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2010 EV Festival

2010-11-07T07:51:07Z

This years Australian EV Festival was held in Adelaide. Friday was a conference day, with a speakers from Universities, wind power and charge point companies, car companies, state government, and EV drivers. Many, many really smart people. Lots of great ideas. I talk about some of them below.

The photos are from Saturday, where there was a public display of home converted and commercial EVs. This photo is Rosemary talking about our EV to Michael Harbison, the Lord Mayor of Adelaide, who is quite keen on Electric Vehicles:

Peak Oil is Main Stream

I was surprised at how many speakers cited Peak Oil. This is a big change from a few years ago. For example Tom Kenyon MP had the opinion that EV take-up will occur due to sky-rocketing oil prices over the coming decade, due to world wide economic recovery and diminishing oil supplies. Environmental reasons, though important, just don’t motivate the same way the price of petrol does.

Range Anxiety

I heard the term “range anxiety” for the first time from Peter Pudney. This is a great term – describes the main concern the general public has when thinking about EVs. It evaporates after you drive an EV for a few days. I don’t even know what the range of our EV is, we just drive wherever we want each day and plug it in each night.

It’s like a threshold, once your EV has enough range for the sum of your daily trips, range is a non-issue. This depends on your city and your commute. Peter presented some great graphs on this. For Adelaide (1.2M people), 92% of people have a total daily drive of less than 100km. This is the range of todays average Lithium powered EV.

I guess 100 years ago early ICE drivers had similar anxiety over finding gasoline stations.

Charging Points – Do We Need Them?

Charge Point Australia had a interesting talk about their very high tech charging points (charging bollards). They even use mesh networking to connect their smart charging bollards, have a network management system, billing system etc. Reminds me of the technology used in the Village Telco and Flusko projects.

Anyway the idea behind smart charge points is that I can use GPS and my smart phone to direct me to a vacant charge point so I can recharge my thirsty EV while I shop for a few hours. The electricity then gets billed to me, and I get all sorts of stats on economy, a map of where I have charged etc.

Only, it’s not a problem that I need solved, at least for day-day driving. I am a real-world EV driver, with a modest EV, living in a medium size city, and I don’t need to charge during the day. Charge points might be useful for short country trips, but we only make these a few times a year.

See the 92% figure from Peter Pudney above – most people won’t drive far enough to need a charge point. Now for larger cities in todays Gen 1, 100km range EVs I can see some need for charge points. However the 200km EV (possible today, likely tomorrow) will make public charging even less common.

Actually I have a bigger problem with the notion of charge points. There is a myth that we “need” charging infrastructure before large scale EV adoption can happen. It’s just not true, and this myth works against EV adoption. It’s EV-FUD based on range anxiety. Even in the largest cities vast chunks of the population drive less than 100km/day.

Honestly, our experience is that the “problem” of charging is largely solved by the humble General Purpose Outlet (GPO). I have about 30 in my house.

Fast Charge

There were some interesting ideas around fast charging (20 minutes or so) stations. They could look like regular gas stations, and people could buy a coffee or check their email while they wait. A big problem is where to find the huge amounts of electricity needed to fast charge each car – e.g. 50kW per EV, or 500kW for 10 cars. This sort of power could be a show stopper. It’s the average power drawn by 500 houses. It means rewiring a city and dealing with massive peak loads.

If you want this technology for long distance EV driving, then you need huge amounts of power available in the between cities. Right where the power is not available at the moment. That’s a lot of expensive infrastructure.

To me, this sort of thinking is an attempt to map Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) thinking to EVs. We currently use gas stations, so we must continue to use gas stations. We can currently “charge” quickly with fossil fuels, so we must continue to “charge” quickly.

I bet none of these guys actually drive an EV. We just plug our EV in at night like a mobile phone. It takes 5 seconds to plug in and walk away. Would you take your mobile phone to a special place and wait 20 minutes just to have a fast charge? No, neither would I. Do you like going to gas stations? No, neither do I. It’s so much nicer to refuel your car at home.

