Please take a moment and read this message from the Grameen foundation, a cause I strongly support:
Last year, we kicked off a global campaign in hopes that our supporters who believe in the power of microfinance will help us share its importance with their networks.
On the 27th of each month, we ask our supporters to make a donation of $27 to let the world know that poverty is unnecessary and one person can help change the lives of the world’s poorest.
Today we can double our impact! A group of friends of Grameen Foundation has pledged to provide a dollar-for-dollar match until we reach $200,000.
Why $27? In 1976, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus planted the seed that created Grameen Bank by making a loan of $27 to a group of Bangladeshi women out of his own pocket. This small action was a catalyst for the global microfinance movement that has since provided millions of women around the world with the microloans they need to help start or improve a small business, provide for their families and escape the cycle of poverty.
Three things you can do:
1. Give a gift of $27 to this movement. Visit: http://tinyurl.com/give27 . 2. Change your LinkedIn status today to: Today is the 27th! Let’s celebrate the first $27 microloan. Support Grameen Foundation http://tinyurl.com/give27 3. Change your Facebook status today to: It’s the 27th of the month, and I’m giving $27 to help the Grameen Foundation end global poverty. $27 was all it took for Muhammad Yunus to give his first microloan. Join in: http://tinyurl.com/give27 and DOUBLE your impact because generous donors are providing a dollar-for-dollar match until we reach $200,000! Your $27 becomes $54!
Micro-lending is a very important way to help improve economies around the world. You can have a large impact for a small number of dollars, please take this opportunity to lend a leg up to an entrepreneur in the 3rd world.
When the iPhone came out it was amazingly great and obviously stupid at the same time. No cut and paste? No changeable battery? No slot for expansion cards?
Now the iPad will have a similar growth curve. The software that is initially shipping with it suffers from being 1.0. And Apple 1.0 versions suffer further from not receiving wide beta testing. Congratulations early-adopters, you get to beta test the iPad extensions to the SDK. This device will lay the groundwork for a great future in tablet shaped devices, and this initial device will be fondly remembered but not with the martyrdom of the Newton because this one will be supplanted by improved devices instead of being abandoned.
The netbook just died, it hasn’t stopped moving yet but netbook sales are about to fall off a cliff. I’m sure this drove the $499 price point.
This will be the device that makes eBooks real. Kindle was a side show, there will be more iPads in peoples hands than Kindles only a couple weeks after launch, and in a year there will be some serious numbers. The people with these devices in hands also just happen to be the people who spend real money on media.
There are hints of impending perfection:
The single most important thing about this device is the new form factor. The apps will come and like the iPhone this will be a gadget that paradoxically improves with age.
Book reading will be good. Not perfect but very good. I’ve already switched to reading books on my iPhone months ago, this will be better, I think.
My kids won’t be hauling around huge textbooks in college, it is pretty clear that some device with this form factor will be filled with PDFs or something and take the place of print very quickly.
Book and magazine publishing has to be impacted by this. Not tomorrow but soon. Glossy magazines that found no love with Kindle will find it here. That goes doubly for Playboy and their kin. Cookbooks and cooking magazines, sports, etc. And comic books. Any pub that pay photogs or artists as much or more as they pay writers.
Unfortunately there are some flaws we will be stuck with for awhile, possibly until other manufacturers catch up;
Relatively low resolution screen. 1024×768? Really? Is it 1996 again? This will need to double linearly asap.
It shouldn’t be necessary to own a computer in order to make full use of either the iPhone or the iPad. This is an artificial limitation and driven by Apple and the cell carriers marketing strategies.
Ditto for lack of a memory card slot. Apple wants to up-charge storage.
Cameras. Come on. This device format will be the video phone we’ve been promised for 40 years.
The bezel is way too big and spoils the esthetic, which tells me it was an unavoidable technical problem; guts too big to hide fully behind the screen, larger screens too expensive, battery life with larger display area too lousy. The thin-bezel OLED version of this thing in 2 years will be pure sexy.
No GPS. Stupid. Had to be cost driven for this generation.
For the love of Pete can we have a little multi-tasking? That Pandora has to stop so I can check a map is stupid on the 3Gs, it will be mind-numbing on the iPad.
