A Look Inside

iPod + iTunes + iPhone = iCuffs

2007-01-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

They may be good at design, but Apple could certainly use a lesson in customer service: Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs - New York Times. They might be well served to take a page from the Southwest Airlines book of customer service before someone comes along who can compete on the design level and has the customer care mentality to boot. Of course, lucky for apple, in some, if not most, pockets of society appearances rule and in that corner of the marketplace they are the champ. Hey all you anti-Microsoft folks who are patrons at the Church of the Mac (and I'm not putting a vote in for Microsoft here, but it's gotta be said), Apple ain't exactly gettin' it right either. Their commercials are pretty funny though.

technorati tags:apple, iphone, customerService

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File Replication

2006-11-02T15:38:00.000-05:00

I'm in the market for file replication software. We will have two remote customers who will be scanning in documents. Each document scan creates database records of the document types and the file locations. I need software that gives me the ability to replicate those images and databases in real-time across a WAN. I need it to be secure and dependable, or stable. Does anyone have any suggestions from experience?

While I'm here, I'm also in the market for an experienced PHP developer who is able to read classic ASP and has done, hopefully, extensive work with SQL Server. The position is with a company in the health insurance industry in the Detroit metro area. If you are interested, please email a current version of your resume to turbo.brown (at) gmail (dot) com. All qualified candidates will be considered.

Apple Design

2006-09-21T11:13:00.000-04:00

There's an article in BusinessWeek called Who Is Jonathan Ive? about Apple's Senior VP for Industrial Design and their design process.In my opinion there are some very valuable nuggets in the article.

For starters, Apple keeps their focus on a few products and intends to provide excellence, instead of having a wide array of average offerings.

Second, they put value in differentation and design where their competitors cut costs, but the result is some fiercly loyal customers. According to the article, "Apple spends as much as $65 per PC casing, vs. an industry average of maybe $20." That means that fans of their design are going to keep coming back, whereas competitors are forced to find ways to cut costs and improve performance to keep customers. I would guess that among computer manufacturers brand loyalty is significantly higher with Apple because of their intense focus on the quality of their products' designs.

And lastly, they are willing to pay for talent. The article claims that the average salary for folks in their industrial design department is $200,000. Their department is significantly smaller than the industry averages among their competitors (also related to the diversity of product offerings), but their results speak for themselves. When you buy the talent you experience the benefit.

A lot can be taken away from this article for companies in any industry. There's some other excellent points on the content of the article over at the 37Signals blog which is where I came across the article.

Flock Memory Leak

2006-08-14T21:22:00.000-04:00

I'm bloggin with Flock about a memory leak in Flock. My computer slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason...all I had open were browser windows. I though maybe it was the java applet that I was running in IE (why IE? because of course it doesn't work in Flock). But when I pulled up task manager I was shocked to see that Flock was sucking down more than 500 MB of memory. Ridiculous! Hey Will Pate, Will Tschumy or Daryl L. L. Houston, I love Flock, we need a fix!

(Tip to novice bloggers: Using people's names in your blog posts often helps draw their attention to them.)

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Confirmation Bias

2006-08-08T23:31:00.000-04:00

Confirmation bias is something that I first heard about at The Dilbert Blog of all places. Basically the idea is that when you believe something to be true your brain shuts down from hearing logical arguments against it and you stick to your beliefs even if the evidence presented clearly proves that they are illogical.

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, explained it in a great, and funny, way, and apparently was doing an experiment on his blog related to confirmation bias recently.

There's also additional information on confirmation bias at wikipedia.

The areas of cognitive science have become increasingly interesting to me and may become an area of future professional study, ideally at an accredited university in the local area whose colors are Maize and Blue.

PLEASE NOTE: Many viewpoints expressed by Scott Adams are contrary to viewpoints that I hold. The reference is intended for the specific topic and content mentioned and not an endorsement of his viewpoints.

