My one insight into this is that they do not see Dealertrack as just a CRM or a finance-department application. They see Dealertrack, with 17,000 dealerships, as the Bloomberg terminal of a trillion-dollar global industry. From that perspective the tie-in is even more interesting. They will be able to offer a full omni-channel experience to the dealers – from when the person first looks at a car to the final delivery of the vehicle.

updated: I accidentally wrote 2012, instead of 2002 for the initial VC funding. Corrected as of 6/16/2015 5:03PM.

English: SmugMug Main Screen Shot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a major new launch you also need to write a post for your customers to show them how to back to the old design. Maybe I am overdramatizing, but it really struck a chord with me.

Here is smugmug – a company I used to love to use – with a new tutorial on

“Get the Legacy Look in the New SmugMug”

I am happy folks at Smugmug are taking customer questions and complaints seriously; and there is always someone who wants what they had, and no upgrades, but this is exactly why you do not typically simply upgrade everyone without giving them a choice or at least a moment to click and confirm the upgrade.

Related articles

• Get the Legacy Look on Your New SmugMug Site

Canyonlands NP

As kids get older we think of times, people, and places to share with them. The first two are difficult, but the latter can be done especially if they are protected by the federal government. Some day we will go back to American West with them, but in the meantime some of the old favourites to reminisce on.

Arches NP, Bryce, Grand Canyon, and Canyonlands – wish we were there…

Related articles

• Planning a Family Trip to the Grand Canyon
• Day 14-15: Sedona and the Grand Canyon, Arizona
• See the arc of Mother Nature’s beauty

Related Google+ Page Widget

I am always on the lookout for a smart UX decision. Today’s feature is a relatively recently added “Related Google+ Page” feature on gmail.

– What is it?

It is small widget in the upper right corner which replaces the person’s widget when an email is sent from a corporate account instead of a personal email.

– Why I like this?

It is actually serving a useful purpose without being overly annoying and in your face. Located in the upper right corner of the open email and as such does not interfere with the message itself. It does not require me to dismiss or otherwise interrupt my flow but helps draw attention to what I may not not – that there is a public google+ page for this entity.

– Why is this good for Google?

Related People on Google+

Lots of people follow their favorite companies on Facebook, but few user would be going on Google+ looking for yet another place to see these companies. This widget allows Google to leverage the enormous reach of GMail to promote its other property without being overly annoying.

– Extra benefit for the user

If you are already following this organization you will see that it is in one or more of your circles, possibly giving you a reminder of a prior relationship.

Conclusion:

Google needs all the help it can get to compete with Facebook and grow Google+. They are doing a good job leveraging GMail and other Google properties in this war, and GMail users are already used to, theoretically, to their emails being processed in order to target ads.

From the User Experience design perspective this is a nice little feature that adds a little value without asking anything from the user upfront.

It is pretty incredible what phone cameras can do.  I took a lot fewer photos than usual but as always – if you cut down to just a few, you can try to skew the average quality up.

I used to do a lot more photography – purposeful photography intended to leverage technical capabilities of the cameras, film, scanners, computers, and tripods in order to create meaningful images. Needless to say I was not very good at that. But – thanks to the internet, I could post these images on various photo forums and critique sites. I truly believed at the time that the reason – the ONLY reason – I posted these photos was to receive constructive criticism from my betters so that I, in turn would get better and bestow my true vision on the public.

That did not really happen.

Looking back it seems obvious that really I was simply looking for people to look at my pictures and preferably to like them. This suspicious was confirmed when

(1) I was compulsively checking the number of views and comments on my posted photos
(2) I was running against the limits of pictures I can post in a day and
(3) I kept seeing the same people move from site to site, reposting their portfolio to the adulation of new fans.

Facebook, and Google+ turn out to be much better for people to post pictures. There is the “like” button right there and your friends and family like any pictures you post that does not make them look bad. Seriously – you know you have liked a picture of a foot-long Subway sandwich someone posted and you definitely liked a picture of your friend’s cat even though secretly you hate cats (DOGS RULE)

There is silver-lining though. A few of the photo critique sites are still going strong. Free now from people who simply want their pictures to be liked they can cater to their inner core of camera geeks and their hanger-ons. What does not kill you – makes you stronger.

English: Sr-71 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For a while now I wanted to visit the Smithsonian Air and Space museum outside of Washington DC – The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. It is located right next to the Dulles airport, and is definetely worth the trip. It is not nearly as crowded with people or planes as the one located at the National

Mall, but more importantly it has space for two of the most awesome examples of engineering prowess and human ingenuity.

After seeing them both, I will cannot decide which one impressed me more – the SR-71A “Blackbird” or the space shuttle ‘Discovery‘…

After thinking about it for a few days – I think the Blackbird is my favorite. It was a truly remarkable feat of engineering that was done on a relatively small budget, met all of its objectives, and has a legion of fans. I hope that one day I will work on something I could as proud of as the Lockheed team must have been of this plane.