For all that, will I be buying one? In a heartbeat, if I can jailbreak it. Otherwise I’ll be waiting for an Android pad. Trust me in 2-3 years you’ll have a device very much like this sitting on your desk, another in your living room, and another that lives on your nightstand.
At our first Ignite Cincinnati I talked about my journey from bread-machine pizza dough neophyte to confused yeast chemistry padawan to mastery of the simplest way you can possibly manage to get great bread and pizza on the table.
I can only show you the path, you must walk the path…
Others with more time and baking authority on their hands have actually done a great job of explaining the main technique I use. I am going to point you to them as the place you should start. Firstly Mark Bittman, food writer extraordinaire for the NY Times was the first to really put “no-knead” bread on the map. He has a great article on it. So start with the simplest version.
This has evolved since then.
Water is important, and I’m sorry I neglected to mention this. You need to use great tasting water, so if your tap water isn’t great tasting to you, use filtered. I just use the cold water straight out of the filter built into my fridge, consistent taste and temperature, no surprises.
While I was searching for extra images (11pm the night before) I was momentarily surprised to find someone has a book out with almost the exact title I originally used for my topic. I haven’t had a chance to look at it but the premise is sound and their journey probably similar, with the benefit of having put a bunch of time into to to put a book out. So check it out.
The King Arthur Flour company is a bakers best friend, whether you are making serious bread, pseudo bread or cookies and muffins. Check out these recipes and blog entries that fall into this school of breadmaking.
At this point we have almost 200 people ticketed, not a bad start for Ignite in Cincinnati!
We have a lot of creative, investment, cultural and tech events in the city, but none that try to combine all these crowds and get some drinks in them. Your mission tonight: Have fun and get some creative juices flowing, and mix with new people and see what happens.
Note that we’ve lost a couple speakers due to uncontrollable events, like Google getting hacked by China. We have room for a couple last minute speakers and a challenge for anyone with the guts to give it a try: Powerpoint Karaoke. We have a number of decks that are essentially random hipster, biz, and cultural references and text, even slides from real presentations. You get up without knowing what will come up and freestyle.
Over the past months I’ve been compiling a list of resources for Entrepreneurs, Startups and people who want to join startup companies in the Cincinnati area. I’ve been doing this as a help to people, but more to compare what is available here to what is available in other hot startup markets and see where we are lacking.
An awesome event that is held in other places, particularly Seattle and Boulder, is Ignite. This is a quick heads up that we are starting an Ignite program in Cincinnati and are targeting January for the first event. More information about IgniteCincinnati is coming soon.
Mike Venerable had a post today on simple UI design that stirred up some thoughts. When designing anything, a device, web site, business card, anything, there are two related principles to consider; simple is best, and worse is better. Once upon a time design was about changing the world, lately what we call design tends to be more about selling sugared water or soap. Even worse we draw what I consider to be artificial lines between different design worlds; industrial, graphic, web, software. It can be about seeing something did not exist before, or seeing the true form of something, not just being pretty.
I had the great fortune to have a team at NeoWorx that built some truly great software. The design of this software, and I truly mean design from depth, not just how it looked but how it felt to use, how it ‘thought’, how it was built from the very ‘bottom’ of the deep hooks it had into the operating system to the reports it gave, was truly great. It was great enough to get the company sold to McAfee, and from there strongly influenced the look and feel of their entire consumer product line over the next year.
By far the single most important ingredient to great software design is an integrated team and an integrated design process. If you leave UI until later there will be compromises.
We never felt the need to codify the principles we followed at the time, being a “gelled team” we pretty much thought and acted as though of one mind a lot of the time (which is not to say that we were always in drone like agreement, much to the contrary, but we had good culture of trust and respect that allowed us to hash out things without anyone trying to defend ‘their’ idea to the exclusion of good input.)
If I were to try to codify now the principles we operated under then it would be something like:
Make it easy to find what is needed, and if we need something from the user ask plainly. Most important things easy to find, action the user has to take front and center. Need info? Ask for it in plain English.
Don’t ask the user any question they don’t have any basis to answer. This goes hand in hand with offering too many features.