That being said I find his writing to be thought provoking, well done and often extremely entertaining.

meebo me

2006-08-08T17:43:00.000-04:00

Meebo is an online chat client that combines the likes of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN and other instant messaging clients in one site. It's really quite convenient.

Well, meebo has come out with a chat tool that you can embed in your blog. You may have noticed it on the right hand side there. I haven't had a chance to play with it much, and I may not use if very much, but it seems like a great idea and is very cool. Anyone on your blog can look at your meebo me widget and see if you are logged in to meebo. If you are, they can chat with you then and there. Pretty cool stuff from the folks at meebo. They even let you pick the size and the widget name.

You can read more about it, and the other cool things they are doing, at the meeblog.

(Hat tip to Mark Jen.)

Google Adds Saved Locations

2006-08-05T22:35:00.000-04:00

Google has added the ability to save locations in Google Maps. This is one of the features that many have suggested holds Google Maps back from being the top choice for the average user when it comes to mapping websites. As far as I'm concerned Google Maps is definitely the best around, and this only solidifies that for them. You can read more at the Official Google Blog: Saved locations on Google Maps

technorati tags:google, maps

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Providing Valuable Content

2006-07-14T23:53:00.000-04:00

In a post yesterday one of the things I talked about was joining the conversation and doing so with valuable content. You draw people to your blog by providing value to them for nothing. That value may get paid back to you in the form of donations or new customers.

I ran across a great example of this today. AccuQuote, an insurance company from what I gather from their site, started a blog. Their blog provides specific information on the insurance industry. They are using their expertise to provide content that provides value to a large marketplace. They can then turn some of the viewers of that content into customers.

Don't just take my word for it. Jason Calacanis' company Weblogs, Inc (purchased of course by AOL), probably the best case of turning blogging into a profitable business, is the company that designed AccuQuote's blog.

I only have a couple problems with the AccuQuote blog:

1. It's not clear how to get to their homepage. Right now it's a link at the bottom right of every post title "Read". I'm not sure how that makes any sense. They should make it very easy to get to their business site, it'd probably help people make the transition from reader to customer.

2. I hate "the jump". Blogs should always display an entire post instead of just a partial post and then a link to read the rest of the content. I fail to see any value in doing that.

Besides those two things this a great model of a business adding value to the marketplace as a whole.

Advertising For A Cause

2006-07-14T23:42:00.000-04:00

I caught a post by Fred Wilson that I had missed from late last month about how his blog ad revenue goes to charity. I'm pretty sure that I had read it on his blog in the past, but it's just cool to hear about. It's a great twist to the web advertising model, ad clicks for a good cause.

Way to go Fred!

technorati tags:advertising, charity, avc, fredwilson

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Development Process

2006-07-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

I put together a development plan for my company. Essentially we wanted to document the process we are going to follow from the point that an idea for a system, or enhanced system functionality, enters someone's head to the point that we have finished product.

The contruction phase is meant to follow Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies. It may be written a little bit differently, but that's so that any business member who's not familiar with those processes can look at it and understand.

I'm open to feedback so anyone who stumbles across this and has any thoughts, they are more than welcome.

Development Process

technorati tags:development, process, plan

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Creating A Web Presence

2006-07-13T22:57:00.000-04:00

I had a meeting with the director of an adoption and counseling agency today. He's a great guy who wants to use the internet to cultivate his business. He recognizes that he needs a web presence and he wanted to talk about strategies for updating the company's site and driving traffic to it.
I had the privilege to explain to him what a blog is and talk about how starting a blog enhances your exposure. I briefly explained the concepts of feeds and feed aggregators and the opportunity that gives people to hear from you, and interact with you, on their terms and at their chosen time.
We talked about some of the reasons the blog is such a great medium. None of these points originates with me, but here they are:

1. Writing a blog makes you part of the conversation - When you add valuable content to the larger conversation about whatever topic pertains to you, you provide value to your prospective audience and gain exposure. The key here is to make sure to be providing quality content, and doing it on a regular basis. Another important part is to engage people who are talking about you to make sure that they know their opinion is valuable. A great example of this is dell contacting a blogger who had trouble with one of their computers and posted about it. There are quite a few similar stories out their about things like this, and it's a credit to those companies who connect with the people who are talking about them.