Refuelling an EV is already a better experience than refuelling an ICE vehicle.

Supply of EVs is the Problem

There is a lot of demand for EVs that people can buy and drive away. Several presenters pointed out that supply of EVs, not demand, is the problem. So where are the EVs?

Mitusbushi have done a great job by having a number (112) MIEVs on the road here in Australia, most of them have been leased to governments for trials. However the price ($60,000 for a 3 year lease plus, I presume, a residual) is very expensive, over 3 times what a equivalent internal combustion car would cost.

As several people pointed out, it’s cheaper to buy a new internal combustion car, through away the CO2 generator, and convert it to an electric car with equivalent performance. When asked about the price, the expense of the battery pack was mentioned. However I can (and did) buy an equivalent battery pack for $6,000. In quantity 1.

The University of Western Australia presenter described just how disruptive this technology is. The Australian government gets $15B from fuel tax – and we have some of the lowest fuel taxes in the world. Car dealerships depend on servicing income, which evaporates with EVs that require near-zero servicing. So you can see why big car companies would be in no rush to deploy EVs.

As other EVs come to the market, I think competition will fix the price issue. There are many new EVs planned for release over the next few years. I figure with steady competition, the $15,000 EV is coming.

Thanks

A big thanks to the people who helped put on the EV Festival – especially Eric Rodda who I know worked very hard for this event. Here is an under the bonnet photo of Eric’s very nice EV conversion, which he recently completed:

Some University students built this novel, self balancing EV:

David Sharpe drove his EV to Adelaide from interstate. He has 3 Zivan chargers for fast charging and an auxillary generator for emergencies. He typically drives for 1-2 hours, then charges for one hour. A novel, relaxed way of travelling long distances.

Modern procrastination

2010-02-01T11:11:00Z

The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn't ship and most of all, busywork.

These represent safety, because if you don't challenge the status quo, you can't be made fun of, can't fail, can't be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything.

I'd like to posit that for idea workers, misusing Twitter, Facebook and various forms of digital networking are the ultimate expression of procrastination. You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger your circle, the more connections are available.

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

"Honey, how was your day?"

"Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy."

"I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?"

Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn't mean mattered.

When the resistance pushes you to do the quick reaction, the instant message, the 'ping-are-you-still-there', perhaps it pays to push in precisely the opposite direction. Perhaps it's time for the blank sheet of paper, the cancellation of a long-time money loser, the difficult conversation, the creative breakthrough...

Or you could check your email.

How to protect your ideas in the digital age

2009-12-07T10:23:00Z

If we're in the idea business, how to protect those ideas?

One way is to misuse trademark law. With the help of search engines, greedy lawyers who charge by the letter are busy sending claim letters to anyone who even comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client 'owns'. News flash: trademark law is designed to make it clear who makes a good or a service. It's a mark we put on something we create to indicate the source of the thing, not the inventor of a word or even a symbol. They didn't invent trademark law to prevent me from putting a picture of your cricket team's logo on my blog. They invented it to make it clear who was selling you something (a mark for trade = trademark).

I'm now officially trademarking thank-you™. From now on, whenever you use this word, please be sure to send me a royalty check.

Another way to protect your ideas is to (mis)use copyright law. You might think that this is a federal law designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. It's not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them. Copyright protects the expression of ideas, the particular arrangement of words or sounds or images. Bob Marley's estate can't sue anyone who records a reggae song... only the people who use his precise expression of words or music. Sure, get very good at expressing yourself (like Dylan or Sarah Jones) and then no one can copy your expression. But your ideas? They're up for grabs, and its a good thing too.

The challenge for people who create content isn't to spend all the time looking for pirates. It's to build a platform for commerce, a way and a place to get paid for what they create. Without that, you've got no revenue stream and pirates are irrelevant anyway. Newspapers aren't in trouble because people are copying the news. They're in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.

