logan's shared items in Google Reader

Nickel Tile Floor! A DIY Bathroom Renovation

2010-10-04T16:41:10Z

Shared by logan
Further evidence the dollar is devaluating :-)

This project was completed by some regular readers from Seattle: In March 2010, I came upon the ever-popular Penny Tile floor post on your site. At the time, we were in the process of renovating our 1950s rambler and I was unsuccessful in finding a contractor to complete a concrete overlay (thin-set concrete) design on our master bathroom floor. A standard flooring option just wasn’t what we were envisioning for this space…

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It’s Time To Reinvent The Signature Page

2010-08-27T19:46:05Z

Shared by logan
Good point

Last night I printed, signed, scanned, and emailed two signature pages. As is my custom of not keeping anything around, I tore up and tossed the sig pages and then deleted the files. This morning I woke up to an email saying “We didn’t get your signature pages. Can you please send them.” I just went through the same print, sign, scan, and email process again.

This is so profoundly stupid. I sent a note yesterday afternoon in reply to the email thread asking if I was all set to go that said “I’m all set to go.” A bunch of lawyers were on the email thread (mine and the company’s.) We are wiring the money today. Now they have some pretty scanned sig pages also.

There has got to be a better way. Over the last decade, there have been lots of “electronic signature” companies pop up. None have seemed to take root in the corporate world. In the past year, I sold a house and bought a house. In both cases, there was some goofy online thing that I signed with my mouse (my signature looked like a messy “X”) for the offers (to make / accept) but I still had to go to the title company and sit and sign 37 documents to close. Every time I go to the grocery store I swipe my credit card through a little electronic checkout machine and when it’s time to sign, I put a big “X” on the sig line.

When I think about the number of places my actual signature is at this point, it’s a pretty useless mark. But for some reason it’s still important in the legal closing process. This now seems more like a tradition, instead of a useful thing.

While I’m not interested in funding something in this arena (it’s outside our focus), it seems like there’s finally an opportunity to solve for this, at least in the corporate world. I’m not talking about biometrics or retina scanning – just a valid electronic signature that becomes a standard. Maybe someday. Wouldn’t it be cool if they lawyers took this on and tried to solve it?

Official Google Reader Blog: Readers: Get your Buzz on

2010-02-12T06:38:40Z

Shared by Jenna
yay!! esp this part: "Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you'd prefer."

We know that many people like Reader because it makes it so easy to share interesting stuff with a wide group of friends. That's why, over the past year, we've added a number of features to help you share the content you find most interesting: comments, following, people search, liking, and "send to."

However, even with all these great features, sharing has been mostly limited to the subset of your friends who use Google Reader. While many people use Reader, we know that even more use Gmail. That's why today, we're thrilled to announce that with the launch of Google Buzz, the awesome items you share in Reader can also be shared with all your friends who use Gmail with Google Buzz.

A shared item in Reader (background) and Buzz (foreground)

Getting started with Google Buzz is easy. Just head over to Gmail and you'll be able to link up your Google Reader account with just a few clicks. Then, anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you'd prefer.

And don't worry, you don't have another list of friends or followers to manage. The people you follow in Reader are the same people you follow in Buzz – those you've already chosen to follow in Reader, plus the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.

Check out the video below, explaining everything you can do with Google Buzz!

Head to our help center for more details about the Buzz integration in Reader, or leave us feedback in our forum, on Twitter or even using Buzz itself.

P.S. Keep in mind that Google Buzz is rolling out gradually, it might be a few days before you get it for your account.

Hot! Gotta hit the pool

2009-08-29T21:39:22Z

Hot! Gotta hit the pool

Psychic

2009-08-26T00:00:00Z

Handerpants — The Underwear for Your Hands

2009-08-17T07:16:41Z

Shared by Jenna
hee hee! (via chadt)

Sure, they look like they’re just fingerless gloves, but they’re more fashionable than boxers and have a handy opening flap on the front. Click the link for a Billy Mays-inspired sales video.

Link

Managing UI Complexity | Brandon Walkin

2009-08-17T07:03:20Z

Shared by Jenna
Nice writeup. (so read this and then don't get angry if some of your Reader options get hidden.. please?)

Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it.

Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure is the most popular means of managing complexity. The idea is that clutter and cognitive overhead can be reduced by hiding less frequently used elements behind some avenue of accessing those elements, like a mouse click or a keyboard shortcut. It requires that the designer accurately determine which elements are frequently and infrequently used and to what degree.

Quite a bit of care needs to be put into the progressive disclosure hierarchy and the mechanisms used for disclosure. Poorly considered use of progressive disclosure can achieve the opposite of the intended effect by making the interface even more complex. As an example, Microsoft Windows has been trending towards removing the menu bar from individual windows and instead packing each function into the main interface (often using pull down menus), which has some issues. I’ll go over a few of them:

There are inconsistent ways of accessing common functionality. The Print function, for example, is in different locations in both the application’s interface and the progressive disclosure hierarchy. The Print controls in Internet Explorer, Contacts (Windows Explorer), and WordPad are highlighted in the screenshot below, to illustrate this. Competing first-party Mac applications (Safari, Address Book, and TextEdit, respectively) have the Print function available in a consistent location – the last item in the File menu. A user who learns how to print in one of those Mac applications won’t have to hunt to find the Print function in other applications. It’s a “learn once, use everywhere” model.
There’s a tendency to overwhelm the user with progressive disclosure points. The default Internet Explorer interface (with Windows Live installed) has a total of 17 pull down buttons – highlighted below. Further, all of these progressive disclosure controls require screen real estate. As more screen real estate is occupied by administrative actions, less is dedicated to displaying the actual content of the application (which, in this case, are webpages).

Contextual Actions

This is a form of progressive disclosure where contextually appropriate controls are exposed on a particular object. The most common implementation are contextual menus, activated on the Mac by a right-click or a control-click. While contextual menus are a consistent and useful way of revealing contextual actions on objects, they’re hard to discover, which makes them inappropriate for workflow-critical actions that necessitate greater weight in the interface.

The standard way to give these actions greater weight is to integrate them in your interface by providing the set of contextual controls in front of or near each object. Complexity is increased substantially, because the set of controls is repeated for every object on screen. We can get rid of most of this complexity by using a different progressive disclosure technique. Controls can be displayed on a single object if the object is selected, the object has focus, or when the mouse is over the object. This solves the complexity issue since there’s only one set of contextual controls being shown at a particular time, but it’s not without its downsides. Consider whether this sort of technique is appropriate for your interface before deciding one way or the other.

Alignment & Visual Hierarchy

Aligning elements in a user interface to a simple, consistent grid, will go great lengths in reducing the appearance of complexity. The use of strict alignment and a thoughtfully laid out grid can turn an interface from chaotic and overwhelming to harmonious and appealing.

Some compelling examples are the inspectors in Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Lightroom. While a host of factors are responsible for the Expression Blend inspector looking considerably more complex than the Lightroom inspector, the rough horizontal alignment is certainly a primary one. The horizontal alignment lines have been drawn in red to illustrate the differences.

The examples shown above also demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques used in each interface to indicate hierarchy. The Lightroom inspector has very strong visual distinctions between section headings and their contents. Headings are prominent. Set in large type with generous padding and a relatively high contrast foreground-background color combination, sections, headings, and the relationships between them are immediately clear.

Visual Noise & Contrast

The amount of visual noise in an interface has a great deal of impact on the perceived complexity of the interface. And contrast plays an important role with respect to visual noise. Using lower contrast UI elements reduces visual noise which will often reduce the effective complexity of the interface, as you’ll see in the next couple of examples.

The Address Book UI eschews fields with relatively high contrast borders in favour of fields with borders that are only visible if the field has focus. This causes the fields to blend in with the rest of the interface. The Create Contact window in Entourage 2008 uses the standard window background color and standard text field styling which contributes to the interface looking more complex than the Address Book interface.

As another example, I’ve taken the Filter window in Aperture 2.0 and mocked up what it would look like with the transparent controls from iLife ‘08 (and parts of iLife ‘09) with high contrast edges instead of the relatively low contrast controls that it shipped with. The UI I’ve mocked up looks notably more complex than the shipping interface because of the higher contrast controls. Simply adjusting the styling of your controls can have a considerable impact on complexity.

