Be the Record, Not the Needle

March 28, 2013 — Leave a comment


Photo courtesy of IStockPhoto

I’m like a record player 
I keep goin’ round
With a needle in my arm
Playin’ someone else’s sound

-  ”Like a Record Player” by The Lawrence Arms

Among music purists it’s generally accepted that the best way to listen to music is on vinyl.  There is a rich and “live” quality to the sound that has never been reproduced with digital music.  My nephew Tyler’s company, Vinyl Me Please, is a cool little company banking on the return of vinyl.

One of the key components of listening to vinyl records is the needle (or stylus) on the turntable.  You can spend crazy amounts of money on the perfect setup, all in the name of hearing the record in near perfection.

Music is ultimately about the record, not the needle.  Yes, a better needle will get me better sound, but in the end I want to hear the record.  The needle is just a part of the delivery. If there were no record, I have no reason to buy the needle.

The needle’s job is to play someone else’s sound, as The Lawrence Arms so aptly put it.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.  These are all great needles.

Wouldn’t you rather be the record?

In Business, life, philosophy
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Unsubscribing

January 21, 2013 — Leave a comment

Since about the middle of December I have been unsubscribing from just about every list I am on, especially the ones where someone is trying to sell me something.

It’s funny the emotions you go through for just a simple unsubscribe.  FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) kicks in.  ”What if I miss that awesome deal from Amazon for that book I didn’t know I wanted to read?”

That’s the thing about advertising.  Their job is to make you need something you didn’t know you needed.

If your inbox is overwhelmed with ads, I highly recommend serially unsubscribing from every list and taking at least three months off.  You can always add back what you really need, and I bet after three months you will realize you don’t miss any of it.

 

In life, philosophy
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The Really Well-Designed Combination Lock

January 17, 2013 — 11 Comments

Using the Masterlock Speed-Dial 1500 reminds me of how I felt when I first used an iPod.  Of course this is how a combination lock should work.  I bought this little beauty today and was really impressed with the obvious attention to detail and great design, not to mention how easy it was to use.

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The most obvious missing component of this lock is the (now heinously ugly) combination dial with the numbers and ticks.  How much more 20th century can you get?  Instead of turning a wheel right then left then right again, the lock is opened by moving the button on inner part of the lock.  There are several advantages to this approach:

  1. You can set your own combination instead of having to remember some random set of numbers
  2. You control the length of the combination

 

How Does It Work?

When you unbox the lock, it has a pre-set combination as expected.  Once the lock is unlocked, any new combination can be set.  You set the combination by moving a switch on the back of the lock to the Reset position (see below).

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Once you move the switch, you can move the button on the front of the lock to set the combination.  Masterlock provides you with some stickers that you can affix to the surface of the lock to help you remember what combination you set.  In my case, I used letters and created a password.  They have stickers for numbers, card suits, and various other patterns you might use.

IMG_0670

 

For example, if my password were ‘bathtub’, I would move the lock button in the following sequence:  up up right left right right up (b a t h t u b).  Pretty neat, eh?

Once you have your combination set, you slide the reset switch back down and shut the lock.  Voila!  You have a password-protected lock.

Oh, and it comes in four colors.

Why does all of this matter?

I love it when a company takes an idea that is so entrenched and does something new with it.  As NEST has shown us with their brilliant thermostat, it’s worth looking around at the things we think are just “here to stay” and wondering how they might be done differently.  Yes, this lock does the same thing that the old, ugly combination locks do.

I bet, however, that if I had this hanging on my locker and you had the stale, old one on yours, you would want mine.

 

In design
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The Lessons From Get On The Shelf

November 29, 2012 — Leave a comment

Walmart Labs is a division / subsidiary of Walmart.  The mission of Walmart Labs is simple:  Fix the Innovators Dilemna within the company.

After struggling for quite some time, it appears Walmart Labs is beginning to hit their stride.  They are churning out ideas fast and furious.  Some will work, and some will not.

One of the more interesting ideas to come along is Get On The Shelf.  Walmart held a competition and invited all comers to post their product ideas for consideration.  Winners get the privilege of having Walmart shelf space dedicated to their products.  Walmart shelf space is without question some of the most valuable retail real estate in the world.