Patents are an option except they're really expensive and do nothing but give you the right to sue. And they're best when used to protect a particular physical manifestation of an idea. It's a real crapshoot to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day.

So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?

Don't.

Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.

New REFIT feed-in tarrifs for Eskom

2009-11-02T14:26:53Z

New refit tariffs announced. Biomass, biogas and additional solar power technologies were added to the list of renewable energy sources that qualify for feed-in tariffs to be paid by Eskom to independent power producers.

SA's National Energy Regulator (Nersa) announced the second phase of Refit (renewable energy feed-in tariffs) on Friday, amounting to:
R3.13 a kilowatt-hour for concentrating solar power trough without storage;
R3.94 for grid-connected solar photovoltaic systems producing more than 1 megawatt;
R1.18 for solid biomass;
96c for biogas;
and R2.31 for concentrating solar power with six hours of storage.

These tariffs are in addition to those announced in March:
R1.25 a kilowatt-hour for wind power;
94c for small hydropower; and
90c for landfill gas

Solar PV plant operational in Paarl by 2012

2009-11-02T08:54:28Z

Sasol (JSE:SOL) and the Central Energy Fund (CEF) are to proceed with a R900m plant to manufacture thin film solar panels at Paarl late in 2012.

The thin-film panels based on technology developed by Professor Vivian Alberts of the University of Johannesburg, are a major departure and a big improvement on conventional silicon-based rivals.

They will be more efficient in extracting electricity from the sun and cheaper and easier to produce. Because they are thinner than a human hair and flexible, they will have many practical advantages as well.

This confirms a Moneyweb story published on February 1.

The new plant will be owned 45% by the Central Energy Fund, 45% by Sasol, 6.1% by the National Empowerment Fund and 3.9% by the University of Johannesburg's intellectual property company PGIP.

Raoul Goosen, technical manager of CEF, confirmed that the go-ahead of this private-public partnership had been approved in principle.

He told Moneyweb: "As soon as equipment guarantees have been signed, work will begin. The plant should be operational in 2012."

"What do you need me to do?"

2009-10-08T09:41:00Z

This is a question that defines the person asking it. It is very different from, "here's what you might need..."

If you ask people for the next task on the list, if you allow them to define the thing they are buying from you, you have abdicated responsibility. Your work product becomes dependent on the insight and guts of the person giving you an assignment. This is especially dangerous for consultants and freelancers, because the answer might be, "nothing." Or it might be a paying gig that's profitable in the short run but a career deadener over time.

Far better to reach a level of confidence and skill that you can describe solutions rather than ask for tasks.

The priority list

2009-09-19T10:46:00Z

What should you do next?

Is it better to email an existing customer, send a brochure to a prospect or improve your product a bit? Should you tweet or post a new blog post? Should you have a meeting to coordinate your team or spend ten minutes returning phone calls instead?

This is an unheralded skill, something successful people do really well and others struggle with.

How do you decide what to do next?

One of the challenges we have in reducing carbon emissions is that (as far as I know) there's no priority list. Which is worse: leaving your computer on all night or not having the windows weatherstripped? Which is worse: driving a car to Boston or going by plane with 200 other people? Is it worth driving across town to buy a pint of organic strawberries or should I get the ones from the nearby store that came from California? If you have a thousand dollars to invest in making a reduction in greenhouse gasses, should you buy new tires, switch to local foods or perhaps send $900 to help a factory in China switch away from coal and then use the other hundred to have a massage?

Without a list, you can see how making intelligent decisions is impossible, so we resort to confusing activity with productivity.

Back to your office: do you have a list? Have you figured out which metric you're trying to improve? Can you measure the impact of the choices you make all day?

I see this mistake in business development all the time. Assume for a moment that the goal of someone in this department is to maximize profit. Why then would this group spend most of its time tweaking existing deals (looking for a 3% improvement in yield) instead of spending the same time and effort doing new, game-changing deals?