Better still, don’t ask the question. Too often we demand of users they make choices. To the creator of the device or software it may seem like we’re giving freedom to the user. Really you aren’t, it is delaying what should have been a design decision until the last possible moment. If you can make the system a little bit smarter and save the user having to be bothered, it will be more useful.
Less is More. Don’t overwhelm the user with choices and data, just get to the point.
Good Enough security. This one applied specifically to security software, and is the hardest for ‘serious IT’ folks to understand. Technical people often strive for a ‘perfect’ security solution because it is theoretically possible. The computers should do our bidding and the humans should do whatever it takes to make it so. Of course it turns out that if you make users to unnatural things, like overly complex passwords they must change every 2 weeks, they will subvert the system to make it human compatible again by writing it down. So don’t waste time trying to protect against incredibly unlikely events, instead focus on doing a great job with the things that happen every day. Classic 80/20 rule.
Just work dammit. This one turned out to be a problem over time. What’s the perfect spam filter? Just make all my spam go away. Period. Perfect Anti-virus? Block anything bad from getting on my computer. Don’t bug me about any of it, just freaking do it. Oh the irony. In the case of security software it is a particularly insidious problem; if you are doing a great job and being quiet about it the user may be unsure of what value they have received when it comes time to upgrade or renew their subscription. At McAfee we were eventually forced to make the software notify the users of events that strictly speaking were not ‘newsworthy’.
But now the $100mil question; why doesn’t everyone follow these sorts of principles? Because it is hard. It is much harder to make something simple than to make something complex. The normal approach taken to adding a capability is to take what is there and tack on additional material/infrastructure/laws/data fields/etc. to accommodate the change. It is more work, and depending upon the organization involved fraught with political peril, to accept the newly desired behavior and then rethink the entire thing to find the new best form it should take. (We have the same problem with legal infrastructure and policy and procedure at any company over 100 people, this is directly related to why startups are more efficient than large companies and why after 200 years the US government is gridlocked and only able to take action in the face of crisis. But I digress.)
As Mark Twain said “Sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
Some other time I’ll talk about YAGNI and other important principles of bottom up software design, “box computing” which is an important component of the future of UI design, and why fear-based security marketing is a problem and why Phil Katz hated McAfee.
Many of the cool ideas that have been brought everyday use by the computer industry over the last several decades were first contemplated at Xerox Parc. In particular many of the ideas that led directly to the Mac. One of the visions at Parc involved computing devices existing in three formats; tabs, pads and boards. (Think pda/phone, light tablet computers, and compute servers built into building with large interactive wall-mounted displays).
The ways we use computing do seem to be evolving in this direction. It seems like everyone I know carries a Tab (iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, Android), and we’re starting to see the promise of blackboards with Surface and wall-mountedanalogs.
We are likely to receive a bastard hybrid of a tab and a pad from Apple some time soon. Certainly the rumor mill/slash pent up desire is all clamoring for such a thing; basically a jumbo iPhone/iTouch (duct-tape three iTouches together to get a sense). It will be another good step in the right direction. Still too heavy and a little small, and the battery life will suck, but everything else may be what we need.
A device which works better for viewing and lightly manipulating documents, which will already have a library of thousands of applications available thanks to iPhone app compatibility. This will allow a device to succeed that surely would have failed released on its own. The iPod made them able to own the online music business, the iPhone gave them an app store and a revenue stream from monthly subscribers, the iPad would give them the paid page-oriented content business that needs to arise to replace the vanishing dead-tree editions of everything.
This isn’t slam-dunk. Paid Internet content has a mixed history, mostly full of fail. A pad is large enough that putting it in your pocket isn’t an option, though we’re getting used to carrying some small device thanks to netbooks. We are also conditioned to talking on the phone the way you would with an iPad. But really we’ll be best off when Pads are cheap enough that you can have several around the house and the office and don’t need to carry it anywhere.
Incidentally, Apple has a history of playing with an idea in a low key way to let someone else take the brunt of any bad news. For example iTunes on Motorola phones is obvious in retrospect for the experiment (and sucker ploy) it was. Is the iTunes LP practice for interactive e-books? (There is some evidence that iTunes LP is not really what it is claimed to be.)
