taigeair

Free Email Me App Link Service

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 16:33:19 +0200

Use Google Apps Script + Gmail as a free email service to send your app link.

Try it above.

Why I built it

For iOS, it's still hard to install an app you found while browsing on your desktop computer. There are services that text you the app link, but everyone has email on their smartphones, so why not just email them the link? It's easier and free.

I couldn't find a free service for this, so I built something using Google Apps Script as "Get The App Link" email service for my app.

How it works

You write an Apps Script to 1) capture the visitor's email address, 2) dispatch the app link email using Gmail Service to the email address, and 3) log the email address to Google Spreadsheet. Deploy the script as web app. Embed it on your site and add some front-end notifications. Now you have your own free email sending service :)

Let me know what you think or if you have questions!

References:

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/articles/sending_emails https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/gmail/

Victories

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 15:33:19 +0100

The todo app with slick freestyle typing, statistics, and encouragement.

Victories is available for download here.

Why did I create Victories?

I've been looking for the perfect todo app for a while but never found one. Like pasta sauce, there isn't a perfect one, but rather clusters of great ones for different taste preferences.

What I noticed was... no todo app had a user interface where I didn't have to type into a stupid little box everytime I wanted to add something. There also wasn't one that made it fun and encouraged me.

Let's be honest, being an adult can be pretty lame. Look at all my to-dos... pay the bills, buy groceries, find a roommate. It’s not fun. You don’t get rewarded for it. You don’t even hear a good job. You just check it off a list.

Having worked in social gaming, I wanted to use the same game mechanics that got people addicted to doing meaningless things (e.g. harvesting crops) for good. I hope with this app, I can help people be more diligent and achieve their goals in the real world.

What is it?

Victories is an iOS app that makes you feel good and be productive in real life. It’s not a game. It’s not a goal app. It’s a to-do app that adds more play into your life.

All tasks are called battles. You don’t complete a task, you win or surrender the battle. And it says good job to you when you do. A group of related battles are called conquests. You can go from a serf to a king as you win more battles. It even gives you statistics. At the end of the week you can look back at your victories and feel good about yourself. This app is designed to help you be more productive.

Hopefully one day, as you’ve been leveling up in the game, you realize your goals have been accomplished and you’ve levelled up in life too.

What's next?

There are many more great features that need to be added to make you feel better about completing tasks such as bragging about it on Twitter, end of week summaries, fuzzy do or die reminders, real world prizes, and life balance bars.

Life balance bars are diminishing health bars based on the 5 balls philosophy. You need to juggle 5 things in your life: work, family, health, friends and spirit. Your battles should reflect that. Win work battles to boost your work health. Win spirit battles to boost your spirit health. You get the picture. Victories will help you keep balanced in life. If you run out of battle ideas, you can even get suggestions from the app or friends.

Real world prizes are rewards for keeping a streak going. Every week you get shown a reward such as a carnival cruise or a best-selling drone. If you complete at least one battle a day, you are entered to win. Advertisers would be happy to get their product in front of you for the cheap price of giving some away.

Then there's the social part where you can make your battles discoverable by friends so they can join or help. Actually this part I've broken out into a separate app called LittleQuest which is in beta testing. People can play in a world where they can discover fun or meaningful things to do with exisiting friends. Members of a clan can provide high levels of support to one another.

There's still a lot to do and I'm hoping it will become the fun app that will truly improve your personal and social life.

You can download it here!

Anonymous Delivery Service

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:33:19 +0100

I launched the world's only anonymous delivery service for Amazon. I'm curious what happens next.

So I've been working on LittleQuest, an anonymous social app that lets you go on quests with existing friends (i.e. play together, work on ideas and goals, helping one another). It's super MVP right now, but I like the concept and think it'll be a fun way to re-connect with friends. If you want to join the beta, check it out here.

And last week, I was thinking about all the cool levels and functionality you could unlock in the app. One thing I'd like to do is to anonymously thank my friends with a simple $1 thank you. Sometimes a friend helps you or needs a cheering up. Imagine what a joy it would be to receive a thank you in this way. In fact, you could send it to a friend, just because you're thinking of him or her. It makes me happy to know I'm making a friend feel appreciated. It's easy and doesn't cost much. Also it doesn't have to be money. Maybe a small thing of chocolate. What if we could do this now before we even release the app?

Well I did some research and found people are looking for an anonymous delivery service. In fact, it's super hard to give anonymous gifts. There aren't even services for it. Not only is it a lot of work, but also by asking for the address, you'd give you away. So I think there are people who would want this service. I don't know how many, but it wasn't too much work to make a website to support this, especially with my existing Wellingtons Travel business' infrastructure and reputation.

In conclusion, I'd like to announce the world's only anonymous delivery service for Amazon products... Wellingtons Travel's Secret Delivery Service!

Github Contributions Not Showing

Thu, 05 Nov 2015 15:33:19 +0100

I've been coding a 2-3 times a week but mostly not on Github. Yesterday, I started pushing to Github because I started on a new Angular Ionic project. Today I got annoyed my contributions weren't being tracked. There are many reasons why it might not be tracked. See: https://help.github.com/articles/why-are-my-contributions-not-showing-up-on-my-profile

Here's how I fixed my issue.

1. Check to see if your email is included in your commits.

Get any commit url and add .patch to the end.

Example: https://github.com/taigeair/ionic-playground/commit/f5026ba139db2fca53e9db62af10446c93d1d3d3.patch

2. If you don't see your email there, add it.

git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS"

It should look like this now: https://github.com/taigeair/ionic-playground/commit/2998a0351222a6c58fd6b35401583909610a75be.patch

3. Add your email and verify it with Github.

Shortcut: https://github.com/settings/emails

That's it! Here's my Github profile if you're interested.

VW Brands: Revenue Contribution

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 16:33:19 +0200

What's the revenue break down of VW brands such as Audi and Porsche? I took at look at their 2014 Annual Report and found this. It's quite interesting how Audi and Porsche have higher operating profit than Volkswagen.

Google Analytics: How to Filter for a Set of Pages

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 16:33:19 +0200

Maybe I don't know how to use Google Analytics properly and a quick Google search couldn't tell me how to do this, so I did it my way and just wanted to share.

To see only the pages you are interested in on Google Analytics: On the left hand side, go to Behavior->Site Content->All Pages. Then click on the advanced link under the graph.

Let's say I want to see pages x and y. Problem is there if you choose to include page x and use the "and" to include page y, it doesn't show anything. See below.

If there were an "or" operator, I think this would work, but there isn't so you have to make it yourself.

To do this, now select include, page, Matching RegExp, and then type the page urls you want in RegEx. Just use "|" for the or operator. For example, I want to see two pages, my article on using iPhone on Wind network and Gmail shortcuts.

My RegEx looks like this "/how-to-use-iphone-5s-on-wind|gmail-shortcuts-you-will-love".

Now I just see the metrics for just the two pages I want.

Product Manager Guideline: How to write a JIRA Ticket

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 16:33:19 +0200

Product management is something you learn on the job, not at school or online, but this means there's a lack of educational resources out there. When I was leading the product department at a Berlin startup, I created a guideline on how to write stories on JIRA for the team. I've re-created one to be shared publicly.

First, you need to know what type of ticket to make and the relationship structure.

Hierarchy
Epic is a group of related stories and bugs related to a major business goal.
Stories describe a feature or a task and can be comprised of subtasks.
Bugs describe something that doesn't work as expected and how it should be.
Subtasks are usually written by developers to better organise and define their work; cannot be released by itself but only as part of a story or bug.

We're going to focus on a story which is a feature to be developed. The parts of a story will be described from top to bottom.

Important messages

If there is an important deadline or message to the developer such as a special procedure for implementation or deployment, I'd include it on top in red.

User story

This is generally the first line of the ticket. It explains in everyday language what the user wants to do and why. It will include who, what's the goal, and what can help accomplish the goal.
Here's the template:

As a <role>, I want to <goal/desire> so that <benefit>.
Here's an example:

As a travelling business man, I want to see an trip duration estimation so that I can make an informed booking decision.

As a cleaner, I want to see customer ratings for each job I perform so that I know if I did a good job or not.

Priority

How important is this ticket? Usually it goes from low to high, but the exact wording is determined by each company.

Status Quo

Developers who haven't worked on this before would like to know what has been done, what exists, and the general situation. Explain it here.

Requirement

What needs to be built? Here's an example:
reschedule feature to let the customer change the start time and date of the appointment.

Specifications

How should it look and behave? Sometimes it could be beneficial to separate those two.
Design:
Specify what should be shown where. Here you can also include mockups or prototypes. Attach any graphic assets to the ticket and include hex codes, sizes, etc. Often the graphic designer can help with this. Responsive design should also usually be mentioned here.
Behaviour:
Specify how the elements should behave. For complicated features, you should include a flow chart.
Integration:
Sometimes developers need to have special access or work with other, so include credentials and contacts.
Tracking:
Mention anything that should be tracked.
Multilingual support:
Add multilingual considerations here.
Notes:
Although it's not necessarily part of the specifications, it's good to be clear, so I usually explain possible any points of confusion here.
Questions:
As I'm writing the ticket, I'll have questions so I just list them here until I have a chance to speak to someone who can answer them.

Business value

Often companies would like to keep track of the ROI or business value of a feature so that it can be used during backlog prioritisation and sprint planning meetings. You can talk about revenue gains, cost savings, engagement, customer satisfaction, and other benefits here.

Metrics

It's good to indicate which metrics we are measuring in relation to this story. For example, how many users are affected by this and what's the current engagement? This gives an overview of the scale of the feature and a snapshot of the situation before the feature is released.

Estimations

Here the developers will estimate the story in terms of man hours or story points.

People

Stakeholder: a person outside of product and development who has an interest in this ticket.
Reporter: the person who initially created the ticket, likely to be you; the product manager.
Assignee: the person working on the ticket, usually a developer or a QA specialist.

Use cases or Test cases

You can write each use case in this section. Usually it's quite easy if you just go through the flow chart and enumerate them.
Example:

Reschedules a cleaning with a perferred cleaner, more than 24 hour in advance
Reschedules a cleaning without a perferred cleaner, more than 24 hour in advance
Reschedules a cleaning within 24 hours of appointment
Test cases are similar to use cases but more detailed and used by QA to test the feature. It's written in a a special format that uses the 3 keywords:
Given - Given lines describe what pre-condition should exist.
When - When lines describe the actions you take.
Then - Then lines describe the result
Example (from TutsPlus):
Given I am on the home page
And I am signed in
Then I should see "Welcome Back!"
And I should see "Settings"

Acceptance Criteria

Here, you'd list anything that you require before the ticket can be approved by QA. Unlike requirements, these are measurable tests and checks that need to be passed to prove it's been correctly built.

That's it. If it's helpful, I'll write more articles like this.

Travel Sites For Finding Your Next Flight

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 16:33:19 +0200

This is a handy list of travel sites and apps I like. I wrote this post as a quick reference for myself and for sharing with friends when they ask me about travel sites. Feel free to bookmark it and comment if you know of other great sites.

Get ideas for traveling.

Hitlist - see where your friends have been and want to go.

Kakay Explore - see places to travel to with estimated prices on a map.

ZapTravel - get travel inspiration (see my review).

Drungli - see places to travel to with estimated prices on a map.

Know when to book a flight.

Hopper - get airfare predictions and advice on when to book.

Flyr - lock in airfare without committing to buy.

Search for traditional flights.

Kayak - vast selection of flights.

Skyscanner - vast selection of flights.

Hipmunk - great user interface for flight search.

Google Flights - great user interface for flight search.

Cheapoair - good prices.

JetRadar - great selection and user interface on mobile app. I like it but haven't booked anything on it yet.

DO NOT USE Opodo because their confirmed bookings sometimes fail and you will be stranded. See: Opodo Review: Worst Online Travel Agency Ever

Search budget airlines.

Skypicker - find cheap flights from budget airlines.

Whichairline - search low cost airlines.

Save money on travel by being flexible.

Skiplagged - get to your final destination cheaper by skipping the final leg.

Tripdelta - check for detours and get suggetions for alternative routes or times.

Fly anywhere.

"If the price is good and I’m free, I’ll go. I don’t even really care where" - if this sounds like you, read about secret flights. For example, Adioso.

Find travel deals.

Urlaubspiraten - see travel deals for Germany.

Secret Flying - see travel deals.

Search for ground transport

CheckMyBus - checks trains, buses, and even rideshares such as BlaBlaCar.

Kayak Cars - great car rental search.

Lastly, I want to highlight a new startup TripRebel for hotel search. Book through it and if the price drops, you will get the lower price! For accommodations, I also frequently use Wimdu, Airbnb, Booking, and Hostelbookers.

Have a great summer!

A Simple Zoom App to Showcase Images

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 15:33:19 +0100

Want to showcase your artwork but don't want to give away the image?

I have a business called Wellingtons Travel and the only product at the moment is an old-fashioned London wall map. However; it's hard to show all the details of the map without giving away the high resolution image, which is why I created a mobile app designed to showroom images.

With the help of two developer friends (Inam and Matej), I made an iOS app that can showcase a single high resolution image in a powerful and branded way. You can play around with the app here.

Features include:

*pan and zoom an image

*link out to a website or store

*share functionality

*annotation of artwork

*iAds (disabled)

*splash screen

*custom fonts

*welcome screen

*custom popup message

So if this sounds like something that you could use, I'd be happy to offer this as a white label solution. I'd just swap out the image, customise the app a bit with your style, and publish it for you. Contact me for a quote @taigeair!

Best Bank in Germany

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 15:33:19 +0100

Comdirect is the best bank in Germany. Many of my discerning friends agree and are already customers, but I'll just let the facts speak for themselves.

Why Comdirect is the best bank?

No monthly deposit minimum
Many German banks require a salary deposit of 1000 euros or more every month or they will charge you a monthly fee. Not Comdirect.

No monthly fee
None. This lets you keep the bank account open even if you don't use it for a long time.

Withdraw from any bank ATM
Most German banks require you withdraw from their ATMs or pay a fee. Comdirect lets you withdraw from any bank's ATM without a fee (use the visa card).

Great customer service
Although there is no retail branch, short waiting times make the phone customer service experience exceptional. Although they're not allowed to speak English legally, sometimes they do and are just really friendly people.

100 Euros for free
For doing something you should be doing anyways (opening an account with Comdirect), they give you 100 Euros. That's got to be the easiest money I've ever made on a per minute basis. Simply make 5 transactions of at least 25 euros in the first 3 months of the account and they will transfer 100 euro into your account in month 4.

Get a credit card
Credit cards are hard to get in Germany for a newbie without credit history, but they will give you one. I got a prepaid one which sucked. Luckily I got one from American Express. Let me know if you want a referral for that. Contact me at @taigeair.

Amazing financial products for cheap
They have great saving accounts, term deposits, and stock brokerage accounts within their online banking suite.

Open an account here

Additional reading:

https://www.deutscheskonto.org/en/comdirect/currant-account/visa-card/

https://www.deutscheskonto.org/en/comdirect/

http://www.the-best-german.com/banks/

Head of Product: What I've Learned after 4 Months

Sun, 07 Dec 2014 15:33:19 +0100

I started my career as a product manager just over 4 years ago. The boom in social gaming allowed me to leverage my analytical background to transition from finance to PMing games. Being entrepreneurial, a problem solver, and fascinated by technology, I gravitated to product management and can't think of a better career option.

The funny thing about product management is there's very little hierarchy, which also means there's limited upward mobility.

Recently, I've been given the opportunity to lead product management at a 270 person startup while they searched for a product head. Since joining, I've been leading a small team of 5 product managers and dealing with things I've never had to touch as a product manager.

It's healthy to take some time to reflect and introspect once in a while.

Here's what I've learned. It's not a list of what makes a great Head of Product, but just what I've noticed. Actually I haven't found many resources at all about being a successful Head of Product. Most resources are about being a product manager.

1. Always challenge the narrow framing to build something.

I'm learning to challenge requests in a cooperative way. At Helpling product managers rarely get time to dream up ideas on what we should build next. There is so much demand, so much opportunity, so much growth and so many more bugs that we are inundated with requests. Requests come from every department and passionate employees push their requests through harder than Lonsdaleite. So all this leaves product managers with quite an enormous burden of understanding the request, analysing its efficacy, considering whether or not it (or a better solution) should be built and the priority.

A book that has helped me with this is Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath. A particularly helpful section of the book is about how to widen alternatives. One way is company introspection: finding effective and efficient parts of the business to be used as role models for boosting efficiency. Another is competitive analysis where you look at people who have already solved the problem for you. Walmart for example largely rode to success with this strategy-- Mr. Walton extols the effectiveness of taking great ideas and tactics from other businesses. Finally there's analogies, taking solutions from other realms and transplanting it to a new domain.

Once you've opened the narrow frame of the request, you are much more likely to build something amazing.

2. You can't build something that is perfect.

Just like there isn't a perfect animal, there isn't a perfect product. A shark is great at swimming, biting, and hunting. If it were a product, it'd be a pretty awesome product. But a shark is not a perfect animal. It can't fly. It can't walk. It doesn't have good defensive armour. Check out a great white shark vs. saltwater crocodile fight thought experiment.

