sure I'll actually act on any of these self-found "tips" - but I like that I can easily find stocks which fit my own dreamed up criteria and then watch them easily in a spreadsheet...

If you want your own copy of that spreadsheet, go to this page where the spreadsheet itself is fully described.

(and, of course, I'm not giving any financial advice here, and if historic results were any indication of future results, you shouldn't listen to me anyway)

My Tracks on the G1 is oh so sweet

2009-02-16T21:31:00.011-05:00

If you're in tech, you've always sought the killer app, and while I know it's a plural (after all, I've got several killer apps near and dear), there's one that hit me right between the eyes this weekend - and I'm telling everyone. It's on my G1/Android phone. It's called "My Tracks". It was developed at Google - but that has nothing to do with my feelings expressed here. Seriously - it could have been developed by Bernie Madoff (oh - more on that soon) and I still might have to love it.

The main reason for my instant adoration of this product is based on my prior experience in custom mapping... Almost exactly a year ago, I painstakingly clicked off about 4 different hikes using the original My Maps feature of Google Maps - trying to re-create the exact path taken through some wooded hikes. At the time I was raving about how cool it was that I could create those maps and share those hikes - but, I realize now why I rarely went back to do more. It was just too much effort (oh - poor me... 5 minutes of clicking a mouse is too much effort... really - I need a dose of pre-tech life). It all comes down to convenience. The number one rule of successful products - convenience.

I mentioned the maps to my brother in law, who told me I could borrow his awesome Garmin everything-GPS device to track my next hike, "I haven't taken the time to figure it out yet - so you can try it and then show me", he says... so I tried it. Got some interesting... uh... "results"... Some elevation info...that's about it... and carrying this awkward, 1970's cell phone looking thing... I never figured out how to actually get the data out of it.

This time - I take my two boys bike riding on a cold day at a nearby park. I take my phone (which I'm carrying anyway, duh), and click My Tracks - Menu - Start Recording. Done. Put it in my pocket and never looked at it again until 60 minutes later when we got back to the car. Stop Recording. More - Send to Google - Send to My Maps. Done.

I get home and bring up My Maps. OMG. In an area which was otherwise blank, I now see my tracks around the park's different bike trails... I even see one anomaly - a single track across the grass when I was trying to play a trick on my kids to get ahead of them. Busted! Then I click on the push pin in the area of the parking lot, where our ride ended... OMG (again) - Time moving, average speed, average speed when moving, elevation traveled, min elevation, max elevation, etc. Wow. "Craig!" I yell to my Bro'in-law - who's with us with his kids that day, also a gadget freak and the owner of that, uh, great GPS device I mentioned earlier. "Check this out"... "wow". I know he went home and put that ol' GPS device up on ebay.

Anyway - you'll see some of the pics I've included of that first experiment including the detailed riding around in circles I did in the park... which, unintended, is a great show of the detailed capture used in this killer app. I'm suddenly motivated to hike, to bike, to walk anywhere... I'll never leave my G1 home again (anyone wanna buy a first gen iPhone with Jelly Car pre-installed?)

Plastic Rating System - unhealthy opinions vs. facts

2009-02-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

There was something bugging me when I got back from the recent conference I attended... but it wasn't until I refilled the re-usable water bottle from my office that I remembered what it was. Those two gentlemen sitting near me during a break were talking loud enough for me to hear and become interested: "Hey Charlie, I'm ok - my bike bottle is a 2 and my other bottle is a 1 - so thanks for the info". Once it was clear that they were discussing the safety of plastic drinking bottles, I had to ask them to inform me. They told me that the codes on the bottom of every plastic bottle indicate different plastics which correlate to the safety of the bottle.. "1's are the safest and 7's are the most dangerous, generally", they said. "Wow - thanks guys - I'll take a look when I get home!".

So a few days later, with my new "green" water bottle in hand, I remember this discussion and flipped over my bottle - huh? "SEVEN!?", I said out loud. Time for some research, since it's hard to believe I would be given a water bottle which is good for the environment but bad for me. Well - it turns out I wish I had gotten the contact info for those two gentlemen - no, not to yell at them - but to tell them the facts. The codes are there as information for recycling - to identify the resins which make up the bottle. They're not intended to indicate safety.

The codes do provide, in a few cases, enough information to know you should avoid a certain bottle - for example, Code 3 is PVC (PolyVinyl Chloride) and Code 6 is PS (Polystyrene) - those seem to be universally accepted as the "avoid at all costs for food and drinking" type. Code 7, it turns out, is the "Other" type, which is a catch all to mean "either really dangerous (Polycarbonate) or really safe or something in between, depending on what it's made of". Ah, really helpful. And while Code 1 (PET/PETE - Polyethylene Terephthalate) is the most common for recyclable drink bottles in the US, just don't re-use it, heat it or scratch it. It seems the other codes - 2, 4 and 5 - just haven't had any conclusive research as of yet. Does that make them safer than those we know can harm you?

Regarding the relative "safety" of one type of platic versus another - particularly when using the recycling codes as virtually your only consistent guide - the LfT-Group (Live for Tomorrow) sum it up best:

"You may wish to seriously consider your – and especially your children's – use of plastics numbered 1, 3, 6 and 7 (polycarbonate), all of which have been shown to leach dangerous chemicals. This does not necessarily mean the others are completely safe, just that they have been studied less to date. So if you have to use plastic, it is safest to stick to numbers 2, 4, 5 and 7 (other than polycarbonate) whenever possible."

In my quick search for information (not the same as "research"), I found a few more links worth sharing with those of you who cared enough to read to here:

Health facts by each recycle rating
Lots of health information by each recycle rating
Complete information by each recycle rating (pdf)
Plastic bottle quick FAQ by type
Plastic bottle safety FAQ
General information on plastic rating system (wikipedia)
Good article on plastic containers
Be plastic-aware - dangers of each type
International Universal Recycling Codes
Official Recycle coding system from Hong Kong Environmental Protection Dept.

(NOTE: The folowing are internet sites of the American Chemistry Council® (ACC), which represents the leading companies engaged in the business of chemistry, including significant business groups such as the Plastics Division and the Chlorine Chemistry Division.)
American Chemistry Council's (ACC) Facts on Plastics site.
ACC Rumors and Myths about Plastics
ACC 2006 United States National Post-Consumer Plastics Bottle Recycling Report
ACC Official Resin Codes Chart (PDF)

Embed a form in your blog post to collect data fast

2009-02-09T13:45:00.003-05:00

In a recent post regarding using forms to collect data easily, a couple of people thought I should have used my own advice for one of the collection methods - that is, to embed the actual form in a web page - in my blog post in this case. Great idea...

So - below is an embedded version of my Blogging Survey. Took me literally 30 seconds to get the embed code from the "Form" menu of the spreadsheet. This is just a sample survey, but feel free to answer this survey and I'll post results soon if I get enough respondents.

Loading...

The value of Collaboration learned from political campaigns

2009-02-09T13:14:00.005-05:00

I would never have expected to see anything related to the political process as a model for business collaboration - but I guess this is part of "change". Just a couple of (old-ish by now) links to anecdotal evidence of how powerful web-based collaboration can be. In these examples, it was Google Docs (spreadsheets) used as a tool in the 2008 US presidential campaign process...

From Huffington Post:
"While the presidential contenders had enlisted technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, which all received a great deal of attention, it was Google Docs which had the most amount of influence, in spite of receiving the least amount of attention.
... The Obama campaign was aware that this had become a major player in the grassroots space, sparking a revolution in the way people self-organize and conduct grassroots efforts and political campaigns. Since a campaign is constantly on a quest for money and voters, Obama's grassroots organization valued agility over hierarchy; online collaboration became a necessity."

From DailyKos:
"All of us have access to the data, and Google has quick and easy ways to share that data (while retaining the privacy of our volunteers) with the Oakland Campaign headquarters.
... With the advent of Google Docs, what was once a fact of life in community organizing, the lost, corrupted and out-of-date sign-in sheet, has become a much more powerful tool."

Small Business Web Tip: Collect data quickly using a web form

2009-02-04T19:14:00.017-05:00

At the Small Business Technology Summit this week, I was asked "what's the one action these small businesses can do today to have an impact on their business" (I put that in quotes - but I'm sure I've tweaked the question a bit to match my answer ;).
I answered, "Create a form - a survey - for free, which you can email to your customers to immediately find out what they think of your product or service". A bunch of people asked me for more information - so I figured it would be useful to post a quick "Web Tip" here... If you don't feel like reading, there are also plenty of public videos on this topic done by others.

If you want to first get a sense of what one of these Forms would look like, you can answer my example survey about blogging. If you do, try to really answer it, and maybe we'll get some useful results I can share.
The below might seem like a bunch of steps, but this can literally take 10 minutes - it's the thinking about which questions to ask and what multiple choice questions to offer, which is the hard and important part.

How to collect data for free using Google Docs Forms:

Step 1:
Go to Google Docs - http://docs.google.com
Sign-in or get an account. You need a google account, but that doesn't mean a Gmail account necessarily (see my old video on that topic).

You should see your list of Docs - if you've used the service before - or an empty list (which, actually then, isn't a list at all if there's nothing in it... it's just a frame)

Step 2:
Click the "New" dropdown button on the upper left - and choose "Form".

You'll be taken to a new window which is the "Form Editor". It starts you off with an automatic first question called "Name" - just to remind you that you may want to ask (optionally) for the respondants name - and leaves you in edit mode on question #2.
When editing the form - you edit one question at a time (click the pencil button on the right) and click "done" as you finish setting up each question.

At this point you can go back and edit the first question (example - add some help text to tell people that "Name is optional, but helps me know who you are").

The default field type is "Text" - but you *should* use multiple choice or scale questions where possible - as those give great quantitative summaries - and if you want people to type a more descriptive answer, change the question type to "paragraph text".

Step 3:
Finish entering all your questions and click the "Save" button at the top. Keep the form rather short if possible - nobody likes to answer a long survey - and you won't want your second survey to be ignored if you decide to do another one in a few weeks/months.

Step 4:
Make your own confirmation message. After someone responds to your form, they get a generic "Thanks!" message - but you can edit that to create your own message. You can include valid URLs to have a link on that page. At the top of the form editor, there is a "More Actions" button. Click that and select the option "Edit Confirmation".

Step 5:
Send the form! You have a few ways to get the form into the hands of your potential respondents:
1 - Send the form using email... If you select the "email this form" option, you can enter the email addresses of respondents and they will get the form EMBEDDED in their email message if they use Gmail or Yahoo mail (those are the only popular mail systems which allow that) - or - they will get a link to a separate web page which contains your form.
2 - Embed the form on your blog or website. The other option in the "more actions" button is "embed" - that gives you the HTML code you can embed in your blog post, blog template or website so people can answer the form directly from there.
3 - Get the URL of the form and IM/mail it directly to your potential respondents. The URL can be copied from the bottom of the form editor screen, where it says "You can view the published form here:".

Step 6:
Go see your form. Click on that link at the bottom of the Form Editor to make sure your form looks as you intended. That's how others will see it. [NOTE: You can test the form, but there is currently an issue where the form response count will not be reset, even if you remove your test response]

Step 7:
See your responses! The form you created actually created a spreadsheet in the background. After saving your form - close that form editor window and go back to your Google Docs list. Find your form/spreadsheet on the docs list and click it to open it. You'll see a spreadsheet with the questions you asked as the column headers (with one additional column as the first, which is the timestamp of each reply). If you already sent the form out, the spreadsheet may already contain responses which have been received. If you hang out there for a while, you may even see responses appear in real time (that's fun).

Step 8:
See your reponse summary. From the spreadsheet, click on the "Form" menu at the top and click on "Show Summary". That takes you to a page which summarizes, in chart format where feasible, the responses to each question.

Step 9:
Set up notifications so that you know when people respond to your form.
Click the "Share" button (on the upper right of the spreadsheet window) and select "Set notification rules". In that dialog, select the options "[when] A user submits a form", and choose either "Email - dialy digest" or "Email - right away", depending on how many responses you expect to get and how much you want to spam yourself.

Some Tips:

> *Do not* try to re-arrange the questions on the spreadsheet itself. There are issues where the form and the spreadsheet get out of sync if you do that. Re-arranging should be done from the form editor only - where questions can be dragged and dropped into the order you want them.

> There is not yet a way to restrict people to filling out the form only once.

> *Do not* "PUBLISH" the resulting spreadsheet or set it to "Anyone can view" unless that's really what you need. Those settings are NOT necessary to make the form broadly available, and it might let people see the results of the survey which you may not have intended.

> If you are HTML-ready, you can take the Form page and tweak the HTML to give it style or additional logic - just *never* change the POST URL or the NAME ATTRIBUTES on the HTML form object in that page. You'll also need your own place to host the updated HTML page. This isn't something you'll be able to get much support on from the Google Docs help center - so only do this if you are feeling lucky ;)

Have fun!

Small Business Summit in NYC

2009-02-03T16:39:00.009-05:00

I attended the Small Business Summit in NY yesterday. Met many great people and had an opportunity to be on a Panel with Michael Shultz (Microsoft) and Harry Brooks (Network Solutions) moderated by Brent Leary (CRM Essentials and Business Technology Radio). I Had a chance to express some of my thoughts about how web-based social media and collaboration tools create opportunities for people to "keep and nurture loyal customers" (that was the official title - though we covered a wider set of concepts). Also got some great reminders about what small business focus on every day - and in particular, the importance of the search and ads side of the web. That stuff is highest on the small businesses "need to know, need to improve" list in most cases. More coverage of the conference can be found here.

There were a couple of points made during and after our panel which probably warrant more instruction and link or two for those of you who couldn't understand my babbling and happen to find me here... Here's two I can think of - but ping me here if there were others.

Create a Form on Google Docs
I suggested that you "Poll your customers and get their opinions directly and immediately [into a spreadsheet]"... Here's a link to the Google Docs Help Center on that topic. I'm also going to post a quick how-to here on my blog soon, since so many people have asked me for detailed instructions and a sample. (look for that soon)
[Update Feb 5: Here's that "Creating Forms" web tip post]

Use YouTube to collect videos about your product or service
I mentioned how you can create a channel on YouTube to collect videos about a specific topic, which could be useful for prospective customers, particularly when current customers have created those videos. We did that on the Google Docs team - we created the Google Docs Community channel. It's good for customers, for discovery and for the video creators who want more views/exposure.

Last Minute, Automated-ish, Superbowl Pool

2009-01-31T10:59:00.008-05:00

It's the Saturday before Superbowl Sunday - and you wish you had created a box pool for you and your friends. Too late, right? Nah... anything is possible... (if you've never been in a superbowl box pool - either stop reading or read on to check it out).

Here's an online way to do it (I know there are "real" sites for this): I created a SuperBowl Box Pool spreadsheet which has an online FORM for people to quickly participate... People fill out the form and they get assigned a random box in the pool - then, when all boxes are taken (there's 100 boxes, so it's ok to take more than one), the score values are randomly assigned and the names are again shuffled...
Then, as I enter the scores at the end of each quarter, the winners are identified automatically (as if that would be too hard to do by hand - sometimes I'm almost pathetic in my need to create useless spreadsheet formulas)

If you want to play in my pool (just for fun... no "points" to be won here!), just FILL OUT MY FORM and then go SEE THE BOX POOL to see which random boxes.

If you want your own - just go to THE SAMPLE and make your own copy (File menu, "create a copy" option... you'll need a Google Docs account).

If I get 100 boxes filled, I'll post the winner here after the Superbowl!

[Update: If you use the sample to run one of these on your own, be careful once the box numbers are generated... as they could easily be re-generated in-advertently if a change is made to the sheet which forces a re-calc - like inserting columns or other things. This shouldn't impact anything until you generate the random score numbers ... Once you take that startup step as per the instructions, don't touch the thing except to enter scores ;) and PRINT IT to be sure... ]

[Update 2/2/2008: And the winner was - Curious George. I would have won the half-time score, which is no wonder since I had to take almost half the boxes between myself and people close enough that they may as well have been me... Well - maybe I'll start collecting players for 2010 ;) ]

Losing a friend is less fun

2009-01-29T14:32:00.002-05:00

When I first added Friend Connect to my blog it was fun watching as people (slowly) became "members" of my blog, and how some of them became my "friends". The number of people in both those groups is rather small, but the latter (friends) group is really, really small - so small in fact, that when my favorite blogger "un-friended" me (ouch!), I noticed pretty fast. Was it something I said? Nah - can't be - as I haven't said much of anything here in too long... Aha! That's it! What could be more offensive to a prolific blogger than a blog which sits there in silence? I get it.
Ok - you've made your point. I promise to post more. Can we be friends again? Oh, this is tricky... you have so many Friend Connect members on your site (2858... er... 2859..) that I can't find you to formally ask you back. hmmm... oh wait - there you are! You are still on my blog's easy to browse (read: short) members list... whew... Tricky business this friends 2.0 stuff.

Friend Connect now open

2008-12-08T15:50:00.005-05:00

I had many people ask me about Friend Connect when I put it on my blog as part of an early beta, so I figured I should post quickly about it again... While it's been pretty cool up until now, there were only a few blogs which had it - so a bit less "connecting" on my blog. But now, anyone can add it to their site.

If you haven't noticed it, or don't even know what I'm talking about - it's those to little windows (gadgets) on the right side of this blog. The first shows people who "follow" my blog, and the second provides a place to quickly comment on the blog or on a specific post (comments on a specific post page are separate from other comments).

Check out the Friend Connect blog post to get the accurate info.