Tabs will continue to evolve. In the long run we need some sort of e-paper (no power draw when static) solution but with true print quality and in color. Current e-paper is a very nice step in the right direction but lacks color or even decent gray scale. There is better gray scale available on devices which we don’t see much of in the states yet, and color e-paper on prototype devices, such as the electrofluidic display created in Cincinnati or the display technology based on bouncing light back at different wavelengths by manipulating a physical surface (which sounded promising but seems to have disappeared). E-ink has color displays in its lab which are nimble enough to support video.
The progression is we’ve been trying for some sort of tablet computer for about 20 years and all of them have been intermediary steps to where we’re ultimately going; a light, near paper-sized wirelessly connected display. That ‘display’ won’t need much more than a browser as will will be used in conjunction with applications that are largely running elsewhere on servers.
Just add and stir; e-paper, ubiquitous wi-fi/3g, HTML5, cloud apps, fuel-cell batteries, and the Internet. None of which existed when we started down this path.
Aaron Patzer was in Cincinnati to speak to the GCVA earlier this year, and since then he sold his startup Mint for $170m. I thought his presentation to GCVA was excellent and he gives a nice outline of his real life experiences with costs at various stages here:
Everyone seems to have noticed over the past few months just how twisted some of the decisions Apple is making are. They chose a faulty carrier for the US market so they could line their pockets with kickbacks on the monthly fees, they rejected the Google Voice app, the Apple legal team seems to want to make jailbreaking your phone an act of terrorism, they held up information about single-payer healthcare,
But if you only ever learn one thing about interpreting human behavior it should be this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
The idea that Macs were somehow immune to malware because of superior engineering never held any water. (It was observed that they were not as interesting of a target because of their lower percentage of the population. Though really my gut tells me it was because people who tend to write malware tend not to be people who own Macs and therefore had nothing to develop Mac malware on.) Apple isn’t a superior engineering company, it is a superior marketing company. And down that road lies trouble.
Large companies are by their nature schizophrenic. Being made up of many autonomous parts they will make contradictory and hypocritical decisions (a major benefit of startups is the lack of vested interests and turf to protect). At the very least the competing forces of protecting the market share they have while knowing (in smart companies anyway) that they need to constantly re-invent themselves to keep someone else from stealing their lunch causes problems.
Take the app store for example. Brilliant. Stupid. Evil. Brilliant because it creates a tightly controlled way to get apps onto the precious device. In theory this protects apple from the bad PR of a rogue app that starts crashing phones, as Microsoft took grief for years over ‘blue screen of death’ crashes that were caused by device drivers they had nothing to do with. Stupid because over time it has become too much of a good thing, we had a wave of pioneers who hit big, followed by a wave of fortune-seekers. That was all fine but now we’re entering the settled phase and in this phase innovation has to come back into the picture or the app store and the iPhone will stagnate. Evil because Apple wants to own all the choice territory and so they will make decisions to keep out apps that people really want because they impinge on their prime real estate.
Aside from decisions made to protect turf, I think we are seeing signs of the impending divorce between Apple and Google. This is going to be messy. The most visible aspect of Google on the iPhone is of course the maps app, and Apple has recently taken steps that could lead to their own app.
But the root cause of any perception of evil is due to secrecy. The reasons for deep secrecy around Apple products are to protect its magical image. If we had visibility into more at Apple there wouldn’t be nearly as much excitement around launches, it would be much harder for them to keep the high level of quality they do manage to achieve because it would make killing not-fully-baked devices harder (just imagine the suck if Apple shipped hardware the way it ships software, shudder). Perhaps most importantly the press wouldn’t work themselves up into a lather over every tiny scrap of rumor they come across, unfounded or not.
This secrecy comes at a cost, people assume dark motives are hidden by dark rooms. We can’t see the stupid, so we assume brilliant but twisted motives. And paranoia creeps in. There was a lot of noise generated by someone posting pictures of their job offer from apple, evenly divided between “whoa cool!” and “dude you’re going to be fired for posting that.” One gets the sense working at apple is like serving in a really hip dictatorship. Kim Jong Il with a marketing budget.
