Google’s Super Bowl Commercial is very cute. But why Paris? Why not Kiev, Hong Kong or London?

Comparing iPad to other gadgets

Comparison – you’re doing it wrong.

There have been lots and lots of posts about how newly introduced Apple iPad compares to other similar devices that are either currently on the market or very close to be there. Somehow almost everyone fails to understand while comparing all these devices – and what they will inevitably realize while actually using them – is that size does matter. Size of the screen that is. There is a certain threshold in a screen size. Go below – you’ve got a pocket computer, hopefully with a working phone. Go above that and you’ve got a laptop in its raw form – something that fits on your lap. Either would serve different purposes, either may – or may not – serve as a partial replacement for another.

This threshold is somewhere around 7″ to 8″ screen. Most of the stuff below that would fit into pocket almost anything above that would not. Maybe the only orphan here would be Sony Vaio P-series with it’s ultra-useless-wide 8″ screen. It is as elegant as it is useless.

Comparing Nokia’s smartphone to Archos’ media player to Apple’s iPad computer is wrong. You are comparing apples to oranges to kiwis. While they all fruit you can’t really say which one is better. All depends on purpose and the purpose is different all across the board. Nokia N900 is a good smart phone. Archos 7 is an excellent multimedia device. Sony Vaio P series is a perfect thing to keep your pocket fully stuffed. iPad is none of those – it’s not a phone, it doesn’t fit into one’s pocket and it so much more than a multimedia player that Apple even pushed iWork demo for it – just to prove their point. I don’t think anyone would prefer using iPad for office tasks over regular PC or laptop, but the idea that iPad is more than sophisticated movie player/e-book reader should have been pushed through nonetheless.

So what should we compare iPad to? Unfortunately for consumers there are not that many devices you may compare this to. There are a few laptops with touch screens by Toshiba and Lenovo, there’s Asus Eee PC T91 with touch screen. They all way heavier than iPad. They all are pretty poor on batter life. Although we haven’t seen iPad yet, but something tells me Apple will get past 7-hour mark (another threshold!). They all have resistive technology screens whereas iPad sports capacitive, which is more convenient for general everyday use. iPad has got a slower CPU, but it’s irrelevant given the tasks you would be doing on such device. Remember how you chatted or browsed the internet or used Facebook just the same three years ago? Lack of Flash would actually protect the end-user from negative performance hits, everything else would feel just the same.

Two or three months is not a significant time frame for any competition to emerge with anything close to iPad. Yes, Microsoft and HP had partnered to introduce their tablet PC two weeks earlier, but what is that device, really? There are no specs, no real pictures (except those from CES), no dates. Sorry, folks, but if you want a tablet – you stuck with iPad. For now.

As I have shown in the previous post (Tradeoffs Small Businesses Make Are Wrong) picking up “cheap”, “good” and then “fast” is wrong? I promised to elaborate on a better answer, so here goes.

If you have any kind significant small business experience – you probably already suspected that there is no right answer. At least there is no silver bullet. What you want to do is project a right image and get the best for your business. You wouldn’t buy a hot dog from a street vendor for any price if you don’t eat hot dogs or if you are not happy with cleanliness of the spot. In other words – you always go for quality first and you are willing the price if this price is justified. When you go to a fancy restaurant – you’re not questioning the portions, even though they are noticeably smaller than any of all-you-can-eat offerings. Why? Because of the quality!

If you are not doing the same for your business, you should. Or you should quit. Quality is, in most cases, the best competitive advantage you can come up with. Features will be duplicated. Prices will be brought down. But beating quality is a long and complicated road, so if you can offer a higher quality product from the start – you should. It works the other way too – you should ask for the highest quality you can buy for your money.

That means you should start buying before you even look at the first price offering. Think of how important the product or the service is for your business, what the impact, the benefit or justification would be to having this product or service. For example, if you want a new web site for your new product – think how big is the market you want to engage and if whole new web site along with it’s promotion is worth the return you will get.

Once you are done assessing the desired outcome, you should start shopping around. This way when you are in negotiations with service provider or sales person – you know exactly what you want and how much you are willing to spend. A lot of companies are willing to give you the most bang for your buck – as long as you know what bang you want. In many cases that is what we offer our clients – give us your budget and we will give you the best we can that those money can buy. So far this approach for clients worked better than anyone else. This way we know how much we are paid and client knows what to expect for that amount – and is happy with it.

To wrap it up – the so-called “right” answer to the problem of choice is to get the best quality for the money you are willing to spend. Each time you have that urge to say “I want the cheapest thing possible” always think that some people throw food into garbage and that food is the cheapest you can find. Would you eat  it? I’m sure you won’t.

