Who Needs WhipApps?
Different companies need WhipApps for different reasons. Here are two:

• You’re an entrepreneur with several ideas for the web or the iPhone. Which idea do you pursue first? The window of opportunity is closing, and you need to decide now. You need WhipApps.
• Your company is going through turmoil in this tough economy. You know that recession is the mother of invention and you’re deciding which way to steer the ship. You need WhipApps.

Your Own Personal SkunkWorks
In the middle of World War II the U.S. Military learned that the Axis powers were developing a jet fighter. The winner of the jet race would win the war. America needed a jet fighter immediately, but our existing aircraft development system was bureaucratic and slow.

The solution: Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (ADP), also known as Skunk Works. A small team of engineers and scientists got the project done in rapid fashion. In the end, the Skunk Works team was overshadowed by another small & aggressive team of scientists: The Manhattan Project. The lesson is clear: Small, aggressive teams produce results.

Use WhipApps as your own personal Skunk Works.

Next Step
You define your goals, and WisdomGroup will help you get there. Turnaround time depends on the scope of the project. Sometimes we can whip out a WhipApp in thirty days or less.

Next Step
Get started on your WhipApps today. Contact WisdomGroup via web , email, or by phone (1.312.842.2200).

Atoms and Bits
Products sold today can be divided into two categories: atoms (things we can touch) and bits (information). Buffett has stated publicly and repeatedly that he does not invest in technology companies. He prefers companies that likely to have steady profits for the next several decades, not months. At the same time, there are some interesting parallels between the internet and the American railroad system. Railroads are to atoms as the internet is to bits.

What Does Burlington Northern Do?
BusinessWeek describes the company in this 2-minute video.

Higher fuel costs and congested roadways make railroads more attractive for the shipment of goods. The company is looking at hydrogen as an alternative fuel source to reduce costs & boost efficiency.

Betting on America
Buffett has described the deal as “an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States.” Railroads play a role in the movement of all goods in the country. BRK is now in a wonderful position to benefit from the coming economic rebirth, no matter when it happens.

High-Level Business Summary
On Nov 3, 2009 PayPal opened its application programming interface to the developer community. You might think of the API as a doorway that allows authorized software to interact directly with PayPal’s payment system. One benefit: If you’re building a web site and you want to accept PayPal payments without sending visitors away from your site, the API will let you do this. More benefits are listed below.

The Developer Community: X.com
X.com is a very cool URL, like the ultimate vanity license plate! PayPal uses the URL to support the developer community with peer-to-peer forums, sample code, and instructional information. Naveed Anwar of PayPal gives a brief intro below. Anwar ends with a very compelling invitation: “Let me help you make money.”

Pre-Approved Maximums and Adaptive Payments
Companies sell more when they make it very easy for customers to spend money. That’s the whole idea behind credit cards. PayPal takes this to a new level with Adaptive Payments. Let’s say your business runs a pinball game that charges ten cents per pinball. Under the old PayPal system, your customer would have to log into PayPal and pay for a ball each time they pulled the plunger. Very cumbersome!

However, with the Adaptive Payment feature, PayPal pre-approves a maximum dollar amount with one API call. That way, your customers can play continuously, fattening your bank account with each round.

We could have used a more serious business example here, but you get the point!

Adaptive Accounts
Web usability studies have shown that the more you ask a customer to type, the more likely they will abandon a purchase for something else. All of us are lazy to some degree.

PayPal’s Adaptive Accounts feature reduces the amount of customer typing by accepting customer information directly from the merchant’s existing database. So if your site already has customer profile information, they won’t need to retype when they purchase through PayPal. Your site can send the info directly to PayPal through the API.

Micropayments
Consumers in the developing world are very adept at using their mobile phones for purchases. Phone companies understand this, so they are aggressively moving into the micropayment space.

Of course, developing nations can become developed nations very rapidly. Observing this trend, PayPal execs had to ask themselves this question: As these consumers move up the economic ladder, do you want them to be acclimated to PayPal or the phone companies?

PayPal can now accept micropayments through their newly available API. Of all the new features, I’m betting that this one will generate the greatest ROI over the next ten years.

