closing the barn door

why are you still here?

2012-12-18T11:42:00.001-08:00

I've moved to stevebanfield.net. Why haven't you?

moving sucks

2012-11-30T16:23:00.001-08:00

So one year and 100 posts or so ago I moved my blogging here after some time on Posterous and Tumblr. I thought, foolishly it seemed, that there would be such good integration between Blogger and Google+, and between Blogger and the Android Blogger apps that it would be the best place to be. Simple, clean, all part of the Google family.

Eventually it may get there, but right now I'm typing this post on the latest version of the iPad Blogger app. There are no formatting options thought I can set a location, a label and pull in photos. I can't even create a link inside this post. As nice and clean as it is this is 2012. Google should be doing MUCH better than this. (BTW Google I'm happy to come help you figure out how to fix this whenever you are)

So today, when I was kicking off the "great tablet experiment" I was trying to blog about it and I finally just hit the wall with Blogger. As patient as I am there's just no reason for Google's blogging platform to be this limited from any mobile device.

Last year I imported all the old blog posts (dating back to 2007) into a Wordpress site. The idea at the time was to import into Wordpress, export out into a format Blogger could read and then consolidate everything here. Instead I've imported all my Blogger posts into Wordpress, moved my domain name over and this will be the last post I put here.

I have been trying to get the domain www.closingthebarndoor.com pointed to Wordpress. Unfortunately since it was bought through Google and is part of a Google Apps domain, it's a real pain to manage through enom. So at least for a while stevebanfield.me will be the default blog domain. While there's a lot of work to do over there including fixing my About and Bio pages, customizing the template and getting the right sharing links up and running I'm hopeful that this will be the last move my blog ever needs to do.

can I, can I, can I, can I please???

2012-11-18T18:55:00.001-08:00

can I, can I, can I, can I please???, a photo by stevebanfield on Flickr.

Instagram shot from Marymoor Park with Yesler. The green headed mallard looked a little too much like his tennis ball for me to let him jump in after them. He might have found his inner Retriever and not in a good way.

why online photo MANAGEMENT still sucks

2012-11-15T14:39:00.002-08:00

I take photos. Pretty frequently and not obsessively, but I generate a lot of photo data. I've also invested time and money into digitizing my old family photos and negatives. It's thousands of individual files and organized into hundreds of folders.

In parallel to this growing archive of imagery I've been moving slowly and steadily away from storing all this information locally. A large Google drive has become my backup in the cloud for all kinds of files including every one of my photos. I've been using Picasa (on the Mac) for local photo management and the idea was that syncing that library to my Google storage would make it easily browsable on all my online devices where I could grab any photo I wanted to display, edit, and share.

Nope.

There are lots of ways to share a single picture, or even a collection of them. Flickr, 500px, Facebook, Google, Apple's Photo Stream. All of them work great if you have decided which pictures you want to share and just want to publish those out to the world. When you're dealing with an online collection like this one it just all falls apart.

Try this experiment yourself. Upload a lot of folders to Picasa/Google+ photos. Make sure it's more than enough to fill multiple screens so that you have to scroll down in the browser. Make a change to the last folder in the group and boom! You're pushed back to the top of the list with the most recent folders.

That logic is only good if you assume that I'm taking lots of photos and really only want to work on the ones from the last week or month. The right UX experience would be to leave me exactly where I was, seeing the photos or folders that I was looking at before I took an action. Don't just kick me out to the top of the list!

Now try to load those hundreds of albums on a tablet. Sometimes they load, sometimes not. Sort by time works ok, but what about by name or upload date? There are some great apps out there for editing photos on tablets and phones. There are even some good apps for viewing your online and local albums but are there really no good apps for large scale photo management online?

I'm now off on a quest. I'm going to try both SmugMug and the new Photobucket to see if they have what it takes. Right now I'm less and less interested in Picasa, and I worry about being locked into iOS/Mac if I try to use iCloud/iPhoto.

