It may not have been yours, but this holiday is almost exactly halfway through the year.  It may be worthwhile to pause and plot out your next chapter.  I think it’ll again be a turning point for me.

Some of you know what happened last July 4 for me.  But either way, it was the start of a year like no other.  From launching AwayFind to traveling a quarter of the year to speaking every month to falling back in love with photography to starting two DC area events/groups to waking up with a completely different set of intimate friends.  So much of that I owe to the people around me (like you all who are reading this), but one way or another, a year later I’m a different person.

And the process is about to start again: I’m leaving for Barcelona for the rest of the summer, my sister is getting married on Monday, I’ve just hired two new people, and a large project is about to start.  And I’m betting everything on a new version of AwayFind that could actually change the way people use email.

Let Me Shut Up for a Second About Me…

It’s halfway through the year.  Have you thought about where you are right now?  It may not be New Year’s, but it’s a big holiday, and a time to sit back with a beer and think.  How are you doing with your goals?  What milestones are behind and ahead of you?

I hoped to make more impact in 2009.  Michael Martine’s theme was process. Mark Hayward’s theme was helpfulness.  Victoria Pickering chose three themes: creativity, curiosity, and sharing.

Michael, Mark, and Victoria: how have you fared?

Struggles for Another Self

July 4 last year was a time when a lot of things in my life changed, and the things that took place afterwards were heavily influenced by elements that were as much external as they were internal.  For instance, I may have booked my tickets to Iceland, but I didn’t know what affect my friend’s family would have on me (it slowed me down and encouraged me to look around myself, and then Barcelona continued that).  The same story with AwayFind—I may have played a large role in launching it, but I didn’t know what the process would teach me and how it’d affect so many decisions afterwards.

We forget that when we’re struggling to finish something big we’re often adding another dimension to ourselves.  And looking back over the last year I see how different activities led to different growth.

Transitions for Transitioning

I don’t want to forget that lesson.  As I look ahead at all these things I’m about to live through, I hope to use them as an amplifier for the growth I’m seeking.

In case you’re wondering about my “theme”: yes, I’ve made progress toward impact.  I’ve tested the waters and found exactly how I want to impact both my local community and “the world,” so to speak.

But I swear there’s a lesson in here for others:

1. Think about how some actual milestones (events, trips, releases, weddings, whatever) have affected your growth in the past year (give or take)
2. Consider what milestones are ahead
3. Use these milestones as a chance to amplify your theme or your personal growth

That last point could use a little clarification: are there big things coming up in your life?  Don’t just let them happen, instead take a moment to consider how you can affect their outcome, about how much you can actually get out of these milestones.

Have I Made a Point?

I hope I’ve made two:

1. It’s halfway through the year, and thus it’s worthwhile to evaluate how you’ve progressed toward your hopes, dreams, and themes for the year
2. It’s valuable to consider what tangible transitions or milestones in your life are ahead so that you can use them as a way to actually make a transition and grow

I don’t know that I’ve captured the mood I’m in right now, as I’m about to embark on what feels like a new journey.  Sure, I’m off to another country, but I feel like there’s a definitive new chapter starting.

I guess that’s maybe the best metaphor.  End a chapter in your life right now.  Write the final paragraph of what you got out of this chapter and start the next one on a blank page.  You know a few of the events coming up, but what will be the deeper meaning for the protagonist?  Heck. how’s it going to start?

It’s time to make your mark on 2009, part 2.

Flickr photo credit: dmodzelewski

It’s because the internet has no order, but we’d like to think we do.  Guess again: using an orderly approach to storing and retrieving is similar to paying full price for airline tickets: it made sense twenty year ago but is a costly decision today.

Here’s how to file and find things in the next decade.

Bottom Up vs Top Down

Storage and retrieval ultimately fit into two methods: top down and bottom up.  A top down approach is to come up with categories, and perhaps sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories…and then to place each item in exactly one place.  For instance, my residency might be classified as United States:Maryland:Prince George’s County:College Park.  From a legal perspective that’s the only place you’d find me today.  This is how file cabinets and hard drives have been setup forever.