Spreadsheet visualization of industry-sector political contributions

2008-09-27T22:08:00.005-05:00

The Sunlight Foundation posted a great video showing how money has flowed into the Republican and Democratic parties from different industry sectors over time. In normal circumstances, I might have said "(yawn) pass the nuts"... but... they used the Motion Chart in Google spreadsheets to visually show the changes in these flows over time. If you love data, whether you're politically interested or not, you gotta love this visualization... I'm embedding it here for convenienve... full credit to Sunlight for this specific video, to Gapminder team and the Trendalyzer (Motion Chart) team at Google responsible for this great chart type and to Yossi for pointing this example my way ;)

From the Sunlight Foundation Blog:

The gadget gallery has this chart type and others where you can get your own examples to play with...

An unexpected political post with an expected spreadsheet

2008-09-26T23:21:00.003-05:00

I never talk or post politics - but on this eve of the first presidential debate, after a semi-wild week of news (semi? huh...), I figured I may as well fix up that electoral vote calculator I've been toying with and let others have a go at it...
If you want your own copy in your Google Docs account - there's a link at the top of the full published version. With your own copy, you can change who you think will win each state to see the impact on the electoral vote.... quite fun.

Summary - according to CNN as of Sept 26, 2008:

See the full version...

The initial data comes from CNN's Political Site - just after this first presidential debate which took place tonight between Barack Obama and John McCain. There, they have an electoral vote map - showing which states are either strong or leaning to one candidate or the other, or undecided. On their map, you can click the state to change the result.

Brainless marketing to parents

2008-09-03T06:59:00.007-05:00

Please look at this picture - and imagine if you can being a parent (if you're not) and receiving this amongst the piles of mailed marketing waste that enters your home un-invited. Why do you think this one got my attention? What's wrong with this marketing story and this picture?

In case you can't see it clearly, it's two kids playing with toys in the backseat of a car. "Make Getting there half the fun" is the headline of this little story... What's the other half of the fun - seeing these two kids go flying past their safely restrained parents and through the windshield? The genius who put this little marketing story together forgot to strap these kids in! As a parent, I can tell you that there's a visceral reaction to seeing kids in a car without their seat belt buckled... And, in this case, it's so obvious (again, to a parent) since these kids are likely small enough to require (by law in some states, I think) to be in a childs car seat. And don't tell me the car in this picture is not moving... the door is closed and the sun is shining and it's clearly summer (the kids are in shorts) - so the alternative is that they are playing with toys in a parked, closed car in the summer sun... nah - let's stick with the seatbelt badness...

If you plan to sell toys to me, try to avoid that "we don't care about kids safety" angle... not effective.

Go wide (or narrow) with your Blogger Template

2008-07-08T16:12:00.006-05:00

When I created this blog, I couldn't seem to find a blogger template that had both the look I wanted AND full-width (filling the browser window as it re-sizes - both wider and narrower)... So, I took the template I liked the most (thanks Darren) and then fiddled with the template code a bit to make it fill the width of the screen the way I wanted it to and to fill the empty space between the top header, the main content area (the posts) and the right pane (side-bar).

A few people have asked me which template I used (I know, hard to believe), so I am finally posting both a sample blog using that template and instructions on how to use my adjusted template... I figure at least I'll have a place to point the people who have asked for this.

The sample blog shows how the template looks and gives a link to the template file itself... Don't be scared off by the colors, as those can easily be adjusted using the blogger layout tools from the dashboard.

Explaining death is hard enough...

2008-06-26T17:10:00.004-05:00

It was a special moment - a memorable one - when my sons both got their first pets as birthday gifts from their Aunt. A first pet is just so magical - no matter what kind of pet it is. In this case, it was 2 hermit crabs - crab-like critters who live inside, and drag around, abandoned snail shells. For a couple of weeks, my sons were rather good with them - the younger for *not* using his crab as a stringless yoyo ;) and the older one for thoughtfully feeding and caring for both of them.

From the moment those creatures entered our house (the crabs, not my kids) I knew their longevity would be unpredictable, and I'd eventually need to have that dreaded, but important, "what is death" conversation with my kids - I just didn't think that day would come so soon.

So... the other night, after the kids went to sleep, while cleaning the "crabitat", I picked up my older son's crab, and the limp limbs and body of the crab just fell out of the snail shell. I practically jumped back, I was so shocked... and then I felt really sad that my kids would have to deal with this reality.

The next day, I called them both to the tank, kneeled in front of them, and said to my older son, "Your crab is no longer with us - he died yesterday". Well - he went through the classic stages of mourning... demanding a new crab "now", then jealous that his brother still had a crab, then anger (that I killed it, of course), then, finally, sadness, followed by the logical decision that he didn't want another crab at all.... Ok, maybe these aren't classic stages - but this was all new to me.

They actually both dealt with it well... so, after the boys were sleeping, I began preparations for putting the crab into his final resting place (NO! Not the toilet!) - a small paper bag, that we would bury together in the backyard.... I picked up the crab's snail shell again and turned it over... and saw.... AHH! The crab! Alive! I had this sudden nervous energy... I kept thinking "boy, that death conversation was hard enough - but the resurrection conversation is going to be even harder!"... so I grab their "Hermit Crabs for Dummies" book (you think I'm kidding?) and quickly realize that I made a classic, well documented mistake. Molting hermit crabs are often mistaken for dead. Whew... It's not resurrection, it's just the "daddy made a stupid assumption that when a creature's limbs all fall off that it is dead" discussion.

Anyway - the kids were pretty happy about the end result... young son may have been slightly confused that this previously dead crab was now alive, but older son said "I told you he was molting!"... and you know what? He did... a few days earlier - after he read that darn book for daddies - I mean dummies.

A Friend is a Friend - but...

2008-06-25T22:22:00.009-05:00

The lyrics of this lesser-known, but great Pete Townshend song keep running through my head practically every time I use any web site with any form of "friends" community... (doesn't hurt that it's on my ipod at the moment)...

"When eyes met in silence - a pact can be made"

I visit facebook after a few weeks' absence, and see that I have 6 or 7 new friend invitations. Of course, human nature strikes first - and I think "yay!" - and then I see that I only actually really know a couple of them... so I quickly accept those and then click on the names of the others to jog my memory - clearly I must know them, but just don't remember... let's see

"A lifelong alliance - that won't be betrayed"

This first person's name actually sounds familiar, and we do apparently have 3 friends in common - hmmm... two of whom are popular bloggers with, in one case, 5,000 friends (I think I just saw the facebook friends limit)... so now I notice that this 'friend to be' of mine has 2,300 friends himself...

"A friend is a friend - nothing can change that"

...and so, clearly this person really is depending on my friendship ;) - so I accept (for the first time, actually giving in to becoming friends with someone blindly - unless my memory is really failing me here and I actually was roommates with this person in college or something). Hey - a new "friend" - what could be bad about that.

"Arguments, squabbles - can't break the contract..."

Then I look at the profiles of some of these other friend invitations - hey, they're pretty friendful too... 1800, 1300, etc... is that good or bad? Clearly some of those hundreds of electronic friends are actually friends - but can they tell the difference anymore?

"...that each of you makes - to the death to the end"

And now I feel compelled to look at my own profile. 131 friends. huh. Is that too few? or is it too many? I remember a while back, when I stumbled upon my proile page on YouTube, it boldly announced back to me in something close to a 24-pt font,
"You Have No Friends".

I stared at that message for a while and really contemplated it with an ever so slightly broken spirit (drama: mine)... thinking about my friends... Luckily, I was able to conjure up a few real friends at the time and closed that window with a slightly higher velocity, middle-finger click. Interesting that when I went back to find that message again (wish I got a screen shot), it was no longer there... even though I still have no YouTube Friends...

"Deliver your future - into the hands of your friend"

So, I'm sure, as I know you are too, that online friends are a mix of offline-online friends and online-only friends... but I'm also wondering to what extent the simple peer pressure to have lots of friends has driven the activity - the compulsion - to connect to people online. Clearly there is monetary motivation for bloggers and recruiters. Fair. But for the rest of us - once you go beyond your "real" friends and acquaintances - and start inviting - or accepting - online friends... what's the motivation? Is the usefulness of that action becoming diluted - and will we reverse the process eventually - where everyone online is everyone's friend - and then the compulsive action can be to trim down the list to the smallest possible list of true friends.

In the real world - when my laptop is off - YouTube(0) isn't right, but it is closer to the truth than Facebook(131)... Being a good friend to a dozen or so people is plenty if they really are friends.

"A friend is a Friend - nothing can change that" - Pete Townshend

I really do have more than 4 friends (I think)

2008-06-13T08:43:00.003-05:00

You've probably noticed that I added this new feature to my blog which lets people become "members" of my blog... It's the Google Friend Connect product. The features I'm using let people show interest in my blog and even leave comments - not on a specific blog post, but on the blog as a whole. It definitely adds a level of connectivity to my blog which was missing before. Readers can now connect more directly and tell others about my blog through their membership...
I love it! but...
... like other online social networking tools and sites, there's a level of transparency that can either be encouraging or seemingly require defensive justification.

In the case of my friend Orli, it must be encouraging! She's got tons of friends immediately joining her site as members, and even press coverage of her use of this new tool..

In my case - uh... I really must say that, uh, all my friends are not on the web... well, actually, they are... but they're pretty busy, you know... no time to become members of my blog.. 'cause that would take like 2 clicks... well... maybe all my friends are on vacation without their laptops... oh, wait... How many "real" friends do I actually have?... let me see... (1, 2...uh...5... hmmm....... 6...) - yeah - 6. So... let's see... 6 members today, not including me and my mom (seriously)... So, on a percentage basis of real-life friends to Friend Connect members, I'm pretty popular!!

Spreadsheets are sexy?

2008-05-31T20:39:00.003-05:00

The Google IO conference got plenty of press coverage, as this CNet video proves... It was actually a fun interview, but what was i doing with my hands? Is it better to lock them behind my back or let them fly around uncontrollably in front of me? ;)

In another video, a local reporter with independent station KRON4 in CA used some special effects (ok, just some editing) to avoid my flying monkey arms... See that video clip on the KRON4 site - Tech Report with Gabriel Slate (what a cool name).

The two things I liked about this conference: First, it really did feel a bit like a day at Google (with a little bit more junk food than normal), and second, the focus seemed to stay with educating developers rather than getting across a corporate message.

me? biased? probably... but trying not to be.

Lots to learn at Google IO conference

2008-05-28T13:55:00.006-05:00

If you're looking for one of your web developers, you can probably find them in San Francisco at Google IO... a conference for developers to learn more about Google development tools and web services. Reported in varying levels of detail, and focused on many vertical topics, by plenty of bloggers... so no reason for me to give detail... but the energy here is very high and the sheer number of cool tools to learn and use could keep me busy for a decade.

I realize now that adding FriendConnect to my blog last week was a good exercise in learning more about the Social tools being made available to web sites and to people who trust their friends more than they trust other sources. If you want to start somewhere - start there... It's those two boxes on the top right of my blog - where you can see who has "joined"... think about how useful it might be, when you're using the web or web-accessible services/information, to be able to ask "what do my friends use? Who do they trust? what do they think? Expect to see this in more places than my insignificant blog so you can get that advantage of friendly advice and guidance for any web page, business listings, etc... and be able to combine the power of your relationships with your activities on the web. Have Fun.

Heaven on Earth for some of us

2008-05-21T21:24:00.004-05:00

There's a special place, near Princeton, NJ, which my Dad and Mom discovered (as far as I'm concerned, it didn't exist until they discovered it). They would go there together constantly, as it was close to home for them - in fact, it was 'home' for them (if, like my Dad, you listen to Roger Waters and believe that "everybody got somewhere they call home").

There's art amongst the trees and ponds and open fields. There's vision and beauty and mystery. There's love and friendship and childhood dreams. It's practically an imaginary place you'd visit in your dreams - but it's all right there for you to touch and experience with people - which is probably the part that makes it so special. It sheds the one most regrettable part of a great or mysterious dream - the inability really share the experience with anyone.... At this place, called "Grounds For Sculpture", you can share it.

That's what my parents did. They shared this place with each other and they shared it with us ("the kids")... My Dad always told me about this place and gave me that "Jonathan... in your wildest dreams..." pitch (which I just loved), but, regrettably, I never got to experience it with him... so I guess that part will always make this place seem just a bit dream-like for me.

On the day these photos were taken - which, by the way, don't do justice to the place like my Dad's photos did - we happily and permanently made this a place to share with my Dad. We dedicated a bench to him - at his favorite spot, overlooking the sailboat in the pond, in the foreground of the painter's scene. His best friends and family helped make this happen - and now, we all have a new place to sit... a new home...
Thanks, Mom.

Convert Anything on a spreadsheet

2008-03-24T21:46:00.004-05:00

Ok, maybe not 'anything' - but pretty close... It uses a lesser known feature of the Google search box. For example, If you want to know how many feet there are in 12 meters, you type "12 meters in feet" and you get your answer. Or let's say your british friend tells you he has a friend who wants to get to know you better - and you say "describe him" and he says, "right... he's got a good personality, and...well... he weighs 14 stone". Of course, instead of seeming like a naive American (of course not, not you), you quickly go to the google search box and type "14 stone in pounds" and then decide... and maybe then you can use this same method to figure out how many USD (yes, that's dollars) you'll need to buy dinner in GBP (of course, that's pound sterling) - it's not a pretty answer.

Well - now that you know that trick - here's the real trick. In a spreadsheet (yes, on Google, of course) you can send that query to the Google search page in the background, get back the answer, parse it and display the answer in your spreadsheet. All this through the magic of the "ImportHTML()" formula.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to do that here - but I will give you a link to get your own copy of this sample spreadsheet (yes, you'll be asked to login to your google account, if you aren't already, to get this spreadsheet added to your doc list).

I must admit, I've had this fun thing (wha? you don't think this is fun?) lying around for a bit - but I figured I should clear the decks given that I've got some new ideas to post...

Digital Culture what?

2008-03-10T07:11:00.008-05:00

In February, I was interviewed on a show (which, for you wine enthusiasts, is the equivalent of the second label of Good Morning America) called Good Morning America Now - shown on cable TV and on the web. This was a bit of a tanget for me, but there was definitely some relevance to cloud computing and the intersection of our social lives and the web.

Funny part #1 was to see how sensationalism drives the media. It's clear from the way they framed this story, that it was deemed interesting only due to the snippets of sensationalism which could be drawn from a consumer survey. Funnier part #2 was how they titled me in the first half of the clip... almost Seinfeld-worthy.

Whatever the result, it was really a fun experience...

A dinner-time story to break the monotony

2008-03-04T23:10:00.004-05:00

I looked at my blog today... and I didn't like what I saw... a very sparse set of posts, all of which seemed like boring recalls of what I've been doing in the world of conferences (ouch! I just yawned so wide I pulled a muscle)...
so... just to break that cycle... here's something complete irrelevant:

I haven't felt that feeling of uncontrollable laughter in a while - but last night at the dinner table, my four-year old son triggered it.
he: "Daddy - I saw a squirrel today.."
me: "oh, really?"
he: "yeah...it was dead"
me: "awww... that's sad"
he: "his eyeball popped out"
(I swear, he said it so matter of factly... and at the Dinner table!... and I'm supposed to be the "that's not proper dinner-table talk" daddy, and instead I'm trying to hold back extreme hysterics)
me: (bouncing up and down from in-audible laughter) "oh... uh... that's not great dinner table talk..."
he: "yeah... and a bird was eating it"
me: all-out laughter... no holding back... too much pain...

Sometimes it just feels so good to be 4 again.

Web Services at UPenn's Wharton

2008-03-03T06:10:00.004-05:00

I spent my Friday at the Business Technology Conference at Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania). Besides feeling under-dressed next to all the MBA students in suits, it was a very satisfying day - I met a new group of great people and learned things about activities in this area (Web Services) which is slowly becoming a standard part of the foundation of business and life.

The Panel I participated in was really high energy (I thought) and interactive. It was entitled: Internet & Web Services Panel, Subtitled: The Web as Platform: How Cloud Computing Will Change the Software Industry. The Panel was moderated by Jeff Barr - Senior Web Services Evangelist, Amazon.com, and the panelists were:

Alex Chan - Director, Connected Systems Division, Microsoft
Ramon Estopina - Strategy Director, BT Design, BT
Adam Gross - Vice President of Platform and Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com
Rick Treitman - Entrepreneur in Residence, Adobe Systems
Me

Too bad there seems to be no recording or video of the panel - and not even too much blogging activity about the content, 'cause I think there were some good questions and good points made. If you attended, feel free to comment to either counter that point or provide some detail that you might remember (....crickets...).
Hey Rick - How'd you get the title? I gotta get me one a those ;)

More conferences and panels about web 2.0

2008-02-11T17:54:00.000-05:00

Somehow it seems I've gotten into the habit of logging my participation on conference panels and speaking opportunities here on my blog... not in a timely manner in most cases, but logging nonetheless. So let's continue the tradition with two conferences and panels from the past 2 weeks:

Today (hey - that is timely!) I was at the Web Services on Wall Street conference, on a panel entitled "Beyond Web 2.0" (with a much longer subtitle which related it back to the enterprise). On this panel, I joined Tom Steinthal from BSG Alliance (Moderator), Marc Adler from Citigroup, and Michael Ogrinz from Bank of America. This session really dug up some old (for me) large corporate investment banking memories and challenged me to relate all that to my current role... interesting... fun...

Two weeks ago, I was at the Web 2.0 conference put on by WebGuild in Santa Clara, CA two weeks ago - my panel was called "Future of the Web Office", where I was joined by Raju Vegesna and moderated by Ismail Ghalami.

Computing in the Cloud at Princeton U

2008-01-21T09:42:00.000-05:00

I participated on a Panel at Princeton University last week, as part of the "Computing in the Cloud" workshop, hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy. Definitely a valuable experience for me... I met great people and learned from other panelists and participants. The panel I was on - moderated by Andrea LaPaugh and called "What's Next", included Reihan Salam and Jesse Robbins - both of whom are great story tellers and brought completely different perspectives to the subject.