The Consequences of a Life Disconnected

2009-09-11T07:46:00Z

I noticed today that the Jacarandas are flowering again. Here in South Africa, the purple portent was a signal to students to start studying for end of year exams. If you waited until they layed their purple carpet below the tree you were already in big trouble. How many of these natural signs do we pay attention to these days?
In the past, our ability to survive depended on our intimate knowledge, and connection with nature. We'd be watching for the migration of birds, or the lengthening of shadows to guide our decision making in everything from when to plant vegetables, to when to propose marriage.

In our modern day lifestyle, we live our lives very disconnected from nature. Seasons come and go, and we hardly notice the changes, cocooned in our temperature regulated environments. Food no longer comes from last seasons planned planting, but is neatly packaged at the local supermarket for our last-minute convenience.
Both are perfect examples of our great sophistication, our triumph over the capriciousness of life, and our ability to design our landscape to suit us. But what happened to working with nature? Good design has to be more than imposing our will on our environment, surely its got to include a harmonious relationship with the landscape.

I'm far from being ready to return to an agrarian existence, and finding ways to keep chickens in my 3rd floor apartment - as much as my cat would argue for the perfect logic of that decision. Nor do I plan on basing my decisions on the changing seasons, when science can give such exact information. But I just wonder if the repercussions of this basic disconnection are more insidious and far-reaching than we imagine.

Taking the time to teach

2009-09-11T09:54:00Z

What we do in the long run, over time, drip by drip, affects the market so much more than an angry reaction or urgent event.

Smoking a pack a day for twenty years is a great way to be sure you'll die early. Far more likely, in fact, than getting hit by a car. And yet it's so easy to talk to our kids about cars...

Delivering out of the box remarkability day after day counts for far more than one hit or one misstep. When we teach people about our story or our industry or about making connections, the teaching lasts.

Teaching people not only impacts the market, it changes the world. Teaching about connection and community and science, a little bit at a time, can heal our world in the long run. It doesn't happen as fast as we might like, but it works. Emergencies fade, and in the long run our teaching lasts.

The challenge is in responding with education, not reacting with anger.

The problem with positive thinking

2009-09-04T10:00:00Z

All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.

Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they'll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.

No, positive thinking doesn't allow you to do anything, but it's been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.

Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?

The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.

In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.

If positive thinking was easy, we'd do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We're the exception, so we say.

Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.

Planting Season

2009-09-17T19:42:19Z

Shared by Duncan
Sign up and plant some veggies!

"Imagine 1,000,000 South Africans uniting on a single day to plant an organic vegetable in their home or office.

On September the 22nd, 2009 we will take a giant leap to becoming self sufficient in terms of nutrition and get back in touch with nature. Join us and learn Planting 101 from some of the top organic gardeners in the country!"

Engineers should stage a patent strike

2009-09-16T06:48:42Z

Shared by Duncan
"Patents don't spark innovation, they inhibit it." The patent system in SA is quite different to the USA, but I still believe that patents often stifle innovation.

It's time for engineers to stage an intellectual property strike.

Stop filing patents. Refuse to sign employment contracts that give your employer sole title to your inventions. Don't participate in any due diligence efforts on patent portfolios.

Not so good at math

2009-09-06T15:32:21Z

Shared by Duncan
The most obvious answer is not necessarily the correct one.

A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let's say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let's say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)

Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it's more than twice as good a move).

We're not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive. [PS here are some reader-contributed explanations for those still lost: Charlie, and Nariman.]

Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty

2009-08-20T16:45:19Z

Multiply the population of the US by three. That’s how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day.

Do it again and now you have the number closer to $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.

What’s that like? What happens to you when you have two dollars a day to live on. It’s almost impossible to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 45 minutes. $2 buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant...

And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.

The key issue is ‘survive’. Subsistence income means that you have the barest possible cushion, that every penny is spent and you are on the edge at all times. It makes life an emergency.