Use of Icons

Interfaces widely regarded as complex with high learning curves are often characterized by an abundance of icons or glyphs that lack descriptive labels. When a user opens an application for the first time with an interface covered in label-less glyphs, it can be quite daunting. Every icon with a non-obvious meaning will have to be learned for the user to feel any sort of mastery over the application.

This is a difficult problem to solve. There often isn’t room for a label to sit next to an icon, and in many cases there is cost involved in replacing an icon with a label (mainly, users will not be able to quickly scan the interface for the icon). Deciding when to use an icon, a label, or both, is an art all in itself.

Nevertheless, here are some tips for those faced with this issue:

Revamp your icons so they convey their meaning more effectively. Improve metaphors, adjust sizes, colors, etc.
Use grouping to imply meaning. Grouping related icons together can often provide sufficient context to imply their function.
Using progressive disclosure, place less often used icon-only buttons in a pull down menu with both icons and their labels. A nice benefit of this is that the user will learn the meaning of each icon when they use the pull down menu, and if the menu is designed to be used early on in a user’s experience with the application, you can get away with using those icons without labels in other places in the app (since the user will have already learned their meanings at that point).

Mental Models

A great way to reduce effective complexity is to align the conceptual model expressed by your interface with your user’s mental model as closely as possible. A poorly thought out model contributes to complexity by adding a significant amount of cognitive work that your users have to perform to learn your interface.

The recurrence UI in Windows Calendar, for instance, reflects the developer’s model of the task rather than the user’s model. Take a look at the second set of radio options in this screenshot:

What’s the “28th last day of the month”?
What’s the “4th last Tuesday of the month”?
How long did you spend trying to work that out?

These options feel complex because the language used and functionality that’s represented doesn’t reflect your understanding of repeating events. Combat this issue by researching how your users conceptualize relevant tasks so your models are intuitive. You can read more about mental models in the HIG.

Use your Judgement

Finally, use your own judgement. There are costs associated with nearly every technique I’ve listed here. Carefully consider each technique in the context of your interface and determine which are most appropriate for your application and how best to apply them.

Unlocking the Awesome Potential of Behavioural Disorder

2009-06-06T11:10:39Z

The Social Media Venn Diagram Tee from Despair, Inc

I just had to have this - link from NotCot

As the Dollar Continues to Collapse, Where Will You Put Your Money?

2009-05-25T11:06:47Z

Paco Ahlgren submits:

This piece follows a previous article, in which I warned against shorting equities -- despite the fact that I believe the stock market is going to fall dramatically, at least in real terms (which I'll again expand upon later). As usual, my cautious outlook prompted a flurry of emails from readers asking what they should be doing with their money in order to prepare for the impending firestorm of rising prices that will derive from the inflationary printing and unprecedented credit-easing governments worldwide are foisting on their citizens.

It's important to note that, although I refer to "the" collapse of the dollar and Treasuries, these events are not going to happen in one minute, or one day, or even one week. Indeed, since I started writing about this scenario in December, the government has done so much to try to reverse the course of this trend, and yet the cracks have widened, and the dollar and Treasuries continue their inexorable march downward. Even though I don't believe, however, there will be any particular event that will trigger the collapse, I do believe it will accelerate with time -- ultimately exploding in a quick, catastrophic climax.

Complete Story »

More Job Losses = Greater Foreclosures

2009-05-25T12:45:48Z

“We’re about to have a big problem. Foreclosures were bad last year? It’s going to get worse.”

-Morris A. Davis, a real estate expert at the University of Wisconsin.

This is a theme I have been hammering on for some time: As more people lose their jobs, we will see increasing foreclosures, adding further stress to banks’ already ugly balance sheets.

As the New York Times notes, the number of prime mortgages that were “delinquent at least 90 days, were in foreclosure or had deteriorated to the point that the lender took possession of the home” jumped enormously as job losses accelerated. Over the period when BLS was reporting 500k plus job losses a month, from November’08 to February ‘09, the numbers of distressed properties “increased more than 473,000, exceeding 1.5 million.” Total loan value = more than $224 billion. (Sources: The Times, First American CoreLogic).

Thus, even if the recession ended tomorrow, the US will still have another 500k - one million foreclosures. And if the recession continues for another 6 months to a year, well, you do the math. (Hint: About 2 - 3 X as many)

Excerpt:

“In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans — those extended to home buyers with troubled credit — to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

With many economists anticipating that the unemployment rate will rise into the double digits from its current 8.9 percent, foreclosures are expected to accelerate. That could exacerbate bank losses, adding pressure to the financial system and the broader economy. . .

