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Why I only speak one language

bgroundwater — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:22:51 PDT

Ah, English. The universal language. The lazy man's language.

Find yourself lucky enough to be born into an English-speaking family, and you're set for life. Relax, get yourself a hobby. Build model train sets. No need to bother with languages.

That's the way we, at least in Australia, tend to think. It's hard to find the motivation to learn a new tongue when your closest neighbour just speaks with a silly accent, and the others (who are freaken miles away) speak something so foreign to our way of talking that all seems a bit too hard.

There's no better way to make yourself feel like a Neanderthal than to travel around Western Europe. "What's your second language," everyone asks. Um... Australian?

There, if you speak two languages, you're average. Three, and you're nothing special. If you've got four down pat you're doing quite well, although there are people around with five. (My mate Danny was born in Luxembourg, and used to speak four languages until he went to Brazil for a few months. Now he speaks fluent Portuguese, too.)

But it makes sense in Europe. There, you travel a few kilometres and there's every chance you'll be in another country. If you live in Switzerland, you don't even have to cross a border to find everyone speaking a completely different language.

So the motivation, and the opportunities to practice, are definitely there.

In Australia, it's easy to get lazy. For starters, we speak the language that, really, is the universal tongue. International business is conducted in English. Scientists write all of their papers in English. Most people around the world choose English as their second language.

Then there's geography. We're miles away from anyone else who speaks another language, which isn't an excuse in itself, but it does make it difficult to find the motivation to learn, say, German in school when you know you'll have to fly 24 hours to even get the chance to practice.

Asian languages make much more sense, but we're only just catching up on that front. You could take Japanese when I went to school, but not Mandarin, or Indonesian, or Thai.

So there you go - those are my excuses for Australians being known around the world as some of the laziest linguists going. Travel anywhere and if you can hear someone shouting, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?" at a confused shopkeeper, you can pretty much guarantee they'll be Australian or American.

The reality is, you can get away with only being able to speak English in most countries. It may be slightly rude and definitely lazy, but most countries cater to English speakers, and most people under 30 around the world speak at least a little bit of our language.

I'll readily admit that I'm useless with languages. I don't pick them up quickly, and I probably don't try as hard as I should (I started a Spanish course a few months ago, but gave up when we started conjugating verbs - I don't think I can even do that in English).

It's partly to do with the way I like to travel. I'm not the sort of person who likes to spend a few months in one country. I want to see as much as I can in the little time as I have, so I tend to flit from place to place.

It makes it almost impossible to pick up much of the language. And, like when Homer Simpson took a wine appreciation course and forgot how to drive, whenever I learn a few words of a new language, it pushes all the words from the last language out of my brain.

I can usually say hello and goodbye. I can usually say thank you. I try to be able to ask, "Do you speak English" in the local tongue, but that doesn't always work out. Sometimes I can read a menu, or ask where the toilet is, or swear hilariously. I can read words in our alphabet, and a little bit of Cyrillic (actually, I've probably forgotten that by now), but any foreign script makes as much sense as a pre-schooler's finger painting.

And yet, I've managed to get by all around the world. Is that so bad?

Do you try to learn a language before you visit a place? Do you take a phrasebook? Or just rely on someone being able to speak English?

Stop press
Hope you're enjoying the Backpacker blog. As I'm currently doing what all good backpackers should be doing - travelling - there may be a slight delay in comments being published. Please be patient - as the telcos would say, your comment is important to us, and will be attended to as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you're bored, you can follow my trip here, or email me the sports results/topic suggestions to bengroundwater@gmail.com.

Gaming business models: Freemium beats advertising

jeremyliew — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:24:06 PDT

Dan Cook has a great post about business models for flash game developers over at Lost Garden. He says:

Ads are a really crappy revenue source

For a recent game my friend Andre released, 2 million unique users yields around $650 from MochiAds. This yields an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of only $0.000325 per user. Even when you back in the money that sponsors will pay, I still only get an ARPU of $0.0028 per user. In comparison, a MMO like Puzzle Pirates makes about $0.21 per user that reaches the landing page (and $4.20 per user that registers)

What this tells me is that other business models involving selling games on the Internet are several orders of magnitude more effective at making money from an equivalent number of customers. When your means of making money is 1/100th as efficient as money making techniques used by other developers, maybe you’ve found one big reason why developers starve when they make Flash games.

His solution?

Ask for the money

When game developers ask for money, they are usually pleasantly surprised. Their customers give them money; in some cases, substantial amounts. I witnessed this early in my career making shareware games at Epic in the 90s and I’m seeing the same basic principles are in play with high end Flash games. Fantastic Contraption, for example, pulled in low 6 figures after only a few months on the market. That’s about 100x better than a typical flash game and in-line with many shareware or downloadable titles.

I think his conclusion is right not just for Flash game developers, but for all sorts of game developers, including MMOGs, iPhone games etc. dan runs through some steps that game developers should take to maximize their chances of being able to make a living from designing games, specific ideas about what to charge for, and responses to common objections to getting users to pay. For new or aspiring game designers, it is worth reading the whole thing.

Freemium and Freeconomics

Fred — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:26:23 PDT

This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times (John Gapper). I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed but first we need to clarify something.

The FT piece says:

The most plausible contender for an "entirely new economic model" made possible by the internet is what Fred Wilson, the New York venture capitalist, has dubbed "freemium".

There was no dubbing by me. In March 2006, I wrote a post called My Favorite Business Model in which I outlined the freemium concept and I asked the readers to help me give it an easy handle. The word Freemium was not coined by me. It came from Jarid Lukin, who at the time was working for Alacra, a company I am on the board of. Fortunately, we've got Wikipedia which has got the story straight.

Now let's talk about freeconomics. I don't believe everything will be free on the Internet. There will be plenty of paid business models. For example, if you want to watch Major League Baseball games live over the Internet, you'll pay for that. If you want to use services like the FT and the WSJ frequently (more than 10x per month), you'll pay for that. If you want to watch HBO over the Internet, you'll pay for that. If you want a Twitter desktop or mobile client, you might pay for that too.

But we also must recognize that the cost of delivering many services over the Internet has decreased significantly from what it cost to deliver them in the analog world. The marginal cost of delivering a piece of content is approaching zero. But the total cost of delivering content on the Internet is far from zero. My partner Albert wrote a great post about this last week. He said:

The price of watching a stream on Youtube is zero. With marginal cost zero and marginal benefit zero, from a perspective of maximizing total social (net) benefit, free is the right price because it does not preclude any video that could possibly have benefit from being viewed. That does not mean that free is sustainable because it obviously doesn’t help cover the total cost.

And, as Albert recognizes at the end of his post, this debate is not entirely about economics. It is about the value of various participants in the content ecosystem.

Gladwell got pretty negative on Anderson and his book in the New Yorker piece. He said:

It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

These are the anti-freeconomics arguments we hear from the likes of Andrew Keen and his ilk. Lambasting file sharers and entrepreneurs who rightly recognize that free is the right way to build market share on the Internet might be fun and make certain people feel good. But it's ignorance of a fundamental fact. And that fact is that free, ad supported media works best on the Internet. We have seen it again and again. I'm not going to even give examples.

Once you have built that audience, you can deliver upsells via freemium models, you can monetize it via advertising and you can branch out into other services which are easier to monetize. This post by Silicon Alley Insider on Facebook's revenues this year is instructive:

Earlier this week, we spoke to several sources who each have some insight into Facebook's financials (none of them know precisely). Taking the sources' input together, we'd estimate the company's expected 2009 revenue this way:

$125 million from brand ads
$150 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft
$75 million from virtual goods
$200 million from self-service ads.

These numbers are similar enough to others that I have heard that I feel comfortable republishing them here. Facebook has 200mm+ monthly active users worldwide. Let's say they are doing $50mm per month in revenue. That's a revenue per monthly active user of $0.25. Low for sure, but enough to operate at breakeven. And I expect the self service ads and the virtual goods revenues to grow strongly in the next year, more than making up for the likely loss of some of the $150mm from the ad deal with Microsoft.

And the next move for Facebook is to generate transaction revenues with its payment service and off site ad and transcation revenues from its Facebook Connect service. I'm pretty confident that Facebook can take its revenue per monthly active user to at least $0.50 and maybe higher in the coming years.

