“If sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is about suggesting answers. Sketching takes place at the beginning of the development process, prototyping only later.” – Jessie Scanlon reviewing Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences in Business Week

As a designer I find that the most productive parts of a project are the exploration phase, the very early part where your are researching, sketching, exploring ideas and concepts trying to formulate an approach. It has always been really easy to grab my notebook and pen and begin drawing sketches of user experiences or find a whiteboard where you can sketch and erase and snap a picture when you’re done. Showing the initial designs to people, gathering feedback and making annotations. It has always been much more difficult and time consuming to build wireframes, screen flows, conceptual models, etc. There is a certain envy to being able to do low fidelity prototypes with a level of basic interactivity (if only because a number of past clients were not co-located and scanning sketches and providing written context was never enough, however, it might be a lot easier to share and annotate these days using ConceptShare, Octopz, Cozimo or DimDim).

It was tools like DENIM that first showed the power of sketching for web design. It provided a set of tools for creating sketches and adding interactivity to initial designs. DENIM allows users to create site maps, page flows, interaction scenarios and page designs using sketches. It works best with a tablet PC or a Wacom tablet. It works very similar to a paper notebook and can export the pages and links to HTML upon completion. The biggest challenge was that the integration with other tools was not significantly better than paper and pencil.

Today I found Balsamiq Mockups, a tool for creating mockups and designs using predefined sketched controls. No need to move to your tablet machine. No need to connect the Wacom. Just fire up Balsamiq and start laying out user interfaces. While sketched design templates are available for Graffle and Visio (check out Garrett Dimon’s Templates & Stencils; or Graffletopia; or YUI Stencil Kit). Balsamiq Mockups also makes it easy to integrate into a development workflow by allowing designers to export and integrate their designs into Confluence, Jira and TWiki.

I also discovered the Pencil Project. The Pencil Project is an open source tool aimed at diagramming and UI prototyping. It’s less of a tool for sketching and more of a replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio and Graffle that we’ve all become accustomed to using for creating higher fidelity interface mockups. The Pencil Project is available as a Firefox addon or as a standalone application using XULRunner. Pencil Project includes stencils for GTK controls, XP controls. It’s a great alternative to the existing tools.

Designers are starting to see fantastic new tools like Blend and Thermo and Axure. And there continues to be an evolution of mashup tools like DreamFactory, and javascript frameworks like SproutCore, that make it easier for designers and developers to build next generation web applications. I am curious to see the next generation of design tools for cloud based services (Apatar, Popfly, Pipes, Sprout, etc.). 

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) by Bill Buxton Read more about this book…

Viigo is a great user experience for accessing content on your mobile. Project Tango allows access to the News & RSS services that Windows Mobile and Blackberry users already had, but now includes a podcast browser and media player, and news has been rounded out to include weather, sports, and finance information. It is a great looking application, the user experience reminds me a lot of my iPhone. It uses animations to help users understand where they are in the application flow.

It’s a great application, the user experience is one of the best I’ve had on Windows Mobile. The Viigo team is building a cool platform that allows them to add new services that can be enabled and deployed for clients. Hopefully, announcements and partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Blackberry will help them raise additional rounds of funding, now that it looks like Ventures West is having some difficulty raising another fund.

Install Project Tango at getviigo.com/wpc

Stopped in the bookstore to browse the shelves and see if anything inspired me. I’d already stopped and bought Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and it continues to be the most important book of 2008 IMHO.(If you’re looking for a pleasure read, pick up a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, this book is Orwell’s 1984 for the Digital Generation, I found it worth the sleepless night).

I’m intrigued about the discussion of more in Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More. How people make decisions around needs and desires in North America is interesting. This is the basic studies of economics. For a long time, I had a hard time understanding the connection that Herb Simon made between economics, psychology, computer science and design. But this connection has lead to startups both successful ones and failures, but they have all been around understanding how people make decisions, assign value, and trying to design products and services to enable these decisions. I had a quick read of The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas which did a great job explaining real-world perceptions and misperceptions of the world based on human behaviours.