If every single thing goes perfectly, then you and your family will go to sleep tonight healthy, not too hungry and fairly safe. But of course, every single thing almost never goes perfectly. If you are bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, you need to buy medicine and so there’s no money for food. If you need more water, you have to spend two hours walking to and from the nearest half-decent water spot, and those two hours are the two hours you were going to spend harvesting the food your kids need.

From a fundraising point of view, this endless emergency is exactly what a non-profit needs to find and close donors. A dollar donated today will save someone’s life. It will. One dollar, one life. That’s urgent. As urgent as it gets.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t save that person's life forever, it saves it for today. Tomorrow, there’s another emergency, and yesterday’s dollar is gone. So you need another dollar. Two billion people, two billion dollars. Every day. Today, tomorrow, the day after that. It’s an endless emergency, and it never gets better.

That’s where patient capital comes in. It starts with this belief:

The difference between being one penny behind and one penny ahead is profound.

If you’re one penny behind, then every day you fall further back. Every day, the emergencies get worse, the stress gets worse, your ability to survive (never mind thrive) gets worse.

If you’re one penny ahead, though, just a penny, then every day you build a reserve, every day you are able to invest in productivity or peace of mind, and soon you are two pennies or a dollar or five dollars a day ahead. And then you can send your daughter to college. And then you can buy something from the merchant next door. And then you can plant a better crop. And then you have a stake in the community, and then the world changes.

So, how to create this micro surplus? How to prime the pump of the system to improve productivity enough that things get better?

Markets.

When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they’re spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself.

When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the device pays for itself (if it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.) So a drip irrigation system, for example, may pay off by creating two or three harvests a year instead of one.

What does that do for the family that buys it? Well, if you have one harvest a year and you’re living at subsistence, it means your income is zero, or probably just a little below. If you can irrigate and get two or three harvests a year, though, your income goes up by infinity. Now, instead of making -1 pennies a day, you’re making 100 or 200 pennies a day. That’s a surplus of $700 a year. That’s enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. Now, the edge is a lot further away.

And what does that do for the family that sells it? When markets arrive, productivity increases and new innovations can be diffused more quickly, because change is brought in by the market.

How does Acumen Fund create these markets? The answer is patient capital. The companies that are selling solar lamps to replace kerosene or water purification systems in tiny villages, or housing projects for peasants in Pakistan or even ambulance services in Mumbai fully intend to make a profit, but the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road aren’t in a hurry to invest in them. The investments are a little too risky, take a little too long or a little too unproven to take a chance on.

So Acumen finds these entrepreneurs on site in the developing world, funds them, teaches them and pushes them to build really big organizations. A to Z has literally thousands of people in their modern factory creating malaria bed nets in Tanzania. And so it grows.

I’m thrilled at the work Acumen has done, and excited about where the fund is going. I’ve got some interesting fundraising ideas to share with you this fall, and I thought it was worth taking you through my reasoning as to why I chose this organization as the recipient.

Any entrepreneur or marketer can learn a lesson from how new systems create new markets, and how an infinite increase in income or productivity can change everything. Everything.

Free work vs. internships

2009-08-14T09:44:00Z

I think internships are overrated. Most of the time, the employer thinks he's doing the intern a favor, but he doesn't trust the interns to do any actual thoughtful, intelligent work worth talking about. And to be fair, most of the time the interns are busy hiding, not grabbing responsibility but instead acting like they're in school, avoiding hard work and trying to get an A.

Charlie Hoehn has written a beautifully designed ebook that may change the way you think about this. His argument is that 'free work' is something else entirely. It's done as a freelancer, remotely, without direct supervision and it creates a measurable output.

Free work isn't easy to get. Big companies, for example, have bureaucrats that don't often know what to do with a great offer like this. And some people (I'll put myself in this category) are too hands-on to take advantage of it. But you'd be amazed at how many fast-moving companies or influential individuals are all too happy to share credit if it helps the work get done.