Anyone have a better suggestion?

start up, start down

2012-11-06T19:50:00.002-08:00

Well it's been a while since I've posted, so perhaps I should explain my absence. I've been pretty busy since mid-September, and really too busy to write much for this blog.

When people talk about startups, too often they speak about the successes, the opportunity, all the positives. Too often people forget to mention that for every startup that succeeds the vast majority don't and those that do survive past their initial funding often go through a series of tough changes.

So while I sit here watching the election returns it's time to let everyone know that I've left Korrio, effective last week.

Korrio continues to grow and successfully build out their business selling a software as a service (SaaS) platform to youth sports organizations around the country. Korrio's enterprise platform is in great shape with a host of compelling new scheduling, team management and communication features that we've built since I joined in 2011. The product and mobile design work I was able to do with Cecil Juanarena (of Found) was completed and is rolling out to customers. Unfortunately Korrio has to match expenses to revenues, like all smart businesses, so myself and a few others were downsized last week.

So what's next? I've talked to a few recruiters and am actively engaging my full network. Certainly I'd love to stay in Seattle but am open to looking for new roles just about anywhere. I love working on consumer products and services, with digital and social media, so there's a lot of opportunities out there. Until I find something full time I'll continue to work in consulting roles on the west coast.

I'm excited for the new challenge and all the great companies and people I'll meet during this process. Korrio has a great team and it was a real pleasure working with them. I wish them all the best and expect to see good things from Korrio in the future.

back to the dark (sleek, black and thin) side

2012-09-28T19:41:00.001-07:00

I bought an iPhone 5. It came this week. It is fast and thin and works great, especially now that it's sporting LTE.

I had a Motorola Droid RAZR. I got it last November through a screaming deal on Amazon Wireless. It had 4G LTE. It was fast and thin and worked ok. But I believed. I bought into the idea that now that Google owned Motorola the updates would be coming all the time. I believed. And I waited.

I'd overcome my bad history of the original Nexus (nice device but limited memory), my sense of abandonment by Dell and their 5" Streak and my love hate relationships Android 2.x and 3.0. Despite all that I wrote online about preferring Android to iOS. I liked the customizable home screens, the growing number of apps, and the joy of using any old micro-USB cable to charge the phone.

Finally Verizon and Motorola got around to updating the RAZR to Android 4.0, just a few weeks before the faster, better Android 4.1 came out. I thought I could deal with the phone freezing while trying to dial out. Google Voice crashes? No big deal. Dealing with a Gmail app that doesn't provide an integrated inbox? All the better to keep my personal and work mails separate.

The thing that really opened my eyes to the POS that the Verizon/Moto/Google combo had created was buying the Nexus 7. It had the latest OS. It was faster. It worked, things just snapped. The whole product was a joy to use. I hadn't planned on upgrading to the new iPhone. My contract wasn't up and I've long since stopped being an Apple fanboy. But I did it anyway.

I needed an iPhone for some app development I'm doing (nothing fancy, just playing around for now) and after swiping to answer yet another call with the RAZR only to have it look like nothing had happened while the caller is screaming "Hello?" from the other end it was time to embrace the Dark Side. I came. I ordered. I have beheld it's shiny blackness.

I'm still an Android fan, for some things. I love the Nexus 7 and I'm writing this post on an ASUS Transformer Infinity (another device still waiting for an upgrade). However Apple really had created what may be the best phone ever. It works, despite the limitations of iOS, and it works well.

I can't say the same for my history of Android phones.

i am not a photographer

2012-09-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

I take a lot of photos. Instagram, Picasa, Flickr, 500px. There's always a camera -- phone or otherwise -- with me. There are thousands in my public gallery and thousand more in my "archives", a testament to my lack of self-editing. Despite all the pictures I take, I often don't think I take enough. When the opportunity of subject and situation aligns, I don't drop everything to "get the shot".

That's why I feel that while I take photos, but am not a photographer.

Yesterday I'd left work to grab lunch and then run home to walk the dogs quickly. After all that I was in my car turning the corner from Yesler, headed back to work. That's when I saw him.