However, in a bottom up system, one places all items into just one bucket—that means all residents aren’t classified into countries, they just get adjectives (or tags).  They have their name and their adjectives, some of which might conflict.  For instance, I could be a resident of both DC and Maryland in a bottom up system, of both the United States and Spain.

In the physical world it would be impossible to find anything if it were all lined up next to one another, but with fast servers and intelligent algorithms, you can search for “Jared Goralnick” without having to narrow your search to any geographic criteria.  This is helpful, because I identify first with DC, second with Baltimore, and not really at all with College Park.  So if you met me you might have trouble looking me up in and old-fashioned (top-down) phonebook—you might never look in the College Park edition.

There are numerous reasons why bottom up storage and retrieval are better than top down approaches when it comes to digital information:

• When filing something, there’s only one place to put it.  Tags are optional.  No choice means a heck of a lot less time filing
• When retrieving something, it’s better to use a (very fast) search tool…rather than guessing the right folder to look in first
• If an item relates to two projects, or is from an old friend but relates to business, etc…there are times when it’s tough to know where to file…or to retrieve it.  In a bottom up system, you just archive it in one place and search for it later.  End of story
• With tagging, one can tie one item to many categories.  So something can be tied to two projects without one having to copy it into both folders

Applying Bottom Up Approaches to Email

Not everything in the world of technology is ready for a flat, bottom-up architecture.  But email is, at least if you use Gmail, Outlook 2007, or Postbox.  I presume Mail is the same (feel free to verify in the comments).  The fewer folders you have, the faster your filing and retrieval will be.

That is because these modern email clients/web email sites use search indexing, the same technology that allows sites like Google to search the web so quickly.  With Outlook you can even search within the body of the files that are attached to your emails.  And it’s all instant.

That being said, you may still want to have folders for broad categories, but if you do, I’d suggest that you ensure that you can see all the folders on the screen at the same time.  That means that if you have more than a dozen you’d probably better rethink things.  Try to have fewer than five.

You may be thinking that having fewer folders feels less organized.  But in reality there’s less to deal with: fewer places to go, fewer places to look, and less time spent filing or retrieving.

Applying Bottom Up Approaches to the Rest of Your Technology

Data is becoming more bottom-up friendly every year.  The search features in Windows have been pretty good since Vista, and get some helpful improvements in Windows 7.  Same goes for Mac’s Finder—it gets faster in Snow Leopard.

For a long time you’ve probably paid attention to metadata (which is a fancy word for the tagging taking place inside a file) for your music collection—your artist, title, track, album, and other data have been associated with your music files.  That trend is going to be carried through to everything over the next ten years.

So I’d suggest that you think seriously about it the next time you do some reorganization on your computer.  We have more files than ever before (even if they’re online).  So labeling and tagging will be more relevant.  With photos, this is especially true.  But all documents deserve better labels, not better folders.

As we’re surrounded by more and more data, bottom up filing and sophisticated searching will be the only approach for us.  We need to start shifting our mindset and getting ready for it.

You can start now, with email.

Flickr photo credit: John Pannell

I recently saw a play and a film that hit me, and there’s one more coming up.  So even though I don’t usually write about this, I want to share—fyi, DC only for now.

Looped

A few weeks ago I went to the opening for Looped at The Lincoln Theatre (put on by Arena Stage).  It was a ridiculously funny play that tackled some tough topics.  From the show description:

Human nature always continues to fascinate me. Why do so many of us instinctively attempt to sabotage ourselves, causing conflict and chaos when all is seemingly moving in positive directions? Do we think we are unworthy or undeserving of success? Or do we need to infuse self-inflicted drama in order to make ourselves feel more alive in our everyday living?