Facebook is a perfect example of freeconomics at work. A woman who works for a major media company was in my office recently. She quoted her CEO as saying "why doesn't Facebook just charge a monthly subscription fee, they'd be making money hand over fist?". Well I believe that if Facebook did that, they'd be vulnerable to other networks offering a free service. And certainly not every one of those 200mm+ users are going to cough up a monthly subscription. But by offering a friction free service, they have built a powerful and growing network that they are now starting to monetize in various ways and that they will monetize even further in additional ways. And they are super hard to compete with because they are free.

I like to keep my posts short, so I'll end here with the observation that the Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.

UX Is The Beating Heart Of Tech

Stowe Boyd — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:01:50 PDT

[via satori, ai]

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Eric — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:20:00 PDT

In the lean startup workshops, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. With Five Whys, teams can accelerate, even as they scale.

In a previous post, I outlined the benefits of Five Whys: that it allows you to make large investments in infrastructure incrementally, takes advantage of the 80/20 rule to free up resources immediately, and helps organizations become built to learn. Today, I want to talk about the mechanics of Five Whys in greater detail.

First, a caveat. My intention is to describe a full working process, similar to what I’ve seen at IMVU and other lean startups. But as with all process changes, it should not be interpreted as a spec to be implemented right away. In fact, trying too much is just as dangerous at not doing enough. Just as the lean movement has taught us to build incrementally, it has also taught us to attempt process changes incrementally as well. You need to transition to a work flow of small batches – in small batches.

Five Whys involves holding meetings immediately following the resolution of problems the company is facing. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. Any time something unexpected happens, we could do some root cause analysis. Yet it’s helpful to begin by tackling a specific class of problems. For example, a common place to get started is with this rule: any time we have a site outage of any duration, we will hold a post-mortem meeting immediately afterwards.

The first step is to identify three things about the meeting: what problem we are trying to solve, who will run the meeting, and who was affected by the problem. For the problem, it’s essential to hold the meeting immediately following a specific symptom. Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy” or “our team moves too slow.” Instead, we want to hold it for a specific symptom, like “we missed the Jan 6 deadline by two weeks” or “we had a site outage on Nov 10.” Have faith that if a large general problem is really severe, it will be generating many symptoms that we can use to achieve a general solution.

Always explicitly identify the person running the meeting. Some organizations like to appoint a “Five Whys master” for a specific area of responsibility. For example, at IMVU we had masters appointed for topics like site scalability or unit test failures. The advantage of having an expert run each meeting is that this person can get better and better at helping the team find good solutions. The downside is the extra coordination required to get that person in the room each time. Either way can work. In any event, nobody should hold a master position for too long. Rotation is key to avoid having a situation where one person becomes a bottleneck or single point of failure.

The person running the meeting does not have to be a manager or executive. They do need to have the authority necessary to assign tasks across the organization. That’s because Five Whys will often pierce the illusion of separate departments and discover the human problems that lurk beneath the surface of supposedly technical problems. In order to make Five Whys successful, the person running the meeting has to have the backing of an executive sponsor who has the requisite authority to back them up if they wind up stepping in political landmines. But this executive sponsor doesn’t need to be in the room – what matters is that everyone in the room understands that the person running the meeting has the authority to do so. This means that if you are trying to introduce Five Whys into an organization that is not yet bought-in, you have to start small.

In order to maximize the odds of success, we want to have everyone affected by the problem in the meeting. That means having a representative of every department or function that was affected. When customers are affected, try to have someone who experienced the customer problem first-hand, like the customer service rep who took the calls from angry customers. At a minimum, you have to have the person who discovered the problem. Otherwise, key details are likely to be missed. For example, I have seen many meetings analyzing a problem that took a long time to be diagnosed. In hindsight, the problem was obvious. If the people responsible for diagnosis aren’t in the post-mortem meeting, it’s too easy to conclude, “those people were just too stupid to find the problem” instead of focusing on how our tools could make problems more evident and easier to diagnose.

A root cause analysis meeting has a clear problem, leader, and stakeholders. The most important guideline for the meeting itself is that the purpose of the meeting is to learn and to improve, not to assign blame or to vent. Assume that any problem is preventable and is worth preventing. Problems are caused by insufficiently robust systems rather than individual incompetence. Even in the case of a person making a mistake, we have to ask “why do our tools make that mistake so easy to make?”

The heart of the meeting is the analysis itself. For each problem, we want to ask “why did that happen?” and “why wasn’t it prevented by our process?” We do that iteratively until we have at least five levels of analysis. Of course, the number five is not sacrosanct; it’s just a guideline. What’s critical is that we don’t do too few levels, and we don’t do too many. One hundred whys would be overwhelming. But if we stay stuck at the technical parts of the problem, and never uncover the human problems behind them, we’re not going far enough. So I would keep the meeting going until we’re talking about human problems, and preferably system-level problems. For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Why didn’t the person who wrote it know that it would be harmful? Why didn’t our tests/QA/immune system catch and prevent the problem? Why wasn’t it immediately obvious how to fix the problem?

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names” in the meeting. If people are afraid of blame, they’ll try to phrase statements in vague, generic terms or use the passive voice, as in “a mistake was made” rather than “So-and-so failed to push the right button.” There’s no easy fix to this problem. Trust takes time to build up, and my experience is that it may take months to establish enough trust that people are confident that there won’t be retribution for speaking up candidly. Stay patient, and be on alert for blame-type talk or for post-meeting revenge. I recommend a zero-tolerance policy for these behaviors – otherwise our Five Whys meetings can descend into Five Blames.

Another common issue is the tendency of root causes to sprout branches. Complex problems rarely have only one cause, and looking for the primary cause is easier in theory than in practice. The branching of causes is also a prime target for so-called “anchor draggers” – people who aren’t really on board with the exercise in the first place. An easy way to derail the meeting is to keep insisting that more and more lateral causes be considered, until the team is running around in circles. Even well intentioned people can wreak the same havoc by simply staying over-focused on technical or ancillary issues. Try to stay focused on just one line of inquiry. Remember, Five Whys is not about making an exhaustive survey of all the problems. It’s about quickly identifying the likely root cause. That’s why it’s more important to do Five Whys frequently than to get it exactly right. It’s a very forgiving practice, because the most wasteful problems will keep clamoring for attention. Have faith that you’ll have many more opportunities to tackle them, and don’t get hung up on any particular solution.

Once you’ve found approximately five levels of the problem, which includes at least one or two human-level issues, it’s time to turn to solutions. The overall plan is to make a proportional investment in each of the five levels. The two major guidelines are: don’t do too much, and don’t do nothing. Almost anything in between will work.

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees. The reason is simple: setting up a training program is seen as too much work to be justified by the problem. Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. In fact, even the investigation itself is considered too much work. Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic. If those problems are minor, each time it happens we’ll budget a small amount of time to make progress on the solution.

Let’s imagine the ideal solution would be to spend six weeks setting up a training program for new employees. You can almost hear a manager now: “sure, if you want me to spend the next six weeks setting this up, just let me know. It’s just a matter of priorities. If you think it’s more important than everything else I’m working on, go right ahead and find someone else to take over my other responsibilities…” This logic is airtight, and has the effect of preventing any action. But Five Whys gives us an alternative. If we’ve just analyzed a minor problem that involved a new employee, we should make a minor investment in training. To take an extreme example, let’s say we’ve decided to invest no more than one hour in the solution. Even in that case, we can ask the manager involved to simply spend the first hour of the six-week ideal solution. The next time the problem comes up, we’ll do the next hour, and so on.

In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. As we kept doing root cause analysis, the list grew. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. Soon, each new engineer was assigned a mentor, and we made it part of the mentor’s job to teach the curriculum. Over time, we also made investments in making it easier to get a new engineer set up with their private sandbox, and even dealt with how to make sure they’d have a machine on their desk when they started. The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process. Five Whys simply helped us eliminate tons of waste by building one.

Returning to the meeting itself, the person running the meeting should lead the team in brainstorming solutions for each of the problems selected. It’s important that the leader be empowered to pick one and only one solution for each problem, and then assign it to someone to get done. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. This should make it easy to get buy-in from other managers or executives. After all, if it’s a severe problem like a site outage, do they really want to be seen as the person getting in the way of solving it? And if it’s a minor problem, are they really going to object to a few hours of extra work here and there, if it’s towards a good cause? My experience is: usually not.