It might have been a really interesting street photo. A young African-American man, tall, trim and well dressed with a crisp shirt and vest. He had a guitar slung across his back, fedora-style hat tipped forward and was lighting a cigarette in front of the local beer & chips mart.

It could have been a great shot. Maybe he was a busker going to ply the tourists in Pioneer Square. He could have been a musician playing in Occidental Park for the lunch crowd.

I won't know.

There was even a parking space right in front of the market. I had my new Fujifilm X-100 with me.

I kept driving.

There were things to do back at the office. It wouldn't do for me to be gone too long. What if I'd asked for his picture and he'd said no?

A photographer would have stopped. Maybe the shots would have not turned out, or the subject wouldn't have cooperated. A photographer would have tried to get the shot. In black and white, the cool musician resting between performances in front of the busy, dirty store.

I can see the photo now.

I am not a photographer.

Yet.

Next time I will stop.

can I interrupt you?

2012-08-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Solitude. Focus. Clearing the decks.

Sometimes it's pretty scarce. In fact for me it's seemed to be almost non-existent. There's been a lot of change going on -- moving, unpacking, building, writing, working out. It's hard to find time to just focus on one thing completely.

I'm a big fan of open offices despite their drawbacks. I've worked in startups that have offices, mostly for senior staff, as well those that are completely open with just shared conference rooms. That's Korrio's current layout. For the startup as a whole, I think open layouts are much better. Communication is improved and there's a sense of equality instilled when everyone's using the same desk in the same space.

For the startup it's better. Not always so much for me.

In my experience there's a big downside to such an open environment. Interruptions. It's just too easy for someone to walk across the room to ask "Can I ask a question?" or for someone to lean over their desk to yell "Hey Steve, just a quick question!" In my case it's worse because I'm not only the Chief Product Officer I am the ONLY Product Officer. Product design issues and our consumer experience strategy is my responsibility so every group from sales to customer service to the development team is coming by my desk constantly.

Paul Graham wrote in 2009 about "maker" vs "manager" schedules and workflows. Makers in his example were people like programmers who have a need for long stretches of uninterrupted time to find their creative flow. Time to think, to turn a problem over and over again until the right solution presents itself. Managers may be the ones calling meetings and setting schedules are most often working by exception. Managers are set up to react when things aren't going exactly to plan. Interruptions are more easily tolerated by managers. It's in the nature of the job to allocate time for a meeting, react to the unexpected phone call, then go back to the email inbox list for the next problem to tackle.

As the only "product guy" in a small startup, I have to try to live between both kinds of schedules.

For me writing anything new, whether it's a blog post, a sales documents or especially any kind of user stories or specs really requires time to focus on it. Small bursts of attention interspersed with questions from colleagues or phone calls make it hard to really do the best work. Just when you get into a flow, being pulled away kills creativity.

Brad Feld wrote earlier this year about this. He called it the "monastic startup" which he defined as

The monastic startup is a place where engineers do the best work of their lives. This place involves work with long stretches of uninterrupted time.

This combination of long stretches of uninterrupted time is too often at odds with startup "open office" design. In fact it can be at odds with trying to create a startup culture of openness and communication. One person's communication is another person's interruption. Finding the right balance, especially for people to bridge the gap between manager and maker, between creative and operational is a special thing in a startup. Very few startup cultures master it at first and it takes a rare kind of organization to achieve it.

How do you find time to balance your needs for maker and manager time? Do you shut the office door or work away from the office? Can you find balance at home or in a coffee shop that you can't find in the office, and with email, phones and Skype are you really ever free of interruptions?

I know that "maker time" is an absolute requirement this fall. There are too many new design efforts, too much creativity needed to tolerate being constantly interrupted.

If I don't answer the phone, that's where I'll be.

anchors

2012-08-23T14:07:00.002-07:00

I was talking to someone today and the tried to explain that, as a startup your early customers are like anchors.

Anchors can serve two purposes. First they can keep you steady, providing a base from which you can steady yourself to do great things. An anchor can keep you from drifting by helping you focus on just a few things instead of floating all over. Without an anchor the exec has to constantly keep their "hand on the tiller", course correcting the ship.