I’ve been curious about Tallulah Bankhead since her stunning performance in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.  If you’re a fan of Streetcar Named Desire, you’ll also particularly appreciate this (I recommend watching it before you go to this to get some of the references—fortunately it’s on free Instant Download on Netflix).  Disclosure: I did receive complimentary tickets (not sure why!), but I wouldn’t write about anything if I didn’t feel it was worthy of your time.  And this was.  In town until June 28th: tickets.

The Philosopher Kings

Every year I look forward to Silver Docs, the weeklong documentary film festival at AFI Silver, which is one of the best cinemas in the country.  I saw the world premier of Philosopher Kings tonight and it got to me.  It told the story of eight janitors who have so much perspective, and appreciate the world in ways that perhaps we all ought to consider.  From their website:

Socrates would often ask his fellow citizens, "What is the good life?" In America, more than fifteen hundred years later, a third of the population is clinically depressed, the suicide rate is at an all-time high, and kids are shooting their classmates. Moreover, it seems that much of the current destruction and misdirection in the world is being caused by our best-educated and most "qualified" citizens. Who do we turn to for guidance during these trying times? What is the answer to Socrates’ age-old question "what is the good life?" and is anyone even asking anymore?

I can’t say too much more.  At tonight’s opening, I was particularly touched because the cast was there to share even more.  A few of them will return on Sunday.  And it’s your last chance to see it in the DC area for at least a year.  Don’t miss this: tickets for Sunday’s show. (this will sell out way before, fyi)

We Live In Public

I’ll be seeing this late Saturday evening at Silver Docs in Silver Spring; I’ve been kicking myself for missing the opening to We Live in Public at SXSW Film this year.  This film touches a bit closer to home as it explores what it’s like to live on the web…or what it was like back in 2000:

Rigging his loft with 32 motion-controlled cameras, [Internet Pioneer Josh] Harris convinced his girlfriend to allow him to record streaming video of every moment of their lives from the toilet to the bedroom. The project backfired, his relationship imploded, and Harris went broke. Mentally unhinged, he fled to an apple farm in upstate New York. Sundance award winner Ondi Timoner chronicled Harris for a decade, culling through thousands of hours of Harris’s own footage and coupling it with rousing vérité of her own. The result is a fascinating, sexy, yet cautionary, tale where we all become Big Brother.

I’ve heard many strong opinions on this, and being a citizen of the web I feel it’s necessary to see this sooner than later.  After BarCamp Baltimore and a friend’s dinner I’m driving 50 minutes back for an 11:45pm showing in Silver Spring.  I don’t want to wait another year for its release.  I hope you’ll join me: tickets for Friday’s and Saturday’s showings here.

Back to the Regular Scheduled Programming

Sorry to veer off a little from the productivity stuff, but we all have to live through some others’ from time to time.  And this is what I’ve been living.  Hope to see you Saturday…and feel free to share anything that’s touched you on the screen lately.

Fortunately there are still people fighting the good fight.  The following are clips about the current state of information overload, as well as possibilities for the future.  And don’t miss the Information Overload Research Group’s upcoming conference in September!

First, the conference.  I had a great time at the Information Overload Research Group’s inaugural conference (my lessons learned).  And now the next one is being held at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on September 13 and 14.  I’ll be moderating a panel on email solutions, and there will be a host of great speakers and ideas.  Check it out here.

Now, onto some videos.  This first outlines the problem of information overload with  interviews from IBM, Siemens, Network World, the European Patent Office, Research in Motion, and others.  If you’re looking for excitement, you won’t find it here…but this proves the point about the problem of Information Overload at big companies.  Kudos to Basex for putting this together:

On a lighter note, I want to share with you a video of how Microsoft looks at the future of productivity.  It’s not just addressing information overload, and it’s worth a look:

I’ll keep fighting the battle of overload myself, particularly the filter failure issue that Claty Shirky brings up.   How about you, have you come across any great tools or technologies to combat the ever-present digital overload?

The following is a video of me from WordCamp Mid-Atlantic talking about both productivity at work and balance in life.  Though the presentation was initially geared toward blogging, there are 13 minutes I’ve highlighted that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Below the video I’ve listed out the timestamps to skip to, as well as some articles that cover the concepts in greater, actionable detail.  And below that, the slides.  Enjoy!