The trade-offs that small businesses are making are wrong. Well, most of them are. Look at the picture on the left and it will get obvious that you can’t just tweak one of the parameters without compromising other two.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Sometimes, during negotiations, when clients ask me how much would something cost I say I can do cheap, good, fast – pick any two. What should come to no surprise to anyone is that clients almost always pick “cheap” first. Then they add “good”. Then, after some thinking, they say “and I don’t want it to drag into next year”. It’ not just that this is “crisis” and people are short on cash. It’s the way of thinking of small business owner. Guess what’s wrong with this picture?

You think nothing? Alright, read on.

First of all – once any business you’re dealing with (and we are talking about B2B here) hears you pick “cheap” first – they think you are cheap and rightly so. What you probably missing is the departure of their train of though. If you are cheap – they better off try their chances somewhere else where they can make more money. Oops. You just lost a valuable partner, future investor or a bunch of referrals.

Second – when they hear you pick “good” as a second, they immediately project this on your product or service. If “good” comes second for you when you are getting something for your business, it means you are not making goods or services good in the first place, you are making them cheap. And if they turn out to be good – it’s an added benefit. Oops again – you just did more damage to your image or brand than all your competition together.

Third – when they hear your projected time line is “sometime before next year” – they get a really good understanding of your take on schedules and deadlines. That is – if they are still listening at this point.

You can see that a natural response from most small business owners is damaging their reputation – in both short and long term. Even though there is no right answer to this question (strictly speaking), any business owner who want their business to grow should know how to answer that. How? Next post would elaborate on that.

Ever since the beginning this blog was about technology. Only recently did I change it to cover first marketing, then small business as a whole. But almost all the posts of past decade are one way or another are about technology and its applications. So here’s my own little list of technologies – tools, services and gadgets that I loved using in that past decade and still using to this day.

Gmail – beats everything I have been using so far. So much so that I am slowly abandoning Outlook and converting to 100% Gmail user. In fact, any work related e-mail I send from Outlook gets CC-ed to Gmail account.

WordPress – again, slowly but surely this becomes the platform of choice for blogs I write for, as well as web sites we are still building from time to time. One of the main reasons is the automatic upgrade feature – when you take care of number of web sites, manual upgrading is too cumbersome.

Joomla – an excellent choice for content management system for any medium to large size web sites. Was our platform of choice before WordPress. Still works the best when paired with VirtueMart e-Commerce system.

HTC – as a provider of smartphones’ hardware. I’ve been using HTC devices for almost 5 years now, if not more. Starting from HTC’s BlueAngel to TyTN every single piece of hardware was awesome.

IBM / Lenovo ThinkPad T series line – my first two laptops were from Compaq and they were both horrible. So horrible, that I stopped using laptops for some time. At some point later I tried IBM’s ThinkPad T line and never looked back. Lenovo, after IBM shrugged their laptop manufacturing off their shoulders, aren’t dropping the ball with T line either, so I am looking forward to my next purchase of their T510 that’s due some time in February.

iPhone – as an entertainment center that allows you to make and receive phone calls it beats anything else. The phone part is still stuck somewhere back in 90s, but with the help of either Google Voice or Ribbit I am sure one day I’ll be able to sort it out.

Google Reader – my first source of news. Honestly, I am subscribed to a bit more feeds than I have time to read, but still it does a great job of keeping me up with anything I might want to know.

Pandora – hands down the best online radio you could imagine. I remember how much I was upset when Pandora was only working on iPhone of all the AT&T handsets. I also remember how pleased my wife was when I showed her how it works and how she can listen to the music of her choice and never get bored again.

Firefox – remains my primary browser since version 1.0.3, if not earlier. I am using Chrome or Flock (which is also based on Firefox code) as secondary browsers when I need to be logged into two Gmail accounts simultaneously, but main tool always was the Firefox.

UltraEdit – the default text editor for anything text or web related. Syntax highlighting, tabbed windows and anything you might ever want. Been using it for way too many years, each time I tried to use some kind of alternative I just kept coming back to UE.

Photoshop – it’s the only tool that still makes me feel like I have no idea on what I am doing. The more I learn it the more I discover things that just seem alien to me. Yet, it’s the only image editing software that does all I need to do – from photo editing to overly complex 100+ layers PSD files with custom web design we give to our clients.

Trillian – the all-in-one messenger solution. I used Trillian since their version 2, then moved on to Miranda (which is like Lego for messengers), but once Astra was out I switched to it immediately. For some reason this piece of software is so pleasing aesthetically that it makes me want to work more.