But anchors aren't always a good thing. By definition an anchor limits your movements which for a startup can be the difference between fast growth and slow death. Anchor in the wrong place, to the wrong customer, and you'll never get to the better fishing spot. Anchors may make you feel too safe and keep you from venturing out on the open water where there might be a more opportunity over the horizon.

When you find those first customers for your startup, what kind of anchor are they going to be?

a genius bar none: apple store stats #infographic

2012-08-09T13:28:00.003-07:00

via OnlineMBA.com

it began here

2012-08-02T11:16:00.001-07:00

thanks mom for changing my life in ways you never could have imagined.

strategy matters

2012-07-23T10:44:00.002-07:00

Normally I will quote from posts and try to add my own perspective but I've never just reposted something in it's entirety before. This morning in my inbox I saw the article below from Seth Godin entitled "Strategy matters more than ever". It summed up so perfectly some things I've spent a lot of time lately dwelling upon that I had to just share it here.

When everyone is playing the same game, your execution is critical. Your store is like their store, your bread is like their bread, so we care very much about the care and skill you put into your product or service.

Of course, that still matters, but the revolution of the web means that the way you go to market, the structure of your offering, the model of your business--these are sufficient to cause you to lose, regardless of how you play the game. (And able to give you a huge post if you plan right).

Sam Walton was a huge success, largely because he developed a new retail strategy, not because he was better at running a store than anyone else. Local bookstores are in trouble, not because they don't work hard or care a lot, but because they are saddled with expenses that used to be smart (rent for a local storefront) in a world where they are merely ballast.

Running a business with the wrong strategy in the wrong place at the wrong time is possible, but it's an uphill battle. The alternative is to think very hard about your model, your costs and the benefits you offer to the people you'd like to serve.

You could change from a product to a service offering, from free to expensive, from low service to high service, from storefront to web, from large to small, from spam to permission, from acquiring new customers to delighting old ones, from wide open to invitiation only, from dirty to green, from secret to transparent, from troll to benefactor, from custom to mass, or for any of these, vice versa.

Not changing your strategy merely because you're used to the one you have now is a lousy strategy.

Blindly following a strategy because it fits the way you want the world to work or because it's just the one you're most comfortable with isn't the way to fast growth, it's the path to slow death for your company. Sometimes the best, boldest move is the change the strategy, not just to try harder in executing the old one.

6 x 10 x 1

2012-07-20T16:40:00.004-07:00

from the rethinkdigg tumblr

As betaworks and Digg both announced on their blogs, we are taking over Digg and turning it back into a startup. What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks.

This is absolutely the most awesome thing I've read about in a long time. It's not because I am some long lost Digg fanboy. I used it, liked it, left it and moved on. If the service comes back or not I guess I could care less. What I think is absolutely awesome is how a small team (10 people) is going in 6 weeks to reinvent something. They are going to do it, they have told you they are going to do it, and they know you're watching. They have called their shot, like Babe Ruth at the plate. Screw it up and they are the arrogant ones who bit off more than they can chew. Do it and be known for something very cool.

I love it when people do something completely hard core like this just to show the rest of the world that it can be done. Good luck.

want to make a dent in the universe?

2012-07-20T15:05:00.004-07:00

As I've written recently, nobody sets out to be the world's largest jumbo shrimp. So how do you make sure you're the disruptive force, not the minor tremor? How do you make sure you're doing something truly unique and innovative?

Build for tablets.

Let me illustrate my point with two simple charts, both from Business Insider's "Chart of the Day".

First look that the unit shipments for iPhone and iPad in the first few months. The iPad has immediately exploded, and with Google now shipping the Nexus 7, Amazon working on a new Kindle Fire and Microsoft Surface coming (eventually) there is going to be a huge, though someone fragmented, installed base of tablet form factor devices. Even if you focus on the iPad alone, clearly the leading tablet you're looking at a huge potential market with a low price barrier for more and more people to join.