And the benefit to the underemployed? You guessed it: great experience and a resume builder that actually means something. Isn't it odd that we're willing to spend $300,000 to buy an accredited but ultimately useless academic line on our resume, but we hesitate to do a month of hard work to create a chunk of experience that's priceless?

Lessons from very tiny businesses

2009-08-12T10:25:00Z

1. Go where your customers are.

Jacquelyne runs a tiny juice company called Chakwave. I met her in Los Angeles, standing next to an organic lunch truck. Like the little birds that clean the teeth of the hippo, there's synergy here. The kind of person that visits the truck for lunch is the sort of person that would happily pay for something as wonderfully weird as her juice. And the truck owners benefit from the rolling festival farmer's market feel that comes from having a synergistic partner set up on a bridge table right next door.

2. Be micro-focused and the search engines will find you.

My friend Patti Jo is an extraordinary teacher and tutor. Her new business, The Scarsdale Tutor doesn't need many clients in order to be successful. This permits her to focus obsessively and that gets rewarded with front page results on Google. Not because she's tried to manipulate the seo (she hasn't) but because this is exactly the page you'd hope to find if you typed "scarsdale tutor" into a search engine. Could she do this nationwide? Of course not. But she doesn't want to or need to. Living on the long tail can be profitable.

3. Outlast the competition.

I was amazed at all the empty storefronts I saw in LA on my last visit. On one particular block, three or four of the ten lunch places were shut down. And the others? Doing great. That's because the remaining office workers who used to eat lunch at the shuttered places had to eat somewhere, and so the survivors watched their business grow. A war of attrition is never pretty, but if you're smart about overhead and scale, you'll win it.

4. Leverage.

Rick Toone runs a tiny guitar-making operation. His lack of scale makes it easy for him to share. When others start using his designs, he doesn't suffer (he can't make any more guitars than he already is) he benefits, because as the originator of the design, his originals become more coveted, not less valuable. He leverages his insight and shares it as a free marketing device.

5. Respond.

This is the single biggest advantage you have over the big guys. Not only are you in charge, you also answer the phone and read your email and man the desk and set the prices.

So, don't pretend you have a policy. Just be human.

Are we solving the same problem?

2009-08-13T11:25:52Z

Shared by Duncan
Critically important for product design

This is the biggest disconnect I know of.

It happens all the time in B2B sales, in service marketing, in getting along with your boss and even in hiring someone.

One side thinks they have figured out a solution. They spend a long time talking about the solution, architecting it, refining it, pricing it, pitching it, delivering it. The other side ends up not liking what they get. The disconnect: the first side says, "this solution is exactly as we described it!" the other side says, "it doesn't work right."

The disconnect is caused because people focus on the solution instead of the problem you were given to solve. It's a lot easier to talk about features and hours spent and someone's resume and a lot more difficult to dig into the problem itself.

This is where the obligating question becomes so critical. "If we can deliver a dam that stops the water flow, will you be delighted?" "If I can hire someone who can answer ten calls an hour and keep customers coming back, will that work?" "If this book cover receives an award for best design, will that be a win?"

The difficult conversation about the problem is far more useful than the endless effort on solutions. The reason is that people don't tell themselves (or you) about the problem they're actually solving. Sure, they'd like an employee that does x, y or z, but you know what, they'd also like that person to be really good looking and willing to do our bidding, waiting on us hand and foot. Sure, we'd like a personal computer with a lot of computing power, but we'd also like it to be light and sexy and covetable...

The more clarity you can get about what a successful solution looks like, the more likely you will be to have a delighted customer when you're done.

Dashboards

2009-07-31T21:15:48Z

Shared by Duncan
Public user feedback changes behaviour. How would you change if you knew what the average energy consumption was on your street? (or how would you change your street)

Your users, employees, consumers and donors are obsessed with data now. Are you helping them solve their knowledge problem?

Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn't do a thing about it is beyond me.

Yet useless data and hidden data continue to plague users. I have a Garmin 305 watch to track my bike workouts. It's just fine, except I hate it. I hate it because there are only two pieces of data I care about while I'm working out: how fast I'm going and what my heart rate is. My theory is that I can't do anything about time, but I can control effort, right?