Image via CrunchBase

I will now be accepting orders for iPhone 5. I do not know when it will ship, or how much it will cost, but if you send me $1,500 today I will accept your pre-order. All you need to do when iPhone 5 goes on sale is email me a reminder and a payment for the price of the phone when it is released and within 6-8 weeks I will send you your phone.

Why pre-order in some store in China when there is a perfectly good pre-order operation here!

Does your firm measure number of times a customer thinks of you, touches base?

Look at new valuations for startups and you start to get dizzy. But this is all for services that their users use EVERY DAY. multiple times per day, often.

Look at most trusted brands – they all make things their users use EVERY DAY.

You couldn’t tell how many times a day you used an apple device. Dozens for sure, hundreds possibly.

I guess I’m wondering how this high-touch world affects brands whose services aren’t very interactive. Should they change? Can they?

www.theedinburghblog.co.uk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Americans are increasingly interested in buying self-driving cars, though some blanch at the price, according to survey results released yesterday by J.D. Powers and Associates. According to a press release (the full study isn’t available to the public), the firm’s annual look at consumers and emerging auto technology found that 37 percent of drivers are interested in an autonomous vehicle. But upon learning that a self-driving car will cost an extra $3,000, the figure dropped to 20 percent. “

I’d gladly pay $3,000 to have a self-driving car. I am completely in agreement with the notion that I would like to be able to take control at any point, but really – the value of the freedom a car offers and the time/attention saved in NOT having to drive myself has to pay for itself pretty fast.

Related articles

• Google in talks with insurers about self-driving car (phys.org)
• Look, ma, no hands! Cadillac’s self-driving car (bottomline.msnbc.msn.com)
• Google is hunting for helpers in the autonomous car future (slashgear.com)

Solution to the heat equation in a pump casing model using the finite elment modelling software Image via Wikipedia

As we gear up to do some college recruiting, I thought this was an interesting thread. I particularly liked one of the comments, starting with the “These days”:

“I agree that the puzzle-solving during interviews is lame.

In fact, I’ve said exactly that same thing to an interviewer once: “Unless you guys spend all your time here re-designing quicksort, why do you want me to implement it on a whiteboard?”

These days, I usually bring a couple tricky differential equations w/ me to interview, and when the time comes when they say: “Do you have any questions for me?”, I respond: “Why yes, in fact I do”.. and I turn over the marker to him, and ask him to solve the following differential equations x, y, z, etc, on the whiteboard. Invariably, they flame out as badly as you might expect.. even for quite simple vanilla differential equations.. “But didn’t you take calculus in college?” I ask… “errr… yeah”… they stumble… “And you can’t solve this?” etc…

Point is, you can turn the tables on them.. or at least, you can do that if you feel the interview isn’t really going all that well anyway.

…”

When candidates come to our office, everyone has a job to do. Some of us ask specific technical questions, some of us do ask various business/consulting hypotheticals and see how the person reacts. I do not think we are too harsh, and I do not think we are unfair, but we can always get better. I hope that asking more and more puzzlers is not going to be the directions for us. A simple rule should apply – if you and your existing colleagues could not do these puzzles every time – do not ask others, it is clearly not an important attribute that has got you this far.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll come back to this, but let me just say, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

I like books. I really like physical books. I like having them, I like holding them. I do not really like reading them all that much though. They never stay open in the same spot, it is hard to hold them with one hand, and if they are large enough – they take a toll on your back when you carry them on the commute. Let’s not get started on the pain of travel when you have to carry them. In bulk. On a trip. In the overhead space of an economy class carrier… Anyway – many people felt the same and we got these awesome ebook readers now. However, my inner snob is not satisfied – how would people visiting my home know of all these great books I pretend to read?

Ultimately, I want a wall the sort of looks like the picture above, but with my actual books. I have given up on publishers simply giving me the epub/mobi/pdf version with a physical book purchase. I know, I know – it would make too much sense to charge me an extra dollar so I do not have to sacrifice the convenience of electronic copy for the pleasure and security of a physical one. I am sure there are all sorts of complicated reasons why publishing industry chooses to punish its customers.

What I have not given up on is this – could someone make cardboard book covers I could get for the books I really wanted? It would be great if they licensed the original covers. It would be great if they had some new originals – but I could finally have the wall of books I own, to look at happily, as I sit in the armchair reading the amazon kindle.

The above is a bit of a joke, but I do find that having had shelves of books, visible books in the house has been great for the kids. Choosing from a list, or even a cover view on a tablet is not at all the same, as coming up to a bookcase and choose a book – seeing its neighbors, seeing its art. So, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

Organizer for Gmail | OtherInbox.