Now let's take a look at what has been happening with how much people are actually using their tablets in comparison to their laptops. Though specifically this is talking about iPads there's a huge shift of almost 20 points the first and last survey.

So you might be thinking, "Great Steve. Tell me something I don't know. There are lots of tablets being sold and people are using them more and more." That's a lot, and maybe that's enough for you. But I want to take it a step further.

Building for a touch specific tablet form factor device means you have to take a completely different mindset into your design. There's no room on a tablet for extraneous options or the "old way" of doing things. For an example of what happens when you don't simplify enough, see this review of Microsoft Office 2013 running on a Windows tablet.

Mobile design isn't about just bigger buttons and touch controls. It's about eliminating everything that creates unnecessary complexity.

Prof. Clayton Christensen's seminal book The Innovator's Dilemma talked about how hard it is for established companies to move into new markets as the technology platform changes. I was a student of Prof. Christensen in the late '90s at Havard Business School, often arguing with him that his ideas wouldn't apply to software companies. As I've gotten older, experiencing software development beyond the closed environment (at the time) of Microsoft I have come to realize that his idea might apply to software companies most of all.

Your opportunity as an entrepreneur, as a product designer, and as a application developer is look at markets in a completely new way, to throw away the "we've always done it this way" approaches and to create something completely new. That's not news. In fact it's the way it's always been. The touch tablet form, along with all the smartphone platforms that go with it, is just creating a powerful new way to jump into a space and cut out of the old competitors.

why email is my newsfeed

2012-07-20T10:34:00.002-07:00

Right or wrong, email is my newsfeed. It's my RSS reader. When I find a blog or site with interesting things I want to read on a regular basis, I don't search for the link to add to my Google Reader account. I don't keep some of the highly recommended newsfeed readers on my tablets or phones. I look for a "subscribe me" link.

Why "clutter" my inbox with lots of newsletters on everything from sustainable design, product development and technology news to dog toys, the National Corvette Museum and Kentucky politics?

Because my inbox (or inboxes if you want to consider each device as it's own view into the abyss) has a very special feature that makes it work for me. The Delete Key.

I can open up an email, decide it it's interesting and hit delete in just a second or two. I can decide I don't have time and am willing to not open an email at all if I've been offline, just to quickly clear out my inbox. Boom! Gone. Click, click, click. Three more gone. I never have to look at them again.

While being at "inbox zero" (that mythical state where you don't have anything in your inbox) is a goal that I occasionally hit, I don't mind being at a steady state of between 100 and 200 emails in my inbox. I am hardcore about being at zero UNREAD emails, meaning I have opened everything and if it wasn't instantly filed away or deleted, or is part of an ongoing conversation that I want to engage in, I don't leave unread email sitting around. I read it or delete it.

The budding minimalist in me occasionally barks that I've subscribed to too many things, and that some blogs and newsletters are digital junk mail that I'd be better off eliminating altogether. Perhaps. There's certainly some truth that digital makes it easier to tolerate the mental clutter. However even the items that only have occasional use more often than not provide interesting perspectives and enjoyment. Making my input, narrowing my gaze too much feels too constraining to my creativity. It's too limiting.

I find the my Facebook and Twitter feeds are constraining in their own way. Sometimes it's the "echo chamber" effect where everyone is just repeating the same story, the same links over and over. Otherwise the rapid nature and "stream" quality of each means that's it's hard to go back and "swim upstream". To search I have to know what I'm looking for. To keep scrolling back and back means I am looking over things that don't interest me. There's no delete key to get it out of the way.

Email works for me. It's on every device I own. I can do it anywhere, at any time. I can dip into a fountain of interesting ideas, or wipe them away with a click or a tap.

What do you use to bring new ideas to you each day? Subscriptions? RSS Feeds? Twitter? Facebook? What's become your method for managing the kind of random, inspirational input that helps you be creative?

get 'em while they're hot

2012-07-18T21:04:00.001-07:00

Check it out at http://instacanv.as/stevebanfield today!

world's largest jumbo shrimp

2012-07-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

Today I read an article about Dropbox and their recent growth as they just hit 25 million users.* One of the quotes from the article really stuck with me

The worst outcome for a startup is not failure — its mediocrity.