Overall, panelists and attendees of the workshop conveyed a general net positive attitude, balanced with useful caution regarding privacy and security, with strong hope that Cloud Computing (should I be capitalizing that?) will bring increased transparency to such things as government collected information. As in most areas of new technology ("new" is a relative term), there are some valuable pessimistic views which keep people like me - call me a pragmatic optimist - deeply appreciating the skills of security and legal specialists who act as the sherpas (lower-case 's') in their respective mountain ranges (or jungles). I personally still have a strong view that "I trust the cloud more than my laptop" - to sum it up as simply as I can. You can watch the video of our specific panel (that one alone is 90 minutes - and all the others are also posted thanks to the UChannel). I also thought it might be useful to post the notes I put together before the panel, to organize some of my thoughts (opinions) about Cloud Computing...
(click here for the whole post, including my pre-panel notes)
My notes used at the panel:

Computing in the Cloud - "software and data being served from the web" - will continue to grow and will be the norm. The benefits for vendors and customers simply outweigh the risks
- Software distribution is an obvious win. Ridding the distribution process of physical delivery gives:
  - higher margin for the vendors
  - lower prices for the customers
  - better service for customers - bug fixes, security issues, new features can all be delivered to customers faster, since there's less motivation to batch these up into the next costly snail-mailing.
  - better products - similar to the above, this gives good developers the ability to respond to user feedback and deliver improvements continuously.
  - happier developers (working remotely and getting quick feedback from real users)
- NOTE: I have an XO from OLPC (OLP2C - one laptop per 2 children, soon to be OLP3C, once the little one notices)... that further convinced me, seeing how this super-light technology gave me basically everything I needed since all I needed was the browser (notwithstanding the slow speed or issues with that specific browser)
Some are still betting on desktop-to-cloud synch products - like SoonR bought by Cisco (mobile access to your desktop).
I've learned to really hate explicit SAVING of my desktop stuff... Somehow, easy autosaving came along with the web products I use.
Capitalism will drive "good" products (doing the right thing if people demand it)...with companies meeting the needs of other companies and individual customers... INCLUDING all the new challenges
- privacy, security, safety
- relevance, integration, convenience
Collaboration will be an expected feature
- so much of what we create is intended to share...
- existing products and services take on new value with collaboration...
- Creating content TOGETHER, reviewing expenses TOGETHER, planning projects TOGETHER
MICRO-INNOVATION will grow fast as it becomes more achievable - can you say "Gadgets!" ?
- Platforms, tools, delivery
- "pay-as-you-go" Operations and commerce
- Commoditized services make operating a micro-innovation more viable... for example, legal agreements, support, etc.
CONTENT value with further differentiate:
- Original, creative, popular content gets market-driven value assigned, while repetitive, derivative content gets super-commoditized
Simpler integration / commerce / delivery will give better channels to creative talent, allowing them to:
- easily syndicate
- easily gain attribution (back to their service/site)
- easily monetize
- gain celebrity status (e.g. Youtube publishers)
Collaboration brings new productivity - and new issues.... (see "issues" section)
INTEGRATION between services will increase...
- Integration can be more seamless, bringing customers to even the smallest granular service.
- Access to customers / markets
- Micro-Innovation becomes profitable - with canned legal process, pre-defined service delivery and support, etc...
- GADGETS become a platform not only for micro-innovation, but for integration of services.
- Web Services finally become a reality.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for web services and data will become more important, but they will be simplified, standardized and improved - driven by the Service Integration Supply Chain (below) and the need for simplified "service commerce" (the buying/selling of services).
A new "service-integration-supply-chain" exists and will expand:

> Containers for gadgets > platform for gadget development > gadget types (content free) > content-relevant gadget instances
Collaboration and aggregation of services will result in derivative (sometimes larger) products/services
Do-It-Yourself web creation tools will be improved - to meet new(ish) demand.
- the tools are too disparate and hard to find, and still hard to use
Great Development tools - still an opportunity, since new components are available for integration (and new methods)... supporting micro-development and distribution
Great User-Interaction design (UX) still wins
- Usability and designs really do improve applications and the web overall
Semantic Web-like Structure for much more interesting products
- we used to cal it a "data model"
- Great contribution products (community tagging) will drive this...
Ubiquitous Identification - let me be me wherever i go... without worry.... (OpenID?)
Increase in Premium Services model - advertising has been over-used by non-relevant publishers
- Maybe even a Premium "absolutely private" web

ISSUES LIKELY TO OCCUR - which, themselves, drive opportunities...

Ownership and control of Content:
- Collaboration:
  - who owns that document which 3 people collaborated to create?
  - 3 people collaborate - 1 leaves and "shuts off access"...
- Integration:
  - Content from one source being used in another service - how to split value?
  - example: 1 company publishes data - 2 others use it as a basis to create their own service - who's the owner? Who gets the revenue?
  - similar issues as those in traditional media - e.g. actors or writers demanding part of the revenue stream of syndication...

Note: These were just my notes that I used for the panel, since the format included each panelist giving a 10-15 minute no-slides discussion of their views. Nothing Google in here - just some semi-random personal views and not organized into a standalone presentation.

Sarcasm can ruin a kid's vocabulary

2008-01-02T08:57:00.000-05:00

(First of all - Happy New Year to those of you who haven't heard that useless greeting enough already - I know, none of you)...

Over the break, I had a few interesting revelations... well... one... well... maybe not interesting, but, revealing, if nothing else...
My 4 year old asked me something about something (huh?) - I can't remember actually what it was - but it was something like "Hey Dad! " (which I'm sure he repeated 7 times before being convinced that he had my undivided attention) - "look at this thing I made! Isn't it cool?"...
...to which I replied: "Yeah - that's great!!"
(here's the semi-interesting part...)
He said: "What does that mean?"
JR: "What does what mean?"
4yr-old: "great"
JR: "great? You know what 'great' means! ... don't you?"
4yr-old: " " (stare at daddy until he realizes that you thought you knew what it meant until now)
JR: "great - you know, 'GREAT!' - like 'That's really great!' - it means really really really super good!"
4yr-old: "Oh, yeah... 'great'!... that's great!"

Then I realized... He had heard the word 'great' lots of times... from me, and others... but in a very different context... like, when he spills milk all over the table and floor, and I say 'Oh, that's great'... or when we miss his brother's school bus, and I say 'oh great'...
You get the idea...
great = 'not so great' in the bizarro world of sarcasm where adults find minimal humor in the context of something not so great and kids who are learning their native language find confusion and reverse meanings for everyday words.
My seven year-old, on the other hand, loves sarcasm - and is likely half the source of his brother's confusion...

It might kill the effect to add "That was sarcasm - I actually mean the opposite of what I just said" to the end of every sarcastic comment I make at home - so maybe I'll just stop....

nah.

A Toy Company That Roks

2007-11-29T07:54:00.000-05:00

I love toys. I mean as an adult, I really love cool toys. I mean kids toys really, not adult toys. I mean I love adult toys too (no, not those kind of adult toys)... like cool phones or i-prefixed digital thing-a-ma-bobs... but this is about kids toys.

One toy in particular - Rokenbok - has so captured my attention from the moment I saw it practically 8 years ago, that it has literally been blamed (or thanked, actually) for convincing me to have kids, as the only sane justification for me to buy this toy ;)

So, now I have kids, the boys are old enough, and we own this incredible toy.

Rokenbok is a creative building toy and a multi-vehicle, remote control construction site toy. You build a site which becomes the playground for the trucks. The building is just as much fun as driving the trucks once you're done. Each truck has a purpose, just like on a real construction site, and... well... I'll stop there, 'cause that's not why I'm writing this post (or I would have wrote it a year ago).

I'm not writing this post to thank Rokenbok for the incredibly responsive service I've gotten when I've emailed them about issues ("hey, this bulldozer won't go!"; response: "Give us the code from the bottom and we'll get a new one in the mail today" - and they did).

I'm writing this post to praise Rokenbok as a product company, particularly for their focus on kids and safety. They recently posted a new page on their website which describes their safety testing process - to re-assure parents in the wake of this horrendous rash of lead-ridden toys coming out of manufacturing plants in China. If you have a kid with a red Thomas-Train half in her mouth, you'll understand why this is such a big deal (or you should read other articles).

Rokenbok is not just re-assuring parents as a defensive measure, I think they truly have a strong, DNA-level commitment to the importance of safety in the products that they put in kids' hands - and they deserve credit for that.

Rokenbok has remained focused on they end user over all else. That was clear when we dropped (ok, drove) our first truck off a high ledge on an early site we built - and discovered that it was clearly built to withstand much more abuse than a normal toy... but the safety focus - from design to manufacturing - that's proof of their commitment. One example, besides that they don't dip their toys in vats of chippable lead paint, is the design of their admittedly choking-hazard-sized "Roks" (the balls scooped and dumped by the trucks). They designed them with "vents" so that "if one were accidentally inhaled, a child would still be able to breathe through the vents until professional help could arrive". If only all companies had such a focus on great products as a priority over cheap delivery.

I've heard that Rokenbok recently had a significant change in management - let's hope they maintain the same values.... Thanks Rokenbok!

22 years ago, dinosaurs (and my friends) roamed the earth

2007-11-02T11:49:00.000-05:00

Seriously – 22 years is very long time... I recently hooked up with a close school friend whom I haven't seen in 22 years... a lifetime. By “close”, I mean that’s what we were then, but I haven’t seen her since. And while I feel like practically the same person, the world around me is pretty much a different planet. Country boundaries changed, some wars finished, new wars began, and technology changed a bit (!) and, well, my friend from 22 years ago turns out to still be a good friend :)

We looked at old pictures and new pictures of people we knew - people we know... and it really made it clear how much time has passed. I started to think of the things lost and the things gained in those years... so let's start two lists:

What we have today that we didn’t have 22 years ago:

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace.
WikiPedia, Technorati, Techcrunch.
Firefox, Safari, YouTube.
The web.
Laptops, iPods, flash drives, USB, 250gb hard drives the size of a British cucumber sandwich.
Digital Cameras (?).
Cell Phones (well... there was one I saw the size of a microwave oven).
Windows Vista, XP, NT, 3.1, 2.0.
Fear of Interns in the Whitehouse.
Fear of Republicans in the Whitehouse.
Azerbaijan and many other countries.
This blog, any blog, the word “blog” (and so many other words!)
Avaya, Agere, T-Mobile, Netflix
Brittney, Paris, Lindsay.
Virgin (Records or Atlantic)
K-Fed, J-Lo.
The criminal O.J. Simpson.
Shoes off at the airport security gate.
My kids.

What we had 22 years ago that we don’t have anymore:

The Soviet Union.
The big 8 accounting firms (Ernst & Whinney, Arthur Young, Arthur Anderson, Peat Marwick Mitchell, Price Waterhouse, Coopers & Lybrand, Delloite Haskins Sells, Touche Ross)
Wang Laboratories, Typwriters (I'm assuming they're extinct)
The artist Michael Jackson
The ex-Football Player OJ Simpson... Nicole Brown, Ronald Goldman
The artist known as Prince
Phil Hartman, John Candy, John Belushi, Chris Farley
Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Chemical Bank, ,
Floppy drives
DOS, Windows 1.0 (just barely)
Almost 3,000 innocent people lost on September 11, 2001, including some friends.
My Dad.

I could probably go on with this for a while..... but, I gotta get busy with the next 22 years...

How Come I forgot about this NYTimes Story?

2007-10-18T07:55:00.000-05:00

A good friend of our family who has been running a web hosting business since dinosaurs roamed the earth (well, you know what I mean - 1992), sent me this ancient (in web terms) article from the NY Times... It quotes my dad (!) back in November of 1996. The author references his HowCome site (which really was a blog-before-there-were-blogs, and so retro-cool looking at it today). The founder of Webscope (David), was also the founder of my Dad's passion for the web.

The look back at this is really fun...just as a reminder of where we came from: "In September 1995, Long Island had 904 officially registered commercial organizations at Internic in Herndon, Va. This year the figure was 4,933."
- I wonder what that figure would be today...

...and, of course, anything linking back to my dad makes me smile.
(Thanks, David!)

"May I have your attention, please"

2007-10-03T23:14:00.000-05:00

Attention... Some want it. Some need it. Some give it. Some don't.
...and, yes, the mere existence of this blog puts me in category one, I guess.

An interaction with my 7-year old son brought up this whole stream of thought... He and my nephew were making impressive noise right at our feet while we were trying to have normal adult conversation about something which was completely irrelevant to the lives of these two resourceful first-graders. They decided that blowing a whistle and banging a drum – loudly – was the best way to get our attention. At first I treated the noise as part of the persistent, expected din you find in any house with kids. Then I realized that I was practically yelling to make myself heard, and finally shouted to them, “ENOUGH!... “ (hey, that worked). Followed by the gently delivered comment that every sensitive father must learn: “Please. Stop blowing that whistle or I really will crush it”.

“We’re just trying to get your attention!”.

I have to give them points for honesty and awareness - it's usually much more sub-conscious than that.

It struck me later that “getting attention” might be more a basic human need than just a phenomenon of competitive commercial coercion (although the latter is much more common). And now that web-based social networks have finally become recognized as potentially a more effective attention channel than others - here come the herds.

(this post grew pretty long... click here to see the whole story)Any business marketer, advertiser, publication, author, blogger, entrepreneur, actor, musician, politician, even Uncle Arnie is looking for anyone who will listen (“...you know why oil prices will never go lower? I’ll tell you why...”). And while most of us play both parts – attention seeker and attention giver (or withholder), we walk through life now being blasted from every angle with people blowing their whistles or banging their drums.

So we invent filters, methods, channels, for optional listening. Specialized cable channels, Syndicated feed readers, NetFlix, podCasts and iTunes. On our social networks, it's our circle of friends and connections which (apparently) "control" the flow. And attention-seekers invent new ways to blast us. Spam, Pop-ups, elevator video screens, billboards, even street performers. So, while the attention market is mostly based on gaining customers, there are three other goals at work here...

First, friend seekers. Date-seekers in many cases, but also the likes of Uncle Arnie, looking for people to agree with him – to find people who share his view, trying to get attention in small ways, maybe just to prove to himself that he’s right or to get some recognition that he is smart – or hopefully, looking for more diverse opinions which can help him refine his own ideas.

Second, fight seekers. Like that dude at the party who moves from group to group just waiting to find someone who disagrees with his theories so he can more loudly describe them (after all, it’s hard to justify telling people your detailed theories when they already agree. It’s more fun for this category of person to try to convert others to their cause).

And third, is a common one: Fame. There’s a high degree of respect given to those who become famous (even ignoring, I think, the potential monetary value of such fame)... and, therefore, there’s a powerful draw for people to win the kind of attention that brings fame. Like the guys from that show ‘Jack Ass’, who, week after week, would risk personal harm, humiliation, and hatred just because that was their best devised shot at becoming famous (which, they eventually did).

Now comes the popularity of social networks - LinkedIn, Facebook, Orkut, etc. as semi-controllable (implying semi-uncontrolled) communication channels... and here come the attention seekers. First the date-seekers and friend-seekers, then, the fame seekers (they only come after there's enough people watching to create fame)...and then, the professional, commercial attention-getters (businesses, advertisers, etc). I'm suddenly getting poked, compared, bitten... I'm getting virtual gifts and invited to play games... all by people I either know well or at least recognize as those I've invited into my virtual social circles. I'm also getting some valuable attention requests from people with really good ideas and invites to keep in touch with old friends. These new(ish) channels can really be powerful to control the inflow once you learn how - but they're even more powerful for the attention seekers, as we are all more likely to give our attention to someone who has already gotten the attention of one of our friends.

No matter the channel, we each have this powerful resource we can either offer or withhold – our Attention. But manage your network of friends or you might find you've opened your door to more attention seekers than ever. Just like the theory of email-bankruptcy - where people are just starting over and tossing aside their old email piles, you might find yourself declaring social (network) suicide, and killing off your current social profile and the network of 'friends' as the only way out from under the weight of that news feed.

When we are looking for entertainment, or a product or a service or a friend, we can offer our attention and listen for a while, or we can say “Please, stop blowing that whistle, or I really will crush it”.

Porn Potato

2007-10-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

In case you don't get the reference in the title... The origin is here.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I was on the train last night. I found a seat, but before I sit down, I find my eyes facing the back of the 50-something guy seated in front of me and my eyes are immediately drawn to the full-screen image on his phone. It’s Porn.
On his phone.
And he’s clicking the screen... to another image. He’s surfing. On his phone. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”.

He can definitely sense that I’m right behind him (I’m barely 2-feet away) and others are just as close, looking at his phone screen as clearly as he is, and he makes no defensive, nonchalant, screen-blocking gestures, no dirty looks. So I don’t feel embarrassed for him, because he has no embarrassment... which is all fine.

He’s just thinking “That’s right. I’m here on the train ride home, checking out some porn. On my phone. Yes siree... great way to unwind after a tough day in the salt mines”.

Dude! What’s up? If your wife calls on that phone, you gonna say “yes, I’m on the train – I’m getting off soon” (oops)... And it’s not even an iPhone... so he can’t zoom in with his sweaty little fingers. Imagine Apple marketing to that use case... I could just imagine the white silhouetted iPhone porn surfers to go along with their cool ipod campaign.

I know... Half the people reading this will probably think I sound uptight("It’s just porn".) On his phone? The other half will probably be offended that I could even mention this whole story ("That's disgusting, don't give other people ideas").

Now, every time I see someone hovered over their phone, I’m just gonna wink, smirk and give them a knowing nod.. or maybe I’ll add, in my best Borat voice, “Niiiice – you make a sexy time on your phone!”.