First off, I hate that I look like Steve Ballmer’s monkey dance at the beginning, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this (huge thank you to Joe Corbett of iStrategyLabs for filming this!).  Here are the hotlinks:

Blogging Tips: 4:45 – 24:20.  I talk about things like using visual text editors, applications like Texter and Q10, etc.  If you write a lot (even it’s not on a blog), there should be some useful tips in there.

The meat of the presentation about BALANCE starts around 24:40 / slide 17 and goes to about 37 minutes:

• Purge your mind: 24:40 / slide 17: how to make a big ass list
• Masturbatory statistics 25:20 /  slide 18-19
• 50:10 Time management 27:25 / slide 20
• Social media fame vs. real life 29:00 / slide 21: avoiding online popularity
• Unplugging 29:50 (and some talk about SF vs. Barcelona) / slide 23
• In the stream, how to deal with Twitter, etc. 31:15 / slide 22
• Batching email and a cone of silence 32:00 / slide 24: AwayFind
• Identifying your critical path 33:45
• Circadian Rhythms – scheduling around your energy 34:50 / slide 26
• When you’re done with work, go home 35:50 / slide 27

I hope you enjoyed the video : ).  If you have any tips on balance, feel free to share.

Flickr photo credit: SashaW

Much of my interest in personal finance started when I began reading a blog that’s just now morphed into a book.  This book would’ve made my life easier and wallet thicker three years ago.  The following are some highlights from the bestselling I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Ramit from I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Ramit Sethi and I have always gotten along.  While he’s funnier and always a few steps ahead, our blogs attempt to cut right to the meat of whatever subject we’re addressing.  That to-the-point style is why his site is the only personal finance blog in my reader.

I’m writing about his book here because the process of taking care of one’s finances is crucial to productivity, happiness, and building businesses.

In late March, Ramit published I Will Teach You To Be Rich (and it immediately hit #1 on Amazon).  The book explains quick ways to make sure you’re spending, saving, and investing your money wisely.  It’s not an “advanced” book, but rather it’s designed to ensure that your financial plan for the future is sound, getting you 90% to where you need to be.  So every month you’ll know you’re on the right path…and every year you’ll know your future is considered.

That’s a tall order, I know, but sadly so much of our present and future lifestyle relates to how we manage our money.

Some Highlights I Enjoyed

Here are some specific action items or points I noted, some for me and some that I thought you’d enjoy.  Any emphasis added was by me.

• Page 15: You should create a yearly reminder in your calendar to check your credit report and make sure everything looks right.  The site where you can get this report for free, once per year, is AnnualCreditReport.com
• 31: “Automatic warranty doubling: Most cards extend the warranty on your purchases.  So if you buy an iPod and it breaks after Apple’s warranty expires, your credit card will still cover it up to an additional year.  This is true for nearly every credit card for nearly every purchase, automatically”
• 55: It’s important to think long and hard if there are any big purchases that could be made with a credit card that you’re not making that way.  Rewards can add up big time so it’s worthwhile to think hard about this for a minute (are there phone, gas, rent, tuition, or other bills you could be paying with a rewards card?)
• 81: A scary statistic is that “78 percent of twentysomethings cash out their 401(k)s when they leave their jobs, taking a huge a hit on taxes and fees.”  Takeaway: if you’re switching jobs, either keep or figure out how to transfer your 401(k), which isn’t that difficult.  Don’t lose 10+% of your retirement savings because it seemed like the easiest way to get your money.
• 96: Ramit created a great table that explained how to be frugal without being cheap.  Get the gist of his cheap vs frugal discussion here
• 100-101: Ramit goes into lots of depth into “the a la carte method,” which is an approach to rethinking the recurring payments and subscriptions in our lives to save a bunch of money
• 122: if you ever find yourself with unexpected income, one approach is to immediately put 50% away and then spend the other 50% of it on something fun.  Whether or not you divide your gift this way, “compare this with not having a plan and letting your money ‘just sort of’ get spent”

Should You Read This Book?