I really believe that's true. Mediocre startups aren't truely successful ones. They aren't the ones that people want to join, that engineers leave "safe" jobs with big companies to invest their time in. Venture capitalists aren't (usually) calling the average companies.

Fortune favors the bold

The startups that really change the world are the ones that really have big ambitions. It's not enough to say you want to take over a market, it's about embracing revolutionary change inside and out. Bootstrapping, starting small or creating the minimal viable product to gain customer feedback are great tactics, as long as your long term strategy is bold enough.

You will be judged by the quality of your enemies

Comparing your company against the incumbents, the current generation of competitors means you run the risk of only shooting high enough to beat them. Building a company means setting your sights on the biggest opportunity, and that means knowing from the beginning that you are building to win against the largest competition. To be the best you have to beat the best. A strategy built around being acquired by a larger company is doomed to failure, but a strategy built around being so much better than they are that they have no choice but to buy you before someone else does is a winner.

No one sets out to be the world's largest jumbo shrimp, in other words something big in it's own mind but not important enough to really make a dent in the universe. If you're not careful your startup can end there. Don't let it happen to you.

*Though I was a large scale Dropbox user, I have to admit I've switched to Google Drive. Guess Dropbox is really at 24,999,999 users.

what choosing marissa says about yahoo's future

2012-07-16T16:48:00.002-07:00

So Marissa Mayer is Yahoo's new CEO. There's a lot of positives in that -- she's had a strong and successful career at Google where she was a very early engineer. It's another crack in the glass ceiling of major US company CEOs, not to mention the thicker glass that has kept so many qualified candidates out of Silicon Valley corner offices.

What's interesting to me is what the choice of illustrates about how Yahoo's board wants to be seen, and how their ongoing choices reflect how Yahoo is in denial about what it really is.

Yahoo is a media company that wants to be a technology company, and in particular it wants to be more like Google.

Ross Levinsohn, who has been the interim CEO at Yahoo is a media company guy. Besides focusing on media at Yahoo he's been at Fox Interactive, CBS and HBO. He's a guy who really knows consumer media services, and the advertising models that drive them, incredibly well. I got to know Ross briefly and in a limited way via a company I consulted and lead in the digital advertising space.

That's not to say that Marissa doesn't know advertising. You can't be one of the top 10 people at Google and not eat, sleep and breathe online ads. But Google isn't, at least in my mind, a media company. It doesn't create content. It crafts services like search, Adwords, Play, and technology like Chrome, Chromebooks and Android. Yes, Google has YouTube but how much of that is really a premium video experience? For example it took Vevo building on top of YouTube for music videos to be a profitable business there.

Choosing Marissa means the Yahoo board wants to be a technology driven company like Google and away from being a media driven company like Viacom, News Corp or even Hulu and Netflix. If Yahoo was going to distinguish itself it was going to have to be in the content creation business, as well as do a better job monetizing content from others. Yahoo isn't going to out-search Google. It's not going to out-aggregate YouTube. It's not going to create it's own mobile operating system, it's own social network, it's own home electronics.

The Yahoo board is showing us, after a series of choices like Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Scott Thompson and now Marrisa that it deep deep down wants to be just like Google. It yearns to be a technology focused company no matter how closed that road looks to them. Picking someone like Ross Levinsohn, or even someone from outside Yahoo, who will really understand the new world of digital media monetization and the social web is a move away from technology, away from the historic role that Yahoo sees for itself in Silicon Valley. The Yahoo board just can't bring themselves to choose a media leader, and instead looks to people who have dealt with technology problems, not content distribution ones.

I just hope the board gives Marissa the support necessary to do whatever is required to turn Yahoo around, not just to follow the board's dreams of former tech glory.

worth remembering

2012-07-11T10:48:00.001-07:00

via xkcd

all

2012-07-10T10:02:00.001-07:00

sometimes Hugh gets it really right

so choose wisely, or your all will be none before you know it

what are you selling?