Disney, the largest publisher of childrenâ€s books in the world, sells 700 million items a year in 85 countries, said Russell Hampton Jr., the president of Disney Publishing Worldwide. …

The Spider-Man app will be released for the iPad, iPhone and iTouch for $6.99. Geared toward children ages 4 to 10, it includes interactive features, distinguishing it from e-books, Mr. Hampton said.

via Disney Releases Marvel App – NYTimes.com.

I suppose this is not very different from a regular paper-based book, but still, feels a little strange to give this as a gift to a kid. Will probably try it out this Chanukkah season.

On a side-note, did not realize Disney was such a big publishing house.

Related articles

• Disney Releases Marvel App (mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com)

From NY Post page 6.

Soviet School

The person from my old [old, old] life in Soviet Union I communicate the most with is not someone I was close with before. It is someone who I reconnected with, a little, because of the work I do in Russia and an accidental re-introduction by a business partner. All my, admittedly lame, efforts to keep in touch with other old classmates have not worked out.

I am not sure what this means other that you need at least two tenuous connections for even a minimal relationship to work. One is not enough, at least not if it is simply a shared history or geography than no longer plays a big part in your life.

what is the reason every merchant should not offer email as an option for receipts?

Related articles

• Tired of keeping track of receipts? Lemon.com can help (venturebeat.com)
• E-Receipts Cut Clutter, Boost Marketing Opportunities (npr.org)

UPS, and many others, are even worse, asking for separate fields for Street Address1, Street Address2, etc. Google Maps do it, why would not the CRM which has entering of addresses as a major, and common, use case?

What is merely annoying when entering your own profile, becomes truly distracting in a CRM system. I will settle for correcting the system on the rare occasions it gets the address wrong.

This seemed like such a no-brainer that three years I thought of building a service to do just that, providing an address verification widget to those who needed it. And then I thought, “c’mon, everyone will have this implemented as soon as they realize how annoying entering addresses field-by-field is.” Go figure.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

This post might as well be titled – the genius of Verizon or how I overcame ingrained user behavior to save $60/month.

There is a lot of talk, books, and blogs about how properly designed user experience is a key to doing more business on the web, and in real life. But what if the pundits are wrong? What if you have a business that needs to interact with customers on the Web, but where making transactions easy means losing money?

What if you knew everything there is to know about user experience and customer service? What if you turned that knowledge inside out to create an impenetrable online maze? What if you coldly calculated what kind of transactions you want to make easy, and which you want to discourage? You be just doing your job, right? Following orders, as it were. And you might be working for Verizon.

Once I realized that Verizon does not actually want you to make changes their whole website started making sense. It is not ineptitude that allows you to pay the bill right away, but requires an expiring PIN delivered by mail or a phone call to a Verizon home phone line to change your channel choices. It is brilliant and deliberate design.

Verizon’s problem is that whenever people actually look at their bills, they immediately realize that they do not need 285 channels and a 50GB backup bundles with teaser rates that expired 6 months ago. So their formal UX design challenge is to have all of the functionality expected of a customer-facing website, but have it sort of off. 

For example – you would think that having “See More” option that does not lead anywhere would be a bad design choice. Not so.

It does not show me any options for additional movie channels but that is OK for Verizon, because they understand something far more important – bounce rate is their friend.

While most sites want to keep their users for as long as possible, Verizon understands that there is only so much time an average person will spend, at a go, trying to make sense of their subscriptions and options. So if I get frustrated and leave before making a change – that’s OK. Chances are that I was going to downgrade my service or cancel an option, so if a page takes 20 or 30 seconds to load – that’s OK. In this game,  bounce rate is their friend.

Still, I persevered. I got the PIN. I wanted to cancel some channels but keep some others. Finally, I asked their live chat support:

I think the support tried to get me to bounce – I need to call an office from 9-5 M-F to change  my choices? I am already committed to change, so I would rather feel righteous for saving more money (and watching less TV) than to stop now. As a result – all premium channels cancelled.

Epilogue:

Has Verizon lost its battle in keeping me away from changes? Alas, no. they simply ignored my request. Maybe I did not press some button correctly, maybe I did not wait long enough, but when I came back 18 hours later, I will had the channel subscriptions unchanged from before. I submitted the changes again, perhaps they will stick this time.

Related articles

• How not to do surveys – Verizon (fridnet.com)

To the survey, Batman! Without being a UX expert (and pretending I have not dealt with them over the years) I can tell right away – Verizon does not care about my feedback, and never did.

Verizon Customer Service Survey

1. Why are you asking me about Live Chat? I did not come to use the Live chat. I came to do something on the website and Live Chat is mitigating a failure of the site. If the site did its job I would not be even using the chat. If Verizon cared about my experience, that’s what they would ask about. Ask me about the experience, not a feature. 