Charity Frag: Gaming Meets Giving
Games are a waste of time and they don’t help anybody, right? Not necessarily so. A company based in the UK has created game that benefits charity. Charity Frag was born at London’s Charity Hack in September 2009. The developer team blended an open source version of Quake 3 with code that leverages PayPal’s API. Opponents shoot each other in the game. When a player dies, his PayPal account donates ten pence to the shooter’s charity. Here’s a clip from the game:

So… take out your frustrations and help a charity with the PayPal API.

Netbook Giveaway
Every attendee received a complimentary Asus 1005HA netbook pre-loaded with PayPal software. Imagine the logistics of distributing netbooks to 1,500 people! One great thing about the netbook: Although it’s running Windows XP Home Edition, the hard drive is split into two 72GB partitions. Perfect for a dual-boot (yes, Linux!) configuration. One guy tweeted about his success with the new config before the end of the conference.

Music & Networking
The Tuesday night party was a nice touch with great food. The downside: Loud music. I certainly enjoyed loud music as a teenager, but when I’m in a room full of developers I’m more interested in networking and sharing ideas. PayPal can help its API movement by giving developers plenty of opportunities to interact and brainstorm together. That’s what they’ve done with X.com, and they should do the same outside of cyberspace.

Vendors and the PayPal Team
Every PayPal person I met at the conference was engaging and enthusiastic about the offering. That’s a plus. The vendor area was well-staffed with people who were ready to demo live apps and answer questions.

Evolution of Economic Exchange
Human commerce has gone through three transitions in the past ten thousand years:

1. From barter to coins.
2. From coins to paper (including checks).
3. From paper to plastic.

We are now in the midst of the fourth transition: From plastic to electronic. PayPal is not alone in recognizing this trend. By launching Innovate09, PayPal shows that it takes this latest transition very seriously.

According to Hunter, successful CIOs do the following:

1. They frame everything they do in terms of business outcomes and business performance.
2. They show value for money. They show that the IT organization is credible, effective, and efficient – competitive with any other supplier of services.
3. They position IT as an investment in change. They identify needs, execute well, and they show (through measurable results) that promises have been fulfilled.

The main idea of the video could be summarized as follows:

You know when you’ve shown value for money because suddenly the conversation about “Why does IT cost so much?” or “Why does IT take so long?” goes away. That conversation gets replaced with a conversation about effectiveness and price for performance.

Highlights of Gartner’s discussion with Schmidt:

• If you really want to know what the web will look like in five years, watch today’s teenagers.
• 100Mbps bandwidth will be ubiquitous.
• There will be no distinction between TV, radio, and the web. We’ll just have content.

.

The goal: To encourage passengers to choose the stairs (healthy) instead of the escalator (lazy).

The result: 66% more passengers chose the stairs.

What a fascinating way to influence behavior!

Given this information, what steps can we take to improve our own behavior? If there’s something that we need to do, something that we haven’t done yet, how can we make it more fun and get it done?

Fanboys
The pejorative term fanboy (or fangirl) is applied to anyone who accepts a particular technology no matter what reality says. One might expect 37signals to be a gang of Rails zealots given that they created the framework. Not true. This video gives a brief glimpse of the company’s internal reasoning process.

Use the Right Tool
Rails isn’t fast enough for some of the tasks that 37signals needs to perform in house. Some tasks require the performance of the C) programming language. Other tasks are better suited for Erlang). In this video, Imbriaco shares the reasons why he chose Erlang as a backend tool for his bag of tricks. Key points in the video:

• How he was introduced to Erlang.
• How he developed his Erlang skills.
• Where he went for learning materials on Erlang.
• The likely winner in a fight between Erlang and Rails.

Imbriaco’s approach to learning work wells with other subject matter too.

Business View
If you’re a business owner, the kind of person who hires software developers to create products, why do you care about this message? Because when your company is making decisions about what tools to use, it’s important to use the right tool for a given task. Rails and Ruby get tons of positive publicity, and rightly so. However, sometimes a different language is a better fit.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Learn more about 10/GUI at http://10gui.com.

Before the Bird Respirator
The iron lung was standard medical equipment before the Bird respirator. But the iron lung was large, cumbersome, and expensive. Bird’s respirator is smaller, less expensive, and more effective. One model of the Bird respirator is small enough for use with premature infants.

Hidden Advantages of Longevity
Should an 86-year-old man continue to fly? Isn’t that dangerous? Bird says no. In some air emergencies, an elderly pilot can outperform a younger pilot. Why? Arterial sclerosis keeps the older pilot from blacking out!