Social networks might actually be semi-anti-social

2007-09-25T23:02:00.000-05:00

It struck me the other day, watching several phone potatoes doing their "social" thing, that while people are communicating more than ever – on phones and through (ahem) “social” networks and email and text messaging – that they (we!) might actually be more isolated than ever.

You know... Head down over the keyboard, smirking about that zombie bite you just got, or crunched up to our phone screen, hanging on to every word of that really useful twitter from Sally, about how she "likes the hot pepper dip" she's eating while she sits there alone twittering (sounds weird - doesn't it? Sally, sitting alone, "twittering"). Yeah - seems pretty isolating...

What I’m not sure of is whether we are using time which we would be alone anyway to now communicate with others, or are we taking time which we otherwise might have spent with others, physically, to now be alone? Have we just harmlessly, and maybe beneficially, moved the communicating part into bits, bytes and broadband? or have we lost something?

So the “networking” part of “social networking” isn’t arguable, but is it really “social”? I know that It’s more interesting for me when I am in the physical presence of people with whom I want to socialize, but I just don’t have that much time to socialize in the same physical location with others as much as I’d like.

So maybe that’s the key to “social networking” – maybe it makes up for our modern compression of time, to allow us to continue to communicate with others without the normal requirement to plan it and physically travel to a common location. Maybe it’s just like video conferencing at work, which, in theory, saves a trip. The experience is not as satisfying and not as productive, but it’s good enough. So “social networking” is really more like “virtual socializing” ? That puts a negative spin on “Socializing”, rather than a positive spin on “Networking”... but who wants to admit that our lives are just so full of interesting things that we’ve had to downgrade our social experience... Yuck – that sounds really negative – where actually, it’s only negative if technically-based social networking has replaced physical socializing.
It’s actually a positive change if we haven’t reduced real socializing but rather use online social networks and our mobile phones as an add-on to getting together with friends... yeah... I love virtually-social-electronic-communication... really, I do.

Planning Trips Together

2007-09-21T11:00:00.002-05:00

Planning trips can be fun...(Ha!) ...vacation trips, not business trips. But no matter what type of trip I'm planning, there's almost always a need to share the itinerary, if not the planning process itself, with other people.
So, of course I see an opportunity to use a Google spreadsheet here (yes - I know Google Calendar is the more natural choice...). I was inspired by another spreadsheet I found online - where Disney trips specifically were being planned - to create a generic template that anyone could use to plan a trip. Knowing how hard that was (the Disney trip), I could relate to the value of having a 1-page view of the whole trip - particularly the meal reservations (don't get me started on that topic).

The main feature of the template is the automatic creation of the "Agenda View", which is a shortened version of the schedule (yes - I know Google Calendar has the best Agenda view)... so as you fill in the Trip Planner matrix on the front page, the Agenda View is populated with that data. You could even share a link to the published version of that simpler Agenda View with people - and as you update your plans on the main page, they'll always see the most recent version (as long as you use the "automatically re-publish" option on the "publish" tab).

Definition: Phone Potato

2007-09-19T22:27:00.000-05:00

I mentioned this in a prior post, and got a couple of sideways looks... so.. here's the definition of a Phone Potato (aka "mobile 'tater", derived from the english "couch potato, which is also taken from the latin root "potato" which means "useless until cooked and eaten").

You’ve seen them. They are always “on the phone” – not always talking, but always on... in one of two positions...
Position 1: phone pressed to head - lips blabbing.
Position 2: phone clutched in hands - fingers flailing.
They’re totally connected to anyone they know for... well, whatever...
They never look up at you, even if they decide to talk to you.

These people are in their own state of aloneness, interacting with a device which may or may not include others on the far end (It’s not just for phone calls anymore). They can not bear to be without their phone and they are always actively using it, regardless of what else might be happening at the time. They’re doing it while they walk, while they drive, while they eat, while they hang out with their family. There’s no place they won’t answer the phone – car, restaurant, doctor’s office waiting room, even the potty is in-bounds (regardless of whether their counterpart on the other end cares to hear toilets flushing and, whatever else - they probably even shamelessly say “one sec” while they absolutely need both hands for... you know...). These are the people who would probably halt sex to read that text message.

How do they keep their phone charged? Talking is just one thing – texting is the other... doing everything from finding out what street corner their friends are hanging out on (which is sort of useless, since they have no intention of actually moving their body to that location when they are perfectly happy texting), to checking out the latest buzz on celebrity-gossip or, more likely, school-gossip.. AHA! School...yes... these are often kids... The mobile marketers must have an official age range they target – probably 13-18. They’re a huge crop of potatoes, but they’re not the only ones... the ultra-mobile (ultra-young) professional might be the next largest crop. Always on, always working. They equate being on the phone with working, or, when they are physically at work, they’re multi-tasking across their social and professional existences, which are likely so overlapped, that they are virtually one thing.

Quick - Here come a few now! Get me a pot of boiling water and some sour cream - I'm hungry...

Phones ARE more like TV, but not because of new content

2007-09-18T16:45:00.000-05:00

It’s not just the addition of content from television which makes mobile phones and PCs the new TVs. There’s a deeper analogy which struck me (and, yes, which I thought I should share... hey, if you don’t like it, change the channel ;)

The historical adoption of TV into the majority of homes seems to have an interesting parallel to what we’re seeing now with technology products – that is, in theory it connected people, but in reality, while it connected some people in a shallow sort of way, it isolated many others deeply. As TV became mainstream – starting in the 1960’s (?) – people probably used the physical presence of others (in the same room watching the same TV) as a way to justify the sedentary act of watching actors be active rather than being active themselves... “It gives the family a chance to be together”. Right. Sure. Family interaction was the benefit of TV. Each family member in the same room doing the same thing, looking in the same direction, laughing at the same time, acknowledging each other’s presence during commercials (thank goodness for ads!), but otherwise, cognitively alone. I don’t doubt that this is actually true (the good parts) for many families who watch the once-or-twice weekly “24” or “Idol” together as a family. I’m more thinking about the every-nightly spud family.

Becoming a “couch potato” was probably an un-recognized issue for a decade, particularly since remote controls didn’t exist (yes – you had to actually get off your butt to change the channel... but there were less than 13 in the US, so the 10 feet you had to walk for each channel change could not happen often enough to be considered exercise, sorry). The couch potatoes germinated there on the couch whether in the presence of others or not (afterall, potatoes are grown in crops of many, not alone), whether they were trying to do other ativities or not. Once people started eating dinner in front of the TV, it was all over...

Which, finally, brings me to the analogy... The Phone Potato. The person who just can’t stop using their phone. For example, during dinner... They’re not just making that “are the kids ok with the babysitter” call... no, they’re just chatting, or texting... You’ve seen them – maybe even in the mirror (yes, you). And the same is true of the Laptop Potato (who, me?).

I am not being critical of the communication aspects of TV or the mobile phone or the web... the speed at which (valuable) information travels across all technology medium is amazing and absolutely beneficial. The part I’m being critical of is the replacement of otherwise social, creative, innovative, physically active and interactive activities between people (or alone) with the anti-thinking behaviors often observed in the Couch Potato, Phone Potato or Laptop Potato (uh oh... I think that last one might be me!). It's is a sad change which just needs to be, well, recognized, before it consumes too much of our lives without adding value or happiness.

The sad part is that I almost always observe the phone potato behaviors in teenagers – probably parallel to the observations in the 60’s, when young people at that time learned couch potato germination and farming as an innate human activity, which it is not - but through young people, it is being sewn into the fabric of modern human existence (i know, too deep).

"I'm the slime oozing out from your TV set"
- Frank Zappa

Competing with software today vs. yesterday

2007-09-16T14:20:00.001-05:00

It used to be very hard (more investment) to crush (win) a given business area with a killer software product - corporate or consumer. It was harder to actually code (program) quality, easy-to-use software (I think) – which meant it would take longer to produce, which meant you better get it right. “Getting it right” meant spending more time on requirements gathering, more time on testing and therefore, (in our infinite developer wisdom) less time on usability – after all, there was no time for those “nice-to-haves” and no recognition of its value in comparison to getting the business rules right. All of this, by definition, meant that the software took longer to deliver, which, in turn meant that it was more common for users to outgrow the software by the time it was delivered - particularly in the corporate environment.

Users often never got any value (ROI) from software which took 1-2 (or more!) years to deliver. But, even in that environment, (which I think I describe as more grave than it was) sometimes you could get it right and win – and then, as a software vendor at least, you could win big since it was so hard for others to compete (for the same reasons it was hard for you to win).

Gaining market share was even harder. From the customer’s perspective, in the face of their large investment in a software product (nothing was free back then and just the installation cost was something never to take lightly), they had a much stronger “follower comfort” motivation – perceiving it to be safer to go with the leader (“you can’t be fired for using IBM”). That meant you needed customers to get customers. A key reference customer was necessary and critical mass was, well, critical to succeed. In Financial Services, if you did succeed as a software vendor, you were bought by Sungard – they knew how hard it was to win, so they let other companies do it and then just bought them (all... so many, in fact, they have to present them in an alphabetic index ;).

Today, it costs less to enter a given market with an idea and then to fix it, expand it, scale it – or even abandon it. Less up-front time on requirements gathering (because you can credibly limit v1), which means getting software into the hands of users earlier, which provides better usability feedback, which produces better software. There are even basic automated services - APIs - , like transaction processing, storage, etc, which are a snap to integrate.

Overall, the time to produce something valuable is shorter and it's more iterative, delivering value in stages. Programming is easier. And deployment... OH! Deplyment! Those barriers are lifted almost completely – at least for web services (SaaS) – allowing developers to get software into the hands of end-users immediately, without even an approval or onerous legal process (if both sides willingly participate).

All this means there are more competitors. Big companies need to compete with small companies (who, by the way, might be able to alter pricing due to their lower R&D legacy). Old companies compete with new. Customers probably have lower switching costs too, due to their ongoing demand for ‘switchable service’ as part of the service they choose (ironic, isn’t it – that to win a customer’s business today, you hove to prove to them that they can easily stop using your service).

Competing today is actually, well, fun! Got an idea? Try it! Get it out there!

Office 2.0: what it looks like

2007-09-13T08:04:00.000-05:00

These were some notes I made before the conference when thinking about "What is Office 2.0?". I didn't bother trying to mention most of this stuff on my panel, as it seemed over-covered, but thought it was worth putting some of these here for...well... just to put it somewhere (and for dispute or expansion, if you are in the mood). I also didn't focus on the technical characteristics of the tools, but rather some higher-level perceptions of the business environment (not really knowing whether that is useful)...

Workforce:

Mobile and Remote
Flexible (full-timers, specialized part-timers and contractors)
More productive and happier (when working)?
[negative point] Too connected - difficult to draw the line between work and home life

acidlabs' view

Processes:

Collaborative (available, easy and practical via the technology)
Easily procured, standard business services (yes, SaaS)….
Self-customized services (yes, a mix of standard and customized)
More integration between automated tools to support custom workflows (e.g. human interaction supported through integration with communication tools like sms and email)

Technology:

Collaboration supported as an expected feature (as prevalent as copy/paste is today)
Lots of standard services used underneath business-specific apps (e.g. S3, Checkout, etc.)
Practical do-it-yourself customizations (via options and integrations, not programming)
Less package software installations locally
Less custom developed corporate software

Competitive Environment:

More competitors
Faster pace of innovation
Many smaller niche businesses quickly meeting specific vertical needs
[negative point] Too many choices for businesses, if that's possible, in the shorter term (until real winners rise to the top)

...maybe all too obvious to justify a blog post... oh well - too late.

Tough memories of September 11th, 2001

2007-09-11T13:03:00.000-05:00

Six years ago last night was a great night. A normal night. I started my commute home at a reasonable time, and sat on the 40-minute train ride with a friend I haven’t seen in a while – Mike Gogliormella. He was energetic that night as he explained to me that 50 of his close associates at eSpeed were laid off that day – meaning he wouldn’t see them tomorrow… but he still had his job. So he was clearly having mixed feelings – happy to still have his job, but sad that others did not. I remember he had a really short hair cut that night and was wearing a baseball cap. He told me about the haircut he got while on vacation with his wife, Daniela (another good friend) and newly adopted daughter, Gillian. He just lit up when he spoke about his daughter and his family. She was only about 6 months old, and given that my first son was just 11 months old at that time, I could totally relate to the joy and amazement he was feeling then and about to experience in the coming months.

That was the night of September 10th. I went home that night and told my wife “Guess who I rode the train with – Mike G.!” and answered all the obligatory questions about how he was doing, the baby, etc. Mike also went home and probably said “Guess who I rode the train with – JR”, and answered the same questions from his wife.

The next morning seemed like the start of any other day...
(this post is long... click here to see the whole story)
Another day where I would try to figure out how to get my new business off the ground, having left a big corporate job to start ITK Solutions only 3 months prior. My partner was traveling in London and I was alone in our new office on the 23rd floor of One Liberty Plaza which faced the South Tower of the World Trade Center directly across Church Street. It was a great office and we worked hard to find it and negotiate it. I did lots of legwork to find all the possible locations for full-service office space, and then went and looked at about 12 locations. I narrowed the search down to 2 choices for my partner to see when she came back from London (she was relocating once I got the business up and running). In May of 2001, while she was in town, we looked at One Liberty Plaza, which we both loved, and then took a walk across the street to see our other choice: a renovation in progress, on the 93rd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Margaret Echterman, a very friendly and persuasive sales person from the management company which ran the office space met us in the lobby and rode the long elevator ride with us to give us the grand tour. It was, ironically, filled with lots of dust and studs and debris, but even then, you could see that this office was going to be spectacular. We stood for a while in what would likely be our office, looking down almost 1000 feet. There was nothing like it. In the lobby after the tour, Margaret told us the office would be ready by June 1, and offered us a 50% discount off the published leasing rates. Wow. I was sure that with that deal, this would be our space… so, we took that deal back to Claudia – the similar office manager / sales person at One Liberty Plaza and told her “if you can meet that deal, we’ll take your office, otherwise, we have to go across the street”.
Claudia met Margaret’s deal. So we graciously declined Margaret and moved into One Liberty Plaza. I walked away really liking Margaret, a bit jealous that I wouldn’t be occupying that incredible office space on the 93rd floor of the south tower.

I remember the morning of September 11, 2001, was a perfect, slightly breezy, sunny sky. In my office before 8:00 am, I was temporarily confused by the morning sun beaming into my west-facing window (I think the sun rises in the east, right?). I had to look out and up to realize that it was the reflection of the sun off the east side of the South Tower. In hindsight, that was the only morning I ever noticed that happening.

I stepped out of my office a bit before 9am. Standing at the sink in the mens room, I began to hear an announcement over the building’s speaker system and began to walk toward my office. “We are investigating the problem. Please stay away from the west side of the building. Please move to the east side of the building.”

Naturally, I ignored the announcement. As I walked down the hallway, past the other offices of other small companies, I could see the air outside their windows was filled with paper flying everywhere – a sight normally seen only during a parade for one of our winning sports teams (ticker tape parades, after all, originated down here on wall street). But there was no such parade. I entered my office and saw even more debris flying outside my window. Being so close to the World Trade Center towers, I had to push my face against the glass and look up to see what was wrong – there was a pattern of holes, and clearly the burnt result of fire, on the east side of the North Tower. Given the size of the holes I could see, I remember thinking that a small plane or helicopter must have crashed into the building. I also remember immediately thinking about my friend Mike G., knowing that eSpeed occupied the upper floors of one of those towers. Trying to rationalize this event, my mind was racing. I thought that maybe one of the people who got laid off from eSpeed decided to crash his small plane into the building in a desperate act of revenge.

I walked to the shared area of the office, where there was a TV with live coverage of what we all believed to be a horrible accident. It was much worse than what I was seeing on my side of the building. Several of us who arrive early, but have never spoken were watching the TV with amazement as this event unfolded directly across the street. I remember saying out loud to nobody in particular “people are dying right across the street”.

I walked back to my office and my phone rang. A business acquaintance from London “What’s going on there? Are you ok?”. “I can’t really talk now” was my response and hung up quickly. I called my wife to tell her to turn on the TV and also to tell her that I would likely just leave the city now to avoid all the inevitable craziness later (I had no idea). I looked awkwardly up out the window again just for a minute and grabbed just my phone and headed back into the lobby. I walked past the office of my friend Evan, who occupied an office on the south side of the building, and we anxiously chatted about what could have caused this explosion across the street… in the background, out the window, paper and debris was still falling. “Maybe it was a small plane, or someone shot a missile?”, I think he said... all speculation in our state of complete anxiety.

I went further up the hall to see the TV again – as it felt safer at this point than pressing my face against the glass in my office to see what was happening across the street about 50 stories above my 23rd story window. The smoke was increasing, the situation seemed worse. I walked back toward my office on the West side, ignoring the continuing building announcements “stay away from the west side of the building. Do not leave the building.”. I ignored those announcements too. I passed Evan’s office again and said “I’m just going to go home” and continued walking.

As I put my hand on the door knob of my office door, there was a huge explosion which rocked the building – and I ran. The explosion was so powerful and loud that I expected to see a fireball chasing me as I ran back down the hall. Then Evan screamed “It was a jumbo jet! It was an airline jet! I saw it! A huge passenger jet!” and he then ran with me – to the elevators. You could practically feel our hearts pounding – all the people in the elevator – but nobody talking. The debris on the ground was growing and swirling in the wind, and now there was much more falling from the sky from what we now know was the second plane. I used the east-facing exit doors, thinking that I would have less chance to get hit by anything falling from the sky if I put my building between me and the towers. So many small memory snippets in the next few minutes:
...dust gathered already in the revolving door... people waiting to exit, not sure if they should go out in the storm (just like when it’s pouring rain)... a man in a daze, thoughtfully picking up and analyzing what looked like a piece of a metal wall – maybe even a part of the cabin of the plane... several people hysterical crying… crowds gathered at the intersections on Broadway where there was a view between buildings of the burning towers… cops clearly confused about where to send people and sometimes staring up at the buildings themselves…

I hesitantly walked across Broadway to the subway station under Nassau street, thinking that the risk of being underground was less than the risk of being in the shadow of the burning towers.