That's why it's crucial to understand your goal and users when trying to build a solution. If you came to me and said your goal was to survive in the ocean and reproduce, then I'd probably build you a shark. But if you were a vegetarian and pacifist, then I'd need to re-think and build you a jellyfish or something.

To see how successful your animal is you'd look at KPIs such as how much energy the animal consumes, how long the average animal survives, how many babies are born, and mortality rate. Given how long sharks have been around (450 million years), I'd say it's a pretty solid product.

The key is what you build truly depends on your goal and users.

What follows is standard product management...

Once you've understood your goal and your users, you'd generate lots of cool ideas. There shouldn't be a blindly obvious choice because if there is, it means you don't really have a decent set of options. Next, you'd use some criteria to decide what to build or not build. Generally, I'd use customer impact, cost to build (tech difficulty, time, money), and monetary return. You'd also pick a set of metrics to watch to determine if your solution was successful or not so you can adjust accordingly. A good product manager knows what to pick. Just because usage of a feature is up doesn't mean the feature is a success ;)

3. Most of your work will be on process and structure.

At the executive level, it seems the job is more and more about managing people. Sure I get to make some cool strategic decisions from time to time, but mostly I'm tasked with spearheading workflow and process improvements, communicating and documenting it, and ensuring successful adoption. I'm not sure that's entirely for me and perhaps I'd be happier leading a dedicated team where I can be more hands on.

I thought I'd spend more of my time on road mapping and experimenting, but currently it's all about managing workloads, communicating with other departments, and crafting process and structure.

4. Sell within your company

I also realised you need to sell to your team, to your stakeholders, to people you work with. Often times you don't have simple, obvious decisions. Not everyone in the room is going to say yes. And that's a good thing for the product and business.

When working in an environment where views are opposed. Here are two great tactics to use to build cooperation.

What would need to be true for X, Y, or Z to each to be the best alternative?

Asking this question increases cooperation by shifting the focus to the realities of the situation, which gives the alternatives all a fair chance at being considered. Sometimes it involves collecting more data but whatever is the reality determines which choice should be taken.

Under what situation would we reconsider this?

This allows teams to take action but also lets dissenters to voice their opinions or concerns without seeming like they are trying to undermine their colleagues. Here the dissenters can still be team players and let results determine if something should continue or be reconsidered.

5. Ask for updates in writing.

This was something that I found to be quite a time saver. When you ask your reports for things verbally, often they feel put on the spot and may not give you the most comprehensive and coherent answer. It's also synchronous which means you can't look at it at your convenience. So this is more of a tactical thing I've learned that could help new managers.

I'm looking forward to continuing my personal growth in product and building awesome products. Let me know if you want to meet for a coffee in Berlin or work at Helpling (we're hiring).

If Only ...

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:33:19 +0100

I recently listened to Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin and one thing really stuck out to me afterwards. A single sentence.

"I could be X if only Y."

Here's a quote from the book:

"If only" is a great way to eliminate your excuse du jour. "If only" is an obligator, because once you get rid of that item, you've got no excuse left, only the obligation.

It's simple and brilliant. It's a great way to help you acheive your goal by finding and addressing your obstacle and excuse. You can use it in your personal life or at work.

Examples:
I could be good at surfing if only I lived on the beach.
I could be a great boss if only I had a mentor.
I could be an entrepreneur if only I had co-founders.

Yosemite OSX: Open File Location From Spotlight

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:33:19 +0100

Took me a few tries to discover this, so I thought I'd save you the hassle. To open the location of a file from spotlight on Yosemite just cmd + double click.

Pretty simple.

MyTaxi Review and Promo Code

Sun, 21 Sep 2014 16:33:19 +0200

I wrote a while back in 2012 about Uber and its competitors. Read it here.

Recently, I used MyTaxi. It's huge in Germany. I am really not a fan of the app because it doesn't work for me. It's extremely buggy and difficult to use. When I press book, nothing happens and no error message is shown.

My guess is it couldn't save my phone number correctly so my orders weren't working. I managed to book something using the web version on mobile but the driver didn't show up or left without calling me. So that's more than 30 minutes of frustration in the rain.

On my second try that day using the web version (because I really needed a taxi), the taxi showed up but the driver required that I pay in cash and charged me extra for luggage. I couldn't even use the promo voucher too. All in all, I had pretty bad experience and the app is still unusable for me. Customer service is responsive but was no help and just asked me to create a new account. No compenstation was offered as well.

That said, it's fleet is much better than Uber in Berlin and affordable. You can use cash to pay which might be a plus for some folks.

If you want to try it, here's a 10 Euro promo code or gutschein, just enter "TaigeZ1" after sign up. Good luck. My colleague had a seamless experience and likes the service a lot, so I guess it's down to the company's technical problems.

Biggest Problem with Online Shopping

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 16:33:19 +0200

I really don't like how Amazon makes it so easy to buy new things sometimes.

It's easier and cheaper to buy new than to buy secondhand (for many things). I think that's horrible.

I'm moving and have a lot of stuff. It's not worth my time to individually sell something for $14. I still try, but it's hard to find a buyer and eBay and Paypal are so buggy for me that I literally am unable to. Basically my options are:

Sell each item individually.
Advertise a moving sale.
Donate it.
Give to friends.
Trash it.

Guess which option is the easiest? Like may other people, I'm trashing things for no other reasons than it's easier than all the other options.

I'd really like to see a company successfully address this.

So far I've found one. Do you know other companies like Gone?

Goals Are For Losers

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 16:33:19 +0200

I picked up a book which was mischievously disguised as an autobiography. Since it was about Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, I thought it would be funny. It wasn't, but it changed the way I think about life.

Also it turns out this book is more of a self-improvement book in which he shares his views and advice on life and success using anecdotes rather than an autobiography.

One of his main points is:

Goals are for losers.

He explains whenever you set a goal, you're going to be behind that goal. You're always in a stage of losing until you accomplish that goal. That's if you do. It's not good to live life constantly a "loser". It's demoralising. And even when you reach that goal, suddenly your purpose is gone and you'll feel empty.

Instead of goals, have a system. A system is something you can do everyday to increase your chance of success. By using a system, you won't feel bad for not meeting your goal, but rather feel good about doing exactly what you intended to do.

Example: If your goal is to lose 50 pounds, a system is exercising everyday and eating well.

Some quotes from "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life" by Scott Adams:

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal-- if you reach it at all -- feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.

...

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

...

Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

In the book he explains in more detail about what makes a system. The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person using it can make it work. For example, playing the lottery everyday is not a system.

That's the main take-away from the book, but I've learned he's not just a smart and witty cartoonist, but also a driven entrepreneur and tech guy. It takes a lot of talent to make observations, extract truth, and then succinctly describe it in a new way.

He has a lot of other great observations in the book including:

Passion is bullshit - similar to Mark Cuban's blog post.
Positive attitude - exercise, food, and sleep. Avoid overexposure to depressing news, music, movies, etc.
Number one metric to work on is energy - optimise this metric and it makes everything work better and faster.
Every skill you learn doubles your chance for success.
80% of happiness is easy, 5 things: eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, daydream an incredible future, flexible schedule (do things when you want to do it). If you want the other 20%, you might want to check out this course on edX called "The Science of Happiness" but I'm thinking 80% is good enough.

It's a pretty awesome book and I highly recommend it. It's made me a lot happier and productive. I've been telling all my friends about it and lecturing them about goals vs. systems. It seems like the Spurs have a system.

You can buy one here.

- About me -

I am a literate and product manager in Toronto. Currently, I'm working on a to-do app that adds more play into your day. Get notified to try it out here.

The Thing About Bikes

Thu, 15 May 2014 16:33:19 +0200

It's always cars vs. cyclists. Cyclists are assholes and drivers kill.

Cars vs. Cyclists

There is a lot of hate between cyclists and motorists. I've experienced it. It's raw.

To some extent, I believe many cyclists are assholes. They don't obey the traffic laws, bike on the sidewalk, and squeeze in between cars.

Drivers are worse. Drivers sometimes forget there are cyclists on the road. They're impatient and think they own the road when it's really meant to be shared.

As a cyclist in a big city I see a lot of anger, danger, and inefficiencies. I see too much traffic. I see horrible biking conditions. But most of all, I see too much animosity between bikers and drivers.

The problems

1. I believe most of the problem stems from not enough separation.

City planners often don't include bike lanes. How can you improve the traffic condition when you're not supporting people who reduce traffic? I think buses help but even buses and streetcars still create lots of congestion. Bikes are the most efficient and cheapest form of city transport.

Source: Mashable

2. There's a lack of police enforcement.

Even when you have bike lanes, they're often abused by cars.

Bike lanes don't do much good if the police don't enforce them. Toronto has a big problem because the police do not give many tickets. In California, my mom was ticketed by police for stopping past the line during a red light. She drove into the bike lane 200 feet before the right turn and got a ticket for driving in the bike lane. They should enforce laws like that here because so many times cars stop in the middle of the street during a red light, then pedestrians walk in front, then cars can't move, then cross traffic is blocked -- it's a mess. The police need to prevent drivers from thinking it's okay to block traffic.

3. Drivers are mean, distracted, and dangerous.

Drivers get road rage. Drivers use phones when they're not supposed to. But what really get to me is people die because of bad drivers. People die crossing the street. Cyclists die on the road. If we could reduce traffic and separate cars, bikes, and people better, I think drivers would be less frustrated and be less dangerous to pedestrians.

I've been hit by a car 2 times in my life. One of which, the driver (in Toronto) sped off without stopping. I've had a relative who was walking and killed by a driver. Cars are dangers and should be better separated from people.

4. Bikers are assholes at times.

I understand drivers and pedestrians think bikers are assholes. Even as a biker sometimes I think other bikers are being over-the-top. Sometimes I may behave like an asshole. But there are reasons for this I believe.

Many times following the rules will get you killed and if not killed, extremely frustrated. Pro-bikers take evasive action and do things that aren't strictly legal. Inexperienced and scared bikers bike on the sidewalk (which is be legal in some places but not in others).

I know why I get extremely upset with drivers. Not only will they almost kill you, but when you warn them they're killing you, they give you the finger and swear at you. That's just infuriatingly horrible. That's what gets me.

Bikers who are wronged by drivers want to retaliate. No one likes injustice and being threatened with death day in and day out. There's a old Chinese saying, even a rabbit will bite when cornered. Add that to the fact police don't really give bikers tickets, you get a lot of bikers acting out. There's also the possibility since bikers don't go through any formal testing or require a license, you have a lot of people who just don't know any better. Since there are no bicycle licenses, bikers can do whatever they want and still be able to get on a bike again. Bad drivers on the other hand can get their license revoked. In short, everyone can get on a bike and is considered a biker.

What to do

People complain about traffic, but the answer isn't to introduce more roads for cars. I think it's to reduce roads for cars and encourage more cycling, ride sharing, car-sharing, public transit, and walking. I love pedestrian only paths. It's quaint and safe.

1. More, better bike lanes.

I love bike lanes because they separate people who can't share and hate each other. It prevents problems from arising. The number one reason people give for why they don't bike is because of safety. They feel scared. Dedicated bike lanes for cyclists will encourage biking. 78% of Ontarians believe this.

Better bike lanes are vital because a poorly designed bike lane can be problematic and dangerous. For example, bike lanes that don't have dividers or make it hard for street cleaners clear the glass there.

Protected Intersections For Bicyclists from Nick Falbo on Vimeo.

Here's a quick look at who's doing it right:

NYC's First Bike-Parking Protected, Protected Bike Lane! from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

2. Better police enforcement and role models.

I think if police issued more tickets, it would reduce number of cyclists and drivers committing traffic violations. People learn when they're fined. City gets more money. It's easier to catch cyclists on a bicycle, so police should bike more.

Police on bikes will scare drivers who are habitually abusive to bikers. This will also promote biking as a safe activity. Don't forget it's cheaper for the government and healthier for police officers.

Conclusion

16 to 1.

Cities will be less congested if more people biked. You can park 16 bikes or 1 car in the same space. It will be much better for traffic and parking.

Convenience.

City bike sharing is everywhere. I see a gap that subscription services such as Rdio and Bixi bikes fill and know many people using them. I don't use Bixi for a variety of reasons (link) but many of my friends really like the service.

Safer as more people bike.

The more bikers out there, the safer it is. People will realise it's unsafe to throw open their car doors or just keep it open. Drivers will realise there's a reason why they must check the bike lane before right turns. Drivers will be more alert for cyclists, and cyclists will feel more confident in numbers.

Healthier, cheaper, and more reliable.

I'm never late on a bike. I conveniently bike up to where I need to be and lock my bike minutes away. I don't think it gets better than that. Biking is way more reliable and punctual than public transit or driving because you'll almost never have traffic. You can get anywhere to anywhere else in the city in about 30 mins.

People are surprised that you can bike in winter. You can. The roads are no more slipperier than then when it rains. In fact, in most cities roads are much better to ride on than sidewalks because they're cleared and salted daily. You can always bike slower.

Let's encourage people to bike more by making it safe and convenient. You can reduce congestion, pollution, improve health, save money, and kill less people.

Source: Wallpapers Wide

- About me -

I'm a cyclist and product manager in Toronto. Currently, I'm working on a to-do app that you'll actually want to use. Get notified to try it out here.

Website Idea: Book Summaries

Sun, 04 May 2014 16:33:19 +0200

Goodreads isn't doing it. You see it on Amazon naturally. But someone should really do it.

Make a better Goodreads

Goodreads is a good idea, but using it isn't great, and it's missing lots of desired functionality. It could really be a much more engaged social network. I haven't discovered any great books from it. I am not really able to properly track the books I read on it.

I want to see summaries, not just reviews.

The best Amazon reviews are basically book summaries. This one is ranked as the most helpful review for The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business.

It's a book summary. I think it's what people want. At least it's what I want.

I think someone should build a better Goodreads that centres on people writing book summaries of the book they've read. Pay them some of the ad revenue if they have the winning summary. I'd love to just read those instead of the whole book. I'd probably read a lot more. And if I had the time, I'll read the whole book.

I'd love to see this product. I've had this idea since high school (actually before that, since the age of book reports). Until now no one is doing this.

I'd build it if I had time, but now I'm working on something else. It's a to-do list app that you'll actually want to use. It's fun and encourages good behaviours. The pre-launch signup is here if you want to try it.

Conclusion

I'd love to see a website that had community ranked book summaries. Wikipedia isn't specialised enough for this.

The 90 Percent Rule

Sat, 03 May 2014 16:33:19 +0200

I've been trying to lower my stress levels for the past 6 months. I'm doing yoga, exercising, not drinking coffee or alcohol. But one of the most important ways to manage stress is in your head, the way you process the world.

Self-Induced Stress

I've been listening to this book called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. There are a few really amazing tactics that have helped me.

As entrepreneurs, most of us have strong frames. We see this world this way, and if the world isn't the way we think it is, then we make the world change to our will. We aren't the type of people who are full. We're the type of people who are hungry (and foolish sometimes).

I've always been okay dealing with uncertainty and stress, until I got injured one day (basketball) and I couldn't walk. Without exercise, the stress levels became unbearable and started affecting my health. Now I'm better but am still fighting stress. It made me realise I had to lower my stress or it would kill me.

If you're like me, you don't really feel content. You always want to improve something. Beat your personal best. Get to the next level.

But that kind of life is stressful. Having your own business is stressful. Being a manager with accountabilities is stressful. Having aspirations so large you have no guarantee you can achieve it is stressful.

When you're fighting a lot, you will get burned out. I remember one time when I was fighting for sales and pitching to stores, and I needed to drink some water, so I walked into a fast food place and asked for some water. They wouldn't give me any. And I just thought, why do I have to fight so hard for every little thing? I just want a cup of water. I'm not trying to lead a revolution against your company policy.

Maybe there's a less stressful way to achieve success. Here are two of the most effective tactics from the book.

Worst case

Accept the worst outcome. Actually accept it. Then think how to improve it. It's very different from my thought process before, which was: This is how it should be, why isn't it? It's going to be, it has to be, and willing it into existence basically. Steve jobs may have had this view but it doesn't mean it's the best way to approach entrepreneurship. I also read a book called Succeeding When You're Supposed to Fail: The 6 Enduring Principles of High Achievement by Rom Brafman. It describes how people from poor or troubled families over come challenges.

From an Amazon Review:

The limelight effect--Tunnelers have a high sense of inner locus of control. This means that they believe they control their destiny.

Meaning making--Tunnelers find meaning in what is before them and what they are doing.

Unwavering commitment--Tunnelers believe in themselves and their calling. They will stick with a task as long as necessary.

Temperament and success--Tunnelers believe in developing an "even tempered disposition" They're unwavering commitment means that a loss or set back or a series of them will not cause them to lose faith.

Humor counteracting adversity--Tunnelers enjoy laughing and humor. It helps them deal with the different opportunities that life tends to send their way.

The importance of a Satellite--Tunnelers have someone in their life (sometimes only for a necessary season) who invests in them and acts as a satellite.