Skype – I purchased phone number in my area code, and using it for any conversation that is longer than 15 minutes. Just a note – between 12:15am and 12:45am this New Year AT&T’s network wasn’t letting me place any calls at all (I actually had zero bars on my iPhone at that moment). At the same time, calls placed through Skype went through just fine. Simply indispensable tool for both business and personal use.

RoboForm – an excellent password keeping tool. Unfortunately since I am using too many computers, keeping RoboForm gets prohibitively expensive, so I moved on to LastPass recently. It’s a bit more annoying than RoboForm, but does the job and is free.

Nikon D70s – I own this camera since it was released and just can’t force myself to upgrade to anything else. It just feels right. As of right now I probably shot over hundred thousand images with it – and that is given the fact that I am not a professional photographer.

Canon A series cameras – the love started with Canon A95 and carried over to A720IS I currently own. It fits in any pocket perfectly and is pretty good for the cases when full DSLR is an overkill. I am yet to see a better camera line that’s both affordable, portable and gives results of such quality.

Netflix – I’ve been a member for a few years and it’s been another great source of entertainment. Their shipping times have greatly improved recently, sometimes I am able to fit two shipments within a week.

Google Docs – I was a slow adopter mainly due to other people not getting the concept. But once I started using Docs with internet savvy business owners, they proved to be one of the most valuable tools.

Let’s see how many of these will survive in 2010.

With only about 12 hours of year 2009 left to spend, I guess this would be a good time to wrap up. Since my latest trend was to change this blog’s focus from smaller, more often posts to larger posts made more seldom and random. Hopefully by next year I will find a balance between the two, as I get a lot of things I want to share but not that much time to do it.

2009 was a good year in terms of learning from our own successes and failures. A lot of things got tested, some of them got broke and we saw what needs work, what has to be done to improve ourselves and things around us. We got our priorities right, we got our work laid out in front of us and as the old Soviet saying goes: “Goals have been set, tasks have been determined – get to work, comrades!” So, we are at work to make 2010 better, improve on our success and make our failures affecting us less. 2009 clearly showed that our existing approach to work with clients is definitely a success, since even in these harsh economic times we got our old clients as well as new ones come to us with more work than ever before.

2009 was also a good year to assess our own strengths and abilities. Like any business doing their regular SWOT analysis, we did ours and realized there is a lot of potential, there is a lot more that we can offer our existing clients as well as new ones. So one of the goals we set for 2010 is to refresh our strategy and our competitive offering. More things coming through the pipeline, so stay tuned.

Have a happy New Year!

The topic of mobile computing in the cloud seems to occupy every tech blogger’s mind on the planet. The idea of storing all your data on the cloud (in the clouds?) is so fascinating that anyone who dares to say otherwise is considered almost a Luddite. Well, let me play a little bit of devil’s advocate here.

When we are talking about mobile in the cloud we essentially talking about two different things. One – being on the go and storing your data on some network storage so that such data is accessible from any computer. As long as you are able to log in to that storage – you’re good to go.

Second thing – is having all of the above at our fingertips on our smartphone or mobile internet device (iPhone, iTouch and so on). For some reason, still mostly invisible to me, most tech bloggers have decided that by the end of 2010 it will be hot to have all your data in the cloud and accessible from your smart phone.

I did a little experiment recently. I purchased plenty of space on Google’s Picasa and uploaded every single photo I have since I bought my first digital camera. That includes raw images and edited images, so there was approximately 30% overhead. Still, the overall volume hit 110 Gigabyte. Nothing much in terms of current disk space. It took me a week to realize that I don’t want to wait any longer for all these pictures to be uploaded, so I canceled the process. Of course, if I had a dedicated channel it would not have taken so long, but I don’t. My nightly backups have to run. I have work to do. VPN connections eat up a lot as well. So my personal photo collection failed to upload completely.

What about small business use? Will small business owner upload all his documents, data (whatever that may be) or images if it will take away his time? I don’t think so. A few Word documents are fine, but once you start talking hundreds of megabytes, anywhere outside of the corporate networks that might be a problem. Just recently as we have finalized one of the projects, we needed to upload about 100 Megs of files – already compressed – to the client’s representative. It took other party in South Carolina full 15 minutes from receiving a download link to getting a complete download. Sure, storing on the cloud sounds like fun, but until whatever you have stored is half an hour away from you – it’s not a working solution, it’s a storage room out of town.