Toronto is now my home. Having settled in Toronto, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of community. I’m looking forward to reading Small is Possible: Life in the Local Economy, if only to better set a plan for events like DemoCamp and Founders & Funders to better enable our Local Software Economy in Toronto.

Is it me, or does Wired feel relevant again? Wired 16.07 had a couple of articles that were just inspiring to read. The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More – More Is Different contains articles about the secondary effects and analysis of data that becomes possible one you embrace big data. Feeding the Masses: Data In, Crop Predictions Out shows the power of GIS and agricultural data developed by Lanworth, it provides the power to enable market predictions. Makes me think I need to find time to read Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart. Need proof that there’s power in numbers look at the processing by the Idee folks for TinEye or at the relational models of pixels in images for PhotoSynth.

	The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas by Robert Frank Read more about this book…
	Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres Read more about this book…
	Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy by Lyle Estill Read more about this book…
	Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, Halee Fischer-Wright Read more about this book…
	The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Demographic Storm by Kenneth W. Gronbach Read more about this book…
	Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads by Joel Best Read more about this book…
	Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block Read more about this book…
	Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) by Jeffrey Kluger Read more about this book…
	Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More by John Naish Read more about this book…
	The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (Digital Futures) (Digital Futures) by Michael Strangelove Read more about this book…
	Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky Read more about this book…
	Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi T. Ahonen, Alan Moore Read more about this book…
	Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap (Microsoft Executive Leadership Series) by R. Salkowitz Read more about this book…

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Thank you Cory for Little Brother. I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to read it. It has been a few years since I couldn’t put a book down and decided it was worth giving up sleep to finish. Cory has captured the feelings behind my mistrust of government and corporations. And the power they can exert over citizens, and the challenges when this power is abused.

You’ve inspired me to take action to protect my rights. The anti-circumvention provisions of the C-61 copyright amendment does more harm than good. It prevents crucial rights for citizens in a digital age. It prevents citizens from having the right to “use digital works without permission for research, private study, criticism or news reporting”. Michael Geist has posted 30  Things You Can Do to help reflect a consumer view of this amendment.

“The Industry Minister has time to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, time to meet all the major telcos on the spectrum auction issue, yet hasn’t made time to meet with user community on copyright.”

Bill C-61 scares me. It represents a shift in public policy back towards corporations. It reminds of the acceptance of monopolies and oligopolies that Canadians accept as tradeoff for our geography. The bill makes it an infringement to circumvent digital locks to prevent copying and distribution. To make it worse this bill prevents the distribution of the tools that can be used to circumvent digital locks. This means that watching a European purchased Region 2 encoded disc, like the legal copy of The Future is Unwritten I purchased from Amazon.co.uk, in Canada is illegal under Bill C-61.

This kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you’re on. If you’ve been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you’d better know how to shoplift. If you’re designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you’d better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to design anything good.

…

Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider. – Bruce Schneier

Help keep Canada free! Free as in freedom! We need to ensure we have the freedoms so that we can continue to think, explore, innovate, question and challenge authority and government in Canada.

Thank you Cory!

Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Read more about this book…

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There is the opportunity to make $$ making people happy – Tara Hunt

The Universals of Happiness

• autonomy
• competence
• relatedness
• self-esteem

The Powers Working Against Happiness

• fear
• confusion
• loneliness
• lack of control
• struggle for survival

This is a presentation that should be a must read for entrepreneurs, designers, developers, and marketers. What are you doing to help your customers achieve autonomy? competence? relatedness? self-esteem? Or are you working to promote the powers working against happiness. Tara does a great job evaluating:

• Zipcar
• Southwest
• Skype
• Zappos
• Twitter
• Wordpress

These are all great examples working to grow happiness. Thanks Tara!