There are no fixed rules for what constitutes a proportional investment. As teams get experience doing Five Whys, they start to develop rules of thumb for what is reasonable and what isn’t. To restate: the key is that all parties, including the non-technical departments, see the investments as reasonable. As long as we don’t veer to either extreme, the 80/20 rule will make sure that we don’t under-invest over the long term. Remember that if something is a serious problem, it will keep coming up over and over in these meetings. Each time, we’ll get to chip away at it, until it’s no longer a problem.

The last element of a good Five Whys process is to share the results of the analysis widely. I generally recommend sending out the results to the whole company, division, or business unit. This accomplishes two important things: it diffuses knowledge throughout the organization, and it provides evidence that the team in question is taking problems seriously. This latter point can eliminate a lot of waste. I have been amazed how many teams have severe inter-departmental trust issues caused by a lack of communication about problems. For example, engineering feels that they are constantly being pressured to take shortcuts that lower the quality of the product. At the same time, the very marketing people who are applying that pressure think the engineering team doesn’t take quality seriously, and doesn’t respond appropriately when their shoddy work leads to customer problems. Sharing Five Whys can alleviate this problem, by letting everyone know exactly how seriously problems are taken. I say exactly, because it may actually reveal that problems are not taken seriously. In fact, I have seen people in other departments sometimes catch sloppy thinking in a Five Whys report. By sharing the analysis widely, that feedback can flow on a peer-to-peer basis, quickly and easily.

Most organizations are unaware of how much time they spend firefighting, reworking old bugs, and generally expending energy on activities that their customers don’t care about. Yet getting a handle on these sources of waste is hard, especially because they are dynamic. By the time a tops-down company-wide review figured out the main problems, they’d have shifted to another location. Five Whys allows teams to react much faster and then constantly adapt. Without all that waste in their way, they simply go faster.

(If you’re new to Five Whys, I’m eager to hear your feedback. Does this help you get started? What questions or concerns do you have? Leave your thoughts in a comment. If you’ve tried Five Whys, please share your experiences so far. I’ll do my best to help.)

A beautiful piece of targeted advertising:

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:54:35 PDT

A beautiful piece of targeted advertising:

What Drives Consumer Adoption Of New Technologies?

Fred — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:19:38 PDT

I'm participating in a panel discussion this morning during the offsite of a major media company. They sent me a list of questions in preparation of the event. One of the questions was the title of this post; "What drives consumer adoption of new technologies?".

It's an interesting question and one I've never tried to answer directly in writing. But it's also a question we attempt to answer every day in our firm as we evaluate thousands of new startups every year.

Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):

iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
Facebook - a social net with real utility
Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
Blogger - a printing press for everyone
Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before. Sure there were social nets before Facebook, but none allowed you to run your life the way Facebook does for my kids. Sure there were browsers on phones before the iPhone, but there hadn't been one that you could actually use like you use a browser on a computer. Sure there had been personalized internet radio services before Pandora but not one that was drop dead simple and delivered a great experience.

So it seems to me that consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

I'm curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on this. The sooner the better since the panel starts at 10am today.

The answers to the problems with paid search for SMB’s.

Dean McEvoy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:58:15 PDT

A report was released to today by Borrell and associates showing the huge churn there is in small to medium sized business customers buying paid search. Greg Sterling and David Mihm gave some excellent analysis on the report but in short it said that:

The local search advertising market is huge and there has been some significant growth by industry players such as Yodle, Reach Local, and Local.com
Being a great sales force is one thing but re-sellers of the major paid search need to find ways to add value. This make sense as a smart business will always be asking what are they paying for and will eventually go direct if they dont see the value.
The biggest challenge for resellers is churn. Estimates are that 60% of customers leave every 12 months. The biggest reason is that the small businesses not perceiving a return on investment, particularly in the first 90 days.

The reason for this failure is the failure for the re-sellers to clearly understand the amount of business being brought to the small business and clearly and easily communicating that to the owner. To a business owner that has just made thier first purchase of search engine marketing campaign to expect them to immediately understand the value of a click is naive. If I own a local restaurant do my 500 extra clicks on my website per month result in a good investment of my $500 per month. When they read that i bet most owners dont think it does. If they can show it resulted in 50 new reservations, then it is so much easier for the owner to understand without having to be an SEM expert.

Tracking online reservations and calls sent to a business is the only way to determine the true effectiveness of a local search marketing campaign and until the business models and sales commission structures are based around that then there will always be some misalignment between the business, the local search directory and their users. The industry isnt there yet and its because half of the 100,000 sales people selling to these businesses are yellow pages and local newspaper people so its the history of those industries that are still leaving thier legacy.

If you are interested in learning how to re-align your online directories to be more inline with business owners and users get in touch with dean (at)bookingangel (dot) com or follow me on twitter

Weak US Treasuries and Strong Commodities - Here to Stay

Brad — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:19:13 PDT

Check out a piece in MoneyNews by Michael Carr entitled Fed Policy is Causing Inflation and Hurting the US Dollar. Here is an excerpt from that article:

Added together, there is about $20 trillion in cash and promised cash in the U.S. economy. The total production of the country, as measured by GDP, is about $14 trillion. More money is available in the economy than there is stuff to spend it on. The result is that those with money will be willing to pay more for the goods and services they want to buy. This is what economists call inflation.

The late, Milton Friedman in his classic book Money Mischief gives direct insight into how Obama’s reckless monetary policies will cause hyperinflation. Everything Obama, the Federal Reserve, and Congress are doing was predicted in startling detail almost two decades ago by Freidman.

Though he passed away in 2006, in his prophetic book, Friedman showed how, facing massive deficits, the U.S. government would dramatically increase the money supply; why foreign countries would stop buying US debt; how the Fed would start buying our Treasury bills; and why this would call cause massive inflation.

He even predicted that US officials would claim inflation was no problem at all. All of this is now coming to pass! The Obama administration is embracing massive inflationary deficit spending. In just 100 days, Barrack Obama has more than doubled the U.S. money supply . . . committed the government to at least $7 trillion in new spending . . . and warned the American people to expect trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. While the media has been falling over itself to praise Obama’s “bold initiatives,” the question no one has been asking is, “Where is all of this money coming from and what is the price we will ultimately pay for this?”

Decades ago, Milton Friedman answered these questions clearly and precisely in his insightful — and very topical book, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History. In Money Mischief, Friedman even warned that the coming inflation could “destroy” the US. Here’s what he wrote: “Inflation is a disease, a dangerous and sometimes fatal disease that, if not checked in time, can destroy a society.” (Money Mischief, Page 191).

We believe that Obama’s massive deficit spending will doom the dollar and the US economy. If you want to find out what is really happening to the US economy get a copy of Milton Friedman’s book. Its insights are so relevant and shocking — it reads like it was just published for our times! Milton Friedman isn’t the only one worrying about the US deficits and the dollar……the US creditors seem very concerned:

June 2 (Bloomberg) — China’s former central bank adviser Yu Yongding will meet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today and tell him the U.S. shouldn’t be complacent about China continuing to buy Treasuries. “I wish to tell the U.S. government: ‘Don’t be complacent and think there isn’t any alternative for China to buy your bills and bonds’,” Yu said in an interview yesterday. “The euro is an alternative. And there are lots of raw materials we can still buy.” Yu is scheduled to meet Geithner at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing today. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries with $768 billion at the end of the first quarter. Premier Wen Jiabao in March called for the U.S. “to guarantee the safety of China’s assets” and central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan has proposed a new global currency to reduce reliance on the dollar.

China is concerned that the U.S.’s spending and planned record fiscal deficit will eventually lead to inflation and a loss of confidence in the dollar, undermining the value of China’s Treasury holdings, Yu said. The deficit is projected to reach $1.75 trillion in the year ending Sept. 30 from last year’s $455 billion shortfall, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The U.S. should take China’s interests into consideration “so that your own interest can be protected,” Yu said. “You should not try to inflate away your debt burden.” China could still diversify some of its Treasury holdings into euros or commodities, Yu added. “Yes, some people say the euro is very weak,” Yu said. “Okay, weak is good, we’ll buy very cheap.” The best outcome for China would still be to negotiate with the U.S. and reach agreement on its Treasury holdings, Yu said. “The borrower should keep their promises,” he added.