Underground, things were eerily quiet. Most people had no idea what was happening above them, but some definitely did. I remember seeing two people I knew really well from my prior job at JP Morgan, and just ignoring their presence. I wasn’t really ready for the “how are you” conversation. There was an elderly woman strangely babbling about how we’re all going to die, and another woman uncontrollably crying and shaking creaming at her to shut up.

I got out at Penn Station, and everything seemed normal. There was no view of the towers. My train would not be leaving to take me home to New Jersey for another 40 minutes…. So I called my wife and she nervously just asked me to leave Penn Station, for fear that it was another target. I walked the streets for 30 minutes and then boarded my practically empty train – it was approx 10:00 I think.

On the mostly quiet ride home, some people were talking about the event and I could hardly listen – it made me sick to hear people talking about it. Then, as we exited the tunnel on the NJ side, someone looked back at Manhattan and said “Is there only 1 tower? Oh my god, there’s only one tower!”. I turned to the guy near me and we gave each other the same “they are crazy” look… I actually looked back a the burning towers in the distance (you could see them from quite some distance away) and said “It’s just the angle we’re seeing them from, the other tower is behind that one”. My mind would not let me see that one of the towers was already gone. Other people on the train who were able to get a connection talked about how planes were crashing into other places in Washington and elsewhere, and how there was a belief that many other jets were still in the air headed towards other targets.

When I arrived in Summit, my wife picked me up and I still didn’t feel safe. I hugged her tightly and cried uncontrollably. I also remember looking nervously up at the sky, irrationally expecting to see a jet descending on one of the local buildings. The sky was perfectly blue. My 11-month old baby was smiling in his car seat, happily naive to the events. The fear at this point was so high, that we decided to fill both cars with gas and stock up on bottled water – which we did. Then we went home and watched the news – for almost 24 hours straight. At one point, Channel 5 was broadcasting live phone calls from people who had “missing” loved ones – believed to potentially be alive at some area hospital or elsewhere, just lost in the all the hysteria… and my friend Daniela was suddenly speaking on TV, asking people to contact her if they knew where Mike was.

I later learned that Margaret Echterman was killed that day, sitting in her newly renovated office space on the 93rd floor of the South Tower. A good friend of the family, Ian Thompson, was also killed, as was Tom Farrelly, one of the nicest people I ever knew at JP Morgan, and John Cruz, a young man I worked with on the trading floor at JP Morgan who took a job with a bond trading firm in the World Trade Center.

I feel lucky to be here to tell this story.

Popularity caused by Popularity

2007-09-09T20:46:00.000-05:00

Thinking about the competitive environment in web applications as part of the whole Office 2.0 conference pre-think, it seemed worth analyzing (a gross overstatement) what makes some new applications just zoom past the competition in terms of user popularity - and therefore, success (from a usage, not a revenue, perspective).

The examples already seen are obvious, including auction markets (eBay), Video (YouTube), demographically-focused social networking (MySpace, LinkedIn, FaceBook) and plenty of others. Popularity seems to bring popularity. Once a winner is chosen in a certain cross-section of function and demographic (or business vertical), it becomes a peer magnet. The obvious reason this occurs is:

Critical Mass. It often adds value to have more people involved in a service – for example with bidding services, you want 200 potential bids, not 2... or with social networks, there's not much sense to using one which your friends won't use.

But there are 3 other reasons people (or their companies) select particular apps, which might apply more to non-social business-focused apps or at least apps which do not rely on critical mass:

Trust. People perceive something that other people already use as more trustworthy and safer. "If Avis and Budget already use Salesforce.com for CRM, than I'm probably ok selecting it for my business".
Laziness. Given the time commitment of a proper analysis to chose a service, people are willing to save time by going with what peers are already using.
Promotion and Buzz. The more people use a service the more other people hear about it and the more likely they are to at least try it (then it must rely on it's own value).

The speed at which people communicate in this new environment, fosters this phenomenon, since the above reasons given rely on knowing what applications or services others are using. Maybe this is why it seems that a winner in more recent years becomes a winner faster than in the past... or maybe it's just that time seems to be going by quicker...

Office 2.0: Death of the Application?

2007-09-06T18:53:00.000-05:00

From the Office 2.0 conference, this session (named the same as this post) addresses a direct question, which is: Are web-based applications going to replace installed software applications? I'm no pro-blogger, so real-time posting during the event, and providing complete coverage was not my goal here (whew... good thing, since i saved much of this post in draft and now posting almost a day later). The main reason I wanted to blog about this topic was that I have some opinions in this area and at the beginning of the conference had this strong sense that 10 years from now, we will actually think back to traditional shrink-wrapped and vendor-customized installed apps and think "wow, remember that? That sucked." (in fact, I've already thought that). I'm also not going to try to provide a transcript of the session here - just some high level concepts which were discussed - so if I attribute things to specific speakers, it's not meant to be a quote... apologies to the speakers if I missed your point...

The panel, moderated by Greg Ruff, includes Mark Bagley, Danny Kolke, Greg Olsen, Ramana Rao, Rajen Sheth and Frank Zamani

So - Is the traditionally 'installed' app dead to be replaced by the web app?
I don't see a binary answer, as there was for vinyl records or rotary dial phones... but there is clearly a shift to web-based services and software, particularly for business applications. This is not a quick transition by any means, but the pain of installing packaged software and "running it" on your own infrastructure (servers or desktops) is just too painful and time consuming when compared to web-based software. Even the traditional "evaluation period" and eventual procurement through the contract process is painful - which seems to disappear with web-based trial and procurement (although it really just takes another form).

The panel had a few interesting points:
- Users might not care at all about the app (whether it's online or installed on their desktop) they just want to get their work done.
- Users are frustrated by the inefficiencies of installed apps, particularly the persistent issues of upgrading, lack of connection to other users, etc. and are therefore willing to take risks perceived in online apps which have very low barrier to start using.
- IT should be focused (in the enterprise) on making the users within the company more efficient.
- CIOs are challenged to understand and then measure the risks with new web-based apps that their internal users want (or demand). The current mentality includes comfort in internally-stored data and fear of data 'in the cloud'.

Questions from attendees:
Question: History had many cycles of 'lots of products early, then consolidation into larger successful players' - will this current cycle buck that trend?
Olsen: within organizations, there will be some drive toward consolidation, but there will be smaller players with persistent success and real value.
Rao: If you think of it as "Sites" - is it reasonable to think there will only be a few 'Sites' one day?
Ruff: past cycles were driven by the economics - efficiencies in the process. This cycle might not have the same inefficiencies to drive consolidation.
Kolke: There are still many companies keeping books on paper ledgers, and desktop productivity app adoption rates are down for the first time ever which might be indicative.

Question: How does 'coolness' relate to success - in other words (i think) as apps are less cool, will there be less activity in development and will they become less successful?
Bagley: might depend on integration between apps
Kolke: faster cycles have a huge impact on success, since user needs are more quickly satisfied (rather than using 2-years ago requirements by the time software is done).
Sheth: Relevance to users is the key - good software will be successful.
Olsen: Products which are successful (that is, they still sell) will live on (me: I like to call this 'success breeds success')
Zamani: Delivery by software providers also requires strong performance to meet the scale of use.
Rao: There is nothing cool now - that's over already. So the new cool is "usefulness".

Question: (fr Dan Farber) Microsoft can't yet feel the impact of the smaller players, so what makes you confident that your bubble won't burst? What makes you think that the reality is user-created apps, web-apps, etc delivered so differently than the status quo?
Kolke: Integration with existing apps make the Etelos platform relevant. There's more pull from users who need solutions now.
Olsen: We can see what people are building with our product - and if they are building useful stuff faster - and there is traction in spaces that are not well served.
Bagley: companies like EchoSign have a value proposition. Time to market is super fast now and deployment costs are virtually free.
Zamani: Yes, it's tough to compete with the largest companies, but there is an opportunity here to build market share while the big boys wake up.
Rao: asked the audience whether they really feel that the smaller companies are just spinning their wheels.
- - - - end of panel - - - -

me: Any shift in product innovation, including technology products/services, opens a door where the smaller players can innovate and roll the dice (i.e. spend money) on winning customers and becoming a successful, viable business. The prize they shoot for is some exit strategy (being bought by the slower, bigger players who just need that advantage of speed) or an actual continuously profitable business.

[Update: Some similar ideas on the Google Enterprise blog post...]

Bloggers do it better than me...

2007-09-05T17:27:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere rocks. (hey, Firefox spell checker doesn't recognize 'blogosphere'!... and it asked me to capitalize 'Firefox' ;).

We launch some new features in spreadsheets, and the pro-bloggers provide some super-fast discovery, analysis, tie-ins to other news... and then there's the reader comments, usually adding more value... it's just so consistent.... so follow the above links rather than depend on me to provide the details...

Software as a Service: the objectification of business processes

2007-09-05T06:19:00.000-05:00

Software as a service (SaaS) has clearly become one of those dreaded buzzwords which now gets a fair share of buzz in blogs, groups, forums and even in corporate IT circles (Ack! …and now in my blog!). Everyone is on the bandwagon it seems, whether through action or just rhetorical agreement (hard to tell in some cases). Many would just call it good design – the componentization of software down to smaller, expert, well-tested units, but it’s the new(ish) ease of delivery that has come along with web 2.0 which has made this otherwise old concept something to talk about again (with a new acronym, of course). There is, in my opinion, an overlap of 2 specific concepts in many discussions on SaaS - which I mentioned on a recent Panel and thought I should expand a bit here:

First, is the true delivery of software services – that is, things like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services, which allow developers of business-aligned software to focus on the business and not on the commodities (like storage or CPU scaling). Online mapping services (like, uh… Google’s!) are examples of another huge class of services which help web-masters enhance the value of their sites or provide mash-up artists a (now almost cliché, but) cool way to visualize location data. When creating web content, there are literally hundreds of software services which you can leverage through the magic of http (in the simplest form). This category is not often referred to as SaaS, but sometimes it is mixed in.

Second, though, is the main category of more commonly discussed Business Services – the delivery of specific business processes as, well, true services. “Service as a Service” is what I called it when someone recently asked me about the trends in SaaS. It seemed they were in that gray (or is it grey?) area between software components as services and actual Business Services…

When discussed in the context of how businesses can easily acquire and implement basic business processes using 3rd party services offered online (payroll, contract management, expense reporting, printing services, ...and... Sales Process Mgmt, etc) it seems that business services are the target (business-Service-as-a-service). When the context is an actual software service itself, or the building of a web-based product or service which leverages other software web-delivered components, then it’s Software-components-as-a-service. In those latter cases, the service itself is the delivery of software. Back to that gray (or is it grey ?!) area inside of which things like e-mail, content management, even blogging tools and others might fall… but so what…. I’m not looking to resolve all things into 2 distinct categories here, just trying to help people talk on the same level when they are not in that grey (whatever) area. ;)

I know the term “Service-as-a-service” sounds like an idiotic reference to nothing, but my point is that business services can finally be delivered in a way which is easily acquirable by customers, as true services, with:
- clear, non-obtrusive contracts (the business kind… you know, ToS you feel no obligation to read ;)
- clear communication contracts (the implementation kind… “you give us A , we give you B”)
- pay as you go – with clear pricing
- strong support (imagine that)

Yes, web software makes that much more viable, but it is different than Software-components-as-a-Service. It’s the “objectification of business” – where all business services become clearly defined objects – with associated data and processes, and for which there are (hopefully) experts to service all of our individual businesses. It really is an extension of object-oriented design concepts (from programming) applied to business processes. Modular, simple to develop, easy to understand and maintain, and (probably the most important part when put in the business services context) pre-existing and proven.

The best example in my mind is Payroll services (avoiding the more obvious example used because of their early vision of online services). Who today is starting their own business or running a successful large business and doing payroll themselves? (except ADP themselves, of course). There was a progression somewhere in the history of business automation from do-it-yourself processing (manual payroll, in this example) to do-it-yourself programming (roll your own payroll software - yuck) to packaged software (buy vs. build) to Software as a Service… Aha! That’s why we call 'business services delivered online', 'Software as a Service'… because we didn’t jump from manual business services to web-delivered automation in one step – we went through a stage of business services being automated with packaged software. One day, will we look back and laugh?

See you at the Office 2.0 Conference

2007-09-01T21:47:00.000-05:00

Almost a year ago - it was October 10-11, 2006, actually - I participated in the Office 2.0 conference where we (Google) announced the combination of two of our collaborative content creation/editing products: Spreadsheets, which was in Labs at the time, and the Word Processing product formerly known as Writely. Google Docs & Spreadsheets won't even be 11 months old when this year's Office 2.0 conference is held.... which is really just a shocking (to me) reminder of how young this space is.

This year, I'm humbly participating on the opening panel called "What is Office 2.0 and the Future of Work"... Moderated by Om Malik, Founder, GigaOmniMedia and including the following panelists:
Steven Aldrich, VP Strategy & Innovation, Small Business, Intuit
Denis Browne, Vice President, Development, SAP
Danny Kolke, Chief Executive Officer, Etelos
Richard McAniff, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office, Microsoft,
...and, uh...
Me, Product Manager, Google Docs & Spreadsheets (yes, mostly the spreadsheets side), Google

If you're in San Fran next week, check out the conference - or just keep tabs at the conference site... or follow Ismael Ghalimi, the creator of this conference, on his company blog. Last year's event turned out to be a place where I met some incredible people with whom I still stay in close contact... so I have high expectations for this year's event.

An easy prediction: Product fails due to packaging

2007-08-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

Ick! What happened to my water!? Is this some sort of practical joke? Nope - sealed bottle... must have been contaminated and then sat in the hot car for several months and started growing...or... wait... maybe it's actually not water? Maybe it's an actual water-like drinking fluid intentionally colored to look like skunk juice! No way... Is it? It is!! Why didn't I figure that out sooner.... Why was I so quick to judge this poor product as water gone bad? Maybe because it's IN A WATER BOTTLE! What marble head decided to do that - to put a ghastly green tinted, skunked-out-water-looking substance in a container that has become synonymous with bottled spring water? It makes me almost sick just looking at it, how would I ever bring myself to drink it? The failure here, or my prediction of failure - to be fair, is in the packaging only, not in the product. The product could be the absolute best Green Tea drink on this side of the universe, but nobody will ever know. I can only think of a few paths which brought our targeted product manager to the decision to use that water-bottle container:

1 - Mr. Efficient: He saw no need to create a whole new package when they've already got warehouses full of those handy plastic bottles.

2 - Mr. Impatient: He was in a huge hurry after tasting this breakthrough refreshment (from a vat, no doubt, certainly not from the container in question) that he needed the fastest path to market... and was told "we have this warehouse full of containers from the water division..." and took the fast path for fear that competitors might discover green tea as a marketable refreshment (?).

3 - Mr. Wrong: He actually thought that the container itself was the breakthrough. Calling the whole team together one morning, after months of trying to figure out how in the world they were going to unload all this disgusting green tea, and said "I've GOT IT! We'll ship it in water bottles! Water Bottles I tell you!! That will make people think 'Refreshing! Clean! Tasteless!' - Brilliance, I tell you! Brilliance!"...

4 - Mr. Victim: He created the best drink product he possibly could, but has no involvement whatsoever in the packaging decision... his own forehead is red from how hard he slapped it the first time he saw his own product on the shelf.

I can't even bring myself to taste it... so don't ask...
If I turn out to be wrong, and this drink becomes the new Monster Energy drink phenom, I promise to drink a bottle of it.

More product insight from the 6-yr old

2007-08-23T21:01:00.000-05:00

"Dad", he said, sitting in front of the Mac at home, which is right next to his admittedly older hand-me-down wintel laptop, "Macs are the best computers, aren't they"... It wasn't a question at all (hey, Steve, are you listening? or are you sick of all this praise?). He was just looking for acknowledgment that he was right. "What makes you say that?", I asked, conveniently forgetting that I have an apple sticker on my wintel notebook 'as a statement' (that's the answer I gave about 5 times over the past week when people mentioned it's presence).
Now, if you read this far, you may as well pay attention, because here's the insightful part... He said, "Well, the Mac takes, like, not even a minute to turn on, but the laptop takes, like, forever!"
I was hit with that "oh yeah" brick in the head with that simple insight - that something as simple as boot-up time might actually be the differentiator for some people... in fact, it might end up being the differentiator for me. When I want something fast off the web, and neither machine is on, I pop on the Mac - and that happens more and more these days.

I was about to give him the "some people think Macs are best and other people think..." and then stopped myself and said "You're right"... realizing that speed - actually, convenience - really does drive customer perception and brand value...

"Give the Governor a harumph!" - Hedley Lamarr

Quick Blogger Tip: Post Date is actually Create Date

2007-08-20T10:07:00.001-05:00

I noticed this once before, but it got me again on my prior post... so figured I should pass it on to other Blogger.com users... If you post an entry from a previously saved "Draft", the date of your post will apparently be the date you originally saved the Draft rather than the date you actually posted. This could cause some of your posts to appear out of order... like for me, where my "How long can you live..." post was posted after my "Plane Boarding..." post - but drafted earlier - so their order in my blog was the reverse of what I expected... I sometimes put a post idea in draft form a week before actually posting it - so this is relevant to me.
You can actually change the Post Date of a post... so it's an easy issue to fix... which I'll go do now ;)

How long can you live? Ask your broker...