Next stop – mobile phone use. I know people who live and breath their Blackberry, but I also know people who don’t. And I know more people who don’t want to exhaust their eyes reading things on Blackberry screen than those that would. iPhone is a great entertainment device, but I can’t – for the life of me – type anything long there. Same is with BlackJack, Tilt or Droid. I just don’t see a particular reason to do it, if I can always get back to my X61s which at least has a decent size keyboard. Another issue with doing some kinds of work on a smart phone is the limited screen real estate. I am yet to see one client who can grasp an idea of a regular web site mock up, a desktop software GUI draft or even an income statement from the cell phone screen. Of course, a CPA with 20 years of experience under his belt might pull this off with income statement, but not a regular small business owner.

Overall, having your data available both on the cloud and off is a great idea. However, until we will be able to use a real high-speed connection to that data, nothing major is going to happen. Storage rooms are a great business, but having storage room doesn’t mean your car gets to move faster.

While my fascination with Google Wave is settling I want to go back to what this blog is all about – small business. It’s no secret that most of small businesses concentrate on surviving and becoming profitable. News are full of glamorous stories about glorious start-ups. In real life there are thousands of less known ventures and businesses that are alive and kicking – every day. Success of a small business is, indeed, in moving from failure to failure. As long as each failure results in small business owner learning valuable lesson.

We have recently completed a company analysis for $1.5M business. Scratch that. Recently we have completed an analysis of 10-year old successful company that had just found out they are worth well over a million dollars. They though their worth was around $200K and they treated their business as such. Problems we have uncovered and presented to the owners are not uncommon. Even more so, I would dare to say that most small business’ problems are falling under one of seven main categories:

1. Business owner/Leadership issues. Business owner may lack vision, being stuck in a day to day routine. Business owner may, on the other hand, have too broad a vision, trying to compete in all areas at once. Either way business looses.

2. Human Resources issues. Speaking of small business owners it is always hard for the owner to find a person they can trust. Money are tight, there’s never enough time so the owner is convinced that any new person will not be a good fit for the company. Maybe some time later. Being able to delegate solving secondary problems is a virtue not many small business owners possess.

3. Innovation issues. Most of the businesses are shy of innovation because they shy of money. Or so they think and so they say. In some cases it might be true. However in most cases innovation (not necessarily technological – it could be just a different approach to sales) is the ultimate source of  company’s strategic growth. Just because it was working before – doesn’t mean it will work the same in the future. But even if it will – would you rather make the same money or double that?

4. Marketing and sales issues. Most people create their business because they know how to do something, not how to sell it. They think once they start offering their services people will come. People will, indeed, come – to those who can sell to them. Not knowing how to market themselves, small business owners fail to capture their strategic share of market. Around 75 to 80% of business owners cannot price their services or goods properly.

5. Operations and logistics issues. This area is so broad that I would probably have to create another post just for that. Most small businesses fail to understand the importance of the fine-tuned operations. Maybe you spend too much time going to suppliers when for little extra money you can have them deliver to you – while you be making much more money rather than putting your business on hold. Or maybe your people are doing the double work by filing documents in both paper and electronic forms. Or maybe there is something else. Time is the most scarce resource that you have, and operations issues are the biggest time waster.

6. Legal issues. This is a can of worms of its own. Do you have all the licenses you need to run your business? Are you covered in all states and counties you operate? Do you have insurance that will cover you in case something happens? Have you filed all your tax reports on time? You may be surprised at how tricky these things can be.

7. Financial issues. This is the item most of business owners would have put first, so I am deliberately putting it last. You think you have money problem? You might be right. The reason for that is that you are having some of the issues from the list above on your hands. Either way you are not collecting enough sales, or your expenses are too high, or both. Unless, of course, your business model is flawed, but that’s whole another story.

So what is the outcome of the analysis that any small business should do? Identify the most flawed areas and fix them – one by one. Don’t wait, don’t put major things off – the larger the company the harder is it to change things there. So start early, move fast. Today is a good day for change.

Following up on my previous post about Google Wave I think it worth mentioning that Wave is good for more than just tracking your projects and activities. So here’s my own bold move – I am going to collect all the uses for Google Wave I could find. Feel free to suggest more, don’t limit yourself to currently available features.

1. Project tracking, basic project management. Tie in a simple robot and you will even have some stats.
2. New way of scheduling, where everyone can immediately see what the options for meeting are (I am not talking just about business meeting, pizza party from Google’s own example serves just right)
3. Threaded real-time discussions, sort of like forums of bulletin boards, but without a need to refresh to see if there are any changes.
4. Chat rooms, public or private.
5. Blog posting tool, when the stream of blips is available as blog posts, wavelets are categories and you can still have fun with tags.
6. Collaborative document editing, similar to what we saw in Google Docs, but with emphasis on collaboration and team work.
7. Journal, such as workout log or (dare I say it?) captain’s log!
8. Tweeting from Wave!