I haven’t done a great job capturing the book in a few bullet points—because it’s a series of concepts, and then applications for them.  Like I mentioned in the last bullet, it’s about being conscious of (and having a plan for) how money flows through your life.

The book’s not for everyone, but if any of the following apply I’d highly recommend it:

• You don’t have an automatic system for distributing your money every month—cash, short term, and long term savings (you’ll learn everything about this)
• You’ve struggled with budgets (he offers an alternative, tactical approach)
• You don’t max out your Roth IRA or 401(k) every year (or don’t know exactly how these work)
• You’re under 35 and don’t know where to invest (one thing he highly recommends is lifecylce funds.  I personally use Vanguard’s 2050 Retirement Fund for much of my investing)
• Your parents still play a part in your financial planning

I can’t recommend I Will Teach You To Be Rich enough for cutting right to the chase and addressing the questions that were most on my mind when I constructed my financial system a few years back.

If you’re curious, some of the other books I’ve enjoyed on the topic and recommend are The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing (helpful for building a foundation of knowledge about investing) and The Intelligent Asset Allocator (it’s a classic on the topic of sound distributed investing).  I’d lent these both out to friends who were learning…but now I’m just lending out Ramit’s book.

Best of luck in figuring out your finances.  If you have any quick tips along the lines of doing it wisely and productively (or thoughts on the book), feel free to share below.

If you want to get yourself out of trouble and be more efficient in Gmail, installing these takes about 60 seconds.

To find these features, login to Gmail and then click Settings, Labs:

I’ve broken my list into three parts, those that just take one click and that everyone can save time with immediately, those that take a little more setup, and those that have less to do with productivity but I still wanted to mention.

Gmail Labs Time-Savers that Take Zero Time to Install/Use

Forgotten Attachment Detector – if Gmail detects language indicating you meant to include an attachment, and there are no files attached, it’ll warn you before sending the message.

Vacation Time! – We often forget to turn on or off our vacation auto response messages.  With this, you can now set start and end dates for your vacation message…so it’ll automatically turn on and off during the dates you select.

Send & Archive – When you respond to a message, the next thing to do is archive it.  But we usually forget to remove it from our inbox until much later.  This adds an option to both send a reply and archive the message thread at the same time, saving you the trouble to come back later and file it.  I LOVE THIS.

Undo Send – Did you ever press the send button and then realize right afterwards that you forgot something or that there was a typo in the subject or perhaps  something much worse?  Undo Send gives you a short amount of time (assume 5 seconds) to press a new Undo hyperlink before it mails out your  message.  So if you made a mistake, you can fix it before the message is delivered.

Title Tweaks – Sometimes I click over to the tab for my email just to see if I have new mail.  That’s because the count of messages often gets cut off by the number of browser windows I have open.  This fixes that by placing the message count earlier in the title.  If you use Google Apps for Your Domain this is a MUST feature.  Note the difference in the picture below (new result shown before old result):

Suggest More Recipients – When you start messaging a group of people, Google intelligently selects who else you frequently send to along with that group.  This is incredibly helpful.  For instance, in the message below, Melody and Tim are usually involved when I’m messaging Genie and Jessica.

Gmail Labs Timesavers that Take a Little Bit of Thought

Email Addict – Adds a link to your Gmail menu bar called Take a Break.  Clicking on it will force you away from email for 14 minutes.  Not for everybody, but it’s sure a great help for me!  (sadly you can get around this by opening the account in another tab. Shoot, I shouldn’t have said that!)

Offline – this is the only one that requires an installation, but it’s also pretty amazing to be able to read and respond to email while you’re offline.  If you find yourself on a train, plane, or generally without internet access, this can come in handy.