2012-07-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

I came across this great quote from an venture capital blog.

A startup can raise money by selling dreams or data. The earlier the company, the more an investment decision is an emotional decision and based on dreams. The later the company, the more data drives the investment decision.

Investors will always try to evaluate the risks in a business. It’s the responsibility of the entrepreneur to convince the investor the risks are worth taking, which is an emotional, but not necessarily irrational decision. Investors evaluate seed investments very much in this fashion. Some Series As are also decided this way. But later stage rounds (Bs and growth) are much more data driven. This notion exemplified by the distinction in backgrounds of typical early investors and later investors: product managers vs investment bankers. (via Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures)

It reminded me of the importance of data in selling anything. Yes there are always emotional components in funding decisions. Some venture capital firms don't want to be left out of a hot sector. Others don't what their competition to lock up a hot entrepreneur. In those cases the emotion is driven by the data of past wins, despite the warnings that past performance doesn't insure future success.

As Tom says in the early stages you may not be selling on company performance data. The seed round you're raising could be specifically to get the product finished enough to go to market and prove the concept. But in the later rounds you can't deny the power of raw numbers.

Late last year I was inspired by this post from Jason Goldberg at Fab. He really lays out the challenges and distractions that fundraising can become for a start-up executive team. Jason's main point is that instead of allowing his team to be distracted by the process, he gave all of this potential investors a login to their metrics dashboard. In this way he cut out the typical "sales" process the company goes through with new investors. He just showed them the data of how Fab was growing in users and revenue directly, not in a pretty Powerpoint chart but directly in the same system Fab used to manage it's business.

As Jason put it

From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head.

Startups really should think about how they can approach fund raising like this. Obviously Fab was already very successful and had the benefit of a strong data story. They were in a special, but not unique, position. Picking the right potential partners, and showing them up front the clear data about why their company is the best investment opportunity simplifies and accelerates the process for everyone so the VC firms can make quick decisions and the startup can get back to shipping products, acquiring customers and growing the business.

That's what startups are supposed to be focused on, not chasing VC funding.

(who's going to) measure up?

2012-07-08T20:41:00.003-07:00

What's more important -- getting the product to market or building ways to collect about how the product is used once it's released?

Well obviously you have to ship. There's no customer feedback without customers so you have to get the product out there. Doing that is the most important thing, right?

Yes and no. Too often with small product teams they get too focused on the task of getting the product out without thinking through exactly how they are going to collect that usage data and feedback. Too often I've come into product teams, as a consultant or new executive, where the focus has been so tight on features that the team hasn't put any consideration into how they are going to collect and organize the data coming back from their application. "We meant to do that later" or "we thought we'd add that in version two" are the common excuses.

Too often I've seen this from teams who are either entering a new market or launching a new application. The schedule for this first version is so tight and they are so aggressively trying to get it out the door that putting in the hooks for metering and monitoring get lost. When your first version hasn't shipped yet it's easy to forget that the customer feedback is going to drive the next version, and the next one and so on.

Every application, no matter whether it's a web or mobile app, needs a solid way of collecting user behavior. It doesn't have to comprehensive. In fact just collecting the first round of data may enlighten you to new areas that need to be metered. The important thing is realizing that collecting that behavior data is as important a product feature as anything else.

Don't let your app ship without it.

the red hallway "trick"

2012-07-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

ISO 1200 Magazine | Photography Video blog for photographers: The Red Hallway Trick by Gary Fong

Love simple, neat photography ideas like this. Makes me want to order some light gels and do some test shots. Who's willing to be a test model so I can practice?

Google Nexus Q

2012-06-27T11:51:00.001-07:00

I like the idea of an Android compatible wifi streaming device, but not sure I'd replace my Roku or Apple TV until it supported apps like Netflix or Spotify. Is the idea that I'd run that app on my Android phone or tablet and then just use the Q as an output device, similar to using Apple Airplay from an iPad?