2007-08-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

Most mutual fund companies and brokerage houses (Fidelity, Schwab, etc) offer their customers a full service review of their portfolio - basically to help them understand their current finances and to suggest changes to help them meet their financial goals. If you can spend the time to outline all your expenses and a few other details, it's a pretty useful service. So, someone I know did this with Fidelity last week and got a full report - most importantly showing her that she can live off her income and assets, given what she told them about her expected future expenses, until the age of 86. Not bad...

But later that same week, she was showing me the report online, which used updated (ahem, lower) stock prices to give a more accurate value of her portfolio...and things, uh, changed...
"Huh, will you look at that.. now I can only live to 84!".

If you think it's stressful watching the value of your portfolio change day-to-day, imagine watching your financial longevity change day-to-day. Maybe this would be an effective method to treat addicted gamblers... "That bet just reduced your lifespan by 3 years"... nah... that wouldn't work... they would just keep trying to bet their way to an eternal existence...

Plane Boarding - great comedy, bad process

2007-08-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

This is a story of poor customer service and process change (or lack thereof)... not just comedy...

"I'm sorry, if you are not Elite, you'll have to step off the blue carpet"...
This, the words from the serious Continental employee who was trying to follow her employer's rules regarding their never-changing plane boarding process. You can see the customer is thinking "Seriously? You want me to board the plane 5 feet to the left because otherwise I've just wiped out the only benefit you give to frequent flyers, which is that they can walk on the blue carpet?"

A long time ago, they came up with a process of boarding planes by row, starting with the back of the plane, so that Mr. Oblivious - who needs to stand in the middle of the aisle while he inspects his blanket, finds a non-existent pillow and unloads the specific items from his carry-on before finding the perfect place for it in the overhead - won't hold up the whole production of passengers getting seated so we can take-off within an hour of our scheduled time. The idea was reasonable. Execution often fell short, but that's expected when you have virtually no control over your customers. But, then, they added another bright idea - that is, giving special boarding priority to customers who fly often. They call them "Elite" (ahem... I've seen them all, and I could easily attain that status, and believe me, we are all far from Elite). What they didn't plan for was the incredibly high percentage of flyers who would attain that status... seems to be 50-80% of all passengers on flights I've taken. So the boarding process starts with "needing assistance" and "travelling with children" and then, they open the special walkway with the blue carpet and call "We are now boarding our Elite customers"... Stampede! Virtually everyone in the cow pen rushes to the little blue carpet thinking they are part of a select few... trying to tell the people in front of them "excuse me, I am Elite"... only to find out that the whole stockade is filled with Elitists... and now, after the Elite majority have experienced the soft feel of the 6 foot long blue carpet and lined up in the walkway to the plan, the airline employees smugly close the blue carpet entrance and ask people to go through the non-elite entrance... and call "Rows 675-699 only"... as if it matters at this point to load the plane "by row, starting with the rear of the plane", with everyone now waiting in the jetway for Mr. and Mrs. Oblivious Elitist to do their little routine.

omg... there are so many solutions here... but there's no incentive to implement them. Imagine a single Continental employee saying "this is crazy - we'll board the Elite people first, but by row"... there would be an uprising from the Elite person whose got row 7 and the empolyee would probably be saddled by the FAA with all the blame for anything that went wrong on that flight for not following procedures.

There was value in the whole process though - comedy.

Bet you didn't know MIT was in California

2007-08-16T19:08:00.001-05:00

Last night, I participated as a panelist on a discussion on "Enterprise 3.0"... (I'll get back to that title in a minute). The MIT club of Northern California (organizers of the event) keep the east coast university alumni connected on the opposite coast - and there are plenty of 'em (MIT alum) in the Valley... Every few weeks, the club hosts events with a panel of relevant speakers on a certain topic in one of many categories. It's a good mix of casual atmosphere with a professionally organized and moderated discussion. Audience involvement is encouraged and the events are open (and very cheap)... This event was moderated by Sramana Mitra - a very smart "entrepreneur and a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994".
A few people have asked for the list of points I used during my intro discussion, so here it is in raw form... at the risk of it being irrelevant and useless without the context of the discussion ("then why post it JR?".... ). The other panelists - Cliff Reeves (Microsoft)[update 8/20: Cliff posted about the event], Tim Harvey (Webex) and Tom Cole (Trinity Ventures) were all very interesting.

Back to the name of this event... I was somewhat critical of the terminology used in the title of this event (as was a more often read blogger), as I feel that while "Web 2.0" was a useful stake in the ground on a significant shift to robust, web-based applications, and "Enterprise 2.0" was clearly just a conversion of terms to express corporate use of such applications & technologies, the term "Enterprise 3.0" makes a leap into something that will only get lost in definition conflict (which seemed to begin when Eric Schmidt was asked in public to define/predict it - which I discovered thanks to Orli). I feel that Enterprises are just now starting to tackle the movement to web 2.0 apps and are therefore just now helping to shape enterprise 2.0... so defining 3.0 is more simply stated as "What's the next huge shift in how businesses will apply technology and when will it occur". In hindsight, maybe that is easier (shorter) to just call Enterprise 3.0... nah.

New product is ready for distribution

2007-08-12T21:43:00.000-05:00

The analogies of garden growing to product development turn out to be pretty good - the only difference being that you don't need too much experience, training or skill to achieve greatness in the former (I know some of you might say the same for the latter). In fact, in about 60-80 days, and without much more than about a day or two up-front investment (dig!) and about $25 acquisition cost (to improve my time to market - I could have started with $1.99), I had produced the most incredible tomatoes. What a great confidence booster! From virtually nothing more than dirt, water and some labor, it turns out you can produce something that tastes great with a bagel and cream cheese - and looks good too!
I'll have to try this at work... If the analogy is right: some up-front design (just layout and spacing), promotion (dig), some positive energy (sunshine), some incentives (water), checking up every couple of days (yeah), some bug eradicating (uh huh), some hand-holding (stakes to keep them from falling over)... and bam! A Great Product!
Now - how does all this work in the winter?

Pity the marketers - part II - with a vengeance

2007-08-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

This post will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I think of "products" regardless of the situation, location or activity. Unfortunately, it might also cause some of you to just stop reading my blog. oh well.
The other day while I was ... well... you'll figure it out, I looked down and saw a LOGO INSIDE the "potty on the wall" (as my son used to call it). There was a corporate logo conspicuously printed on the screen that both deodorizes and prevents foreign objects from entering the drain of the urinal in the public men's room. (yuck, I know, forgive me).

So - why does Rochester Midland Corporation (RMC) want their logo in the toilet? I guess if your product is made for the urinal, and you are the unfortunate fellow responsible for marketing it, you take whatever opportunities present themselves. Poor marketer.

Too bad for RMC that they can't sell that ad space to other companies - and luckily for us... I think it would ruin my day to see a "Drink Budweiser" ad in the urinal... but it would be relevant, I guess ;)

So - looking a bit more into this (why? I have no idea.), the competitive market for these bathroom products is actually fierce! If you do a search for "urinal screens" (omg - this is now in my search history!), you'll see a full and competitive list of advertisers who want your... uh... business. Seems they're paying $2.50 - $3 per click on those terms... and while there's enough data to see search trends on the term "urinal" (go ask the Aussies and Romanians why they lead the pack on that search term), it pales in comparison to the search volume on the more generic term "bathroom" (where the UK pulls ahead in search volume).

Then, of course, there are many definitions for that pair of terms "urinal screen" - just ask ToiletPartitions.com, whose tagline in their ads is "Because no one wants to see your hiney".

Pity the marketers - or envy them...

2007-08-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

You like this little critter pictured here?
I don't... but that's only because I know that he's a dressed up, smirking, wise-ass peice of snot (literally). When I found him under the drivers seat of the mini-van, I recognized him from his commercials (but, no, I could not name the product, until I turned him around to find the product name happily advertised on his eensy weensy, tightly-fitting, booger-soaked sport shirt)...
I asked my wife very skeptically "How'd he get here?"
Turns out, she was surveyed upon exiting the local drugstore about her knowledge of "Mucinex" - the drug which little-snot-man represents... Luckily, she knew nothing of it.... but as a "gift" for her troubles, the marketing rep doing the survey gave her "Mr. Mucus" (his actual name). Actually, the rep handed him to our 15-month old in her carriage - and I can just imagine what my little baby was thinking ("AHH!! get it of me! get it off me!).

Anyway... I was sure this would be a post about how some marketers are so clueless about what sells, and how I pity the poor souls who are tasked with inventing campaigns for products which are associated with unfortunate bodily fluids - but now, I'm not so sure. A couple of days ago, I read the "Hits and Misses " column in the June issue of Business 2.0 - and sporty little mucus man was pictured and marked as a HIT!

Mucinex has soared like loosened phlegm to the No. 2 spot in the cold-medicine market. The success is largely due to memorably gross advertising that personifies congestion as "Mr. Mucus,"

If you read that whole column, it's not clear that the marketing genius who thought up the scheme of dressing up a blob of mucus, and naming him, is responsible at all for the success of Mucinex - but the drug is successful.... so the campaign certainly didn't turn off people as much as it did me...
I wish I could get Seth Godin (marketing master) to give his opinion on this one.

Disposable Printers and the Electronic Graveyard

2007-07-20T08:39:00.000-05:00

My dad coined that term "the Electronic Graveyard" sometime in the 80's and wrote about it in the mid 90's, as a way to describe our basement... not the whole basement, but a significant portion of real estate in the basement which contained a heap of practically useless home audio, video, and "modern conveniences" such as vacuums, toasters, microwaves and other stuff that plug into the wall. For some reason, these devices were too good for the garbage, so they got a semi-permanent resting spot in the basement. In fact, after a while it almost seemed like we enjoyed the very nature of the pile and celebrated the addition of another abandoned appliance. There were only a couple of reasons why these devices would be added to the EG:
1 - It wasn't broken, it was just replaced by something better... which is why it couldn't rightly be just thrown away. So we'd place it down in the "bogey basement" (my sister's term) in hopes that one day it would somehow evolve into something more useful or be adopted by some poor soul who was more than two generations of technology behind us.

2 - It was broken. These were the items which deserved to be either fixed or thrown away.

So let me focus on these broken items (as if you had a choice of how long it takes me to get to my point). Throwing these items away just seemed wrong... first, because the item clearly still had some value - maybe 10% of it's replacement value on eBay for some hobbyist who also had a broken one and needed some parts - but this is where the "cycle of not worth it" continues - since just the effort to package the item seemed more than this broken device deserved. The other path - fixing the broken item - was deemed as a "good money after bad" approach, since the cost of even asessing the remedy would clearly be more than we'd need to spend getting a brand new one.

And finally - this is my point. I have a respectable electronic graveyard which is secular - allowing only printers onto its grounds... but it's not in my basement - it's amongst the living, in my home office. One on the floor below my desk, one on top of my kid's toy box which contains all the annoying, loud toys which we just assume they never see again (or not until they're strong enough to lift that all-in-one Epson Printer which now just feigns printing when connected). That Printer was $99 originally. It would cost $65 for someone to look at it to assess the problem (not fix it - assess it). The one on the floor, unfortunately, is a $350 large format photo printer which won't even turn on. Since I discovered that large format is not something I do at home, this printer could be replaced for about $$150 - $200.

So - now what. Two broken printers.
One thing I discovered, after about 10 months, is that they probably won't magically start working. My wife actually abandoned that approach after 4 months or so and brought home a perfectly operable $99 HP. And that raises the main question: Are printers now disposable? Are all things electronic so cheap to produce and purchase, and so non-trivial to fix, that we should just create a better infrastructure to dispose of them when they're "done"? I'm assuming there are fairly inaccessible recycling programs for electronics - but, back to the "cycle of not worth it", it would take me the better part of a month to find one... I've considered attempting my own program of launching these things into an upper orbit, but figure my neighbors wouldn't approve of the testing phase which would probably see a printer or two crashing through their roof to end up on their kitchen table due to a failed rocket booster or some such nonsense.

The iphone is perfect, but the Mac is not

2007-07-12T22:10:00.000-05:00

So far my experience with my iPhone has been almost perfect - that is when it is not connected to a laptop/desktop. Here's why....

I buy the iPhone, convinced that it will be the perfect device and accepting the possibility that it might be the trigger to get me to move over to a Mac.

We have a mac at home with all our music and photos on it, but I use my IBM work laptop for everything else (all work, all the time, basically)...
The iPhone will not do anything (sans emergency call) without activation - and that can only be done via iTunes.... so
- I plug my phone into the Mac... nuthin. Check connections, surf, search, read, AHA! Simple... I have to upgrade to iTunes 7.3!... so
- I do. Online download - it's a snap... this mac is great....
- Plug the iPhone back in... nuthin. Check connections... surf, search, surf, read.... ahA! I missed this the last time! I need to upgrade my OS to 10.4 !! Darn! Oh well... I can accept that.. I've had this Mac for over 2 years... so...
- It was too late the day I bought the iPhone to go back to the Apple store... and there was no chance that I could wait to try my iPhone... so... since I already got iTunes for my PC a while back as part of a Quicktime upgrade...
- I plugged my iPhone into the PC... and VOILA! Activation begins and ends within 5-10 minutes and my AT&T transfer of my phone number is done within 20 minutes... wow. That WAS easy.... so
- No music... and just a few photos (misc ones I had handy on my PC... but I can live with that... a couple of days later........
- Went to the Apple Store... bought OSX 10.4!
- Got home and installed OSX 10.4... not a simple proces, since I got what's known to Mac lovers as "Kernel Panic" - sort of the same thing as when you microwave your popcorn too long and you get that burning buttery-chemical smell - only without the smell - just the panicked kernels... anyway...
- Turns out to be my external hard drive and i surf, read, surf and never find anything... just figure it out myself.
- Got it! 10.4 runs! ... so,
- Plug in the iPhone! .... "sorry... this device requires OSX 10.4.10"...
- Wait! I have 10.4. uh...(click 'about this mac'... )... 10.4.6. great.
- Go to apple.com... download 10.4.10 - 170 Mb... ugh... 30 minutes later, it's still installing... ugh... finally! installed!
- plug in phone.... again... "Sorry... iTunes cannot start - you need to download the latest version...". UGH!!!
- Go to Apple.com... look for updates... download... install...
- plug in phone.... (yawn)... nuthin.... kick the Mac.... nuthin...
- Surf, read, surf... "try restarting the machine" says one help entry... so
- I do.
- plug in phone..... (yawn)... itunes comes up.... phone is recognized... wow... (yawn)...
- Remember I Synced the iphone with my PC earlier - and got all my contacts on my phone now... this is relevant to the next step...
- try to drag some music on the iPhone... no go... right, it's the sync thing... i pick an itunes directory to sync some music... "Are you sure you want to erase everything off this iPhone to begin syncing to this computer? You can only sync to one computer."... ARGH!!!
- gave up.

Like i said... my iPhone is incredible - but so far, it's living in sin with my PC.
-

Don't wait for a feature - write it yourself...

2007-07-05T13:50:00.000-05:00

Had to share this, for those of you who don't see the Google Docs & Spreadsheets blog... A spreadsheet filter application was developed using the Spreadsheets API by an intern (go Alex!) on the spreadsheets team. Really valuable when you often work with just a few rows in those large-ish spreadsheets which have many (many!) rows of data...

This app lets you create a bookmarkmarklet (that's a bookmark created by dragging a link to your bookmark bar on your browser) to any of your spreadsheets... it should be self-explanatory - but you basically just feed it the URL of your favorite published spreadsheet...

I got one

2007-07-05T08:13:00.000-05:00

I never expected to want one, but once I saw the iPhone in action, that urge to own one just kept gnawing at me... I gave in... hey, I needed a new mobile provider anyway (nice try JR).

I was fully expecting to have the "why did I do that" regret after 24 hours - but given the experience so far - including the transfer of my mobile number to AT&T - there will be no regret. In fact, I may need two of them ;) The only thing that almost ruined the experience was that the iPhone actually would NOT activate using my home Mac... it requires OS/X 10.4 (I'm on 10.3) even though the newest iTunes version (7.3) installed/works find on my OS. So... without hesitation, I used my IBM Laptop with iTunes installed and, bang. Done.

If I had to pick my favorite experiences in the first 12 hours since activation, it would have to be first the reading of my GMail account via POP. The speed was great (full signal from home now - unlike my pathetic 2 bars from T-Mobile) and the zoom-in capability (I love that!) gave me easy access to my first PDF (the invoice from the Apple Store!).

The other obvious highlight is MAPS... the pics in this post show it as good as I could in a minute or two... i can create my own maps using My Maps - and then access it on the road... I created one for a tour of NYC a few months ago - and that's the one shown in these pics. wow.
More to come on this, I'm sure.

2007-07-02T21:44:00.000-05:00

Darn... I forgot to mention the new Doclist we launched last week... I've been trying (really!) to avoid too many posts related to the Docs & Spreadsheets product... But this time, I'm surprised at my own self-control - 'cause I love this new doclist... Have you tried the search bar type-ahead yet... Muah!! Ron explained it well in our team blog, so I'll stop there...
I know we had a fairly low bar to meet, and we still need a bunch of features people want (including me), but it is a huge improvement...

Anyway - that was just catch-up...

the real reason for this post is to profess my way-too-early love for the yet-unproven, barely-seen iPhone! I finally got my hands on one today for about 4 minutes. Do you think I called my mom? No. I should have. But I forgot this thing even lets you make calls... I immediately went to docs.google.com to check out the doclist - and then, as fast as I could, opened a spreadsheet... and, Voila! There it was!