Feel free to add more in comments, I will keep updating this post as I will dig out more.

What is Google Wave?

The more you read about it the more confusing it gets. Is it an e-mail? Or is it a messenger service, like AIM or MSN Messenger? Maybe it is some sort of sharing thing, like Flickr or YouTube?

Well – it’s none of the above, or rather, all of the above – with a twist. What you need to understand about Google Wave is that it is a new – and more effective – way of communication. Something like Twitter on so many steroids that it has mutated above and beyond any imagination.

If you think about how you (or your parents) used to use calculators for complex formulas. Doing step by step computations, writing temporary values on a piece of paper to plug them into next formula a few seconds later. I am talking about times before even Calc or Excel came along.

Or you can think of making payments in old days – you tear a check off from your checkbook. Then you find the bill and fill out amounts, dates, who is this check made to, maybe a note. Then you put both return portion of your bill and a check into the envelope, place a stamp on it and then run to the post office to make sure it has a slightly less chance of being lost.

These examples are what we are living with now, that’s the way we communicate. Slow, elaborate, multiple step manual and often painful process. That, in turn, is dependent on other processes, that are also manual and elaborate (think – getting a right calculator, a sharpened pencil and paper, or buying stamps and envelopes). Pain in the neck and other places.

Think of how you schedule a meeting. Think how you keep track of your group activities. Think of how you keep track of your own projects. Think of any daily activity that has any continuity to it.

So What’s In It For Small Business Owners?

Being a small business owner has one, most notorious yet unavoidable disadvantage to it. That is having only 24 hours for any given day. No matter what you do, you can’t make it 25, even if you hire enough muscle to turn mountains upside down. Google Wave can make that time count, save you time on multiple hassles and create more opportunities by just being there.

To show you how small business owners can benefit, I will cite an example of one of my clients who runs a successful business but still finds himself being totally lost in regards to what activities are current, what are done and what are pending, who works on what, which projects are complete and which are still open.

My communication with him is primarily through e-mail. He is using Yahoo mail, I am using GMail. He needs about 15 minutes to sit down and think what he wants to ask. Then he opens up last e-mail that I have sent him and replies with his new request. Which totally screws history of each issue and request as well as messes up threading in my GMail. Few hours later he decides to inquire about the status of another issue and the previous request gets buried under the previous one. So is the history of each of request on client’s side, because he fires off these e-mails randomly, without any regard to the previous contents. Issues get overlooked and lost. Important notifications get missed. Status reports and requests get looked at late. Mess is running the place.

Now let’s fast forward couple of years and imagine Google Wave is already open for business and I have actually succeeded moving my client from old and clunky Yahoo Mail to Google Wave. I create a Wave for each project I am working on or possibly will be working on. Or client can do it himself – doesn’t matter. Each Wave represents a stream of communications in regard to this specific project. Emails, images, videos, documents, requests and responses – everything is ordered by project. If something gets orphaned or request gets into foreign territory – we can move it into right stream, unlike e-mail of which we have no control over once it sent. The whole history is visible to both me and my client. We can refer to it and it is much clearer than a heap of e-mails without any order. We can invite participants to discuss certain issues, we can create sub-discussions to branch off discussions or to separate certain issues if we need to prioritize them or if we don’t want new participants to see the whole thing. I actually have submitted this to Google Wave ideas – should be somewhere among New Ideas now, feel free to vote. So if you are discussing something with your internet marketing guy, your accountant and your store manager in the other part of town – you don’t get confused, you can easily follow the stream and see what is going on with that particular project. Less time wasted, more money earned.

This example incorporates the following activities most of us are doing manually on a daily (and some on an hourly) basis:

• e-mail sorting (is designer asking about the banner he sent us Monday last week or this week?)
• assets sorting / file management (where the hell are those banners anyway?)
• issue prioritizing (should we tell him to fix product image on a front page while we are searching for the damn banner?)
• branching off the discussion (when did we say the money will be ready? Let’s ask bookkeeper if she sent the check already)
• including other participants in the discussion (let’s ask what our marketing guy thinks about these banners)
• having a meeting on the fly (alright, if everybody likes this banner, it’s a winner, case closed, move on).

As you can see, it may sound a bit convoluted. Indeed, it does – mainly because we are so used to doing the computation on calculator and piece of paper we cannot imagine having a computer with most of the solutions built in.