Well we think that there is no hiding Yu’s thoughts and intentions…….we will follow on the back of these intentions (short USDs & US treasuries, and long commodities and commodity equities), the trends are clear and make sense:

We are long HAP, DBC, UDN and TBT…….we have a feeling that we will be so for many months!

OMG - No Investor Support

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:52:34 PDT

OMG - No Investor Support:

Fairfax’s MyCareer.com.au number of ads stands at 25,000+. Seek’s - 105,000+.

And it’s no wonder. Even the folks who should be supporting MyCareer aren’t advertising with them.

Fairfax NZ is…

The Best Way to Successfully Overhaul Your Life

Leo — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:44:15 PDT

I’ve done it before and I’m sure many of you have as well: decided I wanted to completely change my life, from diet to exercise to productivity habits to spending and career and family and more.

I’ve failed in the attempt to do this at least a few times.

I’ve also done it successfully. You might have read my story, but basically I went from overweight, sedentary, heavily in debt, overworked and stressed, unproductive, with no time for my family … to a runner, marathoner, exerciser, healthy diet, vegetarian, early riser, much more productive, debt-free, simplified life where I have time for my wife and kids.

And how did I do it all? One little step at a time.

Recently reader Christine asked:

I really want to be a positive, achieving, dedicated, in-the-moment, fun (& all the good traits you can imagine!) woman/wife/mother. How can I become that in my lifetime?

I want to be completely healed from past hurts, mistakes, doubts, failures, disappointments, pains, etc. I want to be free!

In short, Mr. Leo, I WANT TO CHANGE MY LIFE.

Christine, you’ve asked a lot of me, and I honestly can’t tackle it all in one answer, so I won’t try. Instead, I will give you the best suggestion I have:

Start small.

Don’t try to make all these huge changes, and change your entire life at once. It’s too hard, and overwhelming. You can’t do everything at once — you can only do one thing at a time.

So pick one thing to change — something easy. Don’t pick the most difficult thing — just the easiest. Something you can focus on for the next couple of weeks.

Be sure you’re going to be successful at it — again, it should be super easy.

Then clear everything else off your plate and focus on just that. Really put all your energy into making that change. You might try something simple, like smile more, or to be more grateful (say a prayer of thanks in the morning, and show gratitude to people throughout the day), or focus on slowing down as you do your work or chores.

Start small, and be sure to make this a success. Once you’ve had that success, use that feeling of success to leverage a second success — something small that you can win at, again. Keep repeating this, small successes, one after the other.

Small steps. That’s how you’re going to change your life. You’ll probably get impatient and want to do more, but trust me: this will work.
—
Read more about simple productivity, focus and getting great things done in Leo’s book, The Power of Less.

OMG – No Investor Support

Geoff Jennings — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:45:46 PDT

Fairfax’s MyCareer.com.au number of ads stands at 25,000+. Seek’s – 105,000+.

And it’s no wonder. Even the folks who should be supporting MyCareer aren’t advertising with them.

Fairfax NZ is advertising for a Acquisitions and Retentions Manager . Where did they place their ad? Seek.

Then there’s Online Marketing Group, the folks who boast in their job ad that “Fairfax Digital is a strategic investor in our company”, have posted a job for a Online Account Executive position. Guess they don’t have much faith in their investor. They chose to advertise exclusively on Seek.

The World’s 10 Weirdest Vending Machines

Drea — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:06:46 PDT

Vending machines have been around since the first century AD. By today’s accounts, even the first vending machine, which dispensed holy water to temple visitors, was weird.

The tradition continues. This month alone, Germans released a 24K gold bar vending machine, and an Italian entrepreneur exhibited a machine that makes pizza from scratch. These machines are featured along with 8 other oddities below:

Dog-O-Matic

Source: Slippery Brick

The Dog-O-Matic, an automatic dogwashing machine, is a hit in the town of St. Max, France. Inventor Romain Jarry wants to launch it in Britain next year, but claims that “at the moment people are still getting used to the idea,” according to the Daily Mail. That’s probably because the device looks like a canine waterboarding machine. “It doesn’t take long to wash the dog,” he said. “The longest part is the drying. The dogs don’t seem to get bored. They just sit there and they come out clean.” If your dog makes it through without trauma, your wallet won’t: It costs $21 to wash a small dog, $35 for a medium dog, and $49 for a big animal.

Instant Judaism

Source: Jacob Richman

This vending machine sits in Jerusalem’s central bus station, where it sells booklets on Jewish traditions and laws. The purpose of the sponsoring organization, Hadaf Hayomi, is to “spread Torah knowledge worldwide in a beautiful manner.” Not sure how beautiful vending machines are, but they’re certainly spreading the message. (From Jacob Richman’s blog).

Gold-to-Go

Source: Wirtschaftswoche

Online discounter Gold-Supermarkt.de launched the “Gold-to-Go” machine in May to address increasing demand for the precious metal within Germany. The machine sells 1 gram, 24-karat gold bars, and updates prices every 10 minutes. The company plans to install 500 machines in train stations and airports Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The tiny bars are hardly a good investment: Goldbugs pay 31 Euros cash for a bar worth about 21 Euros. But you can’t beat the bars for novelty points.

Pet Beetles

Source: PhotoMann

According to Doug Mann, who took the picture above, some Japanese kids like to keep rhinoceros beetles as pets. The roadside vending machine above sells them for 100-300 yen each. The males, which have long horns protruding from their heads, are especially coveted. Department stores in Japan also sell the bugs.

Call-a-Ball

Source: We Make Money Not Art

If the urge to play a game of pick-up soccer with your friends ever hits, Call-a-Ball will provide. This soccer ball dispensing machine spits out an RFID-embedded ball when you send an SMS with the vending machine code on it. You can also register to have the machine send a “challenge” message to your friends via SMS. When you’re done kicking, just pop the ball back into the machine.

Schoolgirl Panty Machine

Source: PhotoMann

No, it’s not an urban legend. Though Japan’s famous used schoolgirl panty vending machines were purportedly banned in 1993, individuals continued to report their existence around the country until at least 2001. The panties are supposedly worn by schoolgirls before they make it into the vending machines, where they sell for upwards of $50 a pop.

Rolls Royce-o-Mat

Source: NYTimes

Miami’s Mondrian South Beach hotel boasts one of the world’s fanciest vending machines. The specially designed Semi Automatic machine only takes credit cards. In return, it deposits a variety of luxury items, including 24-karat gold handcuffs, designer vases, jewelry, and a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (rental only). According to the New York Times, an anti-recession T-shirt is among the machine’s bestsellers.

Marijuana To Go

Source: Geekologie

The pot vending machine featured above dispensed up to 1oz/week of prescription pot. Approved users could choose from five strains, which they would receive in a vacuum-sealed plastic capsule. The machines were installed in California in early 2008, then seized by DEA agents not long thereafter.

Let’s Pizza

Source: NowPublic

“Let’s Pizza,” a vending machine released by Italian entrepreneur Claudio Torghele, makes pizza from scratch in less than 3 minutes. All you need to do is choose one of four types of pizza, pay $4.95, and watch as the machine creates a fresh pie. The machine mixes and presses the dough, adds sauce and toppings, and bakes the pizza in an infrared oven. At the end of the process, you pick up the steaming pizza on a cardboard tray. If you’re a hygiene freak, or simply in a hurry, you could become fast friends with the “Let’s Pizza.”

Tie Vending Machine

(Source: SurferJerry.com)

Another Japanese vending-machine oddity, in case a paper shredder or cup of coffee gets the better of your old tie.

Let’s make it happen

Lance Wiggs — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:13:40 PDT

On Tuesday last week I was lucky enough to listen to an interesting range of cool people give 5 minute talks on the topics of their choice. (ok – only one person hit the 5 minute market exactly, and he had a giant clock on his chest) It was Webstock’s 3rd birthday and exit from rehab.

There is a great summary of everyone over on Shadowfoot’s blog.

Unfortunately (for me and for the audience) I was also asked to give a 5 minute talk, and as I was placed last I had to follow in some big footprints. I was filled with confidence after there was a cheer as I was introduced, before I realised that it was because I was introduced as “the last speaker before the drinks”.

I’m re-writing what I spoke about at Webstock from an early version of my notes. Sadly I don’t have the annotated notes from the event, so I am missing some of the extra pieces that I had gleaned from previous speakers.