I love this idea for several reasons:

  • It gives producers the chance to get on the map without having to navigate the Walmart supply chain leviathan.  I can’t imagine what sort of blackmail has to go on to get the ear of a Walmart buyer.
  • It put the decision in the hands of it’s customers.
  • It is 100% outside the way of doing normal business at Walmart.  Simply, they are trying lots of new things to see what sticks.

Regardless of how one might feel about Walmart as a company, I am really encouraged to see a company this size taking on the challenges of competing in a more nimble fashion.  If they are able to consistently execute on solid ideas within the Labs context, they will be a model for other companies to point to.

In Business
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The Game(ing) Show – Catalyst For Thought

November 27, 2012 — Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a live theater event here in Raleigh called The Game(ing) Show.  You can read more about their vision by visiting the Kickstarter project.

The show featured a cast acting out scenes in a play intermingled with the audience coming forward to play games.  The game contestants not only had the chance to win something (usually a can of beer) but also affected the direction of the play.  For example, if the contestant lost the game, a member of the cast might have to walk backward for the rest of the play.

The outcome of the game affected the outcome of the play.  It was completely dynamic and random, and amazingly fun to watch.  In speaking with one of the actors, there were thousands of possible variants for how the play could have gone, and no one knew how it would end.

What Does This Signal For The Future?

While the play was obviously live theater, it would seem to me there are a number of kinds of entertainment which could benefit from this model.  I don’t mean a simple “choose your own ending” kind of voting thing, or even the simple “reality TV” examples like American Idol or The X Factor.  I think we will see live and recorded TV embracing the concepts I saw at The Game(ing) Show.

  • Audience members holding indirect sway in the storyline of a show.
  • Audience members authoring pieces of a show.
  • Performers interacting with audience members in new ways to make the show more creative and spontaneous.

What Are The Challenges?

In short, they are numerous.  You have time zones to cross, multiple streams of data to coordinate and possibly co-mingle during a show, live vs. recorded, and on and on.

While The Game(ing) Show was experimental theater, for me it provided a glimpse into the near future.  I fully expect to see elements of what was demonstrated popping up in mainstream media soon.

What do you think?  Would you have any interest in being a part of a show where you could help in determining not only the outcome but the path to the outcome?

In Business, ideas , ,
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SwitchCoder – Build Voice and SMS Apps with No Infrastructure

October 19, 2012 — 2 Comments

I am excited to be writing about a project I have been working on for the last four or five months.  SwitchCoder is an application which allows you to build voice and SMS applications and deploy them, all from a browser.  Application developers will have no longer have to maintain their own infrastructure or deal with complex integrations to other systems if not required.

Background

Voice and SMS applications have traditionally been built using a 3rd-party API.  Either the carriers themselves or 3rd party companies have provided these services to developers in the past.  The availability of Communications as a Service (CaaS) has evolved over the last few years to where providing voice and SMS integration is now quite common.  Where SwitchCoder departs from these traditional approaches is two-fold and very important:

  • SwitchCoder does not require the developer to run their own servers or develop a new application.  In many cases, the applications developers need can be built 100% on SwitchCoder’s platform with no other external dependencies.
  • SwitchCoder runs at the carrier.  Third-party service providers have to integrate to the carrier network.  SwitchCoder is running in the same network infrastructure as iNetwork, which powers some of the largest voice and text customers in the country.

How Does It Work?

For a brief introduction, watch the video below.

Here are a couple more videos that show the service in action:

Group Messaging

How to Invoke Scripts:

What’s Next

With the product being barely a week old, we are anxious to get feedback from users about both the approach we have taken as well as the execution.  If you are interested, please sign up for the service and let me know what you think.  You get $10 in credit to try the service out before you have to spend any of your own money.

Give it a shot and drop me a note in the comments or contact us on Twitter.

In Business ,
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The Romance of Manufacturing

October 18, 2012 — Leave a comment

Having watched the last couple of debates (vice presidential and last night’s presidential), I am struggling to understand the obsession with bringing manufacturing jobs to the United States.  Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get why we want these jobs.