90% rule

90% of your life is good. You're richer than you feel. How much money would you pay to have eye-sight? Or to be able to have all your limbs? $100,000? $1,000,000? $10,000,000? If you have those things then you effectively saved that much money and are that rich. 90% of your life is good. You have your health, water, food, and safety. If you're lucky, maybe even friends and family. Isn't it better to focus on that 90% which is good than on the 10% that's bad? You're likely to always have 90% good and 10% bad.

If you always focus on that 10% which is bad, then wouldn't you almost always be in a mean and dour mood?

I try to remember this several times throughout the day.

Friends

Another issue that's been a part of my life in recent times is making friends. Having lived in a lot of places, I found making friends was pretty easy and natural to me after I learned the pickup line "can I play?" as a kid. In school, it was "hey, did you catch any of that shit?" But now it's substantially harder to make friends as a 28 year old. No one wants to make close friends anymore because they already have close friends: Friends from elementary, high school, and college. Some even have a family and kids. So on a scale of importance, it feels like this:

Baby, husband or wife, parents, old friends, dog, cat, and new friends (<-- me).

For networking it's okay, but as a person that travels and explores the world, finding any real friends or relationships nowadays is substantially tougher. This has been quite a pressing issue for the past year. Maybe it's the place. A wise woman told me that some plants don't grow well in some environments. It's an analogy.

I'm thinking I'll write an article called "Traveller's Guide to Friends" later.

ZenMate is the Best VPN Service I've Used

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 16:33:19 +0200

Wow. I'm blown away by ZenGuard, a company based out of Berlin near Warschauer Strasse (close to the international boat party). See it on a Map.

Its VPN Chrome extension ZenMate is free and amazingly easy to use. It's a bit like Hotspot Shield from back in the old religion.

I love it because it's user friendly, fast, and free.

Once installed, just click on the shield icon to activate. Now you can access US only websites such as Pandora, Hulu, and Spotify at very acceptable speeds without getting blocked, all while on a secure and encrypted connection.

This is an awesome product.

If you want a VPN for your phone, Tunnelbear is also excellent. My friend's recommendation.

My Biggest Problem with Siri on iOS 7

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 15:33:19 +0100

This is my biggest complaint about Siri on iOS 7. I thought it’d be fixed by now but it doesn’t seem anyone cares or Apple isn’t hearing this feedback.

My biggest issue with iOS7 is that Siri covers your screen completely when it’s listening to you. This is immensely user unfriendly for me.

Many times I’ll tell Siri to call a number I’m reading either as an image on a website or even text that can’t be clicked. Or I’ll need to tell Siri some address I need to map to but when it’s listening it renders the screen useless.

I really don’t understand why Apple did this. Sure, translucency is cool and hip, but this is so unhelpful. There’s not even a way to turn this off.

Still waiting for a solution. Even this would be better. I hope I don’t need a smart watch just to read off my screen and talk to Siri at the same time.

Radio Surfing - Listen Like a Local

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 15:33:19 +0100

It's been a while since I last wrote because I think if you don't have anything good to say, it's better say nothing. I was trying to write an article on how to make friends because at age 27... it's a whole new ball game.

Anyways today, I stumbled upon something that's really fantastic for me. Remember when internet radio first came out? We were pretty into that in the year 2000, weren't we? Then we started thinking we knew what was good music. We started downloading our own music for keeps (among random trojans from Kazaa, Limewire, and Napster haha). We started getting recommendations from Pandora and Last.fm. We started listening to our library of music on the cloud via Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, and Grooveshark. We started listening to curated playlists on SoundCloud, YouTube, Songza, and 8tracks. We started listening to trending music from Twitter and smart playlists (iTunes Radio) from Apple.

But with all that, I lost sight of one of the best types of music discovery, one that feels like travelling and understanding world cultures. It's listening to local radio across the world. I still remember lying in the lounge of a Bed and Breakfast in Rio De Janeiro thinking, wow they got some amazing music here. Things I never hear back home.

Sure you'll miss the human interaction, the food, the spontaneity, the sights, but music is a lot.

In London, my Italian friend proclaimed there are 3 things that make life worth living for: food, music, and people. And I think these things define cultures and societies.

So let me tell you about radio surfing...

When you're actually travelling or couch surfing, you're taking in all the place has to offer: the people, diet, architecture, sounds, beliefs, traditions, religion, language, sources of pride, stereotypes, etc. When you're radio surfing, you're honing in on music which reveals a lot about its culture as well.

That's why the "Hey What Are You Listening To" series is so appealing. Check out this one for Moscow, somewhere I still haven't gone to. Or Dublin, a really musical city.

In my search for novelty, I've pretty much exhausted all of the traditional means of music discovery. I feel like I've listened to every one of Songza's playlists. I feel like Pandora and iTunes Radio keeps playing me the same songs. 8tracks is quite good for music discovery but gives no sense of place.

My favourite way to discover music is now radio surfing. You do this by downloading the TuneIn Radio app and searching for a city you wish you were in. For example, I'm working out right now and I'd like some Euro beats. And I know those Scandinavians play some good techno (I think there's like a Swedish ukuza or something) so I did a search for Copenhagen. Found some good stuff. For example, a station called DR P3 93.9. I heard Holes, Friends, Young Volcanoes and Hard Out Here for the first time on it.

With TuneIn Radio, you can effectively travel to anywhere in the world instanteously and listen to their radio in REAL TIME in that moment! I've been using TuneIn since 2010 and saved a few of my favourite stations from my hometown and explored some radio stations in China. But when you're in the travel radio surfing mindset, everything is different. You're saying explicity, hey I want to hear what's happening in Berlin right now. I want to get the vibe there. And just like that, there's an audio portal connecting you to the place. I wish there was a visual tunnel I can just hook into.

This is very cool. The ability to jump through space. You can spend a night in Vienna anytime you want. Another night in Tokyo. You can even listen to talk radio stations for languages you're trying to improve. So for me, that would be Chinese and German.

So there's why radio surfing is great in bullets:

you feel like you're in that city
you discover a lot more new music
you'll improve your foreign languages or hear new ones

Another fasincation of mine is video Skyping friends outdoors. For the past several years, all you could show your friends was your face and your bedroom. Now you can show them your streets and the outside world. It's amazing to see your friends out the real world and show them your moments wherever you are. I'm really happy to have unlimited 3G data.

If I have enough time this spring (I'm already working on a side project on the topic of sleep), I'd like to make a web app that combines daylight information, Google Map, and TuneIn radio. With this app, all you have to do is click on a city and it'll do a search for radio stations in the region and show you a list of radio stations. You can save radio stations on that map so you can see your colony of radio stations (hopefully the sun will never set on them). You also visually see if it's a night program or early morning one.

Mockup below:

Map Source: http://www.opentopia.com/sunlightmaprect & http://www.die.net/earth

Pro-tip: If you ever feel homesick, just listen to your hometown radio station. It always makes me smile when they talk about the streets I know during traffic jam reports. "Oh that 880, should of taken the side street!"

By the way, if anyone wants to work on this app with me. Get in touch!

Baidu Yun Pan Search

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 15:33:19 +0100

Okay, so I just found out you can search for publicly shared files on Baidu Pan. That's a lot of power. Almost too much. If you don't have an account, here's how to open one.

Let's get started!

Go to: http://so.baiduyun.me

Search for what you want:

Add it to your drive or download it:

This is pretty simple and awesome! You should follow me on Twitter or Feedburner.

How to Use iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on WIND

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 16:33:19 +0200

So you're a smart, tech savvy consumer who wants it all. Unlimited calls, texts, and data. That's why you've signed up for Wind or Mobilicity. But that's not good enough for you. You're also a highly-demanding consumer who wants the best phone too. So now you have the latest unlocked iPhone that can be used on almost every network in the world. And that's still not good enough for you. You want all that for about $30 a month.

To get this, you need to jump through a few hoops and do a few things. Here's how to get your iPhone working on Wind Mobile.

1. Cut your sim down to a nano-sim.

Make sure metal faces down. If you won't want to, it's $10 for existing customers and $25 for new customers. Here's a video that shows you how to cut it.

Your cellular services should work now but not data.

2. Set up the data network.

Make your phone settings look like the picture below. Settings->Cellular->Cellular Data Network Go into your APN setting and type: internet.windmobile.ca

See their documentation here.

3. Select the correct wind network.

Stop it messing up after you get out of subways. Disable select networks automatically. Choose WIND, not WIND (Away). Settings->Carrier

Canadian Interac E-transfer Scam

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 16:33:19 +0200

So... my friend forwarded me this. If you want a good laugh and learn how not to get scammed by interac e-transfers, keep reading.

Step 1. List something on Kijiji.

Step 2. Respond to a text message.

Step 3. Get this phishing email.

From: "Service@Paypal" <onlineaccountconsultant@in.com>

Subject: INTERAC e-Transfer from Brad John System

Date: 5 October, 2013 10:33:27 AM EDT

To: [your email]

Dear [your name] ,

Brad John sent you an INTERAC e-Transfer (previously INTERAC Email Money Transfer).

Amount: $1200.00 CADPayment sent to: [your email]

Sender's Message: A message was not provided

Expiry Date: 06 Oct 2014

Action Required:

To check and withdraw your payment, click here: https://etransfer.interac.ca/

NOTE:

This INTERAC e-Transfer payment has been deducted from the buyer's account and has been "APPROVED" but will not be credited to your account until the postage reference/tracking number is sent to us for verification so as to secure both the buyer and the seller. Below are the necessary information requested before your account will be credited.

Send postage tracking number to us or email us through this e-mail onlineaccountconsultant@in.com our Customer security service center will attend to you. As soon as you send us the postage tracking number to us for security purposes and the safety of the buyer and the seller,the money will be credited to your account and a "CONFIRMATION EMAIL" INTERAC e-Transfer Team will be send to you with the PAYMENT REFERENCE NUMBER needed to check and withdraw your payment from the link above:

PLEASE NOTE

Once item has been shipped and the tracking number sent to us,

You will receive a "CONFIRMATION EMAIL" from INTERAC e-Transfer Team informing you that the Fund has been credited.

Trouble with the link? Type it into your web browser address bar.

Need help?

http://www.interac.ca/consumers/faqs.php#emt

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

What is an INTERAC e-Transfer? (previously INTERAC Email Money Transfer). If you use online or mobile banking at a participating financial institution, you can send and receive money quickly and easily.

Email or text messages carry the notice while the financial institutions securely transfer the money using existing payment networks. If your financial institution does not yet offer INTERAC e-Transfer, you can still deposit transfers to any bank account in Canada.

Click http://www.interac.ca/consumers/faqs.php#emt for details.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

Pour voir les d?tails du virement en fran?ais, cliquez sur le lien ci-dessous :
https://etransfer.interac.ca/fr/

Step 4. Click on the fake link. Contact him about it not working.

Step 5. He demands you send it because he already paid.

Step 6. You say you don't have the money and is not an idiot to send him the item.

Step 7. He says you must and threatens you with this hilarious email.

From: jack mark <jackmark394@gmail.com>

Subject: Royal Canadian Mounted Police of Investigation From INTERAC e-Transfe

Date: 5 October, 2013 11:21:50 AM EDT

To: [your email]

Dear [your name], We're contacting you concerning the money sent from Mr. Brad john INTERAC e-Transfer account. NOTE : It is important we know the status of the transaction, otherwise, legal action may be taken against you since the buyer sent the money for theItem purchased from you including the shipping and handling fees. We believed you entered into agreement by requesting money through INTERAC e-Transfer from Mr. Brad john. Therefore, we advice you to get the item shipped out and if the item has not been shipped, you will have to face theconsequences of LEGAL ACTION You are advice to ship the item within 12Hours and get back to us with the shipment tracking number and receipt, we will credit your account with thefund(s) pending. Failure to abide to this means your Name, Picture and Address will be forward to the Law Enforcement Agency in your country to get you arrested, because you are practicing Fraud, and your account with INTERAC e-Transfer, Bank or Credit Card linked to your INTERAC e-Transferaccount will be BLOCKED and SUSPENDED , In order to free yourself from this, get the item shipped within 12hours and send the shipment tracking number and receipt to us so we can Verify the shipping and to release the fund(s) into your account. If you have any comment on this issue do not hesitate to contact us. If the information you wish to provide pertains to an emergency situation, please contact us atonlineaccountconsultant@in.com

**PLEASE NOTE**

Once item has been shipped and the tracking number sent to us,

You will receive a "CONFIRMATION EMAIL" from INTERAC e-Transfer Team informing you that the Fund has been credited.

Trouble with the link? Type it into your web browser address bar.

Need help?

http://www.interac.ca/consumers/faqs.php#emt

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

What is an INTERAC e-Transfer? (previously INTERAC Email Money Transfer). If you use online or mobile banking at a participating financial institution, you can send and receive money quickly and easily.

Email or text messages carry the notice while the financial institutions securely transfer the money using existing payment networks. If your financial institution does not yet offer INTERAC e-Transfer, you can still deposit transfers to any bank account in Canada.

Click http://www.interac.ca/consumers/faqs.php#emt for details.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

Pour voir les d?tails du virement en fran?ais, cliquez sur le lien ci-dessous :
https://etransfer.interac.ca/fr/

Websites for Teaching English Online

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:33:19 +0200

Teaching as a hobby.

Okay, so you're an unemployed liberal arts graduate who also enjoys correcting English grammar in the comments section or a factory worker who got replaced by a robot or a professional who got supplanted by a piece of software.

Do you have something you're good at such as kungfu, piano, or tennis? You can teach it and will probably really enjoy it.

Finding what you're good at.

First you need to figure out what you're good at and people are willing to pay for. I bet you're thinking, well I don't have any special skills or nutin'. Well, let me tell you this -- don't count yourself out of being special. You might not have any special skills or no nothin' but if there's one thing you're good at it's communicating in that one and only language you've known your whole life. English. They say 10,000 hours is what you need to be good at something. And you've probably had 10k hours of English schooling and practice. (It's 4 years.)

Sure it doesn't seem special to you. Heck, even homeless people ask you for money in English, right? Unless, it's those special ops ones that go around handing out cards to everyone and then comes back and collects those cards. They're the best. But in any case my point is, it doesn't seem that special but in places like China or Japan speaking English is actually considered a coveted "skill". Top Shop might not seem that special on Oxford Street but it is in NYC.

So maybe it's time you to take that one thing you're good at besides walking, eating (sure you drop food and bite your inner-cheek sometimes but come on, even Kobe can't hit every free throw), drinking (non alcoholic drinks), and sleeping -- I wonder if you can get paid for those -- and be that English teacher!

Woah. Is it that easy to teach English?

No. There are some minimum qualifications you must have. Here is a list of things you need to have if you want to make some money while feeling superior to foreigners.

A face. You need a face. I have heard people teaching English with a ridiculously good hand puppet before but those are rare. Steve Jobs rare. My recommendation is get a face, definitely worth the investment. I've found it an extremely valuable to have one for user profiles and Skyping.

Access to the internet. Do you have an internet connection on your phone? At home? A library or Starbucks? Congrats, you have internet access!

A certification. Do you have something to back up the fact you're good at English? Do you have a law degree? A Ph.D in anything involving words? I don't know if a GED or high school diploma will suffice but I guess if you lower your rate, you still can find some students. I once rented out some floor on airbnb for cheap, real cheap. If you're a perfectionist, you may want to get certified. TESOL lists some common certification such as the TEFL Certificate.

Getting your pupils.

So how do you find your first pupils? Here's a list of top language websites to get on, hard.

Colingo - airbnb for English teaching

Based in San Francisco, Colingo is a language learning and teaching marketplace. It offers students classes and 1-on-1 sessions over live online video chat. As a teacher, you'll work from home to teach English to small groups over videochat online. Commitment can be as little as 1 or 2 hours a day. Earn $14 for each hour-long class.

Languages you can teach on Colingo: English

Livemocha (Rosetta Stone) - online language learning community leader

Livemocha is an online language teaching veteran having been around since 2007. It provides instructional materials in 38 languages and a community for language learning with 12 million registered members. Acquired by Rosetta Stone in 2013, it seeks language experts to review and critique student works, language coach, content creators for classes, and translators. Language coaches work from home position but need to attend semi-annual meetings in Hub Cities: Chicago, Harrisonburg, VA, Miami, New York City, Seattle, or Washington DC. Instructors need to go through a 30-40 hour training process and are expected to work 8-15 hours per week based on learner demand. Work includes leading Studio sessions, working in Rosetta World, and reviewing language-specific Rosetta Stone content.

Languages you can teach on Livemocha: In demand languages include Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Dutch, English UK, English US, Farsi, French, German, Greek Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish Latin America, Spanish Spain, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

italki - get paid to help people learn a language

italki has its own internal currency which can be used for learning or exchanged for cash. Set your own prices but italki takes a 15% commission. You can work as a certified language teacher, tutor for language practice, or volunteer as a language exchange partner.

Languages you can teach on italki: English, Chinese (Mandarin), French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Italian, Russian, etc.

Myngle - language lessons that come to you

Founded in 2007 and based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, it offers one-on-one and group lessons online in addition to providing language learning material for 45 languages. Myngle teachers go through a special training and selection process.