Apple may have already lost the PR battle for awhile. Public opinion tides turn in ways that seem to seldom be based on objective reality. App authors will certainly be exploring building apps for Android and the newly freed WebOS platform. And I suspect Microsoft has something very sexy in store for WinMoble 7 (native Silverlight 4.0 apps on a dual-core arm processor anyone?).
Eventually Apple will figure out as Microsoft did that open is better. They’ll get smarter about what they keep secret. They’ll realize that adopting an interoperable stance works out better for them in the long run. Let’s hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took Microsoft to adapt.
I made the switch to using gmail through a web browser exclusively almost five years ago, and I’ve never looked back. For a brief period of time I was forced to use Outlook for calendaring only at a company that was still tied to Exchange, and I resented it every time I had to open it. Since it became available I’ve also been using Google Apps for my family domain and multiple company domains. If you are in a startup there is no reason for you to be stuck with legacy technology and self-hosted email. You can be up in running in under an hour. So if you aren’t already using it here is a list of just a few reasons why you need to be;
1. You shouldn’t be spending money on anything that you don’t absolutely have to. That includes email hosting! Are you generating your own electricity? Writing your own development tools? And yes, it is still free for most purposes. The page tries to hide that fact now by emphasizing a big button for the paid version, but what you want is the standard version which is free for up to 200 (!) users. (If you have email to move see my note below.)
2. You shouldn’t be spending any time on anything that isn’t core to your business either! Unless your business is running mail servers (and if it is, sorry brother your days are numbered) you have no business being busy administering a mail server, and your IT folk should be working on things that add value to your customers.
3. Hosting of email from places that throw it in with your web site hosting typically sucks. It is awkward to administer, web mail if they have it is inferior, and the spam filtering? Forget about it.
4. Move to Google, say bye to spam. I went from nearly a thousand a day to a dozen a week. And that’s with multiple publicly available email addresses pointing to me. I’ll take it.
5. Recent improvements make it much simpler to manage multiple email addresses from a single login. After many years they finally got rid of the darned “on behalf of” headers that used to show up for Outlook users.
6. Dump Outlook. For reasons known only to the Office team Outlook continues to be a huge resource pig. Lots of threads, lots of memory, mysterious CPU load. Offload all that to a server and get back the resources better used for development tools, design tools, etc.
7. Stop the interrupt driven day. In case you didn’t get the memo: you can’t multi-task. Getting little pop-up messages when an email arrived was cool, about 10 years ago. Today it is a disaster. Turn off notifications of email arrival on your desktop, turn them off on your phone. Only check mail at fixed intervals. No wonder you aren’t getting anything done!
8. Don’t be tied to one computer. Or worse, don’t be trying to keep multiple copies of Outlook or any other email/calendar client in synch. Don’t ever hook your phone up to synch. With your mail and your calendar ‘in the cloud’ life is greatly simplified. Suddenly every computer in the world that is connected to the internet is a place you could potentially handle email.
9. The best back-end for mail and calendaring for your mobile phone. Period. If you use a phone that supports sync properly (just get an iPhone already) new calendar items appear on your phone or in the cloud within seconds of being created from the phone or in the browser.
10. Multiple calendars will save your sanity. Create calendars that are shared between team members (or between family members!). I have my calendar, my wife’s, shared company events, shared family events and ‘info’ (notes about people being on vacation etc.). I can see everything that is going on at a glance and avoid schedule conflicts.
Note: If you have lots of email archived that you want to upload to have access for searches you should go for it. There are multipleways to accomplish this depending upon where you are moving from. Local client tools will enable you to upload from a local store (like your old Outlook files). If you have a mail server that you are migrating from you can suck all this email across for free; the feature needed to accomplish this is only available to paid domain accounts, but you can get a free one-month trial. The transfer will take a day. You do the math.
Have you made the switch? Happy? If you haven’t what is holding you back?
2. You shouldn’t be spending any time on anything that isn’t core to your business either! Unless your business is running mail servers (and if it is, sorry brother your days are numbered) you have no business being busy administering a mail server, and your IT folk should be working on things that add value to your customers.
The best back-end for mail and