Tasks – For email to get out of your inbox, you either need to respond to it or save it for later.  To save it for later, you need a task list.  While Gmail’s task list is not the most robust in the world, it gets the job done.  Once enabled it will appear on the bottom right of your Gmail window.  When expanded, it appears like this:

Gmail Labs that I Use But You Might Not Need

Signature Tweaks – I don’t like my email signature going at the bottom of the email, I much prefer it just below the message I’m sending.  This takes care of that.

Advanced IMAP Controls – Since I use Postbox on my desktop I like to be able to control which labels (i.e., folders) are synchronized and which aren’t (I find the “All Mail” label to be redundant).  This lets me do that.

–

Other Gmail Labs or Gmail tools you find to be particularly helpful?

In the interview below you can skip right to the best snippets about balance, education, and social media.

Clay Collins now writes at Finance Your Freedom.  When we first met, his old blog was taking off…but he decided to throw the brakes on it, because it wasn’t what he wanted…it wasn’t who he was.

Clay has guts and focus: he knows how to change directions, and he knows the value of total immersion for the purpose of both understanding a market and building relationships there.  He now helps people to choose their own markets online…and to go after them systematically.

I spent a weekend in February visiting him in Madison getting to know someone who’s been fairly influential on my perspective.  In the video below you can ignore my blathering (or not) and skip right to the comments I’ve highlighted at…

• 4:23: Clay talking about leadership and market selection.
• 6:51: Clay talking total immersion in one market, in education, and what you truly believe in.

It’s hard to know from his blog quite what he’s been up to, but essentially he very quickly sold out an educational program on building online businesses.  But rumor has it there will be another launch coming soon.  In the mean time, check out his business idea litmus test.

The following are some of the key points that came up in the sessions.

First of all, thank you to so many of you for coming out and sharing your ideas!  I’ve never organized an event of this magnitude, and you’ve encouraged me that it was worth it.  I just hope a few people got a little push toward starting and succeeding in business.  Now, onto the panels…

What you need (and don’t need) to get a technology business started

In this first session, I moderated a panel with Greg Cangialosi, Scott Harris, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and Paul Singh.  We discussed some of the lessons picked up over the years in the several business endeavors we’ve been involved with:

• A business plan helps to get you thinking about where you’re going with your company, formalizing your thoughts, etc.  But most of us have had to change direction within 30 days and, at that point, the business plan often began to collect dust.  Key point: think hard about starting your business, and write out your overall strategy, but don’t get mired in the details of a fancy schmancy business plan.
• It’s important to cover your ass(ets).  But doing that right isn’t that important until you’ve proven that your idea has legs.  In other words, if you have a product you want to launch, worry first about getting a prototype and later about whether an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp is more important.  After all, there’s no shortage of lawyers who can change your business type later.
• While your legal status is not that important initially, it is important that you discuss ownership with any co-founders early on.  You need to get in the habit of having these conversations when the money isn’t already on the table.  Whatever you do with equity, just be sure that other team-members have to earn their equity rather than starting with it…otherwise underperformers can ruin the distribution of equity and create a difficult situation.  This is called vesting.
• Don’t assume that you have a market.  Spend serious time talking to your perceived market and showing them what you plan on creating.  You’ll learn very quickly that either the product you want to create or the audience you want to sell it to aren’t the best options.  That’s okay—let yourself fail in your assumptions early and instead continue to validate both your product and the market as you move forward.  Read Eric Ries’ blog for a continual reminder and tactical advice on this.
• Paul Singh talked a great deal about using Google AdWords to test ideas for just a few dollars.  See if the conversions are there by testing if people are interested in your ideas.  If they’re not, move on.  I mentioned another way to research markets is to take the first few days of the 30 Day Challenge where they teach about using Google’s market-testing tools with Market Samurai, but do it with a disposable email address.
• You don’t need to have $25,000 in the bank to start your business.  None of us had that in our first ventures.  The best time to start a business is not when you have lots of assets but when you have fewer liabilities.  So if you’re in your 20s that’s probably a damned good time.
• Haroon Mokhtarzada made the point that enterprise experience rarely translates into startup expertise.  So don’t worry about having a background in a big company or hiring people from that background.  Instead, focus on being scrappy and finding others with that mentality.
• If you’re building your business while working for another company, be sure you know whether your current employer has ownership of what you’re working on.  Often there’s a clause in your employment agreement to that effect.  Be careful!