Languages you can teach on Myngle: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic. 45 Languages offered.

OpenEnglish - fluency guaranteed

Founded in 2006, Open English is an international online ESL school based in Panama and focused on Latin America markets. Teachers lead online live classes and provide help to students trying to master English. Teachers will be provided with lesson plans and host hour-long classes with usually four students. During class, they help students improve pronunciation, grammar, and develop fluency through conversation.

Languages you can teach on Open English: English

eduFire - a social learning community

Founded in 2007 and based in California, EduFire provides language distance education and social network for live tutoring using text and video chat. Teachers work from home and set their own rates with a 15% fee to eduFire. Classes can be one-on-one or one-to-many.

Languages you can teach on eduFire: Japanese, Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Arabic.

For more see Wikipedia's social networking language education websites

Other ways to get students

Make a post on craigslist Get in touch or make a posting at a language school Teach at an English language school Go to a language exchange party (in India they have a saying, "the big fish eats the small fish") Make a poster and stick it on things Create a facebook page or website promoting your services Tell your social network you're teaching English and let the referrals come to you

Teaching skills and more.

You need to stay organised as a teacher. You need to start a spreadsheet of all your students so you can remember their progress and make notes on each lesson you guys have. It can be really short but you want to deliver value and good service to your pupils so always keep a record.

It also helps if you make another spreadsheet for your own learnings. What teaching tricks or epiphanies did you have during your lesson? Write it down so you can use it with your next student.

Lastly, enjoy your referrals. There's nothing quite like the feeling of someone climbing a really, really high mountain or travelling extremely far to learn from you. The day you meet a complete stranger who comes up to you and says "I've heard many a great things about you. I've come to learn English from you, master" will be a great day. It will be a glorious day.

How to Get 2TB Cloud Storage for Free with Baidu Pan (Drive)

Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:33:19 +0200

Wicked Update: Learn about searching for publicly shared files on Baidu Pan.

There comes a time when those who imitate, innovate.

My friend says China is going to take over the world. And its Weixin is way better than Whatsapp. He's in Germany so I didn't realise that until now, when he shoved Baidu Pan in my face. It is wicked.

Pricing and Storage

You can get 2 Terabyte of free cloud storage with Baidu for life for free. Unlimited bandwidth. It's a promo going on right now. This will cost you $1200 a year with Google Drive. Dropbox offers 500 GB for $499 a year.

Uploading and Torrentting to Baidu Drive

You can upload from a link (i.e. streaming) or torrent tracker file/magnet link straight into your drive.

For example, if you like a song you can just give it the song URL.

Playback and Streaming

You can play files directly from your drive by streaming or sharing it with your friends. Copy files from friends' drives directly into yours in seconds.

It also allows you to browse your files by music, video, Torrent, shared, etc.

Hosted in China

Files are hosted in China which can be pretty cool but for me it means slower download speeds. It also doesn't use https which is bad.

How to get Baidu Pan

1. Signup

2. Download its mobile app

Android - For Android: Go into your settings to allow install apps outside of Play Store. Check the box that says allow apps from unknown sources.

iPhone - Get it from iTunes.

3. Sign into Mobile App

The first field is email and second is password.

4. Claim space

Go back to pan.baidu.com and then click on claim space.

That's it

As my friend says to his non-Chinese friends, "I'm going to give you a tip that's really going to help you in life -- learn some Chinese." Baidu Pan is only in Chinese.

On another note, Tencent is offering 10TB. 360 Cloud offers 36TB for free and supposedly has faster streaming services but I haven't tried those yet. But yeah, 36 Terabytes sounds good to me :)

Update: I just got 26 TB from Yun Pan 360. Its speeds are faster but I can't use it on OS X so I can't recommend it. The sign up process is similar.

Coolest Productivity Web Startups for July 2013

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 16:33:19 +0200

Hey guys! I haven't reviewed startups and websites in a while but I feel like I need to. I'm a bit in love with a few of them. Here they are:

Web Apps

HackPad I save a lot of code and do a lot of version control by copying and saving it into a text file on my desktop. I think it'll be better on the cloud. This is a neat note taking and writing app that is also collaborative. Organize and share easily.

CodePen I do a lot of my design in the Chrome Developer Tools and Textmate, but I'm liking this cool way to code and preview your HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

MeetMe by Doodle Ever since unemployment, I've had to go to events to be social otherwise I'd just be in front of the computer all day. And no way am I going to work out of a Starbucks after living out of one for 3 months in London. I believe you can have too much of anything. Anyways, I've gotten into a habit of meeting two new, interesting people per week during this period. Never Eat Alone says, it takes one interaction outside of the initial meeting to become loose ties. I remember back in Apple London it was so easy to go out for lunch with interesting people. The office was right at Oxford Circus and it was great.

Gold.net I've also started researching stocks more. I'm really loving this Toronto startup that makes researching the financial market a lot more usable and beautiful.

Web Designs

Help is a company that tries to help you with random and well designed remedies. I like their design and interactivity. Something to think about.

Everylastdrop is a cool parallax scrolling website. I'm learning how to make one for fun. This is a good one to play around with and reference. Built using skrollr.

Why I Will Never Use Bixi Bikes... Here's How to Fix it

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 16:33:19 +0200

One of my best friends loves the Bixi Bike. I can't understand how after we spent 3 hours trying to return them to docking stations in Montreal's Biosphere. I guess some people just don't learn very well. I'm joking but I do constantly send him photos of Bixi bike station with no bikes just to tease him how ineffective the system is.

So here's why Bixi Bikes are flawed and should discontinue if they keep losing money.

1. It doesn't make sense financially.

If I buy a bike it costs me $100-$200 on the legit market. I've heard some people buying bikes for $40 on the black market. But let's assume you buy a bike that costs quite a lot, say $200. If you ride it for 2 years, it costs you $8.33 per month for transport anywhere in the city. But wait, there's a salvage value to your bike. Assuming you didn't damage it, you can probably sell it for $150. Minus $50 for maintenance costs. I actually bought a bike for $90 and sold it for $170 once after using it for a year, just so you know. Anyways, if you sell your bike for $150, your total cost for the bike is effectively $100 depreciated over 24 months so that's $4.17 a month for all your downtown transportation costs.

Bike cost: $200 Maintenance cost: $50 Salvage value: $150 Total cost depreciated over 2 years: $100 Monthly Cost: $4.17

Compare that to Bixi cost of $95 plus tax.

Annual total cost: $107.35 Monthly cost: $8.95

That's assuming you only ride 30 minute at a time so your rides are free. Its fee structure is complicated and is here:

A trip under 30 minutes will not cost you any usage fees besides the system access fees. However, a longer trip will cost you usage fees. 24-hour access example: 1 hour 22 minutes trip $5 (system access fees) + $1.50 + $4.00 = $10.50 1 hour 50 minutes trip $5 (system access fees) + $1.50 + $4.00 + $8.00 = $18.50 2 hour 5 minutes trip $5 (system access fees) + $1.50 + $4.00 + $8.00 + $8.00 = $26.50

First of all, it's so confusing. What are Bixi system access fee, usage fee, and subscription fee? Confusing nomenclature... so I'm just going to assume no system access fee and no usage fee, just that $107 annual cost.

So what does this mean? It's not going to save you any money by buying a Bixi membership.

2. It's entirely inconvenient.

Well, maybe it's more convenient? No. Do you like to commute to work and one day suddenly don't have the bike you thought you had? Now you're late. That's horrible to not have certainty like that. I like my things to be dependable.

Having hung out with a Bixi lover, I've seen him have trouble returning a Bixi to a location 10% of the time. And doing it without a Bixi app is almost unthinkable, riding around trying to find a station and hoping it isn't full.

But that's not all, if you have a meeting somewhere you need to actually walk from 5 to 10 minutes from the docking station to the meeting location. That is if the docking station isn't full. If it is, guess what? You're late! The whole beauty of a bike is you're consistently on time because traffic will not affect you. But now you need to factor in the trouble of finding a docking station and hoping it's not full. Furthermore, what if your meeting location didn't have docking station? You can't even use a Bixi. You need to take the TTC or take a taxi.

And I can't tell you how restrictive the return process is. You can't stop over and buy groceries. You can't just pull over somewhere and lock it there until you're ready to return it.

Bixi is too limiting to use if you actually live in the city. I think it would be good for tourists. But trying getting it to work as a tourist is crazy. The instructions are so complicated and you think you need to be a member or something. It's just super confusing but supposedly you can ride it for $5 a day or something. That's a great deal if I can get it to work.

3. It's not safe.

Bixi is nice because it has a basket if you need to carry stuff like a lady and it has lights. But it doesn't have a helmet. Isn't that dangerous? You should supply helmets.

I know a lot of people don't ride those bikes because they think riding in the city is too dangerous. They'd never ride it without a helmet either.

How to fix it.

Here are the things that need to be changed that will make me use it.

Make it easier to understand how to use it. It's more complicated than Microsoft's Windows Editions. Can you just make it like, "Heya! Are you a tourist? It's $5 a day. Put your credit card in for a security deposit" or "Hiyo! Are you a member? You know what to do! Peace!" Do away with the complicated rules. It's as complicated as Bell's phone plan except you don't have anyone there explaining it to you.

Reduce the limitations of returning it to those stations and timing. Can't you tag these bikes so people can lock them and drop them off anywhere? Pay an additional fee to lock the bike down so others can't borrow it if you still need it. Mercedes' Car2Go can probably give you some tips.

Make it a monthly subscription model. I don't want to sign a year contract. Look if you need a contract to keep your customers loyal, you really don't have a good product man. As a consumer, I don't like signing contracts. If you need a legal document to keep your customers... it's like those shady sales people that sell you something you don't want but are stuck with because you're locked into it. Contracts are for commodities.

I am really surprised some people love Bixi... oh dear.

Email Flowchart - How to Check Email Like a Boss

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:33:19 +0200

This is how I check my email like a boss. It's a simple form of inbox zero.

Gmail Shortcut: Delete All Unread Messages In 0.7 Seconds

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 16:33:19 +0200

Alright, here's the follow up to my Gmail usability post. It's a little disappointing Gmail didn't get any more useable since then even though I know 78K people and a big portion of Hacker News saw it. All the usability issues from my previous post still exist. I think Gmail is as sticky as Facebook now so I guess it doesn't matter.

However, like I said, I'd put out a post with some gmail tips for dealing with Gmail. Here are a couple Gmail power user tips I came up with. I was actually working on a Better Gmail Chrome Extension but man, Gmail is really complicated. I might still work on it as a learning project but here are my favourite Gmail tricks.

1. How to Attach a File in Gmail Without Having It Inside the Email

If you drag a picture into the email body then it'll be embedded into the email. And if you remove it, it won't included in the email nor attached anymore. I was quite frustrated before because Gmail would always insert pictures I was trying to attach but recently, I've noticed you can drag it into the bar below the email body. That will only attach the picture, not insert it into the email. I'm not sure if this was a new thing or I just didn't notice it before but it's awesome!

I find it funny that Gmail lets you make your emails look nice with inline images (instead of attachments) but makes it so hard to format your email.

2. Deleting All Unread Emails In 0.7 Seconds

This is the biggest gmail usability hack I've discovered in ages! This is also the trick that I'm most obsessed with because how often I delete emails. I check my email at least 8 times a day and delete over 70% of my emails. Check out this nifty Google Script App that shows you your Gmail statistics.

And I think it's not only me. Having working on email marketing campaigns, I know open rates for some emails are around 20% so I think a lot of people are also simply deleting loads of emails. Here's some data from MailChimp: How Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates and Email Marketing Benchmarks.

Anyways, I wasn't aware how much I needed a 1-click to delete all my unread messages before Gmail Tabs because now I do the same workflow for what feels like 5 mailboxes...

If you look at my usage stats above, you'll see more than 70% of my messages I delete. So a small 1-click button or shortcut to delete all my unread messages would be a highly appreciated feature. It would save a ton of clicks, especially with several tabs which requires you to do your email checking workflow for each tab.

See how it works.

Setup Instructions

1. Go to Gmail Labs in Settings.

2. Enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

3. Update the shortcuts accordingly. I've stripped out the other shortcuts to focus on only the ones you need to change. I don't know what "Teach Gmail" means so I left it in there :) Yours will look like this right now.

Change yours to make it look like this.

4. Hit "save changes".

Using the shortcut 1. Go to your inbox or tabs. 2. Read the emails you want and leave the emails you want to delete as "unread". 3. To delete: type the letters "e" and "d". 4. Done. Time to feel good about yourself.

Conclusion

You can now manage your email 像一个老板. If you love this, tell your friends. Click here! Or share using one of the social buttons below.

Gmail Tips Appendix (click to show)

The Return on Investment (ROI) of Having a Child

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:33:19 +0200

"And I'm not even counting all the times I changed your diaper."

The reason why I wrote this post is to address the idea you should start a business to make money. That shouldn't be the reason. Don't count the hours and think about getting money for hours worked. As a contractor or freelancer, you can charge your clients by the hour. As a co-founder, you should forget the hours. You're doing it because you want to change the world. No one in their right minds or logical minds should start a business to get rich, unless you're bad at math. Or really desperate.

Here's the analogy.

Having a business is like having a child.

To me starting a business is like having a child. First, you need to find the right partner to begin the journey with. A person who you admire. A person who excites you. A person who respects you back and someone you have chemistry with and can spend hours and hours with. A lot of times your partner is found by chance. Much like finding a husband or wife, you can find your partner through your social networks, through work, online, etc.

Benefits of having a child. Anyways, you find someone and decide you both want the same thing and are willing to dedicate the most valuable possession you have on this pursuit. So you have your kid. Hopefully, this kid can provide for you when you're older. That's called Return on Investment (ROI). A lot of Asian parents believe in this ROI myth.

The other benefts of having a kid is you get to live forever. You are effectively your DNA. Your children are comprised of your DNA so it is you and your partner immortalised. Unless, your kid dies or can't reproduce. Just like a company can live on long after you die; a company is the founders' legacy.

The final benefits of having a child are happiness and a sense of purpose in life. To have a child is to know love at its ultimate form. If you think you know love because of your parents or romantic partner, wait until you have a child. It is more than anything you've ever known. From what I've heard it's like "letting your heart walk around outside of your body." Some say children bring purpose to people’s lives just as some say entreprenurship gives life meaning.

The Financial Return on Investment of having a child.

Cost of Investment.

Let's see if it makes financial sense to create a human child. Let's analyse this investment vehicle.

In the UK, it takes £218,000 on average to raise a child. That's about £10,382/year. In the USA, it cost $300,000 to raise a child until age 18 (full report). Some parents pay for college. If you do that would be $38,500 per year on average for a private college. College Board finds that in 2011-2012, the annual average tuition and fees were $28,500 at 4-year private colleges and annual room and board was $10,089. So let's not pay for their higher education.

My old boss joked (I'm assuming it was a joke) how he's going to track all the money he spends on his child and make his kid pay him back. I thought that was an ingenious idea, if only to shove at their faces when they try to talk back.

Ok, sweet. You're down $300,000. Let's see how much we can make back!

Bad debts.

PewTrends finds only a quarter of adult children are providing financial care assistance to a parent:

While most adults believe there is a responsibility to provide for an elderly parent in financial need, about one-in-four adults (23%) have actually done this in the past year.

MetLife's research institute confirms:

The proportion of adult children providing personal care and/or financial assistance to a parent has more than tripled over the past 15 years. Currently, a quarter of adult children, mainly Baby Boomers, provide these types of care to a parent.

Ok so what does that mean? Basically, right off the bat, you have 75% of your investments defaulting. Kids are worse than subprime. Kids are truly a toxic asset class.

So you keep your expectations low, okay?

Reaching Profitability.

It's going to take your baby a lot of time to make some money for you. And the median household income is $50,502 in 2011. Given that it's likely the household has two people, let's say it's $25,000 per person. Reality test: The overall median personal income for all individuals over the age of 18 was $24,062.

Let's say yo baby gives you 25% of his or her income for 13.5 years. That's $84,375.

Congratulations, you've lost $215,625 on your investment.

Oh wait. We need to account for the 75% of kids that don't provide care for their parents. So the expected return is actually 1/4 * 84,375 or $21,094. Hot dog!

Hold on. That's actually $21,094 for you and your spouse. Your personal expected return on having a child is a grand total of $10,547. Since we're assuming you're married, we'll just sum your payouts together then substract your combined investment of $300,000. This leads to a $278,906 net loss.

But that's not all.

Time value of money.

The average age a mother has a child in the USA is 25. You retire at age 65. So that's 40 years. Did you know one dollar 40 years ago is now with $5.24?

So since whatever money you're getting now is worth less, you're actually only getting 19 cents now for every dollar you're expected to get 40 years in the future (assuming historic trends by using the 5.24 multiplier).

Your baby's promise to hit you back on the first doesn't sound that good now. As a econ/finance major, I know my calculations are really crude but the point is still valid.

Why it's not even close.

Life expectancy in the USA is 78.64 (source: World Bank) so that's about 13.5 years you need to account for assuming you retire at age 65.