Choosing your own topic is a peculiar type of torture – so I asked organiser all round good person Natasha for advice, and she informed me, and I quote verbatim, that she was expecting:

“a ballet recital followed by your rendition of Broadway show tunes followed by your 5 min talk on why Tash is awesome”

I’d left my tutu behind, so instead I chose instead to to add a bit of context to the last time I was up in front of a similar audience – when I affirmed with two sturdy comrades in arms at Foo Camp that “The Future of New Zealand is Fucked”. It was a convincing display by our team, but sadly the audience voted with their hearts – indicating that they preferred to believe the opposition.

So I decided to join the crowd, and spoke this time about “Why are we here?”.

Not “why are we here?” in the Dalai Lama, Catholic Church or Douglas Adams sense, but “Why are we here in New Zealand, in Wellington and at the Webstock event (or even reading this blog)”

I believe that we have a choice in all of these matters (except you Mum – you have to read my blog, even if you don’t actually do so)

By definition, anyone that has the get up and go to attend Westock, to read blogs and twitter about what is going on, also has the get up and go to do so – to leave New Zealand and head for the gold paved roads of the UK, USA, Europe and Kathmandu.

Indeed many of us do, including myself. I’ve been offshore several times now, the first time lasting about 10 years, and the last few times a year or two each.

So why do we come back, why do we stay?

After all in New Zealand, and in Wellington in particular there are three compelling reasons not to be here:

The weather sucks. It really does. As I draft this on Saturday morning the rain is lashing against the house, Cook Strait is closed to the Ferrys and the latest flight from Sydney was diverted to Auckland. Meanwhile in Perth it’s sunny and warm, in Europe summer is nigh and we are consigned to short days, rain and cold.

We are miles away from anywhere - we were the last decent place to be permanently colonized by humans (discarding Pitcairn Island and Antarctica), 4 hours away from Australia and 10 hours way from anywhere interesting (11 from Wellington).

And we have a crappy Internet connection to the rest of the world, a connection seemingly controlled by rent maximising companies (shame on you Telecom) rather than stakeholders determined to open up access to the rest of the world.

It means I’m cold, days and too many dollars away from the great friends I have around the world and my broadband sucks.

And yet, and yet – I am still here – we all are. Why is that?

Again, I believe there are three answers: The weather really sucks, we are miles away from anywhere and we are connected to the rest of the world through a crappy internet line.

In New Zealand, and in Wellington more than anywhere, we expect the unexpected. This Saturday morning the weather forecast was all doom and gales, but some friends and I grabbed and hour of relative stillness to go for a quick bike ride. Meanwhile the day before the Webstock bash, the weather was shake your house from the foundations wash the green off the leaves horrible, and yet canny Wellingtonians knew to put suntan lotion on, for lo and behold it was crisply perfect that afternoon.

It means that when Vaughan Rowsell decided to go for a bike ride back in January, he didn’t wait until next summer, but took off for an April to June journey- knowing it was going to be cold, wet and miserable at times. He’s (almost there) succeeded. It’s the same urge that will guide hundreds of motorcyclists (myself included) to ride to the Brass Monkey this weekend, which is in freezing central Otago and deliberately held at around about the time of the year when the first big dumps of snow come through.

All this adds up to a people that are ready for anything, that accept no excuses and just get stuff done, regardless of what else is going on.

You can see it when we Kiwis land work in London, study in the USA, crew boats in the Med and work in charitable organisations in Africa. Kiwis arrive and depart with a deserved reputation for being able to handle anything and everything with no fuss.

Our society helps create these people with an excellent education system, a great social welfare system that means we are kept healthy, off the streets and trained, and political parties and a system that generally allows logic and fairness to guide decisions rather than a hackneyed partisanship system. Generally.

A word on education. Not only do we have places like Wellington’s Massey Design School, which is a truly great place, but more importantly we have a very high average level of education, and a very high 10th percentile level of education. That is – the least educated amongst us are far better off than their equivalents in other countries.

I’m not trusting comparative statistics for this – I’m trusting the excellent service levels across all sorts of organisations, from airlines to banks, rental car companies to restaurants and lunch bars that we receive relative to other countries. While the systems may sometimes (often) be less than stellar, invariably the people are polite, smart and able to deal with a variety of situations.

And finally that lousy wet weather means that we live in a beautiful place, one that encourages us to get out and enjoy it, and that attracts others from around the world to do the same.

So we are resourceful and smart, a fair people, have a decent corruption free society and we can do anything.

And yet we live miles away from anywhere

Not for us the intense deal making and energy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where anything is possible and nothing is too expensive.

However that vast distance also means that we avoid the Wall Street of today, the excesses that crushed an economy and the deal making and loans to business and individuals that abruptly halted.

And while we do leave New Zealand by the thousands to take advantage of London and New York, we gain valuable experience overseas and then we bring it back – either on loan when kiwi stars appear at conferences and on boards, or more permanently when we return home.

We come back because it is home, but also because it is easy to live and do business here. It’s trivially easy to start a business, to open bank accounts and to pay tax here.

We have thriving local competition, even amongst start-ups. We have DonateNZ and Givealittle, Thinksmall, MadefromNZ and Bizchat, Fishpond and Mightyape, Phil & Teds and Mountain Design Buggies, and the Jobs Summit, Foo Camp and Entrepreneurs Summit.

We all want to give it a go, and that competition means that the winners (be they a single winner or, often, a merged entity) combine to be a great, and hopefully, export led company.

To be sure we also have our problems, stuck here at the end of the world, but we are pretty good at identifying them, and we are pretty good at marshaling attention and energy on them until they are fixed. The number of pre-emptive summits for the economic crisis, the reports and government moves on the lousy broadband, the likes of Cactus Kate railing against the NZX governance and the rise of the NZ Institute all give hope.

But it is that crappy internet that is the final advantage we have. Not the lousiness of it, but the fact that it is there. (And yes – please please improve it with urgency)

Decent internet reduces costs, reduces pain and reduces cycle time. It means that we can build businesses in the cloud (basing them offshore to avoid the thin pipe) and address the world.

It lowers the trade barriers between us and our customers and suppliers, and it makes the world our market.

Our Government is helping as well.

We have signed Free Trade Agreements with China, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Chile, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines and Vietnam. That’s an astonishing 1.9 billion people – or 25% of the world’s population.

We are also in negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman and South Korea. That moves it to a free trade addressable market of 2 billion people – a market of about 480 people per New Zealander, or 4 million people per reader of this blog today. Who cares about the anti-free trade USA subsidies when we have this market?

That’s plenty enough to share.

Finally, why were people at the Webstock event, and why are you (still) reading this?

When I returned to New Zealand in 2003, I’d realised that my ideal job was to
help find and found start-ups, to help growing businesses grow faster and to help their owners and employees perform better. It’s fun.

I met the then existing VC and private equity firms, but they seemed to be on the slow train, and many were mired in government hand-out bureaucracy. The tiny average investment size, the small size of the funds and the slow velocity of transactions all counted against the industry and their funded companies. I wanted better.

I was lucky enough to land at Trade Me, just before they hit the mainstream, and the energy was there. Now, six years later, and after stints overseas and here in New Zealand, I realise that times have changed across the board.

Trade Me, Xero, Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor, amongst many others, have all demonstrated that you can be good guys and start, run and make money from (the jury is waiting a verdict on Xero) excellent and cool companies.

Meanwhile the internet generation is hitting their stride. The 22 year olds of today have always been online, and they intrinsically get the space.

There are older returnees that are bringing energy, experience and cash back to our shores, and, most of all, there is a sense of opportunity.

The opportunities and energy is real. After landing back here in March, after selling up in Fremantle, it took only two weeks before I had over 20 opportunities of one description or another, and I am now part of two new companies.

Almost at the same time I received a call from Equip Design – who consult as part of the Better By Design program. I’m now on the team, and have visited the first of a series of clients that will build off a rich NZ history of successful transformation into design-led export-driven companies. I’ve toured Formway Design (unbelievable) and looked at from afar at the success of Obo, Phil and Teds and other successful graduates of the program.

We are good at this stuff – product design, anything internet based, branding, lean and flexible manufacturing – indeed the entire product development process.