Sidebar: I can see the meeting that drove this decision. “But we are chat division, we cannot be held accountable for the overall experience. This is to make us – live chat customer support – better.” said their manager in an important meeting. Other people in the room, most of whom probably live so far out of the city that FiOS is not available, nod sagely. Everyone in that room has built their careers by defending and growing their turf, not by thinking of their eventual customers’ experience with Verizon.

2. I have no idea. How does this question possibly add a value to me? I already told Verizon the service was poor or excellent. In my case the chat people are always well-meaning but useless. I would not recommend the chat service because to use it is to admit the website has already failed. I would recommend my friends use this service like the would use a fire extinguisher – a painful last resort that will add to the damage but might prevent a bigger loss. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. So why ask this? Because Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

3. I am on a website!!!! That’s clearly my preferred method. It is not any of the choices. And I cannot stand when you require me to answer a question. Are you seriously telling me that my feedback is useless without this answer? An answer to a question you could not even provide adequate choices for? Right… Remind myself again - Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

4. The only useful field on the survey. Maybe it should be the one required field. And the first one. Why not invite the user to tell you how they feel? That would tell me Verizon is willing to read what I write and think about it. But I know they won’t. They will relegate my survey submission to a disgruntled pile, find a way to exclude my ratings from their overall numbers and move on.

To summarize – if you have to give you users a survey, heed the lessons of Verizon. Ask the users in a manner that respects their time and opinion, else your monthly payment from these users will suddenly become $60 less.

If you liked this post, read the first one I wrote on “how not to do surveys“.

Related articles

• Online surveys – how not to do them (www.fridnet.com/slava)

Well before it was finished, the place already had a lot of texture

As weather channel was predicting 20′-30′ rise in water level during Hurricane Irine around NYC, I was thinking, would not it be nice to have a dam that would protect the city from just such a storm surge?

Just days ago I read about St. Petersburg, Russia finally completing its gigantic dam which is supposed to do just that. And since I am on a mini photo-kick right now, I figured I will post some of the pictures I took of the dam before it was a gleaming achievement of russian engineering.

Thanks to @bornmw for taking me there in the dead of winter.

Related articles

• Russia completes Soviet-era dam in St Petersburg (scientificamerican.com)
• Russia completes Soviet-era dam in St Petersburg (huffingtonpost.com)

tooth fairy by anne hazelwood

My Dear Daughter (DD) is very serious about collecting money. Right now it is for books, but that is not really important. In one of her musings she wrote, “I hope tooth fairy brings me $5, or may be $8, then I could buy the new books in the [her favorite books] series that are coming out soon.”

At first I was proud, “She is saving money for books!”, but a moment later I realized – that’s her plan – a tooth fairy will bring her the money.

My DD is still pretty small, but I am amazed at constantly seeing businesses and executives who are supposed to be running them having basically the same plan, hoping for a tooth fairy. It is not that they could not use the money in a good way, it is just that it is not a plan to works out after the first few years of your life, or your business.

There is no deeper point I expect to make. Nothing about how to get money from tooth fairy you need to have your teeth loosened and pulled, or that the money you get is not even close to covering the co-pay and deductible. There has to be a good metaphor in this somewhere, that’s all.

Related articles

• American Children Receiving Less Money From Tooth Fairy: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• There is always a plan B (Steve Blank)

Really really enjoying reading this series. This is the kind of class I think makes the best Universities worth the price.

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship.

via The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 7: Revenue Model « Steve Blank.

Related articles

• A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship: Class 1 at Stanford’s Lean Launchpad (xconomy.com)

Klout seems to think that by giving access to product and marketing companies to provide samples or early access to whoever they consider “influencers” in their field, they would occupy a niche that is currently driven by intuition of marketers about the influence of specific people and heuristics – such as professional stature of someone in the field.

Klout Perks (beta)

This approach makes sense if you believe that a lot influencers are not the people you would traditionally think of. Personally, I am not sure there are enough people who are influential but are flying under the radar to make it worth while, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Perhaps this is just the low-hanging fruit they are picking first. I could imagine that if you could more accurately identify not just the influencers, but people generally interested in some topics, that would make marketers a lot more interested. Again, this assumes existing techniques are worse at these predictions than klout would be.

Related articles

• What is your social media influence? An interview with Klout (maloneyonmarketing.com)
• You may have Online Influence, but do you have any Klout? (thelearningzone.co.za)
• In Defense of Klout Measurement (socialmediaobserver.wordpress.com)
• Digital Influence Recalibrated, Part 1: Klout’s measurement spectrum (thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com)

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Take this quick survey for iChallenge and let us know.