Wonder how this will compare/compete with Google TV? What do the Logitech and Sony teams, who have been shipping Google TV think of this announcement?

nike fuelband vs fitbit: measure me

2012-06-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

Within the last week, first at the annual RealNetworks alumni "reunion" and later in a Facebook message thread I've had multiple friends ask me the same question:

Steve, you're a "gadget guy" and you workout. Is the Fitbit or Fuelband is better?

Instead of continuing to answer the same question the next time I'm out on the town, I thought I'd write up this little explanation.

My Quest, My Tools

I'm pretty open with the fact that I'm trying to get back into shape. After 40 it gets harder and harder, and honestly I've fought my bad eating habits all my life. In 2007 I lost 100 lbs working out regularly and tracking my calories with an online tool. After putting a lot of that weight back on I started after the move to Seattle in 2010 to be more active. A lot of travel in 2010 and 2011 made consistent exercise hard, so I've always looked for ways to enhance what limited workout time I have, and improve the feedback I'm giving myself.

Just running around, lifting weights or going on long hikes was great but the engineer in me wanted more information. I wanted to know how far, how much. I wanted to compete with myself. Having the data to say "just a 1/2 mile more" does a lot for my motivation, so I've always been interested in getting as much data as possible. For me lifting weights means I put on muscle mass pretty quickly, so the numbers on the scale is never a good progress bar, and if the scale wasn't moving I wanted to see I was making progress somewhere.

Fitbit

Back in 2010 I bought my first Fitbit. Fitbit is a small pedometer you wear on your clothes (it's shaped like a clip) or carry in a pocket. It tracks your steps, calories burned, etc. In 2011 Fitbit upgraded the device to count flights of stairs and be more accurate. The charging stand doubles as a wireless receiver and synchronizes your activity with your account on Fitbit.com. You can find my account on here.

Nike Fuelband

This year Nike rolled out a new device called the Fuelband which I purchased earlier this spring. Like the Fitbit the Fuelband is a pedometer but instead of wearing it on your clothes the Fuelband is a bracelet that can be worn on either wrist. It counts your steps, can act as a watch (only, not a stopwatch). There's also a unique activity measurement called "fuel" which allows you to set a daily goal. Your activity is shown via a gauge that goes from red to yellow to green. Fill the "fuel" gauge to hit your daily activity goal which gives the user a cute celebration display on the device.

Which is better, the Fitbit or Fuelband?

I use both devices every day, as well as their respective web sites for additional features. I've obviously had the Fitbit longer and seen them improve their web site a great deal over time. Nike just updated their site to include data from both the Fuelband and the Nike+ running system (smartphone apps and shoe sensors). Nike also just released a new Android app for doing GPS tracking of your runs and reporting that into the Nike+/Nike Fuelband dashboard.

The Nike Fuelband is a good pedometer and if you're already using the Nike+ sensor with an iPhone or iPod, all the data is uploaded to the same place. But all it really does is track activity level. The display on the device is nice (the gauge going from red to green) and helps with motivation but that's it.

The Fitbit is the better all around solution. Because you can carry it in your pocket all the time instead of wearing in place of a watch or jewelry you can use it at work on at play. It's a good pedometer, counts going up/down stairs, will give you a calorie count on the device and a display of general activity level. Additionally the Fitbit lets you track your sleep patterns by wearing it at night, as well as input your body measurements for chest, waist, neck, etc. The real value for Fitbit is on the web site. In addition to the pedometer/activity data it integrates with a lot of other systems via their published APIs. I use the Fitbit site with a WiFi enabled scale for tracking weight, BMI and body fat and with an iPad compatible blood pressure cuffs. The Fitbit web site also has a food database so you can track calories and compare input (food) and output (exercise).

By being so broad and enabling me to do more than just count steps, the Fitbit system can be a one stop shop for getting in shape. It's the better overall solution. If you're a runner or already using the Nike+ system, go with the Fuelband, but you'll need a separate service for tracking calories and body data. Everyone else should just go with the Fitbit.

Are you measuring your activity?
What do you count, and what metrics mean the most to you?
Does having more data help, or hurt, your motivation to get into shape?