Our local economy is strong, our addressable economies of the world are in varying degrees of trouble, but our export volumes are trivial to them, and our products are often clever and cheaper solutions to problems that they are just starting to look at.

So we have the people, the experience, economy and education. People are giving start-ups a go, and we have a huge market to address.

There are plenty of roadblocks on the way, but we Kiwis can do anything, regardless of the weather outside.

Let’s make it happen.

Posted in Internet Business, Life, New Zealand Institute, NZ Business, Trade Me

The App Store Hype Gets A Dose Of Reality

Jason Kincaid — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:48:56 PDT

Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “The Incredible App Store Hype“, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had released (some of which rank on the App Store’s top apps lists), and what other developers could expect to make accordingly. His conclusion? That most of the 36,000 applications on the App Store aren’t selling at all - for many apps, most days go by without a single sale.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

As marketplaces go, the App Store has a very low barrier to entry that makes it easy for anyone to sell their wares, which means that it’s flooded with apps. There’s no way Apple could prominently present these 36,000 applications to users without overwhelming them, which means most apps fall into obscurity as soon as they’re submitted. If you can’t find a way to get the word out, nobody is going to find your app on their own.

Now, as someone who regularly likes to cover the success stories of the App Store, I thought this would have been fairly obvious to other developers and have thus failed to insert disclaimers that these cases were not typical results. But the fact that Strom’s post was written seems to indicate that perhaps we need to make this a bit clearer.

So here goes: The App Store probably will not make you rich.

To underscore the point, let’s go over some of the stats presented by Strom. His application Zen Jar ranks #34 on the Social Networking top apps list. And while most of us would probably assume it would take at least a hundred daily downloads to place there, the reality is quite surprising: Zen Jar reached the 34th position with only 30-35 downloads a day (or around $20 a day for a 99 cent app). Similarly, Sprint Board Pro, which ranked 95th in the Board Games section of the store with 6-8 daily downloads. Granted, these aren’t exactly the most popular categories, but If it takes fewer than 10 downloads a day to make the top 100 bestsellers of any category, that’s saying something.

Strom likens the App Store to a lottery, with the time and cost spent developing your application as the price of admission. And I think he’s right in this respect. The thing is, I don’t really see how this differs from many professions where the rich and elite are given heavy media coverage while everyone else toils away in obscurity. This is true for the entire entertainment business, where actors train for years just so they can vie for a limited number of spots. Most writers struggle to have their books published, let alone see them become popular. Basically any job that has the potential to make you rich is going to require a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. Those with lower barriers to entry will see huge amounts of competition. There’s a reason everyone isn’t wealthy.

Strom writes that software entrepreneurs frequently use the “huge successes” of a market to gauge its potential, rather than looking at the average outcome. I think this may be true for some of them, just as some would-be actors venture to Hollywood with the expectation of simply jumping into the spotlight only to find themselves waiting tables at a diner. But I think that most developers understand the risks involved, and how unlikely it is that their app will hit the big time. The same can be said for most of the web entrepreneurs I meet. They may invest many months or years into their work, but they know that the vast majority of new online ventures are bound to fail.

So for all of you iPhone developers who are new to these somewhat discouraging facts of life, I’m sorry if I (and the media as a whole) have failed to underscore the low probability of striking it rich on the App Store. To those of you who keep building things anyway: rock on.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The Next Layer Of The Social Media Stack

Fred — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:50:41 PDT

Last week Seth Goldstein's company Social Media put on a social media bootcamp for marketers and he asked John Borthwick and I to start the day off with a panel discussion around social media.

During that discussion, we got to talking about what's next in social media. I suggested that the "next layer of the stack" will be services built on top of the primary social media channels. Here's a short video clip that captures the thought.

The next layer on the stack... from Social Media on Vimeo.

I read this weekend that there are over 11,000 registered third party apps built on top of Twitter. I suspect that there are a similar number (or more) for Facebook. As the primary social media channels (including blogs and blog comments) become fully open platforms, I believe we are going to see a host of interesting (and valuable) services get built. It's already happening.

You can see a few short clips from the panel discussion here.

The Printable CEO VIII: Day Grid Balancer

Mon, 25 May 2009 03:37:16 PDT

The Printable CEO VIII: Day Grid Balancer:

(the official page for the Day Grid Balancer is http://davidseah.com/pceo/dgb)

If you’re just joining the conversation, I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life balance the past / …

News Magazines, The Problem is in the Name

Jeff — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:53:42 PDT

News magazines (Time, US News, Newsweek) have simple outlived their usefulness as a tool for informing and educating. The problem is in the name, none of these magazines are successfully presenting news and informed analysis that isn’t found on the web and typically well before being published in any of the above mentioned titles. It’s like USA Today… more actually USA Yesterday, the speed of bits will always beat that of ink and the ability to aggregate, e.g. link to, many sources will go deeper than 2 columns ever can.

Having recently been dumped by Time, I naturally had great hopes for this week’s much-anticipated makeover of Newsweek. Both surviving newsmags (US News is said to exist still in some form, but no one I know has seen it lately) are in an Internet panic like that affecting newspapers. Newsweek has always been a bit faster on its feet. But judging from its first issue, the new Newsweek is not going to be the instrument of my revenge, alas. [From Backward Runs 'Newsweek']

News magazines are literally dying away and nothing will save them, but they persist in looking at their business as a print magazine with an attached website, rather than the other way around.

Publishers must stop thinking like content creators and publishers, and more like information services. Providing original content is still necessary but aggregating everyone else’s content by topic is far more important, and then providing metadata (e.g. geotagging, categories/keywords, search enhancement, quality scoring, sentiment) on top of content that is provided programmatically to other services and application developers is one key future strategy.

Online Publishers: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

Wed, 20 May 2009 23:27:06 PDT

Online Publishers: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: One of the main themes of discussion here at the Web 3.0 Conference in New York City is how Web content is being digested. With the shift from destination sites to syndication through multiple…

10 Great Free Fonts for @font-face embedding

(author unknown) — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:42:37 PDT

Dear Art Director...

(author unknown) — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:08:15 PDT

Dear Art Director, I believe you are confused. To prove my point, please answer a simple multiple-choice question below.

On the web, people run:

Photoshop
Web browsers

Hint: the right answer is (b). It’s naive to expect a web page to render with pixel-perfect precision in every browser. It’s impossible and impractical. Your insistence to the contrary is wasting my time.

ASP.NET consulting with imagination and passion. Hire me!

When Being Rational Kills Your Business – Clayton Christensen

Hutch Carpenter — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:00:01 PDT

Last week, I attended the World Innovation Forum on behalf of my company, Spigit. One of the speakers was Clayton Christensen, Harvard professor most famous for his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. His talk was one I really looked forward to, and he didn’t disappoint.

The theme of his talk was Disruptive Innovation as a Platform for Growth. A good all-purpose title, but one that really didn’t do justice to the range of topics. Clayton delivered a lot of good knowledge and analysis. I tweeted most of his talk, and I wanted to pull it together in a blog post here. So let’s get to it.

Big Steel vs. Mini Mills

He opened with a discussion that one can find in The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s the tale of how big traditional integrated steel mills lost market share to upstart mini mills over the course of several decades. To the point where the integrated steel mills have for the most part been shuttered.

Key to the story is this: The steel market could be segmented into different segments, from low-grade to high-grade steel. And profit margins improved as you sold into the higher grade markets. The big integrated mills produced all grades of steel, which meant the profit margins for the different segments averaged out.

Cue the disruptive technology, mini mills in this case. The mini mills initially were too small to utilize the then-current technology to produce high grade steel. But they could produce low-grade quite well, and at a much lower cost. This meant they could easily underprice the big integrated steel mills, and they gained market share in the lower end of the steel market.

Ultimately ceding the low-end seemed OK to the big mills. It meant dropping the lowest profit business, which made margins look better, as the graphic below demonstrates:

In the short term, this strategy was quite beneficial to the integrated mills. The next part of the story is where the disruption really kicks in. The low grade mini mills’ technology got better, so that they could produce increasingly higher grade steel at lower costs. This forced the big integrated mills to retreat to ever higher margin segments, until there was no place left to hide.

Disruptive technology. Steel in this case, but it happens everywhere.

Why Do Companies Allow this to Happen? They’re Being Rational

This is a wide open question, and it’s one that cannot be answered completely here. But Christensen provided some valuable points.