I am sure it is hard to scale rapidly to 500 million people like facebook, or 5 billion visitors like Google, but PayPal has been stable forever. How hard can it be for an “internet-scale” company to actually scale to perform. It takes so long to login or to go through the three steps of sending money to someone that I constantly switch windows – and eventually time out because I forget I was in a middle of a transaction. Sure I am impatient, but that’s because Google taught me what proper response times are supposed to be – and it is not 15 or 30 seconds per click.

Clean up your act PayPal. You have had an incredible market all to yourself for a long time, and people are gunning for you now – and they will not make users spend a minute trying to send someone money.

Related articles

• How To Use Serve, American Express’ PayPal Clone (AXP) (businessinsider.com)
• PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Google Payment VP/Former PayPal Exec Osama Bedier On eCommerce: Major Change Is Coming (techcrunch.com)

I get asked to answer a lot of online surveys, and usually ignore them. Once in a while a product I like will ask me to fill out a survey – and I will agree. Most of the time I regret that decision and abandon the process somewhere, because the marketers are just being rude:

1. You are being rude to me – when you are asking too much personal information. I am eager to help improve your product or service, but not to the point of exposing my financial and personal history. If you would not feel comfortable asking your decidedly weird rich uncle for this information until you see his will – do not ask me.
2. You are being rude to me when your questions suck. Questions are hard to understand and scales do not make sense. Please remember – I am not playing sudoku or solving the Times puzzle. I am not interested in thinking hard so *you* get something out of it. The amount of time and money you spend designing the questions shows. Lack of the time shows even more. It is rude to waste my time because you could not bother thinking of phrasing questions that make sense.
3. You are being rude to me when you do not tell me where I am in the process. Today’s example, from American Express, did not have a progress bar. I did not know if I was almost done or not even close. Eventually, I just closed the window. It is rude to waste other people’s time.

I think the “weird rich uncle” is a good test subject. Do not send your customers anything you would not do to your rich uncle. Customers are fickle, and their good intentions do not last very long if you try to actively exploit them.

Related articles

• How Long Should a Marketing Survey Be Online? (hubspot.com)
• Are Your Respondents Suffering from Choice Fatigue? (questionpro.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I was at a meeting with a potential customer once, where we discussed moving forward with a social portal project. Their process – despite having some great people (!!) – compels them to spend months and years discussing how things would be done, if there were to be done, assuming they should be done. Or something like that; what they were unable to do is actually move forward. For 18 months. At the same time, we can read about Groupon‘s enterprise architecture here.

We spoke with Ryan Miller and Chris Bland from Groupon about how the company has managed to scale its business so quickly and with such agility. Rather than relying on its own complex internal systems infrastructure, Groupon uses tools like Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2 and S3 to keep the site powered and deals flowing.

A company barely existed 18 months ago! And then I went back to this letter to Enterprise Architecture I saw yesterday:

Actually, weâ€re still burned from the last time you did that to us, when you told us that “multichannel integration” would give us all the competitive advantage that we needed. It didnâ€t give us anything very much, but we suppose you got some “cool” bits or architecture. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy.

But even more surprising than all this was the discovery that even if we agreed to everything you want, we will then have to face an Architectural Council who have the power to overturn everything and send us back to the drawing board. Considering the constitution of this “council” is anyone who has a view on anything, weâ€ve heard on the grapevine pretty much no decisions get made ever. Apparently you all argue for hours over definitions of things such as TOGAFs and whether your “strategic” statements are correct or not. Its all so very ivory tower. Herds of elephants must have been destroyed in the process.

There is a lot in the post that I do not like, but it is hard to argue with the feeling most enterprise architecture teams inspire in their business users and IT colleagues. This reflection prompted a thought,

what if that is the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture – something that lets the company scale as fast as possible with minimal costs. Period. Everything else is a red herring.

One organization had a series of meetings, and another went from start-up to a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in hundreds of locations – all in a same interval it took Earth do 1.5 orbits around its star.

Image via Wikipedia

The people who sign up for the Lincoln promotion arenâ€t handing over their credit-card numbers: they wonâ€t automatically start getting billed when the promotion expires in 2012. And theyâ€ll also learn that if youâ€re not a subscriber, you get shown offers for a free subscription.

via Lincoln offers free access to the NYT | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com.

Would not the lesson of Salon.com be of preeminent value here? They started out as a free service supported by advertising, moved behind a paywall similar to one NYT is trying to implement, had a nice twist on the pay-per-article approach and now seem to have switched to an NPR-like model of user donations and appreciation (plus display advertising). Does not seem to be working out too well for them, but of course NYT is a much bigger brand with a much bigger (longer? deeper?) reach.

The nice twist Salon.com had, as I recall, was that you could have an advertising-free membership, but you could also get a daily pass by watching a 30 second video ad. I really thought that was a great idea. Seemed very fair to me, at least. The Lincoln move for NYT seems very similar, and I hope it works for them. Personally, I believe it will mostly work for brand association and recall, especially if they keep telling me that the daily dose of NYT will be brought to me Lincoln.