Well that's not fair you had to spend 18 years raising your kids and then they continue to pester you for the rest of your life. In fact, nearly 60% of parents give financial support to adult children. And sometimes yo babies even have mo babies just so they can make yo babysit yo babies' babies. The nerve.

And even worse, studies show:

Family financial transfers flow mainly from ageing parents to their adult children: Nearly one-quarter of older households have given large financial or material gifts (worth €5,000 or more) to their children in the last ten years. In contrast, only 9% of older adults have received financial transfers from their children.

How much do you need anyways?

Given it's not fair you have to spend over 18 years looking after them and they only spend 13.5, how much would yo baby need to provide to cover your costs?

For the sake of a simple calculation, say you live in a nursing home. It's an average of $80,000 a year. You're going to need $1,080,000 from your kid. Now, not in 40 years by the way.

So unless yo baby's name is Beyonce, it's unlikely you're going to be getting a MiniCooper or a house from yo baby any time soon.

In conclusion.

Having a kid like starting a business is a stupid idea, financially. So don't do it for the money. And vice versa.

By my rough calculations the ROI is negative $278,906. Some people simply say the return is zero [1][2]

So strictly financially speaking, having a child means a huge negative ROI. And that's not even counting the hours spent changing diapers, years upon years of doing maid service, performing cook duties, etc.

Sometimes I wonder how we continue as a species. But then again... $139,453 is a small price to pay for a chance at immortality.

Why Gmail 2013 Sucks

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:33:19 +0200

I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something.

I'm upset with the new Gmail. I've been using Gmail since it first came out in 2004. Back then we all coveted the invites. Back in 2004, if someone asked you "did you get an invite", you knew exactly what invite. It was "the" invite. I've been in love with it ever since -- until recently when I was forced to upgrade to the new UI. It's terrible. I've been trying to not upgrade for the longest time but now it's mandatory. It's terribad.

This is why the 2013 Gmail sucks

1. I can't easily delete my signatures. You know when you're messaging back and forth with people, you sometimes strip out your email signatures to reduce clutter and make it more readable and less formal? Now you have to click on three tiny dots and then do it. And sometimes I forget because it's hidden from view. This is crappy. It's not user friendly.

2. I can't easily change my email subject. Sometimes you're replying or forwarding an email and you need to modify the subject. For example, you want to modify an email to send to someone else. It takes 3 clicks!! You first click on type of response. Edit subject. And then click into the subject. This is stupid.

Furthermore, it violates a powerful UI heuristic:

Recognition rather than recall - Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

3. Ok, so what if you want to insert a link or something. You have to hover over the + and then can click. That's 2 steps instead of one. If I wanted something so minimalist I would use gmail on my iPhone. It's not even saving space! You still have the bar there. If you really didn't want those buttons visible you can make them appear on hover over the whitespace of the bar instead.

Furthermore, I actually liked the check link feature that took you to the link URL. That's gone now.

4. Rapportive doesn't work. You know when you're writing to someone, how awesome it is to see their latest tweets and see who they are? It's also an error prevention feature to confirm the email you're using is correct. By breaking Rapportive and obscuring information such as the recipient's email address (only showing the name), hiding the "from" and "subject" fields, and concealing the signature part, Gmail makes it a lot easier for users to send flawed emails because users are not able to double check these fields.

Usability Heuristic: Error Prevention - Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.

5. You can't easily get access to people's emails. You can't easily change your sending email address. You can't easily add cc or bcc. You can't easily add bullets and change fonts. You can't easily do anything other than reply. Everything is hidden. Even after you discover where everything is concealed, it still takes twice as long to do than before. While I'm not saying have as many buttons and ribbons as Microsoft Word, these are basic functions I use everyday. And it's entirely not convenient.

If you want to access and copy the sender's email you need to click on a tiny little show details button.

It's not only the clean desk versus messy desk argument. It's also stop putting away the things I'm currently using. I might like to have a clean desk but if I'm writing a letter, I don't want to open my drawer every time I want to reach for a piece of paper, pen, pencil or eraser.

So they're breaking another usability heuristic:

Flexibility and efficiency of use - Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.

You want to make something easy to use. But this feels like I've went from an automatic car to a standard. Why do I have to do all this work? Is it saving me gas? Is it more fun? Personally, no this does not make email more fun for me nor does it appear to be saving me gas.

In conclusion.

You're making something more basic and harder to use in favor of minimal design. This isn't search. You can't reduce a full-email platform down to a message box. If I wanted that, I'd use Facebook which supports email now.

There is a tradeoff in HCI that is between ease and efficiency. It seems Gmail is less easy to use AND less efficient. The only improvement seems to be design.

I'd prefer to have the functions mentioned above be more accessible. Maybe a shortcut that just pops up the advanced editor mode. Or have a simple mode that's basically like the gmail app for people who actually find this new Gmail usable. I can't be the only one who hates the new Gmail?

I'm so annoyed by how unfriendly the new interface is for me I've even decided to learn more Gmail shortcuts. Here are a couple useful ones for the New Gmail 2013.

Reveal the CC box: Ctrl + Shift + c or Mac: ⌘ + Shift + c This will also bring up the from email field :D so you don't need to memorise that shortcut. However, there is no shortcut to edit the subject field.
Replies to all message recipients: a
Moves the conversation to Trash: #

Unfortunately there's no real shortcut for popping out to reply in a new window. It's funny how people didn't know that it was possible. I wonder if they did usability studies and asked people to change the subject... And if they did, did they just ignore how many couldn't figure it out or how much longer it took them? In my case, I know it possible but it's still a hassle, I'd like a shortcut as a bandaid to this terribad UI.

I'm also using Live email more. It's definitely getting a lot better and is a real competitor to Gmail now in my opinion. I also feel their integration with Skydrive is better than Gmail's integration with Drive, but that's another topic.

This picture probably best sums up how unusable and silly the new 2013 Gmail is.

Update: May 3rd, 2013 Wow. I wanted a discussion on this but didn't realise it was going to be this big. From the Hacker New discuss page, I realised I forgot to mention the new picture attachment design flaw. By attaching a picture, it inlines the picture into the email body. But if you don't want it in the body (aka delete picture from body), you don't know if the picture is still attached. No visual feedback to user.

Related articles:

FastCompany - How A Tiny New Compose Window Could Reinvent Gmail

Quora - Gmail: What are the six types of email users identified by Google? Quora

Ghacks - Temporarily switch back to old compose mode

Gizmodo - Gmail shortcuts cheat sheet

Primer to Building Products in a Lean Startup

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:33:19 +0200

Kera laid off all employees recently (out of money). I've worked for several startups but Kera was the one of the few that I worked for that didn't have product-market fit. This meant I learned a lot about finding it. They say you learn more by failing and doing it yourself.

I'd like to share some of those learnings. First, I'll go over the tests used in a lean startup. Second, the AARRR metrics that we tracked. And third, some ideas on how to improve those metrics.

Testing in Lean Startups

There are 4 tests that are really useful for a startup.

A/B Tests (comparative): This tells you what works better and by how much. This is really easy to do with Optimizely. Create variants and then see how they convert.
Usability Test (qualitative): This tells you why things are happening. This is how you conduct a usability study.
Funnel Analysis (quantitative): This tells you what you need to work on. It gives you an overview of the journey your visitors go through to become your customers. There are drop offs at each step. Optimise the part that gives the most net results.
Cohort Analysis (quantitative): This shows how a group of users perform over time. You can segment your users based signup date, feature set, geography, referral source, etc. and see how they retain over time.

These testing and measuring methods are very open-ended so it's up to you to determine what tests to use, what to measure, how to set it up, and how to determine success. Cohort analysis is more complicated to set up than the others so I recommend checking out Ash's Actionable Metrics and Jonathan's Intro to Cohort Analysis. You should also check out this video by Mixpanel.

Startup Metrics

So now you have a number of tests you can use to evaluate your hypothesis, but what do you measure? By far the most renown and adopted set of metrics are Dave McClure's AARRR metrics. I think it's because it's catchy, generally true, and can be flexibly applied to any startup. Here are some metrics that I like categorised into acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.

Examples of Acquisition Metrics

Click-through rate (CTR) - this tells you how well something works or is used. For example, the CTR on a call-to-action button or banner.
Time - this tells you how engaged a user is with that page or element.
Tasks did - this tells you what users did.
DAU and MAU - mostly vanity metrics that give a high level overview of how the user acquisition pipeline is doing.
Entry points - where did the user come from? For example, blog, Quora, social media, press mentions, referral links, emails/newsletters, adwords (SEM), display ads, landing pages, separate apps, organic search (SEO), affiliate marketing, biz dev, print media, inside sales, Tumblr, Soundcloud, Pinterest, Slideshare, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. UTM tracking can be very helpful with tracking this. You can generate a UTM link here.
Exit points - what's the last thing users saw before leaving?
Install/DAU - how quickly are you gaining new signups proportional to your user base?
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) - how much does it take to get a sign up? Total cost of that channel divided by number of signups within a period.

All these metrics can be used to help you determine how successful are you at converting visitors into signups. You should also be able to answer: How many visitors are you getting? Where are visitors coming from? How high quality are different kinds of traffic? Pick 2-5 to focus on at a time.

Examples of Activation Metrics

Time - how long do they spend?
Click-through rate (CTR) - are they engaging with something? Do they see it and click it?
Tasks did - what did the users do? How many times?
Goal completion - do they complete the goals given?
First action - what did they do first?
Last action - what was the last thing they did before leaving?

These metrics (some of which are the same as acquisition ones but interpreted or used differently) can help you understand how good your first time user experience (FTUE) is and if visitors become real users. You can use ClickTale and Crazy Egg to see what users are engaging with on your site (it integrates into Optimizely). You can also do usability testing in person (or outsource it) to see why users aren't activating. Read about user testing here.

Examples of Retention Metric

1-day, 3-day, 7-day, and 30-day retention rates - these report what percentage of your users return within a given period of time.
Daily revisits - how many times per day users come back to the site given that users come back?
Median Return Time - median time before users come back.
Re-marketing Effectiveness - views and CTR for newsletters, notifications (text messages, emails, etc.), RSS, advertising, etc. to get users to re-engage with the app.

These are probably the most important metrics because it shows you how useful your application, website or game is to people. An application can be really fun and engaging such as rumpetroll but if people lose interest quickly and don't return, it's not very sustainable.

Examples of Referral Metric

K-factor - (invites sent)*(conversion to signup from invite)
Invites sent - number of invites sent.
CTR & CPA - click-through and install conversion rates from various sources, campaigns, and copy.
Impressions - number of views generated from viral activities such as embed widget, tweets, facebook posts, etc.
Viral Cycle Time - time it takes to send referral.

Some of the best articles on viral marketing I've read are these by David Skok: The Science behind Viral Marketing and Lessons Learnt in Viral Marketing, which talk about two key parameters that drive viral growth, the Viral Coefficient and the Viral Cycle Time.

Examples of Revenue Metrics

Life Time Value - (how much you make from the avg. customer)*(how long avg. customer stays with you).
LTNV - this adds in the value of referral from the customer as well. One way to calculate: 1/(1-kfactor)*(Monthly ARPU)*(User's lifetime)
ARPU - average revenue per user.
ARPPU - average revenue per paying user.
% Paying - percentage of users paying out of total users.

Customer Life Time Value is like cohort analysis in that it's extremely valuable and a bit complicated. Check out KISSMetric's article on calculating Customer Life Time Value article. HBS has a CLTV calculator. This Top 10 Social Gaming Metrics from jefftee is pretty useful.

How do you decide what to test (and build)?

We usually look at the funnel and see where we can improve that will result in the biggest net effect. What project will give the highest ROI given the objective of the company at this time (i.e. engagement, retention, virality, or monetization)?

Again, let's look at the metrics and think of things we can do to try to improve those metrics:

Examples of Ways to Improve Acquisition Metrics

Click-through rate (CTR)
This can be improved by changing the copy, visuals, and placement. Providing more signup options. Adding animation. Lightboxing. Changing the content type (i.e. make it a video or slider or ajax).
Time
This can be increased by giving the user more things to look at or do, removing elements, changing the visuals, adding video, and changing the copy. It's effective to use A/B testing and track the visitor through your funnel or split-test cohort analysis. Netflix uses split cohort experiments to determine product success.
Tasks did
Once you find what actions increase user acquisition or activation you can optimise your website or application to drive that task completion. For example, at Kera we found if someone watched our tutorial, they were more than 3X to sign up. Thus we made it a priority to optimise our site for people to watch the tutorial. One way to boost conversion to that task is remove other clutter and then A/B test copy and visuals.
DAU & MAU
These are vanity metrics which won't tell you why things are this way or how to improve but still good to track for overall picture.
Entry points
Entry points are very important. This is split into two categories: marketing and product. I'll talk about product improvements in the viral metrics section. Here, you can work on ways to improve conversion for the largest volume channels and increase traffic for lowest cost channels and best converting channels. You should try lots of user acquisition channels. GrowHack is a good website on the subject and the TreeHouse has a good article.
Exit points
In general, you want people to stay on your site so try to improve parts of your site that have higher than normal exit rates. Why are they leaving from that part of the site? Can you convince them to stay? You can improve the copy, change the visuals, add or remove elements, or maybe even remove that page altogether.
Install/DAU
Again this depends what you want to do. If you want to increase signups you can do it with marketing and viral features. It's important to monitor retention rate because a dip in retention rate in make it seem like you're getting more virality.
CPA
You should spend more money and resources on marketing channels that give you the lowest CPA until you see marked diminishing rates of return. However, you should also track this through the funnel to see if those signups convert into paying customers.

Examples of Ways to Improve Activation Metrics

Time
You may want to increase or decrease the time people spend on your site or application. For example, Google wants you to leave its homepage as fast as possible but wants you to come back. If you're Freshbooks, you want people to create invoices as fast as possible and be done with it. Most sites want to increase this engagement metric because it means your product is interesting, useful, or valuable to people. You can improve this by providing better user experience, reducing website speed, making things easier, etc. In general, you should refine your features so they work really well and are easy to use rather than introducing new ones. If you're a content website, make longer higher quality content.
Click-through rate (CTR)
This can be improved by changing the copy, visuals, and placement. Reducing perceived risks and increasing rewards. Adding animation. Lightboxing. Changing the content type.
Tasks did
Increase visibility of those tasks, add rewards, reduce perceived risks, content gating, adding it to a to-do list, putting it in a progress meter, prompting the user. Try Qualaroo.
Goal completion
You can drive goal completion by making the steps linear and preventing users from doing anything else unless they complete the goal. For example, after you sign up for Twitter they make you follow people. There is only the next button which is inactive unless you follow at least 5 people.
First action
If you're Twitter and you see cohorts with first action being follow someone has a retention rate of 30% compared to first action being change profile picture with retention rate 20%, you should probably introduce follow someone in your onboarding process first. Keep learning from this once you've changed your application to require users to follow someone, what's the next first action that drives retention?
Last action
Potentially these are places users are getting stuck or confused. Test things you can do to help them get through it or drive them somewhere else before they leave. Keep them busy with more tasks. Improve the user experience. Olark or Qualaroo can likely help.

Examples of Ways to Improve Retention Metric

1-day, 3-day, 7-day, and 30-day retention rates
For a web application, the advice is make it useful. For a website, make it valuable. And for a game, make it fun. There are tactics you can use to get people to come back though. I've brainstormed a few. For example, social games have timers that you set and need to come back around that time to get the reward. Games can have things happen while the player is gone, so when they return there's fun stuff to interact with. Likewise, websites need to update their content so readers come back. Facebook, Twitter, and SoundCloud have streams and feeds which are like information crack. That's why email is so addictive :)

You can make it more social as well. If you have friends who are sending you messages on it and engaging with you, it's harder to stay away. It's a feeling of obligation. Facebook asks old users to welcome new users by writing on their wall to get the ball rolling.
Daily revisits - I brainstormed some tactics and strategies to boost daily and overall retention. Ideas:
1. Improve revisits by limiting the amount of things a user can do at once.
2. Providing new content over time (i.e. Groupons, new pictures, articles, maps, courses, and videos).
3. Having a waiting period (i.e. Google Drive compressing something, asking to come back in 5 minutes).
4. Provide interesting or motivational stats and tracking (i.e. Codecademy streaks, 3 wins before unlock next level).
5. Social appeal (i.e. see who else is online).
6. Social obligations (i.e. don't want to keep my friends waiting for a reply too long).
7. Make the user pay up front (i.e. your local gym).
8. Increasing switching costs (i.e. helping users accumulate virtual goods, not allowing data export, purchased iOS apps, skills-based: giving out free software for students like AutoDesk).
9. Free updates.
10. Adding a progress bar and open loops. Read about progress bars.
11. Adding random variables on login (i.e. gambling, habit forming technique, Tumblr's new login page).
12. Rewards/gifts given over time (i.e. freebies that require you to come back to use).
13. Higher visibility (i.e. toolbars, desktop icons, bookmarks).
14. Giving a lot of missions that can not be done in one sitting. (i.e. World of Warcraft).
15. New features.
16. Time based events (i.e. remember Pokemon? You had to stay up until 9pm to catch a Caterpie. And this game takes it to a higher level.).
Median Return Time
Create rewards to come back sooner, insert punishments for being away too long (remember your baby Tamagotchi?), shorten timers and appointments, and increase the pace of the content or game.
Re-marketing Effectiveness
You can drive existing customers back with advertising, newsletters, notifications, RSS, social media mentions, etc. For example, if you use an iOS device you'll get lots of notification from apps trying to get you to re-engage. Facebook sends you a lot of emails recommending friends for you to add if you're a new Facebook user. Twitter sends you people who are similar to those that you follow. Airbnb sends you text messages about your booking. Tips: Improve copy, have a CTA, and give rewards i.e. sale, coupon, free gift.