How to market inexpensively with social media, events, and creative public relations

Energetically moderated by Mario Armstrong, this was a fun session with Aaron Brazell, Peter Corbett, Frank Gruber, and Kaitlyn Wilkins.  They talked about what to expect with marketing and how to do it through social media and other channels.

• Peter Corbett set a great tone for the session when he pointed out that social media is not free.  It’s a huge time commitment and, without that commitment, it’s just throwing time away.  But when done right it can be rewarding.
• If you’re a great writer, write.  If you have great presence, speak.  But learn your strengths early when it comes to spreading the word and play off those strengths.
• Niche.  Niche.  Niche.  Differentiation.  If you’re not differentiated you’re not memorable.  And if you’re not memorable you’re already forgotten.
• If your brand is all about solving a specific problem that’s a good start.  But if your brand is about a bigger idea, a cause, a lifestyle…then people will have a reason to come back to it, to hold onto it, to engage with it.
• While marketing is great, nothing happens if you don’t make a sale.

Sorry, I had to run around organizing lunch stuff during this session so my notes are more sparse.  Check out Russell Heimlich’s and Justin A. Brown’s notes.

Workshops and exercises in small groups

Tim Grahl and I organized breakout sessions where the 16 groups discussed their own businesses and the various revenue models of eight TechCrunch50 finalists (as a case study). 

While it’s difficult to capture that online, it’s important to explore and be familiar with various product-oriented revenue models.  The following links explain each of the models in more depth:

• Freemium
• Licensing
• Advertising
• Physical Product Sales
• Revenue Share / Affiliate Sales

Getting your technology right…and what people are using to develop today

David Troy led the next panel, which was about understanding certain key ideas around technology…especially if you’re planning on launch a tech company.  M. Jackson Wilkinson, Mike Subelsky, Amy Senger, and Andrew Turner shared their insight:

• One of the most important points discussed was understanding the differences between a programming language (the most flexible), a framework, and a content management system (CMS) (the fastest to deploy).  As a business owner it’s important to recognize that flexibility and speed of deployment are inversely related.
• Along the same lines, it’s important to recognize some of the most popular frameworks and to ensure that your development team is familiar with them so that they’re not reinventing the wheel.  Examples of popular frameworks include Rails (for Ruby), Kohana, Symfony, and CodeIgnite (for PHP), and Django (for Python).  If your team is developing in one of these languages, be sure they’re aware of the frameworks out there.
• There was a great deal of talk about when to use agile development methods and when not to.  Given the audience of my blog, suffice it to say that if you’re leading a team of developers it’s important to be up to speed on agile so that you can make decisions for when it’s most helpful.
• A couple salient points came up in relation to hiring tech people:
  1. Communication skills and initiative are as important as technology skills.  The best programmer in the world that continually builds the wrong features (and doesn’t suggest alternate ways to approach things) will get you nowhere.
  2. When choosing between open source and proprietary development environments, it’s important to consider what type of culture you’re looking to foster at your office (I’m still debating this one in my mind as my personal experience refutes it)

Introductions to local groups and events

The following groups presented.  Visit their websites to learn more.