In it's full browser glory! (calm down, JR, you geek-loser). The proud owner of this particlar iPhone got it away from me long enough to show me how to zoom in (wow... just like Jeff Han's Demos on the big screen), and that's when I snapped this second picture... oh... what's that... a "trying to reach google.com" message... oh - right - Ajax communication in a collaborative edit session don't yet work on the iPhone browser... oh well... full disclosure is always best anyway - besides, viewing the spreadsheet worked beautifully! So just don't try to edit remotely yet... So now - what to do... buy v1.0 and risk the yet-unknown new product-itis symptoms - maybe a battery failure re-call or a cracking-screens problem? or wait to get the perfected v2.0 in a year... hmmm.... Nah... this is Apple... v1.0 is good enough!

The promise of portals is finally here - as gadgets

2007-06-21T22:13:00.000-05:00

The SIFMA Technology conference is in NY this week (sorry - that's the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assoc) and I'm not attending, but I know some old friends are. I hope they picked up some good tchochkes for me... anyway...

I remember many (many!) years ago at those shows (then called SIA, and before they brought along the cast of the Sopranos to sell IT services - seriously) there were many companies singing the virtues of their Portal products - trying, of course, to sell to the corporate IT teams to sell their internal bankers, brokers, operations teams, etc. It sounded great - but it was too early. Every solution was proprietary or based on a not-yet-and-not-ever-to-be standard which was "awaiting approval" by the W3C or some other speedy standards body... And besides, the internal products were on dozens of incompatible platforms with really poor integration methods.
But now, about 12-15 years later, I think we're there - and it's the consumer market which is driving both the standards (de facto) and the methods and some actual content.

It's all best shown with pictures - which were beautifully collected and displayed on LifeHacker... a bunch of iGoogle screen shots ("show us your iGoogle"), including a very compelling Finance-oriented personalized page... something that really strengthens my belief that this gadget model will take over the corporate market. The simplicity of delivering consumable snippets of applications in windows which can be directly interactive and then expanded when needed is smart and usable and, for me, perfect. It's not just a google thing - Yahoo had some great portaly-gadgety stuff early on, and now pretty much everyone does - but I can sing the praises of iGoogle freely, as it's not my product :) and I really do love it.

media mashup tools do not make me a good producer

2007-06-21T07:52:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my friends at GoToWeb20, I have a shortened morning, having spent the last 30 minutes playing with a media mashup tool they discovered by Vuvox. Embedded here is a sample:

It's Flash-based - so the styles they provide have some level of click-interaction while viewing... very slick. I picked a very subtle, hardly-dynamic style for these photos, but there are lots of other styles to choose from... (go ahead - click the flowers... go on... don't be afraid... it's not a banner-ad in disguise...)

If you like that, you should also check out iBloks - also a media mashup and publishing tool, but possibly further along in their product lifecycle than vuvox, with many options for sharing and gadgetry, and even a place for Agencies, Designers and artists to make money with iBloks. Yes Greg, an ecosystem ;) . Another differentiator here seems to be the focus on 3D animated models as the basis for media presentation.

You can just use the free models that they provide as your theme, or go to the "SHOP" tab and use a custom model (Mods), Themes, Music, Photos and Video... You can even create gadgets to share your creations... There's more depth here that I won't get into, as I have no time for a full review (now that I used my time playing ;)

Father's Day Retrospective

2007-06-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

Here's last year's Father's Day Google home page logo... I really loved that logo. In fact, I liked it so much, I kept it... It just had some special meaning to me. My dad spent many good days with me, and then with his grandchildren, at the water's edge, teaching us to fish, or just enjoying the passage of time while fishing together.

So when I saw this year's Father's day logo, I thought it just wasn't as good as last year's... although, it, too reminds me of great times with my dad - swimming, snorkeling, relaxing on the beach or by a pool.

Then I realized why I was a bit dissappointed with this year's logo... in fact, it wasn't the logo at all... it's just that this year's father's day itself just wasn't quite the same as last year's.

Learn Decision making skills from the (US) government

2007-06-14T21:57:00.000-05:00

At first I was quite surprised with the "wealth" of information available on the Small Business Administration site.... at least at a high level - ya'know, squinting. They have 4 nicely organized sections to "Plan your business", "Start your business", "Manage your business" and "Getting out"... So I'm looking through the basic headlines of each subsection thinking "hey, this is pretty good..." seeing things like "Choose a structure" and "Lease Equipment" and "Get Insurance" - a total of 30 sub-categories, including the one which caught my eye enough to go deeper, labelled "Make Decisions".

Following that link gave me three subsequent links - including the winner of my next click, called "Are You A Good Decision Maker?".

Here lies the key secrets to government beauracracy (which they apparently think should now be applied to small businesses).
The first section, called "Ten Steps to Wise Decision-Making" should actually be called 'Ten ways to put off making a decision for as long as possible'... Each step requires deeper and deeper analysis of the potential alternatives - with no limits - starting with defining the decision to be made and the insightful lesson to ask yourself "Do you really need to make a decision? (if you do not have at least two options, there is no decision to be made)". Then to "Brainstorm as many different alternatives as you can imagine - let your imagination run free..." - including the wise suggestion to "just be sure to write everything down" (clearly there was an auditor on the editorial staff). The next 6 steps require further discovery and then deeper dives into all the potential alternatives of your pending decision which may exist in this universe and elsewhere (at this point, I fully expected them to suggest that I go search my grandmother's attic - or attend 4 more years of college to uncover even more potential alternatives).... afterall, "Additional information generally leads to more alternatives"... so I should "check out", then "Sort through", then "visualize the outcomes", then "do a reality check" (you think they did one?), then, finally, pick the "wise decision" and "Get started!". So here in step 9 is where the true decision-making spirit glistens... "Second-guessing yourself will only cause grief" so "you always have the option of changing your mind in the future" - which sounds like a euphamism for 'go to step 3 and randomly choose another of your deeply analyzed 417 potential alternatives'. Oh my.. step 10 actually does suggest this - "If the decision did not come out the way you planned, go through the complete decision-making process again"....

So, I'm guessing this process wouldn't work well for decisions like "Should I check my parachute?" - cause if I am unhappy with decision alternative #17 in that case, I'm probably not able to "go through the complete decision-making process again". I know, an extreme example - but just needed to make the point... 'cause even a decision like "should we spend our full year's marketing budget on this TV ad" is not exactly reversible...and it feels as important as the parachute example to the small business owner...

The best part (yes, better than the other best part) was in the next section labelled "Common-decision making mistakes" where they list "Not listening to your feelings or gut reactions" as a mistake... Huh?! The process never mentioned anything about intuition or gut reaction before now!! Where was that advice when I needed it! I could have saved 4 months and 62 yellow pads if I just listend to my gut from the beginning!! Why'd ya tell me to keep looking for alternatives!!

Yeah... I'm sure they just mis-titled this whole thing...

Driving to Venzuela to fill up my tank

2007-06-08T08:22:00.000-05:00

Wired Magazine (June) had this great 1-page graphic comparing gas prices in about 35 countries. I had to turn it into a spreadsheet so I could sort it and chart it...
Maybe my father-in-law is right...maybe there are laws/regulations preventing us (in the US) from importing refined gas from other countries who could provide it much cheaper. In Venzuela, for example, gas costs $0.17 ! I could fill my tank for $3.40 !

Once I figured out how to calculate land distance from New York to Caracas, I discovered that it's almost worth it to drive to Caracas to fill up my tank ;)

The only problem is that it would cost somewhere near $715 to get there (at NY prices) to that I could spend only $44 to get back (at Caracas prices)... all this assuming it wouldn't impact my gas mileage to have a 250 gallon trailer pulled behind my car... (it would take 12 tank-fulls to get back home)

Are you changing your email address again?

2007-06-06T06:09:00.000-05:00

If you have an email address with your current ISP (provider of internet connectivity ) - please stop. You are destined to annoy your friends and lose contact with them... Think about it... you move houses to a new town with a new ISP... bye bye old email address... or your phone company or favorite pizza place offers you a better deal on internet servcies - and you don't sign up only for fear of losing that horrible current email address which you've now shared with your whole world of contacts... Your Internet Service provider (Comcast, Verizon, BT, etc) will not give you a free email address if you decide to stop using their services... And, when you do change, PLEASE don't just change your email address to another non-committed email provider...and if you do, PLEASE don't send me your pathetic little "I'm changing my email address from joe34225@ISPthisYear.net to joe476221@ISPnextYear.yuk". I've received at least two such notices from friends lately - and while I had an easy time explaining why this was not a smart move, I realized that I've seen no marketing to this point from any 'independent' provider of more continuous email services (iow, not associated with your connectivity, like Google, Yahoo, msft).

So - what email address would you want if you could have anything? How about joe@soCool.com ? Why not come up with your own domain name and then create email addresses for your whole family at that address? I know - "how the heck do you do that?" - well, besides finding a web domain you like that is available, it's actually pretty easy... Of course, my preferred way is the free way - using Google Apps for Your Domain.. I can give more details if the sign-up page isn't speakin' your language... just ask.

Growing Products, literally

2007-06-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

Probably the most over-used analogy is to compare almost anything which requires work - businesses, products, even relationships - to a garden (or even a single plant). You know... water it, give it sun, pull the weeds around it, rid it of pests... and one day you'll reap the rewards of the fruit. It's a good analogy usually. But the other day, I got a view of the most beautiful flowers, close up, in my kitchen, which made me think that the analogy goes deeper than the obvious.

There were about 70 peonies, cut from the garden, practically exploding in color on my kitchen counter, and I was totally frozen by their beauty (I know, too much feminine side.. deal with it). First of all, I immediately realized "that's why she does it", thinking, of course, of the hours of time and energy my wife spends planning, ordering, planting and caring for these (and hunderds of other) plants. The basic part of the analogy, about how hard work and proper caring can really bring rewards, was truly proven here... but then it occurred to me, that there is also a time limit to the reward. In this case, the appreciation of these incredible blooms could only last for a few days at most. In fact, in time, no matter what we did, the beautiful flowers would turn into crumbly, dead vegitation, rotting away in stinky swamp water vases (yuck). I quickly grabbed my camera in an effort to prolong the time I had to appreciate the flowers in their current colorful state.

So that whole analogy, including the time element, applies nicely to human relationships.... they take work to bring continuous reward and in time, no matter what we do, relationships fade and die... whether (but hopefully not) due to lack of proper caring, or just the natural aging of life into death. (that's the deep part...sorry... no more of that..)

The analogy also applies really well to Products (ah.. again.. my point... at the very end of a long post... I have to stop that). Some products take tons of work for a very brief, but powerful (or mild) reward... like a great event... a family reunion or wedding, for example... which takes lots of work, but brings great joy only for a very brief period of time. Other products also take lots of work but continue to flourish and live and bring reward for many, many years. Developing pharmaceuticals, for example, have the potential to bring great reward for as long as we can see. The Polio vaccine is an instance of that. Imagine the work involved - but the reward is continuous.

...and the key thing that I learned by looking at those flowers the other day, is to appreciate the reward as fully as possible while you have it - particularly since you know the reward won't last.

"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying."
by Herrick, Robert
Quote Provided By Quotations Book

Your whining sales person is living in my house

2007-06-05T22:21:00.001-05:00

A friend was recently complaining to me about their woes of selling products to corporate IT departments - knowing that I can relate to their pain from a previous life. He's sure the people working at the target company would love their product - in fact they've told him, but he can't convince the corporate IT guys. This is no surprise, given that the IT guys are in the business of risk aversion as a priority over innovation or risk taking - even if there is a huge potential gain in productivity or revenue or whatever... (I'm not sayin' that's right, I'm just sayin' that's how many corporate IT groups operate)... So.. my friend's product continues to grow (albeit slowly) by appealing directly to the people working in operational jobs within the company... under the radar of their IT group.

We've seen many products succeed by being offered directly to the end customers rather than those in charge of purchasing - either by chance (the end customers find it and fall in love with it) or by design (the product is targeted to the end customer directly as a sales method to get around those in charge)... then the end-customers sell the product to their guardians from within - they become moles.

So it struck me that kids are probably the most powerful moles - little sales people living amongst us... How else could you sell sneakers with concealed wheels in the soles - you can't market those to sane parents directly (apologies to the 95% of my parent-friends who have purchased these). But when a kid whines for a few months about getting this seemingly insane product - the parent has about one choice to stop the whining - and that sells product. Drug companies selling perscription drugs directly to the public, inject every doctors office with whining patients who suddenly start requesting certain drugs... TV Show producers get their target audience to sell their product when they "ask their cable company to add the Freak-of-the-Week-Channel" (they probably bought ads on Desparate Housewives for that specific show).

Who is your end customer? Are they whining enough to sell your product for you? Just be forewarned - if I ever get a hold of the people who put candy bars in supermarket checkout lanes, I'll lock them in a room with my kids for a few hours during a good sugar high from their fabulous, artificially flavored food-stuff.. and I'll leave them there during the post-sugar-high crash too...

Deadbeat dads = Fisherman?

2007-06-02T23:19:00.000-05:00

Someone must have done a study and found that either there are an unusually high number of deadbeat dads who go fishing, or, that fishing is a major cause of responsibility neglect... Knowing how crazy I was about fishing a few years back (but only before having kids... really...) I think the latter is more likely the case...
Anyway - tonight, I needed to buy my fishing license online... and before I could complete the transaction, I was presented with this pop quiz which forced me to answer Yes/No to the following questions:

a) Do you currently have a child-support obligation?
1. Are you in arrears in payment of your child-support obligation?
2. Does the arrearage match or exceed the total amount payable for the past six months?
b) Have you failed to provide any court-ordered health insurance coverage during the past six months?
c) Have you failed to respond to a subpoena relating to either paternity or child-support proceeding?
d) Are you the subject of a child-support related warrant?

Seems that the fishing license is only one of many things a deadbeat dad (I'm assuming "deadbeat parent" is the politically correct term?) is prevented from obtaining... which puts this in pespective... but on its own, it seemed odd... then funny... then sad (gimme a break - I meant sad for the kids! not for the poor dad who can't go fishing now ;)
That said, I'm going fly-fishing tomorrow morning (really).

What's in YOUR mailbox?

2007-06-02T10:52:00.000-05:00

Dear Pat Johnston - Director of Consumer Credit / Capital One,
I really need a few more offers from you before I finally collapse in a heap of return envelopes, important disclosures and fake cardboard credit cards. Only 7 generous offers from your company this week - not enough to wear me down. But, please feel free to continue trying - change the language of your offer (just slightly), or give me 0.0% APR for 18 months rather than 12, or 5.9% financing for *life (btw, what's that asterisk?), or maybe use a "Yes, I Want It" sticker rather than a checkbox, or try "Very Urgent Matter" on the envelope rather than the plain old "Time Sensitive Material"... I think eventually, I'll just give in just so you'll LEAVE ME ALONE! But wait, if I take one of your god-forsaken credit cards, will you actually stop harrassing me?

What's my real incentive here? How about if I take two cards? Then will you stop? How about if I promise to watch your annoying spokesperson's movies or reruns of his TV shows until I'm sickened even more than I am by your waste of paper and waste of mailbox space (not to mention my garbage can space!) Please! Just Stop!

For now, I'll just keep sending back to you all that helpful marketing material in each and every pre-paid return envelope you provide - as my own personal recycling effort... maybe everyone i know can do that too... I hope you appreciate that.

Great idea - even if it is being done already

2007-05-30T20:09:00.000-05:00

When you have (what you think is) a “great idea” – what do you do? I get this false positive often, so I write a quick summary and maybe a sketch in one of my many notebooks (yes, with a pen) or, if I’m online, I add it to my perpetual JR-ideas document (yes, of course it's a google doc).
Sometimes, I actually believe I have an original, great idea and I begin to consider plans to get it from concept to market. Many times, the idea is probably crap, and I know it, but I write it down anyway (there's an analogy here with cow-produced fertilizer - where maybe this idea can help another better idea grow... so maybe that's why I keep it). In either case, the step I recently realized that I avoid for a while is the obvious research step - the online search (yes, of course that online search) to see whether and how this idea has been done before...

I'm pretty sure I avoid the search for 2 reasons:

1 - If I find other examples of this idea too soon, it might ruin my creative process and sub-consciously guide me towards the pre-existing designs... I'd be influenced and "my" idea might not get a fair shot at becoming unique or innovative.

2 - I'm never quite sure whether finding examples of the idea is better or worse than NOT finding examples... This is actually the root concept I wanted to make in this post (it always takes me a while to get there, doesn't it?)...

So if I find no results in my search - that is, no examples of products implementing this idea - I can look at that optimistically ("yay! I'm first! I knew this was a great idea!"), or, pessimistically ("...of course nobody's doing this - I knew it was a bad idea.. they probably tried and failed or did the research and found no market or no margin")...

If I do find results in my search - examples of this "unique" idea - again, the optimist says "see? This IS a great idea! People are already spending money in this area!", while the pessimist says (in their best Eeyore voice) "hmmm... too late... again".

The other day, I had one of these self-proclaimed "great ideas"... one which I actually told a few people just to get their reaction. My personal litmus test passed, which is "I would buy one of these!"

The Idea: Crank-powered Cell Phone Charger

You've seen those emergency radios, right? with the crank on the side so you don't need batteries... well... why not power a cell phone that way? We all have "emergencies" where we have no power in our cell phone, but urgently need to call home to see if we should be picking up milk or pizza ;)

Was I right? Is this a great idea?

Of course it’s a great idea (is it?) – that’s why it’s been done! (does that make it a great idea?)
When I finally took the obvious step of searching for such a product, I found more than a few – including the Sidewinder, which was exactly what I envisioned when I wrote this (ahem...) totally original idea in my ideas list.
In fact, CNet, Gizmodo and Engadget all reviewed such devices (ok... Engadget's was a review of a different kind of cell phone charger which probably had no predecessors when the dude pictured did his search for "hamster-powered cell-phone charger"), but the Gadgeteer reviewed the SideWinder as far back as September, 2003 ;)

So - my conclusion is, it's ok to take a bit of time developing an idea before even looking at the market... I think it does help the creative process... but when those 4 minutes of innovation are over (ok, maybe 40), I'll do the search! Even if the results (or lack of) leave me confused and optimistic (or is that pessimistic?), at least I'll know whether I can just buy one - rather than designing, developing, producing, testing , fixing and producing again, just so I can have one myself.