I am not sure what it means, for me personally, to be among the 200,000 most heavy users of nytimes.com. Does not feel like an achievement, but if that gets me a “free pass”, I guess that’s good for something.

Related articles

• Silicon Alley Insider: Lincoln Is Offering “Smarter” Readers Free Access To NYT.Com For The Rest Of The Year (businessinsider.com)
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• How the NY Times Paywall Could Turn Out To Be A Success (wired.com)

Then I said, “Hmm, I have an intuition that if I looked at the historical linguistics of Māori, I could probably get a better fit. Nah, thatâ€s too much work.”

Then I said, “Wait. Māori is a Polynesian language, itâ€s not hardly any work at all. The entire sound correspondence for the whole language family probably fits on half a page!”

via Māori Tengwar for DungeonWorld | Expositions on the Obscure.

If true – this is some nice and impressive work.

One immediate realization is that had I thought at 9AM that the headache would persist, I would have taken Advil then. You see, like many people and businesses I do not like to take medicine. Medicine affects things, causes side effects, challenges what feels like “normal” state, and there is always hope that “it will just pass“. And often it will do just that – pass. However, when we do end up taking medicine, it often works, and we regret not taking it earlier. So, when hit with a spade of headaches a few weeks ago I decided – just take the medicine when it starts to hurt. It was amazing how much better I felt, how much more I was able to achieve.

The thing is – businesses can do the same. Facing up to the problem early, realizing that what you are doing is causing pain – and that taking “medicine” is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of being focused on moving forward. Surprisingly often, headaches are not a sign of a brain tumor requiring major surgery, they are like Advil – cheap, easy to take, and provide relief to focus on things businesses need to thrive and move forward. But it only works if you take the medicine. What have you got to lose except a headache?

Image via Wikipedia

I liked the beginning:

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

A tale of the dystopian technological future? No, just autobiography. The Device is, of course, the printed book and I’ve been its willing victim all my life.

via Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? – By Alison Gopnik – Slate Magazine.

I just really like these two paragraphs, but then added some more ramblings below…

Firstly, all “greatest danger to our civilization ever” writings remind me a discussion before the “Device” was even invented. From “Phaedrus“:

“…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

At some point I really have to wonder – so what if these things, devices and technologies, change us? Is not change the constant and stability an aberration? Seeking to preserve what we are only grasping to understand – incompletely and painfully naively as the past state of our existence seems doomed to failure – and for what? Is the seeking to preserve, catalog, keep from disappearing just a knee-jerk reaction for a people who are lost in their own world, and are afraid to lose what little grasp of reality they (I?) hold? I think at this point few people hold to any kind of optimistic promise of technology – to make our lives better, easier; yet we reap its benefits all the time. Technology has fulfilled much of its promises, but what people earn for has never been technology or its abilities. I think “experts” are confused too – conflating ease of accepting today’s technology as a given with transformation or change of some abstract human nature.

I happen to think that, by and large, human nature is immutable, or at least extremely slowly d/evolving. If it were not – we would not be able to relate to Gilgamesh or Noah, care about D’Artagnan and Luke Skywalker, and have any reaction whatsoever to Scarlett O’Hara and Snooky. And if so – then being able to call out Facebook or Skype for ruining the civilization is a little simplistic and pessimistic not about technology, but humans themselves.

I, of course, am extremely partial to this version of Skywalker – who might invent the next “Device”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

Related articles

• Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? (slate.com)
• Keen On… MIT Professor Says Robotic Moment Has Arrived, And We Are Toast (TCTV) (techcrunch.com)
• Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (fredbortz.scienceblog.com)
• Stephen Colbert Asks Sherry Turkle: What Is There To Live For Without Latest iPhone?! (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

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FoReal:FirstBlood for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad Wi-Fi + 3G on the iTunes App Store.

Image via Wikipedia

Seriously. I know I am overdoing it on the op-eds, but even without “fisking” the article it is another mish-mash of wishful thinking, half-truth, and plain inconsistency. The only thing I can conclude from the article is that N. Gregory Mankiw cannot be bothered to roll out of bed for less than $1,000. And that’s in a world with no taxes – must be nice to live there, or in Cambridge.

Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

via Economic View – Higher Taxes Mean Iâ€ll Work Less – NYTimes.com.