Economists refer to the current surge of foreclosures as the third wave, distinct from the initial spike when speculators gave up property because of plunging real estate prices, and the secondary shock, when borrowers’ introductory interest rates expired and were reset higher.”

Note that these foreclosures are not the exotic no money down I/O ARMs from the early phase of the housing collapse. Rather, these are “modest borrowers whose loans fit their income.”

A few last data points to consider (as of February 2009):

• Foreclosure rates among prime borrowers have been growing fastest in states with higher unemployment.

• Economy.com expects mortgage defaults in 2009 caused by unemployment to double, from 29% in 2008 to 60% in 2009;

• Prime mortgages that are distressed (90 days delinquent, foreclosure, REO) are greater than 1.5 million;

• Alt-A loans — those given to people with slightly tainted credit — rose to 836,000.

• Subprime mortgages that were “distressed” reached 1.65 million;

• From February 2008 to Feb 2009, total dollar value of distressed mortgages increased 60% in dollar terms;

• More than four million loans worth $717 billion were “distressed” in February.

All told, that’s about 4 million problem mortgages out there. My guess is half go into foreclosure. So far, the Obama admin aid to homeowners have seen less than 55,000 mortgages modified.

What this means, for those of you still paying attention, is that we will see lower RE prices, more bank stress, a lot more distressed sales, and no normalization of RE markets for some time.

The best you can hope for is some “stabilization” — if you consider 60% or more of all existing home sales (and many new home sales) to be distressed sales, foreclosures or bank owned properties — as “stable.”

I got your real estate bottom right here . . .

click for larger graphic

Source:

Job Losses Push Safer Mortgages to Foreclosure

PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY

NYT May 24, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/economy/25foreclose.html

~~~

SP500 Consolidates in Tight Range

2009-05-24T17:59:59Z

After an amazing run-up off the early March lows, the S&P 500 is finally pausing to consolidate some of those gains. Let’s take a look at the current triangle consolidation forming and note key levels of support and resistance going forward.

As I mentioned recently, the S&P 500 has (at least) three levels of confluence resistance at the 940 level via the falling 200 day SMA, top of the Bollinger Band, and the January highs. These levels are still holding a lid on price as bulls bump against this area.

However, there now has developed a level of key support about the 880 level, coming from the February highs, May lows (resistance once broken becomes support) and the 20 day EMA.

There is also a rising trendline that can be drawn under the steady uptrend since March, but if you look very closely, price has just nipped beneath this established trendline in what might be an early sign of weakness - 45 degree angular trendlines are never eternally sustainable, especially on broad indexes.

A doji has formed on the support of the 20 EMA at the 880 level.

Look closely also to see that - currently - a descending triangle may be forming on the daily chart - if so, this has bearish implications. Notice the contraction in price swings that will soon lead to an apex and breakout of the minor converging trendlines.

As it stands now, 940 will be powerful resistance to break and if price fails to hold 880 as support, then it will set-up a sudden “magnet trade” to test the rising 50 day EMA at 860 and if that is broken, then we will have to look to Fibonacci retracements (drawn from the March low to the May high) for additional levels of possible support.

As I suggested previously, it’s probably better for most people to wait until we break above 940 or beneath 860 or 880 instead of trying to play Price Ping-Pong between these key levels.

Corey Rosenbloom, CMT
Afraid to Trade.com

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Follow Corey on Twitter: http://twitter.com/afraidtotrade

Coldplay: Free Live Album

2009-05-17T22:00:05Z

What a refreshing change! A band that has figured out how to use the internet to promote itself by giving away a random live recording. Nice work:

click for free download

Normalizing Earnings During Profit Freefalls

2009-05-18T11:07:27Z

I am becoming terribly enamored of the charts Ron Griess highlights each week form The Chart Store. Now that earnings season is all but over, Ron looks at a few charts that are revealing of the extent of the damage done to corporate profitability. It is, in a word, breathtaking:

How Cheap Are Stocks?

How Much Have Profits Fallen?

CNBC: Record Credit Card Defaults in April

2009-05-15T19:03:00Z

From CNBC: Credit Card Defaults Reach Record Highs in April

U.S. credit card defaults rose in April to record highs, with Citigroup and Wells Fargo posting double digit loss rates ...

	April	March
Citigroup	10.21%	9.66%
Wells Fargo	10.03%	9.68%
JPMorgan Chase	8.07%	7.13%
Discover Financial Services	8.26%	7.39%

And the beat goes on ...

Expect More Quantitative Easing When Bonds Falter

2009-05-18T18:20:11Z

Larry MacDonald submits:

Here’s some food for thought from Nandu Narayanan, one of the few hedge-fund managers to have lived up to his industry’s promise to deliver positive returns regardless of market conditions (see table below for his investment performance). He argues that U.S. policymakers are going to need to administer much more quantitative easing and fiscal stimulus — and as the realization dawns on financial markets, they won’t like it.

Complete Story »

Fed: Delinquency Rates Surged in Q1 2009

2009-05-18T21:07:00Z

The Federal Reserve reports that delinquency rates rose sharply in Q1 in all categories.

Click on graph for larger image in new window.

This graph shows the delinquency rates at the commercial banks for residential real estate, commercial real estate and consumer credit cards.

Commercial real estate delinquencies (6.4%) are rising rapidly, and are at the highest rate since the early '90s (as delinquency rates declined following the S&L crisis).

Residential real estate (7.91%) and consumer credit card (6.5%) delinquencies are at the highest levels since the Fed started tracking the data (since Q1 '91).

Although there is credit deterioration everywhere, the rise in these three categories is especially significant. There was also a significant increase in C&I delinquencies (commerical & industrial).

Note: The Fed defines commercial as "construction and land development loans, loans secured by multifamily residences, and loans secured by nonfarm, nonresidential real estate", and many of the problems are probably in the C&D loans. These are the loans that will probably lead to the closure of many regional banks.

Also check out the charge-off rates. The charge-off rate for residential real estate increased from 1.58% to 1.8, and for consumer credit cards from 6.33% to 7.49%.

Just more evidence of severe credit problems at the commercial banks.

Digg Lead Architect & Socialthing! Founder Start Mobile Gaming Company

2009-05-16T17:14:39Z

Shared by logan
Augmented reality - another really interesting variation - games - on using location and computer vision on mobile phones

Socialthing! founder Matt Galligan and Digg's Lead Arichitect Joe Stump are each leaving their day jobs behind to focus on Crash Corp, an alternate reality mobile gaming venture.

The concepts behind alternate reality (or augmented reality) interactive gaming are futuristic in themselves. Gamers are freed from their PCs and permitted to roam the face of the earth like normal, social human beings while remaining in-game. Adding mobile and social aspects to the mix pushes the oeuvre into mind-blowing territory. Adventures are location- and proximity-based, IRL interactions spring from in-game teamwork: The mind reels. And don't let's get started on revenue streams, which will occur to you at a rate of one every half minute from the time you read this post until well into next week.