• Baltimore OpenCoffee
• Greater Baltimore Technology Council
• Refresh DC
• Refresh Baltimore
• BarCamp DC
• BarCamp Baltimore
• NetSquared
• SocialDevCamp
• BeeHive Baltimore
• Baltimore Angles
• TECH Cocktail
• Ignite Baltimore
• Ignite DC
• WordCamp Mid-Atlantic
• DC Tech Events 

Success stories and lessons learned

Matthias Broecheler, Martin Ringlein, and David Troy shared their mistakes and talked about the different forms of entrepreneurial success in the final panel, which I moderated. Some of the topics discussed:

• Martin Ringlein spent some time discussing the different definitions of success, and how we all have to understand the importance of impact, family, lifestyle, and money.  For instance, if you work until midnight every day but don’t get to relax, have you truly achieved success?  Needless to say, I blog about this a lot, but the point of balance is not just for happiness…it relates to our core opinion of our own success.
• We all talked about the merit of having service-based businesses, especially when getting started.  For one thing, one can become cash flow positive in a service business right away; for another, one will learn very quickly what customers want when they’re working directly with them.  And of course, having a service business is a great way to bootstrap the building of a product company (that’s what I’ve done with SET and AwayFind).
• It’s unfortunate that geeks often get the impression that they need people with a business background to launch a company.  They absolutely do not.  It’s much easier to teach a geek about business than the other way around.  This is proven time and again in the most visibly successful companies, large and small.  kthxbye.
• Doesn’t matter how big your company is or how much you formalize the process, you need to talk with your employees one-on-one to discuss each other’s performance at least twice per year.  It will get a lot of information out into the open that you might not expect.
• If there’s even an ounce of negative emotion in an email, sleep on it before you send it.
• If you’re in a family business, draw very clear boundaries between work time and personal time
• If you have a business process and you decide to take on a project with a friend, don’t bend the rules or you’ll slip up.  Follow the same business process when dealing with a friend as you do with clients.
• Whenever possible, avoid taking credit cards.  The reason: you’ll never win a fight with VISA.  (This is especially relevant with high dollar transactions with people you don’t know really well.  Less important for low-dollar transactions)
• If a project is still holding you back, and you’re a tech person, consider turning it into an open source project (if you have the time ; )
• And for the next steps:
• Write down all the things that are holding you back.  Are these surmountable?
• Do your best to be around (virtually or in real life) the people who are where you want to be.  You’ll soon find yourself there.

In Conclusion

It was a rockin’ day with a good vibe and great ideas.  Thank you to all the speakers, small group leaders, sponsors, and of course the University of Maryland for making it all happen.  When I have them I’ll either post or link to the videos.  But in the mean time, here are the photos from me and Bobby Saini (we shared my camera, and he took most of the photos shown above).

Thank you and hope this all helps : ).

Below I’ve indicated the timestamps for when AwayFind, email productivity, and Bootstrap Maryland are discussed…so you can dive right in.  After the videos are also some recent links, like being in Gartner’s 2009 Cool Vendor Report : ).

Robert Scoble Interview on Scobleizer TV

• 00:30: Continuous Partial Interruptions
• 1:31: Difference between AwayFind and the Vaynerchuk/Ferriss approach
• 5:30: What I’m working on for the future—understanding different channels
• 6:55: What sucks about Twitter and lack of chat, being used for support, etc
• 11:17 Bootstrap Maryland discussion

Note: After this interview, I was also on air for a longer discussion with Robert Scoble and Dave McClure.  It was an excellent discussion of the state of the venture market (mostly just Dave sharing, because Dave knows it better than anyone).  Robert’s blog post and video are here.

Greg Cangialosi Interview on Blue Sky Factory TV

• 11:30 My interview starts
• 16:20 How to better manage when we check email
• 21:00 I explain how I go through my day
• 30:45 Bootstrap Maryland discussion
• 48:15 My interview ends (stay on for email marketing tips)

AwayFind Around Town

• Gartner Research: Cool Vendors in Project and Program Management, 2009
• The Digital Marketer: Four Tools to Manage Your Calls
• Summit Daily News: Technology Solution of the Week: AwayFind
• Tokyo Beer & Blog Meetup with AwayFind
• San Francisco Meetup at House of Shields (Facebook)

Thank you to Robert, Greg, and the other folks who were kind enough to speak with me and review AwayFind.

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We’ll soon be back with our regularly scheduled programming, like an upcoming post on “Action Tweeting” : ).  Cheers!