2. Using feeds allows people to catch up with you on their time - In today's world attention is a scarce resource. People have so many things vying for their attention, and your website, or newsletter, is just another thing they have to remember to read. Setting up a blog with a feed allows people to capture your latest posts and catch up on them when they have the time to focus. One of the strongest features of allowing people to subscribe to your feed is that you don't require them to visit your site to get updates along with all the other sites they would want to visit in a day or week.

3. Email newsletters are going the way of the fax machine - Email newsletters are hardly much different from magazines. Most of us get more magazines than we actually read and they end up getting stacked up to read later (it goes back to the whole attention thing). When we never get around to reading them they just get thrown out, or in the case of email, get deleted. Combine that with the fact that if the content that may connect with a specific user is buried deeper than they end up looking you lose them. On blogs menus and tags allow you to provide people quick access to the content that is valuable to them. Content people with that and you are more likely to turn them into a customer, or in the case of a non-profit, a potential donor.

4. Passionate people are more valuable than paid advertising - If you are able to connect with people via the blogosphere, even if they aren't in your target market, they have the ability to draw more attention to you than even an expansive marketing budget could. Let's say in this particular example you were to provide valuable content on adoption: common misconceptions, what to expect, etc. People across the country can benefit from that information and you have the potential to make yourself the defacto online presence for that kind of information.

The beauty of today's internet world is that you have the ability to control your own web presence by the content and value you provide to the connections and conversations that are already going on in ways that never existed before. It's just up to you to take advantage of it.

New Car

2006-07-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

I've been driving an F-150 for almost two years and loving it, for the most part anyway. The gas mileage is not something to enjoy. It came advertised at 14 mpg city, 18 mpg highway, but I would guess in reality that it's probably more like 12 mpg city and 15 mpg highway. Other than that it's an amazingly smooth ride for a truck and having a four door was great. Plus there's nothing like the utility of a truck, it was very convenient when we moved, did our landscaping and so many other times and it wasn't just for us, other people were able to use it as well.

It was a lease, and I've been putting more miles than we paid for on it. As many of you know that's a costly proposition so it came time to investigate our alternatives. Nothing was really looking good as far as we were concerned. We talked to a Ford Dealer, we looked at VW's, we visited a Chevy dealership and we searched around at used car lots and on the web. Nothing was particularly good as far as deals or vehicles, and we were looking to cut our costs which wasn't working out either.

Then we heard about GM's zero percent financing for 72 months. Yeah it's a long time to pay for a car, but you can't beat borrowing money for free. We decided to head out to a Pontiac/Buick dealership in Brighton to take a look at the Grand Prix and the Rendezvous. When we first started talking prices with the salesman nothing was sounding right, the prices were still higher than what we were looking for. As we were walking back into the building to talk about more prices after looking at a Rendezvous a vehicle drove in front of us that we both had to admire.

We connected right away visually with what would soon become our new car. We immediately asked our salesman, who turned out to be great to deal with overall, what we were looking at. Apparently it was the Pontiac Torrent, not something either of us have seen on the road, or advertised even though it's a 2006 model year car, so it's been out for at least a little while. Tom showed us the car in the showroom and we were even further convinced. The price tag looked right, it's fairly close to a crossover and it has a surprising amount of interior space.

We took one for a test drive and decided then that if the numbers were right this was the vehicle for us. Tom needed to make some calls to get the color we wanted in the package we were looking for, and we needed to make some calls to get a GM employee discount. We signed the credit application Saturday to lock in the zero percent no matter when we actually made the purchase and we were on our way. Not two hours later we had a GM employee discount code, and we were going to be paying less to buy the Torrent than we were to lease the F-150. The deal we got couldn't be beat.