Sponsor

Galligan, whose startup was acquired by AOL last year, recorded this elegant and grateful kiss-off to the old-school web giant and announced his planned summer travels through the Midwest:

Stump has likewise given his notice to Digg and will apparently be couch-surfing his way across Europe through July.

Once the wunderkind duo have settled back down, Crash Corp's work will begin in earnest. Although the team is currently operating in super-stealthy hush-hush mode, we've been frieNDA'd enough to whet our excitement and can't wait to see what the startup will bring.

According to interactive game developer Brooke Thompson, whose site we now quote because its definition of the term most closely approximates what we've heard from the Crash Corp team, "Alternate reality gaming is a growing genre of pervasive games in which participants interact with an imaginary world within a real world space, uncovering a story through multiple means of communication and media. The games tend to be highly collaborative which make them excellent alternatives for team building exercises, viral marketing events, and promotional entertainment."

A mild example of a mobile augmented reality game would be the award-winning Ghostwire, which adds a basic overlay of a "ghost" into the environment as seen from a mobile device's camera:

Other examples of the tech can be seen in this Games Al Fresco post on augmented reality for mobile.

Of course, the better the tech gets, the more imaginative and exciting gaming possibilities become. From the afore-referenced Wikipedia article, "Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators."

In a word, the Crash Corp team are ignoring the fine line that separates technological realities from science fiction, and we applaud their ambition and wish them the best success.

Discuss

Comixology and the future of connected commerce

2009-05-01T07:21:37Z

It dawned on me recently that, not only are we in a period of great change and transformation, but that those of us who have been working on the web to make it a more social and humane place have only barely begun the process of taking the “personality-ization” (not “personalization”) and connectedness that we take for granted on the web into the offline world.

All at once, my sense tell me that things coming to a head, and, as Om Malik pointed out, we are at the end of an era. It’s anyone’s guess how the next chapter of the social web will read, but a few experiences lately got me thinking.

A connected Apple experience

I first saw a glimmer of this when in Boston, shopping at the Apple store for a USB charger. Upon checkout, I was asked whether I wanted a print copy of my receipt or to have it emailed to me. Reluctant to explain the “+apple” in my email address, I hesitated for a moment but submitted: “by email.”

The Apple employee looked at his screen, read back my email address and said, “Is that correct?”

“Yeah…” I stammered, somewhat surprised. “It is.”

Of course all they did was correlate my credit card number to the email address I’d previously had my receipts sent to. When I was shopping in San Francisco. Here I was in Boston!

Apple had recorded my email, associated it with my credit card (perhaps more than one), and then shared it with all their stores, providing me with a specific kind of convenience that few other stores — at least that I know of — have attempted. (Aside: And don’t give me any buts about privacy and correlations and any of that bullshit. Privacy has a certain kind of value and importance, but I’ve heard so little vision out of privacy zealots that it’s time think about the other side of the coin.)

Now, that small example of convenience may not seem significant on the surface, but it does suggest that new connections — between the world of brick and mortar identity and the realm of digital identity — are emerging, creating new opportunities for creative commerce.

Comixology and Isotope

My favorite comic book store is located in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. It’s run by James Sime — someone who belongs in comics, much moreso than he belongs selling them. His shop is called Isotope and every month or so, as time allows, I stop in to pick up my “subscriptions” — known in the comic book universe as my “pull list”.

The pull list is a simple concept, essentially a list of comic books that I want to set aside on an individual or ongoing basis — that I’ll come and pick up later. Since new books arrive every Wednesday, it’s not terribly efficient for me to drop in just to pick up one or two issues, so the pull list is the best way to make sure I don’t miss an issue while stretching the time between visits.

The pull list is also a kind of personal relationship: I trust James to not only grab the titles that I’ve explicitly asked for, but to also suggest new books that I might not otherwise learn about. He also has to set aside inventory that might otherwise be made available to his walk-in patrons — even though I might ultimately decide, “Y’know, I think I’ll pass on this one”, so in that way, he’s trusting me to be a reliable patron.

Some time ago, James told me about a dashboard widget that he had discovered that let him see what comics were coming out soon. I checked it out — but then forgot about it — preferring the high touch relationship I had of visiting the store and browsing the shelves.

On a recent visit, James told me that he’d actually been in touch with the makers of the widget and that they were collaborating on “something big.” Having personally introduced James to both Twitter and Foursquare, I was intrigued… I mean, James has long had a blog, has presented at a BarCamp — as comic book retailers go, he’s about as 2.0 as you can get. And since he knows what a big web dork I am, his excitement told me that he was indeed on to something.