Dan’s lesson was that these student programs need to focus on teaching what a big idea is:

If your going to teach someone who [sic] to make a company the number one goal should be to help them identify what a good business opportunity is.

Dan links to one of the most important lists of what Sequoia Capital looks for in it’s investments. All entrepreneurs should be asking themselves these questions and evaluating their companies and products. I’m fond of Rich Customers who need Pain Killer solutions in Large Markets. Too often these are overlooked as unimportant, but they help define the type of company.

Sequoia Capital’s Elements of Sustainable Companies

• Clarity of Purpose
  Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.
• Large Markets
  Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.
• Rich Customers
  Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.
• Focus
  Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.
• Pain Killers
  Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with the solution.
• Think Differently
  Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.
• Team DNA
  A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or the most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.
• Agility
  Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.
• Frugality
  Focus on spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.
• Inferno
  Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

Greg Wilson suggested that I try profiling a company like Adjuvant Informatics from Hamilton, ON. This is a market that I have only passing exposure to, and therefore the details of this analysis could be questionable. I’d be happy to publish the feedback from others with more knowledge in the space.

Management Team

The Adjuvant Informatics management team is made up of Dan Meyer, Dr. James Paul and Anders Elmik. Dan Meyer is the founder of Med-Tel Software. As of 2006, Med-Tel was reporting having 1,000 clients and continuing to grow. Mr. Meyer has a track record in providing successful clinic billing and reporting software. Dr. James Paul is an anaesthetist with a specialty in pain management.   

Market

I’m not an expert in this market. Suffice to say there is a lot of money spent on pain management ranging from the costs of medications to the management and effectiveness of treatments. Healthcare as a whole is an increasing part of the developed world’s economy, consuming over 16% of the GDP in the US and estimated to grow beyond $3.3 trillion annually.

The market for pain management medications in 2006 was estimated at approximately  $26 billion per year and growing. The market is estimated to be growing at an annual rate of near 30%, and will reach $40 billion by 2010. However the medication market is just one piece of a complex pain management puzzle. Understanding the market requires understanding the medications, the hospital costs, the medical staff costs and the impact on the patient.

In 1998, the average length of stay in hospitals for people who had surgery was 5.1 days and a greater than 160 million surgery-related days were spent in hospital. There is growing support that pre-operative risk management and post-operative pain control is thought to result in more efficient use of health resources, decrease overall costs and increase patient quality of life by reducing the chances of acute pain becoming chronic.

Product

Adjuvant Informatics builds tools to help clinicians and hospital administrators manage information related to patient pain.

Its product, the APS Manager (for acute pain service) not only captures and analyzes patient drug orders, doctor visits and critical incidents, it also allows information to be saved in a searchable database. It was installed in Hamilton Health Sciences hospitals in 2002 and has since been picked up by Toronto General and Sunnybrook as well as hospitals in Australia and Norway. Others in Israel, Central America, the United States and Germany are studying it. – Steve Arnold, Hamilton Spectator

The product suite aims to provide standardized data capture and analysis tools for hospitals that take in patients scheduled for the operating room. The tools gather information to assist in research into patient risk analysis.

Coupled with the platform for each hospital, Adjuvant Informatics is building a centralized data store for clinical anaesthesia “allowing hospitals to make comparisons between their own patient outcomes – such as side effects and length of stay” with those of other hospitals. The centralized data store is being used in conjunction with Cardinal Health to provide data to patient’s drug-administering pump infusion devices to management the distribution of pain treatments and their effectiveness.

The goal of the product is to “make the use and tracking of pain medicine more accessible to hospital staff and hospital systems”. Adjuvant’s products allow hospitals to do systematic reviews of patient outcomes, of critical incidents, of cost management related to giving medicinal narcotics to patients.