So our new car is the Pontiac Torrent and we're pumped about it. If you want to deal with a salesman who is just an all around good guy visit Tom at the Pontiac Buick in Brighton. Check out this sharp ride:

Nursery Stage 2

2006-07-05T22:51:00.000-04:00

Well, it was certainly a busy holiday weekend. I got to (as in: had the privilege to) work on Monday, although we did get out at 2:30. So it wasn't the full 4-day weekend that many enjoyed.

Work continued in full swing on the nursery Tuesday, which was supposed to be my day off. You'll only see a slight bit of difference in the pictures this time around. We peeled off the tape, did some touch-up work along the base molding and installed the chair rail. It certainly wasn't as difficult to do as I expected, or as I've heard, but it was still definitely time consuming. My dad came to help which was awesome, so we scratched our heads and worked on our geometry and got it done. It's actually looking really sharp. What you can't see is that the top edge still needs to be caulked, and the nail holes need to be plugged and touched up, but other than that preparations on the nursery are almost complete. Besides those two things I need to hang the ceiling fan and then my work there is done.

Looks good from where you're standing doesn't it!

Nursery Stage 1

2006-07-03T23:14:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a few months since I did my last post. Nice. Not that there's anyone out there who reads this that doesn't know already: but our first born is due in just under 3 months.

Our yet-to-be-named little baby boy is due September 26th and needless to say we are very excited. Today preparations went into full swing.

We've had a couple furniture ordeals, we returned a full set due to various problems and have been mostly unsuccessful at finding alternatives. Well today that selection was made and we also started painting.

Below you can see pictures of the paint job. Stage 2 of the project is to peel off the tape, clean up the plastic and put in a chair rail tomorrow. Should be fun.

Oh yeah...I tried to talk Shannon into letting me paint the door tan and the squares green to match the walls...she wouldn't let me. Some people have no sense adventure.

Knowledge & Decision Making

2006-03-03T16:28:00.000-05:00

"The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement." - Malcolm Gladwell

It's a great quote from an interview with The Sports Guy. It comes from talking about why Isaiah Thomas is so ineffective as an NBA GM.

Inspirational and Incredible

2006-02-27T13:03:00.000-05:00

I don't need to say anything else, this video speaks for itself.

Here's a great local news piece on it.

Just for the heck of it, and because you can't watch it too many times, here's a CNN piece.

Coincidence

2006-02-24T17:02:00.000-05:00

I was just looking through my old posts to find a link and realized that I started blogging in February of last year. I've known many a blogger to mention their "blogging anniversary", so I decided to dig a little deeper to figure out exactly what day I started.

Totally coincidentally, I swear, it was February 24, 2005, one year ago today. How great is that? Happy Blogging Anniversary to me!

In retrospect how do I think I've done (or better yet, how have I done at adding to the conversation as Seth Godin would say)? Well, "less than average" is probably generous and "poor" probably comes a little closer to describing it.

So here's to some better efforts, and content, in my next blogging year. Thanks to the 5 people who read.

Wasting Time

2006-02-24T16:45:00.000-05:00

No, this post is not what you think. Many of you that have read this blog....er all 5 of you...will know that I've talked about how I struggle with whether or not I waste too much time watching TV. It turns out, participating in pop culture (movies, tv and video games) may not be the waste of time than I thought it was. In fact, it may be actually be making me smarter.

Don't take my word for it, check out this great article by Malcolm Gladwell. Apparently the involved and interwoven plot lines of my new delight, 24, are potentially more practically educational that reading a book.

(For those of you who don't know who Malcolm Gladwell is, he's a writer for The New Yorker and I highly recommend his books The Tipping Point and Blink.)

And Another Thing

2006-02-05T23:42:00.000-05:00

(On the Superbowl.)

On the platform at the end of the game: the owner, the coach, the wide receiver (and MVP!) and the running back (the "great story"). The person who was missing: the quarterback.