Garmin puts my heartrate in 3 point type in the top right corner. It's unreadable by anyone old enough to be crazy to use one of these devices. And my speed? They convert miles per hour into some sort of runner's fraction that I still haven't figured out. Broken.

[I was wrong! It's not broken, the instructions are. My faithful readers have alerted me that I can fix the display, which I'm going to spend the next hour figuring out how to do. Sorry to offend the 305].

Acumen, on the other hand, has built a charity dashboard that lets them evaluate projects on cost-effectiveness across sectors. It's a marvel, and it completely changes the way you think about philanthropy.

Or consider the ambient dashboards that have been built in surprising ways. One company put pinwheels on a VPs desk. When sales went up, the pinwheels spun faster.

Just curious: what do you think would happen to energy consumption if every car registered in the US was required to have a digital mileage readout installed?

Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:

If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
Highlight data that changes behavior.
Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them.

I'm not focused on digital companies here. If you can add a dashboard to a payroll company or a sleep measurement device, you can add one just about anywhere.

The confusion

2009-07-31T20:49:58Z

Shared by Duncan
What can I really add? Seth hits the nail on the head

We frequently confuse internal biochemistry (caused by habits and genetics) with external events. If we didn't, marketing wouldn't work nearly as well.

Our brains are busy processing chemicals that internally change our moods, but find a way to rationalize those mood changes based on events and purchases in the outside world. We often act as though money can buy joy, but of course, it works better when we're joyful in the first place.

We don't say, "I'm genetically pre-disposed to mild depression," or "I haven't exercised in a while and I spend a lot of time watching TV," instead, we say, "I'm disappointed because I don't make enough money and my boss is mean to me." And yet, someone in the very same circumstances seems much happier than we are. And somehow, nothing ever happens in our career that makes everything all right forever.

We don't say, "I'm grouchy because of hormones." Instead, we say, "He deserved that outburst. He was being a jerk." Of course, he was the same guy last week and you sort of liked him.

We don't say, "When I dress and act like the people around me, I can feel safe as a member of their tribe." Instead, we think, "I feel good when I'm with my friends."

We don't say, "I have a very complex relationship with money because my parents spoiled me." Instead, we say, "Hey, the bank gave me a credit card so it's okay to buy things that I deserve."

We don't say, "I eat to drown out the way I feel about my mom," instead we say, "Hey, if it's on a salad bar, it must be good for me. And anyway, next month is my birthday."

The external world is remarkably consistent, and yet we blame it for what's going on inside of us. People who think the world is going to end always manage to find a new thing that's going to cause it to end. People itching to be bummed out all day long will certainly find an external event that give their emotion some causal cover. The thinking happens long before the event that we blame the thinking on.

Products are remarkably similar, yet we use their marketing stories as an extension of our self-image and self-esteem. Should a new phone really make you that happy?

Colleagues are almost always trying to work with us, yet it's easy to blame them when anxiety about other events triggers time-honored patterns in our behavior.

Hang out at the mall two weeks before the prom. Can those items on the rack really pacify the raging anxieties of the teenagers waiting to buy them (or is the social triggers that do it)? Watch McKinsey doing a multimillion dollar consulting gig for a Fortune 500 company. Are they really telling the board something that couldn't have been discovered by a few talented folks in the finance department? Or are they paying for peace of mind?

Marketers spend billions of dollars identifying common biochemical events, and then they launch products and services with stories that align with those events. As a result, we spend money on external forces in an attempt to heal internal pain. Marketers want the equation to be, "if you buy this, everything will be all right."

I wish it were so easy.

More bug-killing standards for firmware coding

2009-07-29T09:56:00Z

Shared by Duncan
More of the same

Rules 11 through 15 of Netrino's list of bug killers for firmware coding include how to deal with global variables and keywords. Michael Barr also weighs in on brace style.