Business Model

The market for health care solutions seems to have 2 main market opportunities: cost-reduction or safety-increasing. Basically, does the solution reduce the costs of the care provided or does the solution increase patient safety or the quality of patient care. Adjuvant Informatics sells an enterprise software solution to hospitals to help them manage their patient pain information. The solution includes a suite (read menu) of software applications including Pre-Op Clinic, APS Manager, and offers hardware and software solutions for bedside data entry. The business model is either a subscription model for software or a more traditional enterprise software license plus annual support contract. 

Customers

Adjuvant Informatics has a great list of local and international hospitals and healthcare networks using different parts of their product suite. The list includes:

• University Health Network, Toronto, ON – Pre-Op Clinic
• St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton, ON – Acute Pain Manager
• Cardinal Health, San Diego, CA – APS Manager
• Ullevaal University Hospital, Oslo, Norway – APS Manager
• Prince Charles Hospital, Brisbane, Australia – APS Manager
• Sunnybrook & Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, ON – APS Manager

It appears that customers come through focused conference attendance including: Canadian Anesthesia Society Annual Meeting; British Pain Society Annual Scientific Meeting; American Pain Society, etc. Targeted lead generation focusing on anaesthesiologists and pain management professionals. Then a standard enterprise/institutional sales practice that follows up after interest and demand is generated at events.

Strategic Relationships

Adjuvant Informatics has built strategic relationships with:

• Cardinal Health – Integration of APS Manager software suite with Alaris Gateway suite provides access to networked pain medication devices that provide medication delivery for 1.5 million patients annually. And generates more than $2.7 billion in annual revenue for Cardinal Health.
• University Health Network – Co-development of a new preoperative assessment module in partnership with Dr. Scott Beattie of the University Health Network.
• National Research Council of Canada – to develop the International Clinical Anaesthesia Database

Relationships with key hospitals, like UHN, for product development and deployments are a great way to ensure functionality , usability and compliance. The strategic partnership with Cardinal Health allows access to a manufacturer and distributor of healthcare devices that allows for integration in existing hospitals and health maintenance organizations.

Competition

There are direct competitors in pain management software including Pain Associates International Network. However there is larger competition in traditional electronic medical records software providers. This is because the majority of the data gets captured by these tools today. Extending these systems to include pain management risk assessment criteria could put the Adjuvant Informatics solution at risk. However, the aggregated data in the ICAD solution offers an opportunity to perform robust cross facility analysis of risk factors and successes. There is an opportunity to build connectors to import data from the larger EMR companies. There is a growing category of new providers in the space including Microsoft Health Vault and Google Health which provide SaaS solutions for capturing and maintaining consumer health records.

Barriers to Entry

• Government regulations
  Healthcare is a highly regulated space with concerns around patient safety, privacy, legal status, interoperability, future proofing, among other legislative and regulatory guidelines. Having a management team and company familiar with the process and an approach for approval is a huge advantage for Adjuvant Informatics. There are also a ton of standards for electronic medical records including HL7, ANSI X12, HISA and others.
• Intellectual property
  Founded by an anaesthesiologist and a software developer, Adjuvant Informatics has a built a suite of tools for managing the clinical activity of the anaesthesia departments of hospitals. The in clinic experience and understanding of the practitioner’s concerns, coupled with a deep experience building billing software with Medtel Software should provide Adjuvant Informatics significant head start momentum. 

Summary

Adjuvant Informatics has shown there is an under-served market for pain management solutions. There are open questions to me about:

• Average size of a deal with hospitals or other HMOs both in terms of revenue and profits
• Length of time to close each deal

This coupled with further research into the actual size of the market, i.e., finding numbers about either the effectiveness of the solution for reducing patient costs or reducing patient risks are necessary. This will help determine if the model is to sell the solution to clinicians or hospital administrators, or insurance companies. It is unclear to me from looking at the publicly available information who has the largest financial pain or the great power in choosing the solution. It seems that there is still some work to be done in defining the revenue sources in order to find funding.

So far, Meyer estimated, Adjuvant has chewed up $400,000 in capital "with no real revenue stream yet.