Examples of Ways to Improve Referral Metric

K-factor - Indirect metric of metrics below.
Invites sent - Ideas below:
1. Increase touchpoints for referrals.
2. Add more ways of referring such as Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, email, Tumblr, etc.
3. Give them a tool to invite (i.e. I used Dropbox's tool to email 5000 of my gmail contacts).
4. Maybe increase scarcity (i.e. if I only have 10 referral I value it more than if I had unlimited).
5. Give rewards for referrals.
6. Give examples of who to refer.
7. Help them target right people (i.e. Zynga peopel who like games).
8. Increase inherent incentive for inviting friends (i.e. more social interaction features with friends).
9. Cut down time before inviting.
10. If you're a game, you can require someone to help you do something by inviting them, sharing your accomplishments and adding rewards to entice signups. If you're an app, ask users to create teams and share work or projects.
11. Make a widget for your product (i.e. Etsy mini).
12. Put your logo on stuff (i.e. Freshbook invoices).
13. Ask them to include a badge on their site or write about you in return for some value.
CTR & CPA - Improve copy, visuals, and focus on what works.
Impressions - Find partners, give incentives, create embeddable widgets, add more platforms.
Viral Cycle Time - Shorten, simplify, and incentivise.

Examples of Ways to Improve Revenue Metrics

Customer Life Time Value and LTNV
Increase virality, ARPU, or user life time. Customer life time can be lengthened by good user experience, brand loyalty, new features, new missions, introducing internal economy (i.e. google apps, Eve Online, Amazon Affiliates), create some setbacks, and new content.
ARPU
Sell more things (i.e. what are people willing to pay for?). Wider range of pricing. Renting. Internal economy (allow users to buy, sell, exchange i.e. apple takes 30% of app revenue.). Adding new revenue streams such as advertising, product placement, and deals (those surveys you know?).
ARPPU
Try increasing the price until it reaches market price. Careful not to hurt repeat buying by setting the price too high. Introduce luxury goods and features. Sell addons. Even apple sells headphones and cases. There's no shame in it, unless you're like Ryanair. That's just evil.
% Paying
More touch points for payment. More payment options. Better features or goods worth buying. Increase scarcity i.e. have a limited time deal. Reduce price. Add freebies for purchasing. Incentivise first time buyers. Give away free redeemable coupons (get them familiar with buying process). Ask for payment information up front (i.e. Apple's App Store). Restrict features (i.e. Rdio limits plays per month). Give free a trial and optimise it (i.e. test trial length, features accessible, etc.). Change what's included in packages (i.e. Spotify mobile app only available for paying users).

Conclusion

That's my comprehensive guide on the metrics that you'll need to know and work with at a lean startup. Feel free to share and distribute this. I'm open to feedback and comments as well.

How to Conduct a Usability Study

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:33:19 +0200

I wrote on the Kera Blog a few days ago about conducting usability studies. It's a very personal and valuable post that I want to keep. It's not good to have duplicate content for Google rankings but it's okay to have some. Furthermore, my personal blog is mostly for myself. Here's the re-post:

I've conducted several usability tests for different web applications but it's still time consuming to plan and I always feel like I'm forgetting something. Many people know the importance of doing usability studies but not so many are able to do it well.

Similar to me, many developers, designers, and product managers fell into this UX role and had to learn it themselves. It’s taken me a while to learn how to conduct effective, valuable user testing so I thought I’d write a guide and checklist for those who don’t do this as their full-time job or just starting out.

Similar to me, many developers, designers, and product managers fell into this UX role and had to learn it themselves. It's taken me a while to learn how to conduct effective, valuable user testing so I thought I'd write a guide and checklist for those who don't do this as their full-time job or just starting out.

Basic Idea of Usability Study

If something isn't performing well, you have to go be a detective and figure out why. That's the essence of doing user testing.

This is something I really enjoy doing because as a product owner, you always want to build the best product possible and there's nothing like watching real people use your product. For my maps business, I literally stood in the retail stores and watched how people responded to the product: if they noticed the product, how they responded to it, how they decided whether or not to buy, why they bought it, etc. It's like being a modern-day Sherlock Holmes but less dangerous.

Recently, I performed a usability test for our latest product, the Get Started Widget and will use examples from it.

Reasons to do a Usability Test

The main benefits of doing web usability testing are

You get unfiltered and high bandwidth feedback
You can see how users think and points of confusion
You get to figure out the why
You feel like Sherlock Holmes

Usability testing is a qualitative method of research which is much better suited for answering question about why or how to fix a problem. Quantitative methods such as A/B testing do a much better job answering how many and how much questions. Nielsen Norman Group has a great article on which user experience research methods to use.

Aside: If your company has a support team, the team lead should be involved with user experience in general because those people really understand the pain of the customer and can often provide ideas and suggestions to vastly improve the product.

For example, at Wimdu we were missing out on signups because of our Facebook Connect design. We didn't know this but we confused some users into thinking we required Facebook in order to sign up. People actually called in to try to figure out how to sign up without Facebook. We fixed this with by adding a horizontal rule with the word "or" between the sign up methods. That ceased those types of support calls.

Step 1. Planning (1-3 hours)

Have an objective(s). Why are you doing this study? What questions do you want answered?

Kera Example

Study Objective 1: Do people know what what they're signing up for?

Study Objective 2: Why are people not embedding?

Study Objective 3: How easy is it for users to use our application?

Decide on goals for the user to accomplish. What would success look like?

Kera Example

Goal: User creates a mission and embeds widget on his or her site.

Have hypotheses (optional). Although it is recommend to have one, I have often been really successful without one especially early on. Sometimes product challenges are so difficult, you need to do research just to get a hunch. In this case, keep an open mind and just watch users and take in what is happening without any bias to prove or disprove.

Alternatively, you may want to conduct a heuristic evaluation, a review by a usability expert of your UI against accepted heuristics, to generate some hypotheses. This can also help you create appropriate tests and prototypes for the next step. See also: Tips on doing it yourself and a primer.

Kera Example

Hypothesis 1: People don't understand how to use the application.

Hypothesis 2: It's not friendly to marketers.

Choose a location. This should be as close to the environment of the actual user as possible.

Kera Example

Location: Office environment, on users' own computers.

Make a list of questions you want to ask. These include interview questions you might want to ask, prompts for follow-up questions, as well as post-experiment questions that you want to ask each participant.

Screening Questions:
What's age? What do you do? Have you ever embedded a YouTube video?

Experiment Questions:
Did you understand you'd be getting a widget for your website?

What do you think we do?

How would you describe us to your friends?

You can also try to understand what is going through the user's head by asking them questions as they are using the application. See "asking question to get the why" in Step 3.

A usability test plan template. Here's a template that can help you plan your study.

Step 2. Setting Up the Study. (1-6 hours)

Get the prototype or test environment ready. Create and ready the materials you need for the study. For example, do you need build anything, create mockups, set up a test or local environment, disable A/B testing, etc.?

You may want to pilot test the study to help you identify gaps in your experiment or test setup.

Prepare a way to record the study. Recording the user is best because you may want to reference it again if you missed anything and it allows you to administer the test better since you're not focused on taking notes. (And I'm pretty sure all good spies use recording equipment.) If you're not recording, figure out how to take good notes. If you're collecting quantitive data, prepare a form or table to help you quickly take notes and stay organised.

Get the people. Ideally you'll have a pool of candidates to ask to come in for a usability study. I suggest putting up posters offering cash for participation around offices, incubators, and universities. And online on craigslist, etc.

If you don't have a pool to select from, you can try finding participants on the spot at cafes, offices, universities, meetup groups, and hallways.

You should pick a few types of people for your user groups because it's interesting to see how different groups respond but if you're testing for general usability, random people with normal intelligence are just as effective. I'd recommend 4-8 participants. Since our product is for web users, we wanted to get people who are internet savvy. We put people in 3 groups: business/marketing, engineering, and general.

A usability study checklist. Here's a checklist to help you prepare for conducting a web usability test by Steve Krug's Rocket Surgery Made Easy book.

Step 3. Executing the User Research Study. (1-4 hours)

Greeting the participant. You should brief the users in a standardised way that allows you to understand them and helps them give you the best feedback possible. A sample script:

Kera Example

Intro to Usability Study:

Have you done a usability study before? (yes/no) Great, just to give you an idea of how this works. We'll be asking you to take a look at our website and asking you some questions. Then we'll get you to try our application to perform some tasks. It should take about 25 minutes in total. We're going to be testing the web application to see if it is understandable and usable. We're not testing you. There are no right or wrong answers.

Intro to Marketing Site Analysis:

Say a friend has sent you a link to this site. I'm going to give you a few moments to look at the site and then ask you what it's about. Look around the site as you would normally. This is yours– go ahead. (Open the site/test environment and give them the laptop or mouse/keyboard.)

Intro to Task Completion:

Now we're going to ask you to use our application. (After finding out participant was a history major). I'm going to give you a scenario. Let's say you're a project manager for a museum's website that has users. You want your users to be more engaged and active so someone has recommended that you take a look at this site. You have developer resources but you're going to take a look first and evaluate it because you're responsible for this project.

I highly recommend watching this short video on how to run in-person experiments on Stanford's HCI course (slides) and this Zipcar usability test example. If the videos are no longer available you can still find them in my shared Usability Toolkit folder on Box below.

Lastly, collect information on the participant and get them to fill out any paperwork if necessary (i.e. contact info, demographic data, consent, NDA, etc.). Many templates are in the Usability Toolkit folder at the end.

Observing and taking notes. Observing the user is one of the main benefits of in-person experiments. Watch users as they attempt to perform tasks with the user interface. Collect quantitive data on task completion. Record interesting findings. Log points of confusion. Steps users took to complete a task or to explore/navigate your website. Note what users were looking at and what they ignored. What users say and ask.

Kera Example

Some notes I made:

- she clicked on 'get started' button because she wanted to get more info; not interested in pricing yet

- visuals were the main thing she looked at; headlines second; text copy was ignored

- visuals did not communicate to user what our product was. it was confusing

- welcome message– user ignored it

- get started icon– she was not interested in clicking it and didn't know what it was

- user did not click on it was because didn't know what it was

Asking questions to get the why. There are many questions you can ask during the study to understand why users are doing certain things, why they did something, what mental models they have, and what they were guessing or attempting to do. Some questions I ask are:

Kera Example

Can you describe what is happening?

How would you go about doing [something]? Take a guess.

What do you want to click on now?

What do you want to know now?

Why did you do that?

What are you thinking?

What do you think this is? (point to a UI element).

Is there anything you're confused about or that stands out to you?

People don't always tell Sherlock Holmes the truth. As NN Group explains self-reporting can be skewed because often users tell you what they think you want to hear, what they remember, and rationalise.You should use your judgement on what's really happening based on your observations and use questions as another source in your investigation.

Asking the user to talk aloud. The think aloud protocol is an effective method to understand what is going through a user's mind. It's similar to asking questions to get to why but here the user is talking aloud as he or she is performing the task uninterrupted. You'd need to teach the user how to think aloud first. I usually say something like this:

As you’re doing the task, I want you to say aloud whatever you are thinking. For example, if I am thinking aloud (take a pen), I’d say: I see this pen. It has a blue cap so I assume the ink will be blue. It looks like I can just pull it off so I’ll try to pull it. Great, it worked.

Or see 8:25 of the in-person experiment video to see a Stanford professor do it.

Often this is hard for a user so you'd need to revert back to prompting the user or asking questions to get the why. Remember: participants who think aloud will be slower at performing tasks and may behave differently.

Debrief the participant. This is the time when you can 1. inform them about the purpose of study if you couldn't before 2. get them fill out paper survey questionnaires and 3. get them to sign a receipt of remuneration.

Step 4. Summarising and Presenting Findings. (2-5 hours)

Refining notes. Right after each participant, take the time to write down all your observations and particularities while they are still fresh in your mind. Quickly check the notes you made during the study to see if they can be understood later on and convert to long-form if necessary.

Aggregate findings and performing calculations. You'll get an idea of the most critical discoveries which will drive your report. Compile all the qualitative findings into main takeaways, citing numbers or percentages to indicate importance. Do the same with quantitive data. Perform calculations as need. Here's a website with many useful calculators for usability testing.

Reporting findings. Summarise the goal, participant characteristics, results, and recommendations. The report depends on the scale of the project and your audience. If it's a small study for your startup, it can be relatively informal. If it's for a client, you might need to package your presentation accordingly. Here are some tips.

Presenting. It's great to give a presentation to the team in person so you can be sure you're communicating the findings effectively. You can also take this time to answer questions, discuss the implications, and brainstorm improvements or follow-on studies together.

Final Thoughts

You might want to outsource this. While I enjoy doing it in-house and being close to users, there are definitely companies that specialise in UX and conduct great usability tests. A couple relatively cheap and easy to use ones are YouEye and usertesting.com

To me, data without reason is just noise. For example, if there is correlation between flu outbreaks and iPhone releases, would you trade on it? Probably not because there is no underlying rationale. There are many dangers to basing decisions on just data such as randomness, data dredging, confounding variables, correlation vs. causation, Simpson's Paradox, false discoveries, etc.

I'd recommend using both A/B testing and usability studies to give you both strong data but also help you uncover the reasons for why things are happening. Usability studies and talking to your users is the best way to confirm or disprove your reasoning.

Books and other excellent sources that helped me

Checklists for your usability study. Get it here.

Template for planning usability study. Get it here. More templates on usability.gov

Example of an expert conducting a usability study for Zipcar. See it on YouTube.

Example of usability study process for Boxee. Read the article here.

UX Books, classes, people and more.

This is a prerequisite for starting out in user experience. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. Here's a nice review.

This is the most respected web usability guide. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.

Usability Testing Demystified by Dana Chisnell. She also has several great articles on UX Magazine and her website.

Human-Computer Interaction Course (Stanford + Coursera.org)

Hack Design. An easy to follow design course for hackers who do amazing things.

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, 2nd Edition (Downloadable sample eBook or on Amazon) by Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell

Whitney Hess is a UX designer who has really gone out of her way to help aspiring UX designers and people interested in this field like me. Some good ones: So you want to be a user experience designer, You're not a user experience designer if, Whitney Hess's recommend UX resources, and UXers Twitter List.

This is my Usability Toolkit shared folder where I keep a lot of my resources for user experience design. Say hi and get in touch over Twitter if you want to be a collaborator.

---

Taige Zhang is a Product Marketer at Kera. You can follow him on Twitter @taigeair.

ZapTravel - Probably the Most Beautiful, User Friendly Travel Site Out There

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:33:19 +0200

ZapTravel is a beautifully made travel startup by Andrew Lacy, the guy who cofounded Tapulous. It's a joy to use because its aesthetics is amazing. It's like 500px + Kayak got together with powerset. This startup is based in San Francisco and Europe (London + Paris), and backed by Khosla Ventures (listed on Angelist).

Andrew calls it: A smart "Kayak" for tailored deals when you don't know where or when you want to go!

For me the site is mostly a pleasure to use because it makes searching and browsing for deals fun. Unlike most travel sites where searching for deals is a pain and you want to spend the least amount of time on there as possible, this makes it actually an enjoyable experience.

It's brillant visually. Its top sights to see section uses user-generated content and information from Frommers. There's some cool features such as allowing you to swap out hotels and add deals to wishlist as well.

I think there's a lot of great potential for this startup, could be like Kayak one day. At this point though, its semantic search isn't very impressive and deals are often "no longer available". I think these issues will get better over time but it is still a very impressive site overall.

Check out their explainer video:

To me, ZapTravel wants to be the best by combining inspiring travel sites such as BBC Travel or Isango, "travel deal" sites such as lastminute.com and "booking travel" sites. It's an ambitious goal but they're off to a good start.

I'm very excited about this startup and intrigued by its distributed team. I wonder how it'll work out. I also love the idea, they're not ignoring Europe's huge travel opportunity and setting up shop there early. I think it'll be hard for Rocket Internet to clone this one, assuming it's worth cloning but I think it is.

I've just followed them on Twitter and you can follow them as well here.

Opodo Review: Worst Online Travel Agency Ever

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:33:19 +0100

I used to be a big fan of Opodo for the simple reason it's a tech startup in travel and alternative to Kayak. Who doesn't like an underdog? Opodo is a British company that was started in 2000 and is now in my opinion the worst airline booking search engine out there.

Don't just take my word. See their low review on Trust Pilot. Or see their 1.4 star review on ReviewCentre.