Having seen the pictures from inside of Foxconn, where iPhones and iPads are made, I am pretty sure there aren’t many here in the US willing to work in those kinds of conditions, much less live on a campus devoted entirely to manufacturing.

There is a good bit of romance tied up in the idea of manufacturing jobs.  I think it probably is still a relic of the heyday of the industrial economy when everyone went to work at a plant, built stuff and watched it roll off of the assembly line.  Real people tightened rivets, put car doors on, and sewed jeans together.  Until machines could do it better and faster.

The labor force of the US has moved up the value chain.  We have far more opportunity in knowledge work, making far better money, than training people to put iPhones together and trying to make that attractive.  When Georgia kicked all of the undocumented workers out of their state, nobody moved there to start picking lettuce and peaches.  Why not?  If we are so desperate for any kind of work, all of those Georgia farmers should have been overrun with people willing to step in.

They weren’t, and the same would be true of some factory in nowhere Indiana making widgets.

Repetitive, non-creative work is going the way of the dodo bird.  Let it go.

If we are going to invest in job training outside of knowledge work, how about the trades?  There is a rapidly approaching shortage of electricians, plumbers, and carpenters.  It’s increasingly difficult to find good ones, and the good ones make a whole lot of money.  I would be thrilled if my kids wanted to be electricians.  No shortage of work there.

I am not suggesting that there isn’t real hardship for the unemployed.  I know people who have not been able to find good work for a long time.  It’s real pain.

I don’t think the answer is to have those people sewing dresses.  Let Foxconn make the iPhones and pay their workers $2 an hour.  I want us focused on creating the next iPhone.  The value created is exponentially higher.

In Business ,
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Trusted Referrers – How To Fix The Reference Process

September 21, 2012 — Leave a comment

I was working on a project recently and needed to find out if the prospective vendor could actually do the work.  So, I did what everyone else does in a similar position, and asked for references.  The references, as you would expect, were glowing.  We were going to be working with a great company.  I was fired up.  Until we actually had to do real work.  It turned out they were in way over their head, and could not pull the project off.

If you think about it, the reference process for prospective vendors and employees makes no sense.  The company is not going to cough up clients who have had bad experiences.  The prospective employee is not going to give you a reference who knows they smoke pot all day.  This is especially true if you don’t know the person you are talking to.  How do you know who to trust?

Finding Great People and Companies

I do a lot of work with developers from all over the world.  I use a pretty rigorous process to figure out if they can cut the mustard.  It includes, among other things, having them do test projects for me prior to being hired in any full-time capacity.  The test projects will typically parallel what I need done on a real project, but with far less detail.  What I am after in the process is usually to evaluate them on the following criteria:

  • Can you read something that took me 10 minutes to write (tops) and create something real from it?
  • Can you understand what I am saying, as well as what I am not saying?
  • Can you make intelligent decisions when faced with unknowns?
  • Can you organize your thoughts and ideas into a well-thought-out solution?
  • Can you do it without asking me questions every 10 minutes?

For every ten people that say they can solve the problem how I want, I may find one that actually can.

Ask For Work Product

I am starting using a similar process in hiring companies to do work.  It’s no longer enough for a company to assure me they have their act together.  It’s no longer enough to have three random references assure me that they have their act together.

I am asking for test projects and prototypes that contain the hardest parts of the eventual solution demonstrated in working fashion.   Then I typically will ask them to demonstrate it and change it on the fly.  If they truly know their stuff, they welcome the challenge and love showing off.  When I find a vendor that loves to show me how great they are and can do it with me firing questions at them in real time, I have someone worth working with.

If, however, they are insulted by the request, I tend to walk away or at least be much less favorable to using them.

A New System – Trusted Referrers

I have been thinking about a way of providing and looking up references along the lines of Stack Overflow.  On Stack Overflow, users post questions and other users answer them.  Everyone can rate both the question and all of the answers by +1 or -1.  The best questions for a topic bubble to the top, and the best answers for a question bubble to the top.   The users asking the best questions and providing the best answers get reputation in the network.