In pursuing the higher margin business and jettisoning the lower segments, companies are being eminently rational. Fighting it out over low-margin business is generally not considered a good application of corporate capital. Why? Here’s my personal take on Christensen’s disruption model:

Existing customers are not clamoring for your low-margin business
Current manufacturing and installed base do not support lower cost production or delivery
Return on capital for protecting the low-margin business is poor
Low-margin business is not strategic to customers, and does not fit long term company goals

Indeed, all of the above are rational and generally the right approach to the problem. Spending large dollars pursuing low-margin commodity businesses is something most of us would view as folly. Christensen, in describing the big integrated steel mills’ management, noted that he never uses the word “stupid”. They’re actually being rational.

In being rational, companies encounter a significant problem when it comes to innovation:

A business model hijacks an idea and forces it to change to conform.

The existing business model rides on a set of processes and principles. Anything new must work with that “innovation infrastructure” to get anywhere internally. But often, this requires changing an idea so fundamentally that it no longer works like it’s originator thought it would. Innovation takes a hit.

Who’s Next for Disruption? Oracle and Toyota

Christensen mentioned some specific companies at risk for disruption.

Oracle, the ever growing enterprise software behemoth, is at risk for disruption from Salesforce.com. I get that. Salesforce clearly has lower cost applications that can target Oracle. In databases, Oracle seems to have prevented disruption by MySQL by acquiring it.

Toyota was a surprise pick for disruption…by the likes of Kia and Hyundai. As Christensen explained it, Toyota has been putting resources into higher margin luxury cars and pick-up trucks. Meaning they’re vulnerable at the lower end.

That’s one thing with these disruptive technologies. It’s really hard to believe it before it happens.

Key Strategies for Addressing Market Insurgents

Christensen offered three pieces of advice to companies in dealing with market disruption:

Create separate units to deal with insurgents
Frame the problem correctly
Understand the job your product was hired to do

Separate business units. This advice is in his book, but it still makes sense. Essentially, the best way to handle disruptive technologies is to tackle them in a separate division outside the main corporate focus. Keys to this division:

Separate sales force
Leverage new technologies for cost-advantage, performance benefits
Be willing to cannibalize existing sales

Most companies do not do this. In the computer industry, Christensen cited IBM as the only company to successfully navigate disruptive technologies: Mainframe -> Mini computers -> PCs. Of course, they’ve jettisoned the PC business. I wonder if the next wave will be the mobile platforms emerging, like the iPhone.

Frame the problem correctly. Christensen believes the root cause for the inability to innovate is not framing the problem correctly. Companies do not understand what is happening with their customers as they use new technologies:

Expensive failure always results when disruption is framed as technological rather than business model terms.

There’s a tendency to view market competition through a technology lens, not a business one. A company will see a new technology, and note its obvious inferiority to what current leaders offer. It then becomes easy to dismiss it.

That’s the mistake.

Companies should think in terms of the business context for changes in their industry.Best way to do this?

Customers hire your product for a job. This was an intriguing way to put things. Christensen advises thinking in terms of “the job your product has been hired to do”. I heard this, and my initial instinct was…huh? But it really is a powerful way to understand how your customers use your products and services.

The crux of his point is that segmenting the market on demographics – e.g. urban hipsters, suburban soccer moms, etc. – is a way of performing marketing. But it’s not useful as context for product roadmaps or assessing new competition for your customers’ wallets.

Christensen referenced a Peter Drucker quote to bring this home:

The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him.

There’s an enormous amount to be learned when you consider your company’s product in the hands of a customer. In understanding the uses of the product, the job of the product, you increase the likelihood of framing diruptioon in business terms, not technology. One example he gave is Ikea. Ikea’s not a low-priced furniture store. It’s integrated to get a job done – to get your place furnished fast.

The Disruptive Potential of Green Tech

Green technology has emerged as an important driver of our future economy. There’s a lot of investment in the sector. Here’s where Christensen put forth an interesting observation.

He traveled to Mongolia to see his kid who was on a mission there. While walking through a market, he came across some cheap solar-powered TVs. They were miniature, and the solar panels were low-cost materials. The quality wasn’t great, but they functioned well enough for that part of the world.

He compared these little cheap solar devices to the larger green initiatives underway today. And in his view, disruption of the traditional power industry is more likely to come from things like cheap solar TVs than from big heavy investments.

Those TVs are closer to the job people are hiring for.

Electric cars are often in the news today. The biggest challenge for them is that currently technology requires a heavy battery onboard. This causes them to be slow, and they don’t go very far on a charge. So who might be interested in “hiring” heavy, slow cars that can’t go too far? Parents of teenagers.

The Power of Employee Ideas

I’ll close out this post with this note. Christensen was engaged by Intel to talk to its employees about disruptive innovation, and framing the problem correctly. Led by then-CEO Andy Grove, the company held a series of employee meetings to discuss new ideas for their markets.

Last year, ideas coming from those employee ideas amounted to $18 billion for Intel. Not bad, not bad at all.

Tagged: innovation, innovator's dilemma, wif09

Hey, have you heard of Twitter?

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:35 PDT

Hey, have you heard of Twitter?:

Listen man, subscribe to our Twitter already. These brainiacs have:

You’ve been served.

Competition is not an excuse for failure

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:35 PDT

Competition is not an excuse for failure:

Mark McQueen points to a story by Reuters columnist Eric Auchard which was generally about the up and down of the tech IPO market. Mark called out one chunk of the Eric’s story:

“There is…

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute

Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:01 PDT

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute:

“I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud”

There’s a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It’s all…

Customer Development Talk Startup2Startup

Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:00 PDT

Customer Development Talk Startup2Startup:

Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame and the author of the Lessons Learned blog joined me at Startup2Startup for a joint Customer Development talk. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser…

Someone is Thinking Outside of the Hound Box!

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:59:40 PDT

Someone is Thinking Outside of the Hound Box!: This afternoon I was lucky enough to receive a press release from Homehound highlighting the recent updates they’ve made to their website. I don’t often use Homehound (as the map search irritates…

If Someone Resigns - Accept It!

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:59:40 PDT

If Someone Resigns - Accept It!: Have you ever had the situation where someone who reports to you resigns and you try to talk them out of it? I certainly have and i have also tried to talk them out of it … often successfully….

How to close a term sheet quickly

Nivi — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:00:33 PDT

How do you quickly turn a signed term sheet into cash in the bank? I’ve seen entrepreneurs do it in one week and I’ve seen them do it in four weeks.

How do you do it as quickly as possible?

Complete all business diligence before you sign a term sheet.
Set a firm closing date for your lawyers and justify it with something like, “I’m leaving the country on that date.”
Have a strong BATNA that keeps the other side moving quickly.

Listen to our podcast below for the details.

Audio: How to close a term sheet quickly (mp3)

Transcript

Nivi: I was talking to a couple of entrepreneurs today about how to expedite the closing process. Closing is when you go from a signed term sheet to money in the bank.

You are taking the signed term sheet, which is really just a letter of intent; it is for the most part non-binding, except for some confidentiality and no shop clauses, and turning it into a set of closing documents and money in the bank.

Closing can take anywhere from one week, to four weeks, to six weeks, depending on the complexity of the closing. There are some things that you just can’t speed up. There may be legal diligence that needs to be done that just can’t be expedited. It takes time to get it done.

Other than those issues that you can’t really speed up any faster than they are going, it is really up to the entrepreneur to set the timetable for closing. You can set things up so it gets done in a week and you can set things so it gets done in four weeks.

My preference is to get it done quickly for a few reasons. One: It just reduces the risk of not closing. Two: The faster you get it done the quicker you can get back to building your business. Three: It is just good experience and practice to move things forward during negotiations with your lawyers, with the other side’s lawyers, and with the other side.

There are three parts to closing quickly. One: What you do before you sign the term sheet. Two: After you sign a term sheet, what you do on your end to make sure things are moving quickly. Three: After you sign a term sheet what you do to make sure the other side is moving quickly. Lets cover each of those parts.

Before you sign the term sheet

First lets talk about what you do before you sign a term sheet. Number one, most term sheets have a clause or term in there that indicates what the expected closing date is so your lawyers, the other side’s lawyers, and the other side can all work together towards that date.