- My review -

Since 2010, I've used Opodo a couple times and subscribed to their newsletter. I was actually an advocate of Opodo to my friends. My online flight search engines were Kayak, Opodo, and Skyscanner. Kayak usually gives good results but sometimes Opodo and Skyscanner find airlines that aren't covered by Kayak.

Top reasons why Opodo sucks.

1. Horrible things can go wrong. I booked a flight using Opodo for a leg of my family vacation in Brazil. They sent me this e-ticket below.

On the day of the flight at the checkin counter, the airline said the e-ticket didn't work. The e-ticket I had wasn't valid. Opodo never actually booked it. Can you imagine thinking you had a valid ticket for 2 weeks and then being told you needed to buy a last minute ticket at 5-6 times the normal price because Opodo didn't actually make your reservation? Even worse, the airline was fully booked on Christmas Eve and we actually had to fly out the next day. This means wasting a day of holiday, ruining the itinerary, paying for an extra night of hotel, wasting a night of paid for hotel, paying for transport from and to the airport again, and buying last minute tickets for 5-6 times the price. And then multiply that by 3 because it's 3 people. So yeah. Opodo sucks.

2. Extremely bad customer service. After begging non-English speaking people to use their phones and spending £30 on long distances phone calls. Being put on hold for 30 minutes at a time. Being put on hold for 5 times. We got to the bottom of it. Opodo couldn't book the flight and refunded us the money. They said they sent an email telling us it was refunded. We did not receive any email. And here are the worst parts they 1.) denied responsibility and 2.) did not try to help us re-book in a foreign country where people don't English.

Not only did they ruin Christmas for us (along with wasting a helluva lot of our time), cost us a boatload of money, but also they did not provide any assistance or even apologise. Instead, guess what they do?

3. Lies. Instead, they lie. First, they said there was a technical system issue and they couldn't book the ticket and the money was refunded. Second, they said they contacted us about the cancelled ticket. Would we have strolled up the the checkin counter on the day of the flight if we knew the ticket was invalid? Yeah, that sounds about right. Third, they said there the payment was declined so they couldn't book the ticket.

I'm not sure what to believe. But I do know this: I received a Opodo e-ticket and was never contacted again by Opodo.

4. Very inferior technology. Their technology sucks so hard. I don't know how they operate. How do you even live with yourself when people trust you with something so important as their travel plans? You'd not selling popcorn. You're uniting families. You're getting people to important business meetings. You're helping people see their loved ones one last time. Opodo's incompetence can be seen in their emails.

And this is the email you get when you try to reset your password. WTF did I just get? There's not even a link to reset the password. There aren't pictures. The email doesn't even make sense.

Basically, this company sucks. There are so many alternatives, you have no reason whatsoever to use Opodo. I'm not using them ever again even if their prices are way cheaper. I'd rather pay the difference. It's a matter of principle. You don't f*ck people over like this.

Check out SkyPicker for cheap deals and stick to Kayak and Skyscanner.

The Definition of Happy

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 15:33:19 +0100

I know this blog is about travel and tech and ideas. But here's another personal post. You know how sometimes things creep up on you? Something crept up on me.

One of my favourite people once called me "the definition of harmless", which I find funny and lends to the title of this post.

A Winter Walk

A couple days ago, I was taking a walk on a cool, crisp night in a wintery scene of freshly fallen pure white snow. Walking through my old university campus, I felt like I was in another world. I love the snow. I love the cold. On my way back home, I realised I was happy. Really. For the first time in a long time.

Statistics

I am 26 years old at the moment. By all accounts this is my prime. If I were a woman, it would probably be 22 or 23 but for a guy, I believe I am probably at a pretty good point in my life.

How a Person's Desirability Changes With Time

The graph from OKCupid shows the desirability of guys and girls based on age. Desirabilty here is based on sex appeal but I believe sex appeal is based on a combination of factors from maturity, to identity, to material wealth, to status, to nunchuck skills, to personality, to availability. It can be a proxy for a person's overall well-being.

I would reference this piece of research from the Economist but it seems cursory to me. As noted: "A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences." To me, all this graph explains is the mid-life crisis. You can read it in detail if you want.

My old AP Psychology teacher from Gunn High School, Mr. Herbert was amazing. I still remember him telling me the twenties are the most stressful time for people and it gets a lot better in your thirties. Today I looked it up and here's the facts from the Pew Research Center:

There are modest differences in happiness by age. Adults under 30 are less likely to be happy.

Young men are less likely to be very happy than other men (are). Among women, there are smaller differences in happiness ratings by age.

Sources: Young, Underemployed and Optimistic. Coming of Age, Slowly, in a Tough Economy (2012) and Are We Happy Yet? (2006) But the more I looked, the more statistics I found, the more I realise how little we can trust statistics and how unpractical it is.

DailyBeast:

Those born with two long alleles of the gene known as 5HTT are 17.3 percent happier than those with two short 5HTT alleles.

Economist:

A study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese

Oh hey Economist, you left out Canada! Thanks. And I'll ignore your comment on Asians -- at least Family Guy knows what's what. And you realise you're referencing a "working paper" that's pulling data from another study...

Pew Research Center:

Married people are 19 percent happier than unmarried people.

People with children in the house are less happy than those without.

More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer.

Is my happiness because I'm Asian, under 30, highly educated, employed, unmarried, religious, in Canada, and have long 5HTT alleles? These findings are interesting but not very applicable because people find happiness in different things. Some people want to be married and some people not. Some people want to work and some not. Plus I'm not an average. So I said F* it and I made my own infographic of "Happiness Over Time based on Life Events" based on what I observed in my 26 years on this planet.

People have more freedom and money as they age. Awesomeness begins when you have more money and power than time.

I believe money is a faciliator. When we're young, we're held back by money and other resources. As we age, we accumlate more resources that allows us to do what we want and if we have the time (freedom), then that's when you feel awesome.

...

But if you really want to generalise (which I enjoy doing and it has saved my life a few times!), you will get happier as you get older but watch out for mid-life crisis.

Let's focus on something more practical and granular.

4 Keys to Happiness

In Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness, he talks about 4 things that contribute to happiness.

1. Perceived control - I did not have any control of my life in the past year. I didn't have control over where I'd be. How long things would take. Who I could see. What I would be doing. How much money I made. It was a difficult journey I chose for myself. Today, I realised I have a lot of control on what happens around me. I appreciate I can decide my future again.

2. Perceived progress - Not only did I have no control over critical life events in the recent past, I did not feel any progress for what seemed like a long period. How do you end up from living in an amazingly spacious and sunny apartment in Prenzlauer Berg to a room in your parent's home? Sure, I made some good friends including Daryl and David this summer but I felt like I was failing.

3. Connectedness - For a period, it felt like I only had 2-3 people in the world besides my mom that really cared about me and I depended on them a lot: Jason, Anna, and Anele. In addition, Kelvin, Kane, Shams, Bo, Jenna, Ross, Zifan, and Chenyang were also very helpful. But the only person from that list who was physically there for me was Jason. Everyone else was miles and miles away. It wasn't great. Now I have a lot more close friends who are actually close by. And the keystone is Charles, a close friend I met first year in college who is now a philanthropist. Hard to believe that's his "job" now.

4. Higher purpose - Meaning. I see purpose in my life. As defined and described below.

Defining Higher Purpose

I believe 4 things contribute to higher purpose and living a happy life with meaning.

1. Fighting & Conflict - I actually enjoy fighting what I consider to be evil or injust. I think it is an essence of life - if you have something to fight for, you're living with passion and purpose. If you're fighting for yourself, it can be very worthy but if you're fighting for something you believe in, it will be majestic. I think Steve Jobs lived life with a purpose and his Stanford Commencement speech is a great reminder to live with meaning. I've been instigated in a fight recently. Fighting means the possiblity of losing but what most people don't realise is... you can have an advantage just by wanting it more.

Someone once said:

If you want it badly enough, you can be the last person on the bus.

2. Career - I haven't really counted but I've had quite a few jobs in my life. I've been blessed to do what I want quite often. When I was at Apple I thought to myself, wouldn't it be good to be in Product Management? It looks like those guys are having all the fun building things. Once I mastered that I thought, wouldn't it be cool to learn Product Marketing? Guess what? I'm doing Product Marketing at a startup.

I don't know if people outside the Valley know how awesome it is to work for a startup. But it's so awesome to work in small teams, on dreams, learn and grow exponentially personally and as a company (or die trying), and have the best perks in the world. Even the top company in the world, Google works very hard to stop their employees from going to startups. Sure, we might run out of money in the next 6 month but so do "safe" companies like Lehmans and Blockbuster. Instead it's up to us to make it succeed.

I'd rather be challenged in my job than waste my time at a large company (at this stage of my life). I'd rather fight and feel significant than feel like I'm trading my time for money. So you could say, I'm happy with what I'm doing in my career. Working at a startup that's trying to change the world with smart people such as Cameron. Who could ask for more? I wouldn't want to work for any other company in Toronto.

3. Hobby - My favourite things to do in the world are comedy, sailing, swimming, and surfing. Some people blog or garden as a hobby. I like making ideas into reality. One of the things I'm most proud of is ufashion (the fashion group at University of Toronto) that I started in my final year of university. Founded in 2006 and 6 presidents later, it is still "the" fashion group at Canada's largest university. I've gotten involved with the co-presidents this year, Frances and Tiffany. I'll be mostly hands off but am excited to get involved again.

University of Toronto Fashion Group on Facebook

A consumer brand. How many people are lucky enough to be the owner of a consumer brand? Wellingtons Travel Co. is a hobby business of mine that I hope to build into a house-hold name for vintage, travel, and cartography with my partner and friend Anna Butler. She is an amazing person who took an idea of mine from 2009 and spent 3 years to make it into something real. Of course, I'd quit my job and move to a different country to start it. Of course, I'd go knock on every door on high street. Of course, I'd learn how to drive a manual car for 3 hours in a Polish parking lot. Of course, I'll go to China to mass produce a product we dreamed up. How many people can see their products being sold in stores? It felt surreal for me.

We are not focused on retail anymore but we're doing better than ever online. Thank you to everyone that bought a map from us. We really appreciate it. We promise to delight you with more products in the future.

4. Family - I'd like to have a family and kids. Don't miss out on having kids. Quora and Slate:

[You] spend half your life chasing away boredom. There comes a time in life when you ask yourself: What the hell am I doing this for? What is the point of it all? Surely it has nothing to do with how many horses I have under the hood, gigs in the PC, or zeroes in the bank. Surely it has nothing to do with how good I look, how good she looks, or how witty I am at parties. Surely it has nothing to do with anything I've ever thought, read, said, or written.

And then it dawns on you, your purpose in life: It's love. A life without love is a life without purpose and completely meaningless. And I'm not talking about the kind of love you feel for your soul mate. That love is not invincible. I'm talking about unconditional love. The kind of love only children have to give and would die inside without it.

I'm 26 and I'm single. I don't think there's a better age for me to be in terms of having a social life. But I don't want to be the old guy still hitting on girls or trying to find the right one.

I believe in having kids and giving back to the world. The truth is we can never repay our parents for the hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds, years of their lives, and unconditional love they gave us. I think the least we can do in this world is to pass it on and give that kind of love to our children and be the best parents we can be. That's my reality.

Still it depends on the person. For example in Germany, you'd have a lot of old people in their 30s or even 40s who don't want kids. I guess the party never stops for some people. There are literally over 30 and over 40 parties in Germany. Germans are funny like that.

They also sojourn indoor beaches. I missed out on that... I did really enjoy the Christmas Markets and Oktoberfest though.

Happiness Boosters

Friends - I don't think you'll ever make as many friends and as deep friends as you do in college or high school. I think it has to do with all the time you spend together and life stage. But I think I'm doing pretty well and have a few new friends here such as Wei and Monika who are pretty caring. And I'm super grateful for having some college friends around.

Dog - one of my goals this year is to get a dog. I've never had a dog because I've travelled so much and valued my freedom so much. It's just one of the things I've always wanted to do but never could.

Check out this Harvard Medical School study on the Telegraph:

Forget hedonism: a good marriage and a puppy are secret to a happy life A 72-year-long research programme, which observed 268 men from youth to old age, found a successful marriage and close relationships are the key to a happy life.

Help - I like asking for help from my friends. I also love it when I can help my friends. I think that is the basis of friendship and community. However, there seems to be some taboo or shame about asking for help for some people, which I'm against. To remedy this - dreamed up an application to facilitate this by making it easy to leverage help your friends and for you to reconnect and deepen relationships with your friends by helping them. It's called MayFriends.com Let me know if you want to get involved. Contact me on Twitter @taigeair. It's similar to Zaarly and FavorTree. (FavorTree had the same idea but did it wrong.)

Philosophy

People that know me know this: I think the secret to life is to be in love. In love with an idea, a place, a person.

Thanks for reading this long post. I hope you found it valuable. Now go be awesome!

Skypicker - Europe's Low Cost Air Tickets Search Engine

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:33:19 +0100

Skypicker is an awesome low cost airfare search engine for Europe that was launched earlier this year. It has a simple UI that allows you to see what flights are available from any city or country. Hovering over deals, you can find your flight path. The search is fast and the prices are... well it's like the price of a movie ticket.

This will be a strong competitor to Skyscanner, Opodo and Kayak for flight searches in Europe.

While it's great to find cheap deals and search low cost carriers, the wow factor here is Skypicker allows travellers who don’t care about specific date to find good deals.

Interestingly, Skypicker doesn't do the booking itself but they say on their site: "This way users can be sure they’re getting the lowest price without any commission."

Don't they get commission for sending traffic the same way Kayak who also doesn't do direct booking does? It looks like they currently aren't set up for that. Either way, the consumer doesn't pay the commission and that line is misleading. Consumers expect you to make money if you're a business, don't shy away from it or mislead.

Just a note. I hate Ryanair and would avoid it at all costs. I'd pay 3X more for the same flight. It's a long story. So for me to use this site, would require them to add a filter where I can filter out evil companies like Ryanair. Never fly with them. You'll pay more. Deal with a lot of shit. Be extremely inconvienced. Hate the people you're flying with. Despise the experience. And get treated like shit. It's not worth it.

Add a filter.

Reflective October

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:33:19 +0200

I'm now in Canada. I recently joined a really amazing startup called Kera. It is the best way to teach someone how to use your app or website online. Check out the demo: kera.io

I'm really reflective right now like Mulan, except I'm not indecisive or anything. I'm just a little in awe of my experiences and reminiscing on passed moments. Maybe it's the fall. Maybe it's starting in a new city. Maybe it's starting a new job. Maybe it's a new home. Or maybe it's because almost exactly a year ago I left Berlin. It was actually on Halloween. Some dates I'll always remember. 5/5 first day at Apple. 11/11 incorporation of my company. 1/1 first girlfriend.

But these days, memories I haven't revisited in ages make pleasant appearances. Mostly German ones. Bumping into a colleague at Rewe after work on Saarbruckestrasse. Working out at McFit. Working out at Fitness First off Regents Street and Baker Street. London Business School and LSE libraries. Marylebone train station. Virgin train to Holyhead and Ferry to Dublin. Cruising around Zoologischer Garten with my Asian friends. Watching a war film with an old girlfriend. Having a house warming party with no furniture. Living in Kreuzberg for a month while searching for an apartment and competing with Germans for apartments. International boat party. The nudist lakes. Polish trains. Living in Manor House and shopping at Sainburys. Having a Gingerbread Latte at Starbucks somewhere in Roppongi Hill. Living in a furnished company housing apartment and making sandwiches for dinner or Swabian Maultaschen. Christmas time on Oxford St in London. T5. Apartment on Bond Street.

These random sentence fragments might not mean anything to anyone else but to me, I'm teleported to those moments and those places and those feelings. It's incredible to myself sometimes. I feel lucky for the people I've met, things I've done, and places I've seen. I'm grateful for those times. Too bad all they are just memories.

It's pretty exciting moving to a new city and not knowing anyone. I must have had 8 phone numbers (2 UK, 1 DE, 2 US, 2 CD, 1 CN) in the past year and about 4 smartphones. You truly know what it's like to be independent. You do everything yourself. It's really novel. The thing with people is we experience hedonic adaptation and start taking things for granted. It's like coffee habituation. And I've just been trying harder and harder to make my life as interesting as possible, until one day I couldn't anymore. It is a lot of work actually. Because in a way you almost have to break things and start fresh to get that rush, to feel the relative change. But now I want stability in my life.

I'm not sure why I'm suddenly looking back at my adventures with gratefulness. Either way, I'm thankful. It's funny these experiences are mine alone. Even for the people that experienced with me, they might never think of it the way I'm thinking and feeling about it now. I don't know if my adventure of exploring the world is over but I hope not.

LinkedIn Ads vs. Google Adwords vs. Facebook Ads

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:33:19 +0200

I'm impressed by LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn has been great for recruiters and job seekers. They've been making quite some money on premium accounts and job postings. And now their ads are really spurring growth.

I was given $50 of free ad credit for LinkedIn Ads. Having run ads with Adwords, Bing ads and Facebook ads for my own businesses and for a social gaming company. I was eager to try LinkedIn ads. My experience with it has been really good so far.