“They have an iPhone app,” he began, “called Comixology. It’s like the dashboard widget, but get this: I’ve been working with them on a pilot to hook up my store to their website.”

“Ok,” I said.

“So go to their website and create an account. Then search for my store. You’ll see a button that says ‘connect’. Hit that. From then on, whenever you add something to your digital pull list on the Comixology service, I’ll see it and add a copy to your stack.”

“Wow,” I thought, “this changes everything.”

Connected commerce, activity streams and the point

It isn’t that my Apple experience or the Comixology service is the answer to question “what is the future of retail?”, but they outline the contours of the nexus between the social web and the real world.

Given what I’ve been working on in a round-about way on the DiSo Project, it is so patently clear to me that where Apple connects a credit card number to an email address, I see an OpenID associated with a payment gateway and a transaction dropbox that happens to be hosted by Google (that is, my email); where James and Comixology see a contextualized relationship management and inventory tool, I see an iPhone application that lets me buy physical goods, connect to a real life merchant of my choosing (based on his high-touch service), and then communicate my tastes and purchases to my friends and fourth-party services through activity streams.

Imagine: after a month of so assembling a good sized pull list on Comixology.com, I visit Isotope and James presents my selections, suggesting a few new books I might be interested in. I agree to give them a try, he updates my pull list on his Mac through the Comixology site, immediately updating on my iPhone. I review the list — everything looks good — and tap the “checkout” button in the app. Pre-loaded funds are immediately withdrawn from my Apple iTunes account; James receives an instant payment confirmation and I can take my comics to go without having ever reached for my wallet. Walking out the door with my nose in my phone, I uncheck a few comics from my transaction history and send the rest to my activity broker — which in turn pushes updates out to Facebook, FriendFeed, and to anyone else who is subscribed to my comic book purchases (yeah, like two people) — and in turn, they take my social recommendations, applying James’, and add some of my picks to their respective pull lists.

The whole thing takes about three minutes, with room for salutations.

This is buyer-mediated commerce (contrary to vendor-mediated), or what I might call “connected commerce.” This is one potential future for platforms like Facebook Connect to get real, and where I think identity, social, commercial and location technology will begin to hit their stride.

Idea Gardening: A Primer

2009-04-06T18:35:12Z

Shared by logan
Great article on the entrepreneurial process. I've tried to follow this approach with NewsForWhatYouDo - minimal investment and feature set followed by market testing. The key to getting in to this type of idea gardening is to not be afraid of starting. For a long time I viewed starting a company as something that required the "right" idea. The problem is its not possible to know that an idea is right until after considerable work has been done on it. So whatever you do start, watch for the signs of traction, and adapt to what works.

We teach entrepreneurs that they should pick an idea they are passionate about, work up a business plan, assemble resources and then execute it.

If we think about entrepreneurialism as a kind of gardening, this traditional approach in a sense encourages people to plant monocultures that are extremely vulnerable to disease. Furthermore, who wants a garden with just one kind of plant in it? Lastly, if the “idea” you choose to plant cannot grow well in your location or your climate, or the climate changes, you are left with a failed crop of your monoculture, and little recourse but to bankrupt yourself and start over.

Any gardener will tell you that putting together a good garden requires a kind of “flow” — getting “in the zone” to think about what plants will work where, what plants will complement each other, and how timing and horticultural relationships will play out to produce a garden that is maximally rewarding, whether those rewards are aesthetic or culinary.

Gardeners know what plants are native to their place, which require sun or shade, which are susceptible to parasite damage, and how to combine plants to achieve symbiotic results. They know how tightly certain plants should be planted, which ones need thinning, and which ones must be started as seedlings.

What you rarely see is a skilled gardener go out and plant a monoculture of, say, beets. Beets by themselves require a specialized kind of farming. A certain kind of soil. To really get a lot of beets, you need to apply particular pesticides and take a particular approach. And when the crop matures (assuming your bet on the conditions and climate pay off), you’ve got just one thing: beets. And, let’s face it: it’s pretty easy to get sick of beets.

“Pushing rocks uphill sucks.” - Sisyphus

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down so he could push it again for all of eternity. This is a decidedly bad gig. Some businesses are like this too, and too many well-meaning, intelligent entrepreneurs spend time on these kind of Sisyphean enterprises – consuming a lot of precious resources and never getting traction.

In business, there are rocks to push sometimes: hard work is always part of doing something worthwhile. But successful businesses always reach the summit and get to watch the rock roll down the other side.

This is when business is fun. The world seems to love what you’re doing. People are clamoring to work for and with you, the press thinks you’re great, and the money keeps rolling in. New opportunities and ideas emerge at every turn and the sky seems to be the limit.

