…from a business perspective, account limits like Basecamp has for the number of active projects can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it’s an opportunity to upgrade customers and have them pay you more money each month. On the other hand, it forces customers to revise their position, and if you’re not doing a really great job, it can prompt them to question the value of an account they may have otherwise carried on using for years.

(via Moving from Basecamp to ActiveCollab — All in the head)

Oskar’s didn’t just bring in its own selection of hand-crafted brews, though; the tap line includes draughts from competitors, such as Left Hand and New Belgium. “We’re all about promoting great beer in general,” Gray said. “Introducing craft beer to the consumer is so important to us. When someone orders a Coors Light, we serve it with a 3-ounce sample of Mama’s Little Yella Pils.”

(via 43 beers and a Cajun Creole menu | Boulder County Business Report)

‘‘Organisations will start this year to get less obsessed about what site they’re on and focus more on whether the content they’re producing or the interactivity, especially around customer service, is engaging.”

(via The Post.ie)

Those who are worried that the iPad will cut into sales of the iPod Touch or the MacBook are the same people who worried that McDonald’s (MCD) chicken nuggets would cut into hamburger sales. Successful expansion into new categories is always a good thing. Apple did it. They created a new category within the mobile Internet tsunami.

(via Four Ways Apple Beat iPad Expectations — Seeking Alpha)

and

Apple’s not actually selling a computer. Or a flash drive or multitouch. They needed to make those things for their product, but that’s not what the product is. The product is, simply put, a magical screen that can do anything you ever want it to, no matter what that is.

(via This is why it’s worth learning about advertising, by Rory Marinich)

That said, there is one trend that I believe will truly take shape in 2010 the way it has been predicted for many years now: mobile web browsing.

For years (and I mean this literally), the mobile web was going to be the next big thing. I was working on a WAP mobile site almost 10 years ago. Back then, smartphones were a rarity and mobile web browsing was not even remotely easy to use.

It seems that every year since then, a pundit has proclaimed this to be the year of the mobile web. What has always prevented this has been the penetration of capable mobile devices. Coming into 2010 though, I think we’re closer than ever. We’re finally seeing the beginning of ubiquitous mobile web browsing.

The following is a quick look at the many mobile devices now with the ability to browse the web and my thoughts on each:

• Smartphones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm) – 39% of consumers own a smartphone according to ChangeWave Research. Many have built-in Wi-Fi, truly turning them into portable computing devices.
• iPod Touch – My Dad, not a gadget or smartphone user, asked for an iPod Touch for Christmas. The iPhone OS is becoming mainstream.
• Kindle – Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader has a built-in, permanent 3G wireless connection. While providing the ability to download ebooks anywhere, this also allows for mobile web use with the included web browser.
• Netbooks – Many think consumers purchase netbooks for their inexpensive price. I’d argue it’s mainly for the portability. I bought a Dell Mini 9 to convert to a hackintosh for exactly this reason.
• Tablet computers – Tablets are almost the definition of mobile computing. Apple is rumored to be announcing their iTablet later this month.

All of the above devices have built-in web browsers, many of them supporting web standards used on most modern web sites. When you’re able to use a web site on a mobile device that was not specially designed for a mobile interface, everything starts to change.

Additionally, I took a look at the last thirty days of traffic at two of my web sites, StatsMix and All Climbing. Each of them has what I would consider to be significant mobile traffic compared to how little I used to see. On StatsMix, 2.7% of all visitors were using a mobile device and on All Climbing the number was 2.4%.

I’ll revisit this post later this year to see where those numbers stand.

Finally, a surprisingly high number of beta testers on StatsMix have been requesting a mobile-optimized interface. Trying to predict what features users want is one thing, but actually reading their requests is another. This is the first product I’ve worked on where users have been requesting mobile access in significant numbers.

What are your thoughts? Is this the year for mobile web browsing to finally break out?

If you’ve never written anything thoughtful, then you’ve never had any difficult, important, or interesting thoughts. That’s the secret: people who don’t write, are people who don’t think.

Improvements

• The upgrade freed up over 10 GB of space of my hard drive.
• Snow Leopard offers much better swap file management (effectively giving me more RAM on average as it frees up the swap quicker). Leopard never freed up the swap without a reboot.
• Finder, iCal, Address Book is snappier / more responsive
• Startup and shutdown are noticeably faster.
• Screenshot naming now includes a descriptive date and time.
• Built-in recording in new Quicktime

Issues

• Firefox 3.5.2 had a serious memory leak and crashed when selecting menu items. Installing Firefox 3.5.3 looks to have fixed the issue.
• Several Mail.app plugins were disabled. Since I now exclusively use Mailplane, this wasn’t an issue and I will not be fixing.
• Snow Leopard broke the symbolic link for MySQL. Here’s the fix: http://mineer.blogspot.com/2009/09/mysql-server-wont-start-after-upgradge.html
• FineReader for ScanSnap doesn’t work at all with Snow Leopard. This is the OCR software that’s bundled with the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. A possible fix is coming: http://www.documentsnap.com/abbyy-finereader-and-snow-leopard-file-not-created-with-scansnap/
• All previously installed Safari plugins are gone.

Summary
Overall the upgrade was painless and left me with a somewhat snappier laptop. Most users are also likely to find the improvements are nice, but relatively small and not terribly noticeable. Eventually most Mac users will have to upgrade to take advantage of forthcoming software, but I feel the majority have no need to rush to install Snow Leopard.

If you do decide to upgrade, Amazon has Snow Leopard for only $25.

The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and the way you respond to adversity. Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment.

“Despite the recession, it still pays to be your own boss,” says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. The survey, adds John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “reaffirms my view that the more control you have over your work, the happier you are.”

Bingo. I love going to work each day and I think a large portion of this feeling is the knowledge that virtually everything is up to me. Succeed or fail, I have direct influence on every aspect of my career.

(via WSJ, NY Times)

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine,” he said. “We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

(via NY Times)

I’m particularly fond of the minimum viable product (MVP) concept and have been using that from the beginning with my company’s new product, StatsMix. The essential idea behind MVP is to determine as early as possible the core set of features that solves a problem a customer is willing to pay for, build that out, and then continue to iterate in this fashion constantly creating something customers actually want.

Last night Eric spoke while we ate dinner at the Hotel Boulderado and then fielded questions afterward. The entire evening was an excellent opportunity to learn more about his ideas surrounding lean startups.

Here are few of my notes from his talk and the Q&A session:

• Eric advocates small companies split into two cross functional teams – one focusing on the problem and one on the solution. Startups are not just small versions of how larger companies are organized.
• What is the problem and is it worth solving?
• When doing split-testing or A/B testing, remember the AAA’s of metrics: Actionable, Accessible, Auditable
• A/B test anything you think will have a macroscopic effect.
• Have high level company metrics for evaluating split tests.
• Early adopters hate mainstream customers, but you have to go through them first if you ever want to reach the mainstream customers. A startup will eventually have to make a decision about which of these customers to continue to target.
• Many of these ideas come from lean manufacturing and the auto industry.
• StumpleUpon’s advertising program may be the new Google AdWords.
• Understand vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics.
• Actionable metrics – you know what to do to get more or less of these (A/B testing is helpful here)

If you’re interested in lean startups, definitely check out the Lessons Learned blog. There’s also an active Google group called the Lean Startup Circle that has been having some interesting discussions and case studies.

And for Boulder area entrepreneurs, Marty Haught is organizing a local meetup to regularly discuss lean startups based on these ideas.