The guy who last year set the record for the most consecutive wins for a rookie quarterback. The guy who made the game saving tackle in the Steelers - Colts game that allowed this team to continue on in the playoffs. Now he's the guy who is the youngest Superbowl winning quarterback.

It seems to me it would have been appropriate to have Big Ben on the platform at the end of the game and at least take a moment to recognize him.

Just seems strange.

It's Only Speculation

2006-02-05T23:16:00.000-05:00

Or is it?

The NFL has been accused of various levels of conspiracy before. It has been said that they conspired to help the Colts win a championship by giving them a cake 2005 regular season schedule. Handing them home field advantage could make for an easy walk through the playoffs and a Superbowl victory. Their schedule was incredibly easy despite the fact that they had made the playoffs the year before and generally speaking the better the team, the harder the schedule. A Colts Superbowl victory could have made such a great story.

The Houston Texans lost some close games on some very badly missed field goals. So badly missed in fact that one is lead to ask if the kicker was even trying to make it. It is not to far of a deviation to suggest that he was instructed to miss those kicks. The reason was to lock up the number one pick in the 2006 draft and guarantee them the opportunity to draft a player who some are calling the next great back, Reggie Bush.

I've been able to overlook these so called issues. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, so those kinds of things don't pique my interest. However, after tonight I'm starting to wonder.

During this year's Superbowl broadcast they had some special featurettes of players competing in the game holding the Lombardi Trophy and talking about winning the championship. Problem is only Pittsburgh players were featured. There was that halftime montage that included both Steeler and Seahawk players and coaches, but other than that all individual featurettes that played were of Steelers. As a matter of fact, the only one of the 2nd half of the game was of Jerome Bettis.

I find this extremely interesting. Why was it that the broadcast so strongly featured the Steelers players, and their pursuit of the championship? One has to wonder if the NFL is working to orchestrate the story line. This story line: An owner faithful to his coach despite his ups and downs, a running back in his home town at the end of his career possibly ready to retire and a stadium full of their fans. There could have been a more appropriate [arranged?] ending.

Personal Responsibility

2006-02-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

I'm all for some level of corporate accountability so that corporations can't run wild putting people at risk and taking advantage of them.

We've all heard stories of lawsuits that just throw personal responsibility out the window, but this one has to be up there.

I mean, c'mon.

Charlie Rose Got It Right

2006-01-07T00:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know who Charlie Rose is specifically, I hadn't heard of him until today. I've learned, though, that he is a "public television staple". So why do I care and what has he gotten right?

Well apparently copies of Charlie's show are going to be available online through Google's new video offering. Google makes a couple good decisions. The first is to enter in to the video market. I talked in my last post about the possibility of Google hitting $600/share. This would be unlikely with their heavy dependence on advertising for the main source of profit. With their video offering Google gets 30 percent of the revenue. Just like any other market, as the online advertising market matures it becomes cheaper for competitors to enter the market, so profit margins go down and competition intensifies. The second good decision was to let content suppliers set their own price. This allows the marketplace to determine the value of these videos: if a supplier set the value to high the video won't get purchased.

Where Google made their mistake was inventing their own copy protection technology adding another format to an already saturated market. There's now four major copy protection technologies: Microsoft, Apple, Sony (stay away from this one) and Google. What does this do? It prevents any but the most loyal and trusting from immediately adopting this service. When will these companies learn that success is going to be found in a universal format? Because of Apple's ease of use, and cultural icon status, I think Google made a mistake doing this. With iTunes, you download a video and it puts it right on your iPod for you, no work on your part. Google's got a huge hill to climb to compete there, especially if only unrestricted content can be placed on media players since Google currently doesn't offer one.

So getting back to Charlie Rose, he got it right because his videos will be offered through Google's service unrestricted, meaning they can be put on various media devices, and won't require an internet connection to verify the right to play them. If only all the other content providers would be so smart and follow suit. If I purchase it from, let me own it and do with it what I will. Until then all you do is give people a reason to pirate it in order to have the right to do that.