Beer Pitchers 2.0

2007-05-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

Maybe they were thinking "they're too busy bowling to notice"... or maybe bowling alleys aren't the only ones using this new beer interface... I haven't gone bowling in a long time, and, come to think of it, I haven't ordered a pitcher of beer in a long time either, so maybe the whole 'beer pitcher space' changed around me while i wasn't looking...
I'm referring, of course, to the "Beer Pitcher Implant", which, no doubt, is filled with high quality, organic, spring-water ice ("it's to keep the beer cold!"), but also serves the unfortunate purpose of cheating the buyer out of about 24 ounces of the purchased fluid... I don't think they reduced the price of the pitcher since implementing this new chrome...
Any way, I forgot to mention the beer was actually pretty cold, but we drank the small quantity so fast that trying to keep it cold with this new feature is a total farce.
Kudos to the product manager responding to the users who complained their beer wasn't cold, but who forgot to test this thing with real bowlers (er, beer drinkers)... you think he escaped (or got fired) before the user feedback poured in - or you think he got promoted for reducing the cost of every pitcher? (I'm so negative)

Monday morning meeting

2007-05-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

I was moving slowly this morning, trying to wake up for the start of the week as I drove to the train station at 5:55am. Thinking the normal morning product thought (“I wonder if there’s time to get a coffee?”)… when I suddenly get this sense, out of nowhere, that I’ll probably hit a deer on this fine Monday morning (really...this was the actual thought - a very weird thing)- so, I slowed down a bit – to about 35mph. That thought was quickly followed by a memory of running directly over a suicidal bunny last week, which, I swear, did this head-first dive (on this very same road) directly into my rolling right front tire, as if I was about to run over a very tasty looking carrot and he figured he could beat me to it... just like in that book of bunny suicides... So, with that unpleasant thought in my mind, I found myself trying to recall the cartoons from that book... and within seconds, I caught about 2 frames worth of a speeding deer out of my left eye and “Thwack-bam!”, I hit that deer with barely enough time to just touch the brake and brace myself with both hands on the steering wheel. In an empathetic harmony, I simultaneously let out an audible “Uh!” as I saw a bit of deer dust (and maybe a slight splash – yuk) spray from my right front fender. I looked in the rear view mirror to see the deer collapse (rather peacefully) by the roadside and within the next 5 seconds a thousand thoughts raced through my mind as my heart rate built up to an all out sprint... I thought about whether my car was damaged, and whether I should stop... thanked the deer for not being big enough or high enough to trigger my airbags or smash through my windshield... wondered if anyone saw this spectacle of the deer-infested suburbs... wondered if the deer saw my face as clearly as I saw hers...and...then... I thought about whether there was a market for The Book of Deer Suicides.

The important stuff...

2007-05-14T17:47:00.000-05:00

This blog isn't about my family - it's about web products and products in general... But since my Dad died last Tuesday, posting to my blog about web products seemed so unimportant - i felt like I could only continue posting after writing about him in some way...
But this blog isn't about the important stuff, like family and relationships... so, to honor my dad in this post, I guess I'll just focus on the stuff relevant to this blog - his love of technology and the web, his connection to web products and his interest in products in general. I won't mention all the important stuff, such as the relationship I had with him - which, unlike any of my friends relationships with their fathers growing up, was open and honest, based on complete trust and, in many ways, more of a friendship than most experts (or maybe even I, as a dad myself now) might consider healthy. And I won't mention how much I loved him, 'cause even if I tried, there are no words on paper or bits on a web server somewhere which could fairly describe the depth of my love for him... and I won't mention how deeply I trusted him and respected him and how comfortable I was in his unconditional love for me and my wife and my kids - 'cause that certainly isn't relevant here.... and I certainly won't get into his relationship with my mom - which started when they were early teens and started again in their 60's... and I won't get into my Dad's love of his grandchildren (again, no words...), nor his commitment to all the people he helped as patients while he practiced psycho-analysis for 20+ years (after changing the course of his prior 15+ years as a stock-broker - imagine?)...and his love of his profession as a therapist and his passion for life and all the things that brought him joy - I won't mention it! Most of all, I'll skip all the talk of his courage and resilience as he cleverly battled cancer for 7 years, even though the doctors figured his to be less than a 1-year fight - which is forgivable, as they clearly didn't know him and clearly hadn't met his partner in this battle - my mom, who had already beat this evil disease herself and who, with her power of positive thinking (and cooking) could likely cure world hunger - not to mention (which I won't!) the motivation he had, to live to see all 3 of my kids be born, and his other 3 grand-daughters grow into beautiful young women, none of which would not have been possible given his original prognosis... no... all of that is irrelevenat for you, the reader of this un-important blog...

So - what is relevant for this blog then? My dad loved technology... starting with any physical electronic or audio/video gadget, maturing into computing gadgets in the late 80's and more recently turning into a pure love of the web. He was the first person I knew on the web... in fact, he was on the pre-web - on Compuserve's CIS service - getting online help from Gary Yost of Autodesk 3D-Studio fame when we founded Vivid Images together with my Brother-in-law (flying logos for videos). Then he gravitated to the web, where he would give me on an almost daily basis a rundown of the best new sites at a time when only a few hundred were posted per day (on the whole web!). He even started his own column called "How Come?" when he hooked up with a friend who was running the earliest ISP I ever knew. He was the first to tell me about Yahoo, about AOL, about Google (which, even my friends remember as an ironically early foreshadowing of my future employer) - and he was the first to get hooked on Ebay, when he slowly sold off a collection of a few hundred car magazines which were abandoned at our house by an old nomadic friend who reviewed cars and bikes for a living. In fact, he started a site called "SearchAllAuctions" which, before Ebay had cornered that market, allowed people to see search results across all the auction sites (yes, there were actually other players in that space back then). He must have hit a good idea on that one, as Ebay sent him a "cease and desist" on crawling their auction listings ;). He was a pioneer of the web the same way he was an early adopter in all his adult years in audio, CD's, home video production, and anything else electronic. Having secret insight into my future, he was also an avid spreadsheet user - starting with Lotus 1-2-3 and even a hardly-known product called Lucid-3D.
More recently, of course, he maintained a personal DVD Ratings list on Google Spreadsheets, which I subscribe to... and he even, in his last few months, began designing StepParentsOnline.com where his vision was to help people understand and cope with the complex relationships between stepparents and stepchildren.

So - that's the relevant stuff here... not very important, but relevant to most readers of this stream of bytes who, luckily, don't come to my blog to get the stuff which makes life important. The important stuff are the people waiting for you to stop reading this so you can get back to them.

"Burn Slowly the Candle of Life" - Edward Rochelle (original credit to the Moody Blues)

Product Managers aren't exactly artists... but...

2007-05-06T20:44:00.000-05:00

Making my first foray into the art world this weekend, I went to a demonstration by an artist, Elizabeth Pruitt, in a gallery near my home. It was intriguing... to watch someone slowly turn blotches of paint into a practically alive version of still objects. And, while watching Elizabeth, an analogy of painting artists to software product creators came to me quite clearly.

Elizabeth set up her still life model to be a pre-defined image of what her product would become. If you didn't like the way the roses sat atop the box, or if you just don't like brass urns and grapes, than you know in advance that you probably won't like her finished product - even before her brush hits the canvas. On the other hand - if you love the way these objects fit together the way she has created the physical model, and you've already enjoyed the beauty of her other paintings, than you will love this particular painting when done (which we did!).

The point is (yeah, I'm finaly getting there) that Elizabeth defines her product well before she paints it. She figures it all out before any tubes of paint are even opened. The objects, their relationship to each other, the colors, the shadows, the light (!), "the story" (as she puts it). Do all painters work this way? I think not. I'm guessing there are some which start painting without a real vision of where they'll end up...and while they still may achieve brilliance, they couldn't convince anyone else of that until the work was done.

It seemed so clear to me that product managers - at least in the software space - also work closer to one of those methods or the other... either diligent about defining every behavior of their finished product, every graphic, every navigation, every functional feature - or - loosely outlining only the highest level definition of what they are creating (uh..."web-based collaboration", as an example)... while most fit somewhere in between these two extremes (guess which side I am closest to ;)

As I thought about this blog entry - it also ocurred to me that this line of thinking is very close indeed to a brilliant Malcolm Gladwell speech (a rendition of which I heard at a sales conference about a year ago) which expands on the concepts put forth by David Galenson in his book "Old Masters and Young Geniuses".... Here's a quick excerpt from his site:
"Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age."

Seems like analogies come easy when comparing creators in any medium - just took my a bit by surprise at first since it seemed painting was so far from my work for me when I first stepped into that gallery.

See your spreadsheet as a draggable timeline

2007-04-29T22:27:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a chance online stumbling across Kiyo's Blog (ok, "chance online stumbling" is more like a link in my email triggered by a google alert for 'google spreadsheet' ;), I discovered this really cool open source timeline widget in the form of a Sample Timeline using a Google spreadsheet. So it was a double bonus for me.. a cool widget and, even better, a great use case for the spreadsheets API !

Now I could have discovered this earlier if I watched everything that came out the developer pages of Google - as this widget was highlighted previously as a
Google Code Sample related to using Google Calendar API.... but Kiyohito Yamamoto saved me the trouble of both recognizing the opportunity and then coding a spreadsheet-sourced timeline... Thanks Kiyo!

Take your Daughters, Sons and Toys to work

2007-04-27T10:45:00.000-05:00

Today was ‘take your daughters to work’ day… so I brought my son ;)
First – a train ride… That’s almost worth the price of admission to a 6 year-old (“six and a HALF!”).
Then the Subway... whoa... now that's fun!
Then daddy’s workplace (booooringggg... but, wait. what’s this? Toys!! Cool!!).

Given that I work for a company which highly values ‘fun’, this was a fun day for my son and other kids who visited, and it gave me a new appreciation for the value of offering a fun environment at work. The fear that people would be unproductive with distractions like toys, scooters, video games, ping pong, and other kids’ indulgences is an ignorant view. That view ignores not just the value letting people enjoy themselves at work, but more importantly the benefits of trusting people to have good judgement and giving people freedom to get their work done in a way which works best for them.

Funny how reality and theory are at odds here... In theory, it seems right that toys at work is a flawed concept (particularly if you employ people who are just not motivated by their actual work) – but in practice, when combined with strong motivation to achieve a company’s mission, it works and gives adults the type of environment which is analogous to, well, kindergarten! An environment for learning, for exploring, for experimenting and for playing nice with other "kids" ;) Especially when those "toys" include musical instruments and chess boards...

One key difference to kindergarten is the appreciation we adults have for fun in camparison to say, paying bills or going grocery shopping, or getting the insurance information from the guy who just cut you off and made you crash your car, or going to the doctor to find out what that pain in your chest is...
Toys at work? - I love it.

Remember to link back to your site

2007-04-25T08:30:00.000-05:00

Quick 'best practice' tip for Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

I've found a few really cool published spreadsheets on the web, mostly through a blog or from the page of the person who published it... but when other people copy that link, there's no trail back to the original author.

When you publish a document or a spreadsheet - you should always include a link back to your site... Here are some examples... but see the help site for more details...

Spreadsheet Example:

Documents Example:

A six-year-old's view of Google Strategy

2007-04-23T07:11:00.000-05:00

My six-year-old ("six and a half, dad!") quietly lurked as I enthusiastically showed someone how Google Book Search works. It was one of those typical "Oh wow - I never even clicked that 'more' link!" interactions - where I could have spent an hour boring her on every non-search product on the 'more' page - but we focused on Book Search, since that was relevant to her work. She was very excited to get started, and, as I found out later that night, so was my son.

him: "How do you spell 'Construction'?"...
me: "C - O - N.... S - T - R... - what are you doing"?
him: "Google Book Search on 'construction trucks' - 'c-o-n-s-t-r' what's next?"
me: "Huh? How do you know how to do that?"
him: "I watched you show it to that lady - 'c-o-n-s-t-r' what's next!?"

So he happily gets his list of Contruction Truck books...and later he says:
"Why do you have so many different things?"
me: "What are you talking about?"
him: "There are so many things on that 'more' page! - how come?"
me: (I'll save me 'How to explain Google Strategy to a six-year-old ("six-an-a-half!!") for another post') "You think it's too much?"
him: "uh.. yEAh!" (with that 'look how daddy taught me to be sarcastic' tone)
- and then, here was his strategic advice:
"Why can't you just enjoy what you have? - at the end of 2008, you have to stop - no new 'more' stuff."

I just stared at him - contemplating the impact of this advice...
"wow - that's an interesting idea... I'll talk to some people about that and see what they think!".

Happy St George's day, all you British Food Bloggers

2007-04-22T21:58:00.000-05:00

I just emerged from what felt like one of those 1998 "Neato! look what I found on the World Wide Web!" surfing black holes... Lately, those adventures start with a blog search to see who's posting what using a Google spreadsheet (I know I just lost half of you to "oh no, not again" - but I'll continue for the sake of the remaining 2 readers ;) and tonight I found a really cool food-oriented blog, with a post which contained a link to a spreadsheet which contains links to yet 70+ more blogs - all of which are focused on food... all of which had something to say (15 words or less) about why "english food is not a joke" ... and, this was Sam & Fred's tribute to England's national day, called St. George's day.

Maybe it's my history (I worked in my Mom's gourmet shop and bakery when i was in high school and college summers)... but I was intrigued ... The original blog is really nice, and most of the blog's I linked to (randomly, I might add) from the spreadsheet are quite nice, and, falling right into the trap set by this clever blogger, I grew quite an appreciation for the british (ahem) culinary (cough) scene - 3 words I thought I'd never hear together, no less write myself!

If you're into food and cooking, first of all, dive deep into the blogosphere on this category - it's deep. And check out Beck & Posh's spreadsheet as a cool, concise starting point of links...

Creating a blog sidebar with stock prices

2007-04-20T07:45:00.000-05:00

A blogger from Australia (Enough Wealth) created a really simple sidebar using a Google Spreadsheet which shows the up-to-date prices of his stock portfolio, as well as some calculated overall portfolio figures (% return, etc). This is a great simple example of how a spreadsheet can be used to create pretty functional web page widget...

Spreadsheet data... See it, Name it, Talk about it.

2007-04-18T17:38:00.000-05:00

Trying not to make this a shameless plug is futile... but everyone who knows me will forgive me, knowing my passion as a user outweighs my humility as a product manager ;)

You can Chart! Of course it's not perfect yet... but it sure is easy... and convenient. And, my favorite part is this:

I can embed a chart in my blog! I showed that you can embed data in you blog in an earlier post, and the full instructions are in the Help Pages. Notice too that I've used a double-top-secret-beta feature to turn off the gridlines (described here)

For those of you who dig formulas and have the perpetual desire to do things "right", you can now assign nicknames to cell ranges and use those in formulas. You may have noticed that we've always supported range names imported from an excel spreadsheet, but we never provided a way to create new range names.... now we do (look on the "Formulas" tab).

If you want to leave little love notes for your accountant on the cell which describes your tax refund amount, for example, you can now create Cell Comments - use the right click or the "insert" dropdown to add comments to a cell...

ok... enough talk about the product... I'll stop for now...

& Presentations (soon...)

2007-04-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

John Battelle interviewed Eric Schmidt today at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Very interesting discussion covering many topics, including a topic very close to my heart - the "coming soon" addition of Presentations into the Google Docs & Spreadsheets product. Sam wrote about it in our official google blog.

Run your business like this... please.

2007-04-13T19:39:00.000-05:00

"Business can make a profit without losing its soul" - that's the punch line of this great Fortune article about Patagonia and it's leader Yvon Chouinard.

The "green is good" theme is fine... but that's not the part that struck me. It's more their focus on employees and customers and basically "doing the right thing" (no, not like the Spike Lee movie). The essence of the story (for me) is captured in these words by Susan Casey (who's page I would link to if not for the dead link on Fortune Mag's own site): "When the surf was up or the powder wafted down, employees would be where they ought to be: outside. If an employee's child was sick, the parent would also be where he ought to be: at home."

Maps for me, my mom, my dad and my sister

2007-04-05T12:45:00.000-05:00

No more talk of Mashups... Maps are maps... I always expected to be able to add my own pushpins and my own trails and notes, as should anyone, including my Mom. But I couldn't find the right mashup that did it the way i wanted - and, as my team knows, i couldn't code my own (well, i could, but it pretty much sucked). Luckily, the Google Maps team did the right thing and gave us "My Maps" as an inherent feature of Google Maps. I love maps - and now i can create them and share them... Here's my first attempt, which outlines the state of NJ and highlights great outdoors activity areas (hiking, biking, fly-fishing) - but it's still too sparse - so you should zoom into for now until I map out the whole state (huh!?).
I have to just stop sleeping at this point so i can play with all this stuff...

This maps mashup is different, really!

2007-04-02T23:33:00.000-05:00

Ok... forget what i said... and slap me if you must... but the Maps API team at Google posted this really cool spreadsheets-to-maps API mashup idea. It really does bring together two of my favorite things (no, not Lobster and Legos) - Spreadsheets and Maps! (how boring does that make me sound?)
The only thing wrong with the demo of Seattle restaurants is that it's missing the Flying Fish! I just don't have the energy to create a push pin map of my own right now... but that's a cop out, 'cause i could do it in a flash with Pamela's Spreadsheet-to-Map wizard!

OK... NOW you can slap the next guy mentioning yet another maps mashup... ;)