My next suggestion is to conduct all your business diligence before you sign the term sheet so there is no business diligence left to do once you have signed the term sheet, during the closing process.

A lot of startups, I think, make the mistake of signing a term sheet too quickly before the investors have made the decision to really invest in the company. And they are just locking the company up with the term sheet, taking the company off the market so they can do their real diligence.

I would prefer to get all the business diligence done before I sign the term sheet. And we have a blog post on this, look it up. It is called, Complete business diligence before you sign a term sheet. We have also got another blog post called, Discuss your plans before signing a term sheet.

You also want to complete as much legal diligence as makes sense and is possible before you sign a term sheet as well. Why leave some legal risks? Why take yourself off the market and expose yourself to the risks that there is some legal issue that is going to trip up the financing. You want to get as much of that done before you sign the term sheet as well. You can find more info on that in the blog post. For most seed stage investment there is not a lot of complexity in your legal documents, whether it is IP or existing contracts, or what have you.

And top tier investors aren’t going to try to push business diligence to after a signed term sheet, in general. And if they do they are pretty up front about it and there is usually a good reason why. If you are working with a good firm you will get the business diligence done before you sign a term sheet anyway. And if you are a seed stage startup without a lot of complexity the legal work is pretty turnkey, which means that you can get it done quickly. And it is really up to you to determine how long it is going to take. These financing closings take as long as you let them take.

How do you expedite the closing process? There are two parts to this. The first part is making sure your lawyers move quickly. The second part is making sure the other side moves quickly. The other side consists of the fund and their lawyers.

Moving quickly on your end

First lets talk about making sure your side moves quickly. You should understand that you are in a very high leverage position with respect to your lawyers. Your lawyers have taken the risk of working with you while you were an unfunded, seed state startup with a lot of risk that you would go out of business.

They perhaps deferred fees, or gave you reduced rates. And they took on the risks of working with you with the hopes that you would be come a venture backed startup and grow on to great success and do a lot of business with them. Which is exactly what is starting to happen to you at this point in time, you are getting venture backed. You have a signed term sheet.

Your lawyers are in a pretty precarious position. They have taken a lot of risks and that risk is starting to bear fruit. But they are in a position where they are not locked-in in any way. You are not locked-in with them so you can terminate them at any point in time still. If you terminate them they have taken a bunch of risks, worked for reduced rates, deferred fees, and they weren’t interested in working with you while you were a seed stage company. They just did that to build the relationship so that you could work with them when you were a venture back startup spending lots of money on legal fees. If you terminate them, they won’t be able to reap what they sowed. So they’re in a precarious position. You have a lot of leverage over them.

The first thing to do to expedite the closing process is talk to my lawyers and tell them — if you haven’t already, which hopefully you’ve done — is tell them you’re going to measure them in four ways. High quality advice, one. Two, the speed at which they get things done for you. Three, the number of errors in the work product. Four, cost.

Next, you tell your lawyers that you want to have an extremely firm date for the closing process. You can take the Steve Blank approach there, if you like, and tell them that prior to that date, if they need help you are available to help them out, but when that date comes you don’t want any excuses. Right? If they come at you with excuses by that date, it’s really a fireable offense.

The best way to justify an extremely firm date is with a justification. People like to have reasons for why you want them to do things. So come up with a reason why the closing needs to happen by such and such date. For example, “I’m going on vacation on that date, I’m having a baby, I’m leaving to go to a business meeting in a foreign country, we need the money to make a payment, we need the money to hire somebody.” Just get with your team, brainstorm a solid reason why it absolutely has to be closed by that date.

That’s the end of the story of making your side move quickly. Ultimately, it’s really in the interests of your lawyers to actually get it done quickly. We’ve seen too many law firms get fired after a closing because the closing wasn’t done quickly enough, there were too many errors and the entrepreneurs were not happy with it. I think it’s important and good for the law firm for you to communicate what your metrics for success are. Finally, your lawyers are not computers, right? They’re humans. So don’t take the tone of the discussion here too literally. You want to treat them with grace and humility and make them excited to work with you.

Making the other side move quickly

The other piece of the puzzle is getting the other side to move quickly on the closing and getting the other side’s lawyers to move quickly on the closing. In general, if you’re closing with a good firm, a good fund, they also want to close quickly. They don’t have any interest in a slow closing process. It’s just a question of getting their lawyer’s bandwidth.

The best advice I have to get the venture fund, or investors and their lawyers to move quickly, is to have a great BATNA. That’s really the only advice I have for you there. Preferably you’re in a situation where your BATNA has said something like, “If the other side blinks during the closing process, call me.” You want to have a BATNA that’s still chomping at the bit to invest in your company.

I’m not suggesting that you break any no shop clauses or anything like that, or confidentiality agreements that you have in your term sheet. What I am suggesting is prior to signing a term sheet, you want to have a BATNA that is chomping at the bit and will be interested in investing in your company even if the term sheet blows up after it’s signed. They’re chomping at the bit, like I said, they’ve said something like, “If the other side blinks during closing, call me.”

If they haven’t said something like that, you can say something like that. When you call the investors that you’re not going to take money from and tell them that you’re going to sign a term sheet with someone else, you can tell them, “If there’s any problem during the closing process you are going to be my first call. I’m not expecting any problems during the closing process, but in the odd case that there is a problem during closing and we decide to pull the plug, you are going to be my first call.”

So you’re setting things up to have a great alternative if things blow up during closing, and you’re providing yourself with an excuse. You’re saying, if things do blow up it’s not going to be them pulling the plug, it’s going to be me pulling the plug.

Take it away Kazumi.

Online video CPMs can’t hold up

jeremyliew — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:36 PDT

eMarketer has a couple of interesting charts on CPMs by media types.

First offline media:

Next online video:

Online video preroll CPMs are at $25-35.

TV CPMs are at $6-10.

Even granting some premium for preroll that has to be watched (vs TV which can get skipped), these CPMs can’t hold up.

Go With The Flow: Product Planner Maps Out How The Web’s Most Popular Sites Function

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When it comes to building a website, one of the key factors in establishing a sizable user base is your site’s ability to ‘go viral’. While there isn’t any magic secret to accomplishing this,…

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

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from: eldon 9 months ago

Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn. Here's the presentation

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garr@slideshare.net (garr) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:06:13 PDT

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One of the best books I have read this year is Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. The applications for presentation are many. This is a book review of sorts, though I do not highlight all aspects of the book. I focus on the three rules that relate most directly, though all the rules have lessons. Just a fantastic book.

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Best Strategy Is Speed (Startup2Startup May 2008)

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:21:26 PDT

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Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing Workshop

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:14:19 PDT

from: dmc500hats 2 years ago

This presentation demonstrates a simple, actionable 5-step model for measuring startup metrics. The 5 steps are: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!). The presentation also explains how to use the model to make better product & marketing decisions for your startup. Created by Dave McClure & Hiten Shah, presented at Web 2.0 Expo SF on Tue 4/22/08.

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Startup Metrics for Pirates

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:03:16 PDT

from: dmc500hats 2 years ago

This is a 5-step model for creating a metrics framework for your business & customers, and how to apply it to your product & marketing efforts. The "pirate" part comes from the 5 steps: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!)

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nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:58:09 PDT

from: nusantara99 3 years ago

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Alex.Osterwalder@slideshare.net (Alex.Osterwalder) — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:56:02 PDT

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nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:24:06 PDT

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nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:43:22 PDT

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Business Plan

vinaya.hs@slideshare.net (vinaya.hs) — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:17:32 PST

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This presentation describes the structure of a business plan and the contents to put in each section.

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Perfecting the Product Launch

sjhaines@slideshare.net (sjhaines) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 15:56:24 PST

from: sjhaines 3 years ago

Most product launches seem to be troubled. Either we don't hit the market window, we don't take the right steps, or we don't work with the right people. This presentation provides snapshot to help you perfect your product launches.

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Transcript

Before you sign the term sheet

Moving quickly on your end

Making the other side move quickly

Online video CPMs can’t hold up

Go With The Flow: Product Planner Maps Out How The Web’s Most Popular Sites Function

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

Going Fast on the Mobile Web

Brain Rules for Presenters

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Startup Metrics for Pirates

Innovation Strategy

Business Model Design and Innovation for Competitive Advantage

New Product Development Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy

Improving Interface Design

Business Plan

Perfecting the Product Launch