What if you applied this to getting references?  What if the person providing the reference (either professional or personal) had something at stake in the process?  If they provided a bad reference, their public reputation would be dinged.  If what they say is accurate, their credibility is increased.

Participants in the system would be looked upon as “trusted referrers.”  LinkedIn provides some of this with recommendations.  However, it only really works if you know the person providing the recommendation.  It doesn’t solve the problem of a reference from an unknown entity.

In my idea, users would know a person by their reputation, not just their personal connection.

I am still working through all of the details obviously, but I believe there is a way to apply the principles that work in other systems to references.

What do you think?  Is there something already out there that solves this problem?

In Business , ,
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Why Marc Benioff Is One Of The Best

September 18, 2012 — Leave a comment

I watched an interview with Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff from the Techcrunch Disrupt Conference which happened last week in San Francisco.  You can watch the entire interview here, and it’s worth thirty minutes of your time.

I have always been a big fan of Salesforce.com.  They were one of the very first companies to make the bet on what is now called cloud computing.

Some interesting stats about Salesforce.com:

  • In 2002, they had 5,700 customers and about 80,000 subscribers.  Today they have 107,000 customers and millions of subscribers.
  • Current valuation is $21 billion and is the fifth most valuable software company in the world
  • Current revenue run rate is $3 billion a year
  • They have donated 1% of their stock and 1% of employees time to charity since the inception of the company.

What’s curious to me is Benioff is rarely mentioned when the names of elite technology CEOs are tossed about.  Everyone knows who Mark Zuckerberg is.  Most people know who Larry Page and Sergei Brin are, and probably Jeff Bezos.  However, I would submit that Benioff belongs in the same class for a number of reasons:  Consistent Innovation, Staying true to the mission, and Philanthropy.

Consistent Innovation

When I first started using Salesforce at Bandwidth.com, we were a small company drowning in our own success.  We needed a system to run the company, and after reading up on the company we made a bet and went with them for our entire back office systems.  They had just launched their Enterprise Edition, which provided developer access to their platform.  It was a huge step forward, albeit a pretty bumpy one at the time.   Their slogan was No Software.  Their value proposition was simple:  We run the application so you don’t have to.

Salesforce was first to market with the idea of an application store (they call it the App Exchange).  Long before Apple ever thought of the iPhone, much less the App Store, Benioff and Salesforce were allowing customers to innovate on the platform by building their own applications, and allowing their partners and developers to build and sell applications that integrated to Salesforce to solve specific problems in vertical markets. The result was explosive growth, because for the first time Salesforce.com could be bent to solve most any business problem.

The next big step forward was the launch of Force.com, a radical move that let developers build AND DEPLOY applications within the Salesforce architecture.  Solving this kind of technical problem is not easy.  The problem of developers writing poor or nefarious code had to be solved, as well as a host of other technical challenges.

Throughout this time, there was a steady march of quarterly releases that contained fixes, updates and smaller new features.  Every quarter, every year for the last ten years at least.  Forty major product updates, to say nothing of acquisition integrations and the really big moves forward I referenced above.  Benioff and Parker Harris, his Executive Vice President of Technology have been remarkably consistent with new, value-adding functionality.

Staying true to the mission

When Salesforce.com started, the product was pretty simple.  It managed a sales team’s contacts, accounts and deals.  To a large extent, that’s what Salesforce.com is still about.  Yes, they have Support, Social integration, and lots of other new stuff.  Most of the customers, I would imagine, still buy Salesforce to do what it was built for back ten years ago.

What I love about the approach they have taken is that you never hear Benioff say “We are this for that” like so many companies do.  ”We are Instagram for bicycles” or whatever other inane idea raises $500k and you never hear from again.  Benioff has always been about solving real, practical problems for his customers every day.  It’s blocking and tackling.  If you listen to him talk in any setting, he just gets technology as a business and knows where his company fits.