Six Hundred A Share

2006-01-04T23:02:00.000-05:00

A lot has been made about Google making, or not making, $600/share sometime this year. MSNBC.com, for example, had an article about it today.

I'd say if they venture into the consumer PC market, with a multimedia PC running their own operating system for somewhere around $200 available at Walmart they've got a pretty good chance.

(Thanks to TS for the link.)

Yahoo Wins

2005-12-10T20:12:00.000-05:00

Well, they win a battle anyway, but a big one in my opinion. Not too long ago I wrote a post about delicious. One of the things I mentioned was that based on how their tagging works, delicious would change the foundation of search and the big search engines (Yahoo!, Google and M$N) would end up paying for access to their databases of tagged links. Well, Yahoo decided not only did they want access to that information, but that they wanted to own it exclusively. It was announced on Friday that delicious was purchased by Yahoo!. It'll be very interesting to see how this relationship evolves and how Yahoo! uses delicious and all those socially tagged links to their advantage.

Congrats to Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures (both are blogs I love to read and learn a ton from) on a great investment in delicious, and to the whole delicious team on such a great product.

Where Good Ideas Go To Die

2005-12-01T20:46:00.000-05:00

It amazes me at how successful a business can be at turning a profit and how unsuccessful it can be at harvesting ideas. I'm not talking about any particular business here, I'm talking about a lot of them. You know them well, you worked (or work there) or know someone close to you who has. They are small business and large business, privately owned or publicly traded. Every year the business posts a profit. Sometimes more, sometimes less usually depending on the economy within their marketplace and/or the economy as a whole. But when you talk to the people inside these organizations they see areas where their companies could do so much more. I'm not talking about executive staff or high-level managers here, not PhD's or MBA's, I'm talking about middle-managers and the folks they work hand-in-hand with who actually do the work that makes the money on a daily basis. They often see things the people at the top never see. They see how the company could do things more efficiently, how they could trim off some fat, how they could bring in more staff in certain areas and the list of ideas goes on and on. Sometimes, if a business is lucky to have extremely intelligent individuals, they get great ideas about new markets to venture into, new policies to develop, new products to manufacture or departmental restructuring that would increase productivity. The unfortunate truth is most of these ideas go unheard, unrecognized and unused. Either that or they get shared and then someone in management takes credit for the idea if it turns out to be a success. The sad reality is that some of the most successful companies in our country are places where good ideas go to die.

Here's how to tell if your organization is a place, or is on its way to becoming a place, where good ideas go to die:

5. The staff works 9-5 with no passion about the work that they do.

4. Ideas from executives and upper-level managers are the only ideas heard and acted on because that's what they get paid for.

3. Executives and upper-level management spend their time meddling in how people do their every day jobs.

2. Customer service people have been noticing that even the best customers have been complaining more and more about the service they've been getting or the quality of the products they've been buying.

1. The best (hardest) workers never seem stick around for long.

There is hope though. If you aren't headed there yet and want to make sure you never do, if you see some of the signs and want to address it now or even if you've been there for so long you're not sure you can turn it around it can be done, here's what you should do:

Find someone among the ranks of your employees that most everyone trusts and respects. Have them meet with people and find out where changes need to be made. Then commit yourself, and your management team, to making those changes and report back to your staff on specifically how and when you intend to see those changes through.
Buy everyone lunch. Have pizza and salad brought in to the office. Then go hang out with them. Ask them about their significant others, their kids and their hobbies. Spend time getting to know your staff and actually show that you care by spending time with them and remembering the things that they tell you.
Have a place where employees can submit their ideas. Spend time investigating and collaborating on those ideas and determine if anything of value can be accomplished. If an idea translates into some level of success for the company publicly recognize and reward the employee for their contribution.

There are so many other things that can be done, but those are just a handful and they're not that hard to do. The important thing is to find value at every level of the organization. It might take some hard work to do that, but any company can be a place where good ideas thrive.