That’s actually a lot of miracles. Farther on, he concludes that because of tax breaks expiring his children would only receive $1,700-odd dollars before being subjected to estate tax — one affecting people leaving a few million dollars AND not availing themselves of a huge number of other ways of transferring property. What happens if tax policies (*cough* cuts *cough*) remain in place? He leaves $2,000 after 30 years…

<rant> Really?! Really?! We have this discussion from an Economics professor at Harvard about something that has nominal value of $300 and a present value of $30 (with 8% return he expects) or $90 (with 4% return) according to this present value calculator </rant>

Author concludes that this incredibly high marginal tax rate makes him unwilling to work and produce, presumably, similarly weak articles. Fine by me. Is not the whole point of being very well-off is to make this kind of decisions? Would he still work if he got paid more? Since, as a professor he understands that his tax *rate* would remain the same, surely he would not work for $10,000 a day, right?

Luckily for the rest of us, the few tax payers not in danger of being hit with the estate tax, or saving enough money to put our grandchildren through college – we can take the writing job, or the teaching one – if anyone would offer us one.

ps. I know this is not based on a current article, but I am clearing out my draft/desk drawer. Sorry.

Image by mdanys via Flickr

This is certainly one of the small issues that is so well-known, people have stopped talking about it long time ago. Specifically –  in one of our conference rooms we have an old Polycom phone. It is not too bad – as far as very old phones go – but even in the small room, everyone’s default voice level is raised to the level of shouting. That is terrible. Sure, you think you are just making yourself heard, but it is impossible not feel stressed and tired, on both sides of the phone, after screaming and being screamed at for an hour or two. As the meeting goes on - antagonism builds up driven purely by the emotion of screaming at your teammates.

Think about it – does your company expect you to SCREAM at colleagues working TOGETHER? Of course not – they just do not realize that we are hardwired to remember emotions and fall into patterns without remembering the reason you fell into the pattern in the first place. (my interpretation of pp. 276-278 of ‘Upside of Irrationality‘ by @danariely)

So office managers, and other managers, when you invest in cherry furniture, just leave a little money to buy some decent audio and video equipment – it will pay off very very quickly for your team.

Image via Wikipedia

This is somehow surprising? Experts find that a grade of C or B- in High School predicts a similar or slightly lower grade in college… What would non-experts conclude, that a 65 in an NYC High School would correlate to an A in college? Now that would actually prove grade inflation…

Using data collected by state and community colleges, testing experts on a state committee determined last year that a 75 on the English Regents and a 80 on the math Regents roughly predicted that students would get at least a C in a college-level course in the same subject. Scores below that meant students had to often take remediation classes before they could do college-level work. Only 41 percent of New York State graduates in 2009 achieved those scores.

via Most New York Graduates Are Ill Prepared, Data Show – NYTimes.com.

A few times now I have started to draft an “outeducated” article and never had the guts and fortitude to finish it. I was not around for the “Sputnik moment” – a claim true for most of the people in the USA today – so I cannot gauge how good or bad education was in the 50’s and 60’s. My knowledge of that era is driven entirely by watching ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Grease’ – and those kids did not seem to spend too much time studying. (but they sure seemed happy!)

Bill Gross seems to agree:

“The U.S. is being out-trained, out-educated and out- maneuvered in the global competition for employment,” Gross said. “There are seven applicants for every one job thatâ€s available and todayâ€s report only reemphasizes that.”

The horror of this morning’s article is not just in expert’s “realization” that you need a B or C on a Regent’s exam to get a similar grade in college. It is in the fact that by getting a B in one of the weakest primary educational systems in a functioning world you still get a B in what is supposed to be a strong secondary/higher education system.

Related articles

• New York Graduates Poorly Prepared For College: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• Most New York Students Are Not College-Ready (nytimes.com)
• Most New York Graduates Are Ill Prepared (ekonometrics.blogspot.com)
• Really? Preparing Children to Be Safe at College – NYTimes.com. Really?! (fridnet.com)

What’s the rush for an ipo for a well-capitalized company? Fear that the market isn’t going to be there…

Anyway, what really hit me was that message of product introspection applies to established companies as much as it does to start-ups. Existing companies spend as much, perhaps more, time dreaming up products and solutions, offers and packages, as any start-up. IBM alone has thousands and thousands software “products” (part #s you can buy) and each one of these was debated, researched, fought over – and in the end decided to solve some problem for a non-trivially sized market.

So next time we have a solution definition meeting, I will be the guy standing up and asking, “How are they doing it now?”

Update: It took me a couple of days to get to write this post. I actually *did* bring this up in a strategy meeting. The result was to change one of the marketing approaches to our international business. Great return on investment of reading a blog :)

Image by mrflip via Flickr

Thought this was interesting: Digital Swarm Behavior

In general, I keep waiting for a new set of paradigms for “everyone to be talking about” to emerge.

The candidates I hear about are:

• “social graph”, as in “facebook rules the social graph”
• “big data” – alright, this one is pretty much a common phrase by now
• “internet scale” – common in tech circles, but I think will make a jump into mainstream reporting soon

I also liked how the article was written, especially when compared to something like Is Your Enterprise Socially-Networked or Just Your Employees which was nearly incomprehensible, and pretty boring when actually parsed.