LinkedIn ads allow you to target users based on Language, Seniority, Geography, Company, Job Title, Job function, School, Skills, Group, Gender, Age, and Network. This is amazing. You can bid by CPM or CPC and even click "leads" which allow you to start a diagloue with an interested potential customer. One of the annoyances I have is the minimum bid of $2 CPC. It's not really economical for me to advertise at those prices.

My understanding is Google ads are the best for relevancy and timeliness. Since people are actively searching for something, they're more likely to buy right away. Facebook ads are cheaper and have lower CTR because people aren't actively searching.

	Google	Facebook	LinkedIn
Timeliness	Adwords has the best timeliness because people are actually actively seeking something. Ads are relevant and delivered at the right time.	Normal Facebook ads are not delivered based on what users are searching for and thus not timely. Bing ads show up on facebook search results.	Like Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads are not timely.
Cost	Google ads tend to run above $1 in my experience.	Facebook ads tend to run at around $.80 in my experience. However, these include sponsored stories which have more social proof and supposedly increases recall and CTR because it is associated with friends.	LinkedIn ads have a minimum bid of $2 which is higher than both Google and Facebook and $10 minimum daily budget.
CTR	Google has the best CTR because of the timeliness and relevancy factors. It's been about .08% in my experience. I've had ads with CTR of 3% to .10% but on average I'd say the baseline is .08%.	Facebook has a .02-.04% CTR in my experience.	LinkedIn is giving me .05-.06% average CTR
Targeting	You target by keywords, networks, devices, locations, etc. The power of Adwords derives from the fact people are looking for what you are selling.	Here you're targeting people. You know your ads are reaching your intended auidence. They might not be interested in what you're selling now but they're the people that you want to influence whether it's an awarness campaign or just because they match your target user base profile.	With LinkedIn, it's similar to Facebook, you're targeting people based on who they are. However, it's more powerful in a business sense. You can target users based on Seniority, Company, Job Title, Job function, School, Skills, Group, Gender, Age, and Network.
X Factors	Network size. Mobile. Retargeting. Analytics Integration.	OpenGraph allows marketers to utitilise OG connections. Target friends of friends. Sponsored stories. People who like a page. People who have installed an app. And Facebook keeps experimenting and rolling out new ways to target people. Very exciting. Mobile. Cost Per Action. Fans.	Leads. Best way to reach out B2B customers.

LinkedIn Ads is a great tool for marketers needing to target specific professionals. For example if you're a startup selling employee reward programs, you know who you need to target. LinkedIn is the way to go. Just like marketers now are allocating ad budgets to both Facebook and Google, I believe LinkedIn ads will be a growing force once price goes down.

Regrets People Have When Nearing Death

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:33:19 +0200

I found this article somewhere. Not sure original source but it's been posted around. I hope we can learn something from this. For me, I'd say I need to pay more attention to 1, 2, and 5.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Update June 7th, 2013: This is a great video on the subject.

How to be a Location Scout for Print, Commercials, TV and Film

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:33:19 +0200

It seems to me life is more and more about who you know and who knows you. Being a Location Scout was one of my possible career choices when I was younger. It seemed like a really awesome job that had highly desired elements: being able to travel, being in the entertainment industry, seeing your work make a difference, and having good work variety.

Today I met a Location Scout from Pinpoint Locations and must have asked 20-30 questions! Here are the major ones:

How do you get into a career as a location scout? Location scouts are different for print, commercial, TV and film. As a location scout, you need to specialise. Getting in is about meeting people, working with people, and growing your network. You usually start off in something really junior such as a photography assistant or freelancer; in film and TV, it might be a Production Assistant or even someone's Personal Assistant. Either way, you start working and people will start trusting in you and your skills. You can tell your boss you want to move into scouting. Or if someone is needed for scouting, volunteer to do it. After getting some experience decide on whether you like it or not, then you can start considering it as a career. You can become a freelance scout or start your own company or try to find work with a larger company. A good starting point is by finding and contacting your local guild or association. Or you can contact some location scouting companies and look for an entry level job. For example the OMDC.

What kind of scouts are there? Besides being specialised in one geographic area and media format, there can be other types of scouts. There are exectuive scouts for films who are responsible for finding the locations in general, but then recruit several local location scouts to find specific scenes once a general place has been decided. There are technical scouts who go to the location to figure out the technical aspects of the shoot. For example, lighting, space requirements, angles, etc. The scouts can be involved even during the shooting in some cases. In other cases, only the location manager is on site during the shoot. The location manager will manage the shooting permits and licenses.

What's it like being a location scout? It's a lot of variety. If you own your own location scouting company, it can be very seasonal. It will be project based. You find clients, give a quote (rough estimates are $300-500 per day) and are paid to do the work. For scouting: you use online websites such as flickr and wikipedia, do google searches, use location databases, archives and libraries (i.e. Absolute Locations), and go on-site. Talk with owners, get permissions, negotiate deals, take preliminary pictures, schedule visits, and coordinate the final shoot.

More info on location scouts on wikipedia.

SteadyFare, an airfare options company

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:33:19 +0200

A new startup SteadyFare wants to let people lock in flight prices without having to book well in advance by selling something similar to a financial call option.

Their service is interesting to anyone who is price conscious but may not want to finalise flights too far in advance. They are addressing the problem that is one must either buy airfare really early in advance when plans may change or really late when it's very expensive.

With Steadyfare, users choose when they would like to travel and buy the "option" which locks in the fare price. Later the users can decide whether or not to book the flight as planned.

Currently, travelers can search for flights booked from NYC, Los Angeles and San Francisco to a variety of international destinations. They also can't see the exact flight times, number of connections or the airline they'll be flying with until the book the ticket. However, the company says those options are coming.

The main benefit of this is unlike when buying flight insurance or a refundable ticket, users don’t have to pay for the full ticket price up front. This seems like a useful service for a niche market. On a UI note, the flight flexibility sliders are confusing and difficult to use.

SteadyFare is part of Dubai-based accelerator program SeedStartup.

Homeless Entrepreneurs Might Like This: CouchSurfing for Startup Folks

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 16:33:19 +0200

Here's an interesting idea CouchSurfing for entrepreneurs. Startup Stay allows entrepreneurs to avoid youth hostels and save money by staying with like-minded business folk.

Startup Stay lets its members find hosts to stay or arrange coffee meetings with. Unlike CouchSurfing which can be frustrating to use and Airbnb which can be fun and friendly, but costily. This is a great alternative to people who want to save money and meet new connections in business.

"We want to make sure that we spark new connections, friendships and collaborations as a result of entrepreneurs meeting face to face," Co-Founder Fred Caballero said. "The value is in the unique network experiencing, being able to gain insight not only for your business but other businesses and the city you're traveling to."

Based in TechHub London at Google Campus, it is invite only. Though it is open to all kinds of entrepreneurs, 70% are in the tech industry. This is something very appealing to me and I can't wait to try it out. My profile is here.

Ever Wanted to See Where You Could Go for a Set Price?

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:33:19 +0200

There's a pretty interesting startup called Flocations. They're a TechStar startup from Singapore. They allow you to visualize where you can fly to based on your departure airport, budget and dates. It's a travel inspiration tool similar to KAYAK Explore, "see where you can go for how much".

It's pretty neat but isn't really working for most airports. It's a good tool to use once they add more airports and make the flight searches more usable in terms of speed and bugs.

Stitcher

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:33:19 +0200

My favourite music/audio apps are Songza, Shazam, TuneIn Radio, and now it includes Stitcher. It's like personalised podcasts without the downloading. Based in SF, they actually started a long time ago in 2008 and have raised $18 million to date.

Originally I thought it was a way for people to consume their favourite news websites by listening. They should create a tool that allows writers to record audio versions for each of their articles and then add a link to the webpage directing the user to the Stitcher episode. From there the user can listen to it and then subscribe.

It's a great way for the writer to build an audience and great for people who are too busy or tired to read their favourite news, whether it Techcrunch, BleacherReport, Time, or TMZ. Once subscribed, the user can get pushed news articles to listen to, share, and interact with the story. Stitcher benefits from additional publicity and traffic by building this functionality.

And if worse comes to party, text-to-speech might also be an option. If the writer doesn't have time or feel comfortable reading aloud their work. A wordpress plugin that creates an audio file of your post and sends it to Stitcher would be nice. Alternatively, you could even crowd source/contract someone to read aloud your article for $5-15 each. Could be an interesting job. There was actually a startup called 42voices that was trying to make a voice actor marketplace. Unfortunately, it's not around anymore.

I like it but think this app still has a lot of room for improvement in its UI and usability, content, and social components.

Powerful Tool for Leisure Travellers to Save Money, GetGoing.com

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:33:19 +0200

I just got invited to use GetGoing.com and really like it. I actually updated my SecretFlights website to include it.

GetGoing is a YC startup that allows leisure travellers who are flexible in terms of where to go to get up to 40% in discounts on airfare. They even help you find new and exciting destinations around the world to visit.

How it works Choose TWO destinations: 1. Pick flights to each destination based on what YOU want - know the times and prices upfront 2. Find out which ONE destination you're going to after you pay up to 40% less than anywhere else!

This was a startup idea that I wanted to do but never found the team and resources to start so I'm extremely excited Alek and Co. is able to pull it off. They have my full support.

What I think would be very cool is if GetGoing became more of lifestyle brand like Airbnb. I'd really like getting points for travelling with them and if I could earn points elsewhere to use on their website, it'll be really nice. I'd also like if they could bring back standby flights, where you'd get a notification that one of the places you'd like to see is available on the same day and then you'd just fly off because adventure called. Another use case is if you have a week of free time (let's say in between jobs) and would like to go anywhere as long as it's cheap and interesting, you'd use this service to get away.

The US market is a bit tricky because unlike Europe you can't just fly for 2 hours and have an awesome getaway. In general it should be a blessing to adventurous travellers who want to save some money too. Compare this with how GermanWings does it and it's low pricing.

Crash Course on Canadian Startups: Famous Startups, Incubators, and Resources

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 16:33:19 +0200

What are the best tech startups in Canada?

The ones that most tech people in the US I think would know about are: RIM (originally) Hootsuite Freshbooks Shopify Kik Pair (YC)

Then I found ClearFit and TribeHR and Ven.io. And more and more. I found two big lists of top startups.

First, the list by C100, most of which were showcased in their Silicon Valley Tour. Second, a Top 100 Canadian Startups list compiled by Techvibes.

Update: Startupnorth also has a list of respected Canadian startups.

Some are also based in the US now: AeroFS - Secure Cloud Storage without the servers. Hopper - Travel startup. Kontagent - Analytics startup.

What are some Canadian Accelerator Programs?

There are many Canadian Accelerator Programs: Grow Lab HYPERDRIVE MaRS Incubator Extreme Startups Driven INcubes Canadian Technology Accelerator FounderFuel JOLT - a technology accelerator dedicated to building high-growth web and mobile companies DMZ - Ryerson's Incubator Velocity - University of Waterloo's Incubator Program Next36 - program for student entrepreneurs

Resources for Canadian Entrepreneurs

C100 - Mentorship, partnership and investment for Canadian technology entrepreneurs. Sign up for C100 newsletter. MaRS - Organisation for science, technology and social entrepreneurs. Startup Digest - Curated Startup News including Toronto and Vancouver Techvibes Canadian Startup Acquisition Index Startup North Startup Drinks Impact - Startup and Tech news Talent Egg - Good place to find jobs for students and recent grads Waterloo Jobs - Job board

Some Famous Canadian Entrepreneurs: Brian Wong - Kiip Yuri Sagalov - aeroFS Michael Buhr - StumbleUpon Ranjith Kumaran - YouSendIt Jeffrey Skoll - eBay Jonathan Abrams - Friendster

I'm just learning about the Canadian startup scene so I'm sure this post will be improved and updated over time as I research more. Feel free to comment and let me know if I've missed any great startups, incubators, or resources!

List of Uber Like Alternatives or Clones

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:33:19 +0200

Uber is by far the best app for private taxi service in terms of user experience, availability and reach. I've tried a lot of them because I keep getting invites and decided to do some comparison. They usually give you $10 free credit for signing via invite up so I've taken the time to provide you with links that include an embedded promo code / referral.

This will be a running list to be updated frequently. Please let me know if I'm missing any. Since they keep expanding, the locations column may not be very accurate.

All these cabs are making me think of Berlin for some reason...

Name	Funding	Locations or Cities
Uber get €10 free uber promocode	$8.21B	San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Washington DC, Toronto, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles
Lyft aka Zimride	$7.5M	California
TaxiMagic	Not Disclosed	25 cities across the US, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington DC
Olacabs	$8M	India
Cabulous	Not Disclosed	California
TaxiJet	Not Disclosed	Russia
SideCar get $10 promocode	Not Disclosed	California
GetTaxi	$10M	UK, Israel, Russia
Taxi Mojo / Swishly	Not Disclosed	California
Hailo	$20M	London, Dublin, Toronto, Chicago
MyTaxi get €10 free mytaxi promocode: "TaigeZ1"	$30M	Germany

Others:

In London we used kabbee which is a really polished app to compare and book private cabs for slightly cheaper than black cabs but they do take some time to be dispatched.

Some more sources: http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/06/gettaxi-funding/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/16/taxi-magic-hail-a-cab-from-your-iphone-at-the-push-of-a-button/

Update: Oct 5, 2015 I updated this list with MyTaxi and Uber's funding numbers.

Dropbox vs. Box vs. Skydrive vs. Google drive vs. iCloud

Tue, 29 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Update on August 20th, 2012: Now Box offers 25 GB for free!

My mom asked me if I knew what the cloud was and if I could explain it to her. She told me she's thinking of investing in this. I guess it really is everyone and their moms now...

I think the first cloud file service I used was box.net in 2005. It was pretty good and I had it integrated with Netvibes, like iGoogle. It was useful but not too user friendly and a hassle to use sometimes so I haven't really kept using it. Only now have I started using it again because of its desktop client. Box provides limited free storage, 5GB. It has a good web interface and allows you to see what your friends have shared in a facebook newsfeed way. Its desktop sync is for enterprise users but as a personal user, somehow I got an email inviting me to use the Box Sync for free. It works like dropbox but there's a file limit on file size of 100 MB or 2GB for business.

Dropbox is the easiest to use and most consumer friendly cloud storage and sync service. I started using it in 2008 when I was interning at Seedcamp and started telling people about this product ever since. I have 18GB for free because in addition to the 2GB of free storage, they give you 500mb for each person you invite, and other bonuses such as if you use their camera import service. Dropbox has a great desktop sync service and poor web interface, but it's usability is fantastic especially for consumers. You can actually use it to host files publicly and I used it when I didn't have web hosting.

Skydrive is Microsoft's attempt at cloud storage. I have tried it several times but didn't like it much because it simply never works for me. I get bugs when I use it on Chrome and the desktop client is incompatible with my mac because it's only for Lion OSX. I dislike Lion like a lot of people and have kept OX 10.6.8. Normally you get 7GB of free storage. If you have a Microsoft email account such as hotmail or live, you can get 25GB for free! I think the strongest advantage of Skydrive is you can edit word and excel on the web. It also has a beautiful gallery viewer. I definitely am keeping my eye on this product and it should be a very exciting space to watch. I wonder how Box and Huddle will react to this?

Google Drive allows you to manage your google files on the cloud with 5 GB for free. Once you install the desktop clients you get access to all your google docs and files natively your computer. If you want to edit the file (.gdoc), you get sent to google docs. Unlike Dropbox, it doesn't allow you to share the file publicly or with friends from your computer. I think Google still needs to do a lot of work to make this competitive with Dropbox.

iCloud is Apple's effort to make file syncing easy and powerful across iPad, iPhone, Macs, etc. You just turn it on and it syncs. It's pretty useful for backing up all your apps, messages, etc. I believe it is 5GB free for backups but somehow I have 25GB maybe because I used to have Mobileme as a former Apple employee? Not sure. Anyways, iCloud is a lot more seamless and more for backup and apps than for direct file sync. But even then, it's pretty much just a wireless backup service. I don't have the same apps installed on my computer as on my iPhone. So if I'm playing a game on my iPhone can I continue it on my computer or iPad? And Photo Stream syncs your iPhone pictures with other devices but I don't really know how to access it from my computer... I don't even use iPhoto... So yeah Apple also needs to work on it's cloud services.

Here's a quick summary:

Service	Free Storage	Good Part	Bad Part
Box	25 GB	Great rights management, security, and web interface.	Enterprise, not very user friendly.
Dropbox	2GB but up to 20+ GB free	Super user friendly and very powerful. Great apps available. On Mac, PC, and mobile.	Web interface isn't too good. Limited free storage.
Skydrive	7 or 25GB	Ability use web-based Word and Excel directly to create and edit docs.	Buggy web service. Not available on non-Lion OSX macs.
Google Drive	5 GB	Easily access Google docs.	A lot. Functionality. Ease of use. Sharing. Not even an iPhone app yet.
iCloud	5 GB	Good for backing up.	Quite a lot of missing functionality. Hard to understand exactly how it works.

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