Philanthropy

If you watch the interview you will hear Benioff’s passion for giving his money away.  He speaks about the grace he has been given, and how he has been able to give away in return.  In addition to the Salesforce.com Foundation, Salesforce is free to any non-profit organization for the first 10 users.  Benioff personally has donated large sums of his own money to worthwhile causes, like building a hospital in San Francisco.  I like the fact that he thought about giving away a piece of everything from the very beginning.  It wasn’t an afterthought after the company became successful.

And One More Thing…

One last anecdote that I think helps to explain Marc Benioff’s commitment to his customers.  In 2003 and 2004, Salesforce had a lot of problems.  They were growing very quickly and as a result, the architecture was buckling under the strain.  There would be outages almost every quarter when they would do their releases.  At Bandwidth.com, we grew to loathe the week that updates came out.  At the time we were a small customer, probably 40 or 50 subscribers, but our ENTIRE business ran on Salesforce.  When they went offline, we did too.

There was never a time when Benioff would not take our calls.  He would answer the phone and take our blasts and promise to do better the next time.  He would answer every email we sent him.  I don’t know that we would have stayed with them had we not felt his sincere commitment to making things right.  I ran into him in a bar at Dreamforce a year or so later. He knew who I was and asked specifically about our business.

I have dealt with a number of companies much smaller who never cared the way he did, and still does I am sure.  It’s why he, and his company, have been so successful.  I think history will shine a much brighter light on him than he gets in the current climate.

In Business , , ,
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Air Show HD – A New App To Share Your Pictures

September 13, 2012 — Leave a comment

There’s an exciting new company just getting going here in Research Triangle Park called Splitmo.  Splitmo is focused on building applications that take advantage of the growing capabilities of Apple TV and iPad to share screens and move content between screens.  Splitmo was founded by Rob Witman, an entrepreneur who recently moved here from the Bay area.

The first application from Splitmo is in the App Store now and is called Air Show.  Air Show allows you to share and modify photos, create slideshows and share it all with your friends via social media.

If you have ever used the built-in Photo app on the iPad or iPhone, you know that it lacks any sort of meaningful capability for showing your photos on a big screen.  You can basically start slideshows and let them run, pushing them to the TV.  Air Show gives you full control by providing a console to build and manage the content while your friends look at the finished product on the big screen.

Creating a Slideshow

The screen is broken up into two main areas:  The Presentation area at the top and the Picture Gallery at the bottom.

You browse the pictures from your gallery just like you would in the Photos.  You tap the image and it is automatically added to the current slideshow.  Two taps and it adds it to the slideshow and shows it on the TV.  You can also touch, hold and drag an image straight to the TV and drop it on.

As you add images to the slideshow, you can re-arrange the order as you see fit.  Once you have the slideshow the way you want it, you can save it for viewing at a later time with a name you so choose.  The free version of the app will let you save up to three slideshows.  Plenty to try it out and see if you like it.

Doctoring images

For any image in the slideshow, Air Show has some cool image modification capabilities.  You can pinch the image on the screen to enlarge or shrink it.  As you pinch, you can see the changes both on the iPad screen and on the TV.  Very cool.

Air Show also has a laser pointer that you can use to highlight a particular portion of the image.  So if you and your friends are sitting around the TV, you can put the highlighter over the image and call attention to a spot on it.

Last but not least is the ability to annotate a photo with a caption of your choice.  Select the photo from the slideshow, touch the magic wand icon and up pops a screen for you to enter your caption.

Sharing

Finally, Air Show gives you the ability to share any of your doctored photos with friends by using the integrated Twitter and email capabilities of the device.  It works just like any other iOS application. Nothing new to learn here.

If you have an Apple TV and want to use it to share pictures at a party or with a few friends and family, Air Show is a really cool app to check out.  I found it easy to use and understand, with enough features but not too many.  Far and away it’s most compelling idea is the ability for the presenter to control the experience while the observers just enjoy the show.  It’s a peek into the future of where we are headed with multi-screen home entertainment.  I’m excited to see what the guys at Splitmo come up with next.

Here’s a video to give you a better idea of all that the app can do.  Rob is a great narrator, so watch it for no other reason than that.

You can get it from the App Store now, and it’s free!  Go get it and get showing.

In life, splitmo, video , , ,
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