"Clients are just starting to trickle in. Our goal is to become the standard, like Windows, and we have a chance of doing that, but there’s also a real potential of not making our goals," he said, adding the company is talking to angel investors, banks and other sources.

"With $1 million we could finance a very aggressive assault on the U.S. market," he said. "Until then, we have to be very tactical in how we market."

Going Broke for Biotech By Steve Arnold, The Hamilton Spectator, Jan 16, 2006

• Joel Spolsky, FogCreek Software
• Seth Godin
• Jason Fried, 37signals
• Eric Sink, SourceGear and Author, Business of Software
• Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot
• Jessica Livingston, YCombinator and Author, Founders at Work
• Steve Johnson, outside.in
• Tom Jennings, World Power Systems
• Richard Stallman
• Paul Kenny
• Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation

I’m intrigued to see Richard Stallman at a conference about the business of software. However, as many folks will point out that free software is one of the most successful cultural and business models, check out The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media Book). Dharmesh Shah shared his pithy insights on the business of software. This is going to be an awesome conference.

• Ryan McMinn
• John Lam
• Tara Brown
• Craig Saila

However, it is also a sad day. Bryce is leaving Toronto (Toron-o, watch the video for details). Bryce was one of the driving forces behind InteractionCamp and EnterpriseCampToronto. He is a co-conspirator with Kaleem, Matthew, Audrey, and me for the UXIrregulars.  Bryce has been a tireless support of the community efforts and a great friend to have a bourbon or two with.

Congratulations Bryce! Microsoft is lucky to have a designer of your calibre in their cadre.

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A successful pitch will show:

1. the pain you are solving,
2. how you solve it,
3. and the value to your customers.

This combined with a business case helps to build an understanding of the market, business models, the people involved and the strategic relationships that will allow companies to succeed. The outline for each analysis is based on David Rose’s The Pitch Coach and the It’s All in the Sequence for investor pitch decks.

1. Company Title Slide
   Start with the name and logo of the company, the name and title of your presenter, a one-line description or tagline about the company, and the dollar amount of the round you are raising.
2. Business Overview
   Boil down your elevator pitch to one sentence. Tell us what you sell or do in very concrete language. This sets the context for the rest of your presentation.
3. Management Team
   Show us your talent and experience, with one line of background (two lines max!) on each member.
4. Market
   What’s the environment in which you operate, how big are the segments, what are the pain points?
5. Product
   How do you solve a customer’s pain? What exactly do you do? This can be illustrated with a clear product or screen shot, or a simple process diagram, but if we don’t know what you do, we won’t know why we should fund you. (But don’t spend too much time on this, since you’re pitching the company here, not the product.)
6. Business Model
   Who pays whom, how much, for what and from where. What does this mean for annualized revenue streams?
7. Customers
   Who are they, how many are there, how do you distribute to them, and how are they attracted and retained?
8. Strategic Relationships
   If you have any, make sure we know about them.
9. Competition
   Who and how threatening are they? What are the differentiation factors? Include both direct and indirect competitors. Remember that everyone has competition, even if it is just "the old way" of doing something.
10. Barriers to Entry
    How will other potential competitors be kept at bay?
11. Financial Overview
    Show us your top-line revenues and expenses, and EBITDA two years back and four years out.
12. Use of Proceeds
    Where will our money take you?
13. Capital & Valuation
    How much have you raised previously, who are your current investors, what are you looking for in this round, and how do you come to your suggested valuation?
14. Review
    Provide a brief summary of what you said, in this same order, narrowed to the five or six most important points.
15. Contact Info/Next Steps
    Lead us into the next step, such as a follow-up meeting for due diligence…and include your contact info!

The idea is that here is an analysis that moves very quickly in to the talking points for a pitch deck. It’s a framework that is not tied to a practical help me build the conversation around raising money. There are other analyses that can be performed including:

• SWOT analysis (on Wikipedia)
• Six Forces Model
• Context Analysis

I’m looking for suggestions on who should be next?