The latter was just… lame. And what’s up with capitalizing all Your Words In A Title?

ps. I am not sure what it is today with all the “” this and CAP that for me. apologies.

Related articles

• Book Review: The Smart Swarm (businesspundit.com)

So here are some themes I had thought of writing, but unlike my friend Lenny Zeltser – did not create a post every day.

• Technology does help to keep in touch. Sure human nature has not changed and we still have limited number of connections we can make to people. But keeping in touch has never been easier, and I know that is making a huge difference in people’s lives. I am having a hard time understanding what difference it might make in my kids’ lives, but I am sure it will be profound.
• I spent the last few months trying to be better organized. That effort paid off well, but only on small scale tasks and projects. For anything bigger than a short email or a phone call, a different approach to dividing/using time is really needed. Personally, I wish more techniques for “getting things done” were taught in school – instead of a lot of “teach to test” junk time is being wasted on.
• I have become very interested in “technology-driven businesses”. So my attempts to make sure the organization I work for is truly technology-driven have not gotten the results I hoped for – but that’s what 2011 is for!
• There are lots of stories about people losing their jobs because of technology. Descriptions of their jobs and experiences are fascinating, but the march of time and change is relentless. I am waiting for my own work to be looked at in same nostalgic fashion, “we had to look at output from memory in gc and use probes to determine values at different memory locations”.
• USA is being out-trained and out-educated has been a common theme in 2010. I have a lot of thoughts on whether it is true, and how I keep thinking this trend could be reversed. While possible, I am not optimistic that USA as a country is in a right place for such a major change. I am hoping I am wrong. Otherwise, “Super Sad True Love Story”-style future is coming fast.

That’s all for now folks. Got to buy some champaign and cognac. All set with scotch.

Came across The Shadow Scholar article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today. I cannot say I was disturbed by the article; one assumes these things happen all the time (and have happened since time immemorial). As in many similar online discussions, comments are the best part, my favorite was #341. (I would not be surprised if the country of the poster is Russia, but it does not really matter).

Any discussion of education for me really bogs down on the simple question – what is the goal – for particular society – of the education process. And it is a process in a system – with its feedback loops, homeostasis, and other systemic attributes- constantly seeking equilibrium and responding to stimuli and events. As long as the equilibrium of producing 100 degree holders in order to produce one actual degree-worthy candidate is satisfactory to our society, arguing about sharing blame between college administrators and professors is a bit besides the point.

Lotus Connections 3 Reviewers Guide

A lot of highfaluting and important-sounding stuff gets written about office culture, team building, and other human resources buzzwords. I like to think that as much – or more – can be found in small clues left around by the people themselves. A desk with a pile of printouts covering 3 old laptops and 5 coffee cups on it tells you as much about the person as his resume would. At least as much.

But I digress. A similar clue struck me as I walked around offices a little  while ago, late in the evening. It was quiet – everyone had gone home and I had a thorny problem to solve. As I walked the office perimeter, trying to think, I realized that new carpet and paint brought out the wear-and-tear of the doors – specifically door handles.

When I looked at these handles, I actually knew immediately which offices they belonged to – and thought the amount of wear and tear on them made perfect sense given the occupants.

What’s my point? As people decorate and redecorate their offices, fight for team improvement and cohesion, alignment, productivity – they should not forget that in the end there are human beings sitting inside these offices. And so if they find a worn out handle on someone’s door – do not replace it, just quietly give the guy (or gal) a raise.

– from a Colleague’s conference abstract

With all the talk about customer/user experience, businesses sometimes forget that ALL interactions matter, and that friction built in any phase of the transaction will slow down the momentum. Having 1-click shopping experience is great, but not when there is no way to reset a password and complete a sale in the time already mentally allotted for it.

Recently, for example, I was about to buy shoes from Zappoes.com, since I figured it would be easiest for me for to just reorder the last pair of shoes I bought there. With as many account we have nowadays, and different security requirements, I could not remember the password and had to request a reset. A common enough occurrence, I suppose. I find it strange that Zappoes can get shoes to me, if I could order them, faster than they got the password reset email to my Inbox. Like many consumers, I am willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes for such an email, but when it does not arrive – I am forced (forced, I tell you!) to go to Plan B. In this case Amazon won the day. It took me a few extra clicks to locate my desired pair of shoes – but at least I could get in and buy.

So a kind reminder to online merchants – I suspect you lose a sale for every 10 minutes password reset is not done. And every such lost sale is totally unnecessary. If you are not sure how long your site takes to reset a password – go and test it now, do not put it off till tomorrow when more of your sales are going to Amazon, which is one site users do remember their passwords.