Great as these conditions are, they rarely last. Businesses nearly universally reach inflection points where their products fall out of favor or stop fulfilling a market need. They become old news, and seemingly out of nowhere, the business is pushing rocks uphill again – usually to the great surprise of management, investors, and customers.

When you’re pushing rocks uphill, you know it. Everyone knows it. The press remarks on it, and just as when things are going well you seem to be in an upward spiral of success, these conditions seem to dictate a downward spiral of failure. These times can be quite dark. Often, they can be sustained and overcome, until you reach a new summit where conditions have changed so that your boulder can roll freely downhill. But many don’t have the stomach to persist through these dark times. “Business turnaround experts” are really just people who can see what’s necessary to minimize drag and reposition a company to that next summit, where more favorable conditions can prevail again.

Towards a New Entrepreneurship

The old model of entrepreneurship creates arranged marriages between entrepreneurs and ideas, and these marriages often don’t work out. After years of struggle, they often end in disaster, and only in extremely forgiving climates do the entrepreneurs get a chance to even re-marry. Quite often, the entrepreneur decides to become celibate and return to its abusive relationship with The Man, while sometimes the wild-eyed ones manage to persist through a couple more failures before finally hitting upon a success.

According to this article based on a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the predicted success rate for first-time entrepreneurs is just 20.9%. That’s a one-in-five shot. Even more telling, the results for experienced entrepreneurs is not much better. Entrepreneurs with a track record of success see a 30.6% success rate on average, while serial entrepreneurs who failed in their prior venture are only successful 22.1% of the time on subsequent ventures. To pick a round number, these data show that about 75% of all startups fail.

Is this the best we can expect from the great capitalist engine? What if we could do better? How that might work?

You Don’t Suck – Your Idea Sucks

The data above tells us that experience doesn’t count for that much. In fact, ostensibly it counts for at most a 9.7% improvement in odds. Not a bad gain, but what if it’s an illusion? If an experienced entrepreneur and a first-time entrepreneur chase the same idea, I’d argue the odds of success are roughly equivalent. The only difference between a first-time and experienced entrepreneurs is that they have a better sense about what ideas to chase — and even that discernment may only count for a 9.7% improvement.

So the advice to all entrepreneurs thus becomes essentially the same: pick ideas that will work in the marketplace and expend resources only on those ideas.

Of course, this is easier said than done. How do you know what ideas will work? How can people try a lot of ideas without bankrupting themselves or running themselves ragged?

Starting a Garden of Ideas

First, we have to accept the fact that as individuals, people are really bad at knowing what ideas will work in the marketplace. This is the primary reason for the 75% failure rate we see amongst entrepreneurs. It’s also the reason why top-down planning failed in the Soviet Union. As a general rule of thumb, assume you know a lot less than you think you do about what ideas will work and what ideas won’t, because you’re likely wrong. So are your friends, your family, your trusted advisors, and other more experienced entrepreneurs.

Start thinking instead about what you want your idea garden to look like. What ideas motivate you, and fill you with a sense of childlike wonder? What ideas give you inner peace and create a sense of aesthetic fulfillment? What higher causes do you aspire to? What causes do you think you can motivate others to rally around? With these questions, you can start to get a sense of what you might start to try in your idea garden.

Resonance

Today, we have tools to test the resonance of ideas with fairly wide audiences — for free. Twitter, Facebook, the web, and other mechanisms allow us to expand our networks to find people to bounce our ideas off of. Start bouncing your ideas — the ideas you’re most passionate about — off of a wider audience. Put out feelers. See what sticks.

This wider audience should consist of at least a few hundred people, ideally, and you will get a sense of what ideas move people by listening to peoples’ reactions. If you don’t have an online audience of a few hundred people yet, start thinking about how to get one. Go to meetups and other events. Follow people online whose opinions you trust. Build up a good-sized audience and listen to what they tell you about your ideas.

Ideas Are Cheap

You may worry that sharing an idea with people will “let it out of the bag” and someone else will “steal it.” You’re not so smart to have come up with an idea that no one else has thought of before. Really — believe that. Look through the US Patent Office site sometime and you’ll get a sense for just how cheap ideas really are.

What you must have that is unique and irreplaceable is the vision, passion, and relationships required to bring your idea to fruition.

But the idea itself — the raw two or three sentences that define your concept — has very little potential by itself. By sharing your idea with others, you can strengthen it. Others can contribute to it, pointing out the places where it’s weak, and repurposing it in ways you never imagined. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas, in whole or in part, so that others can help you bring them to fruition.

It could be that you do not want to put all your cards on the table at once. That’s fine. If your idea can be broken apart and tested amongst audiences that way, that can be a way of making your ideas public without disclosing the entire concept. This can be a valid approach when dealing with concepts that require patent protection. But those ideas are much rarer than you think.

You can expect that you will break down and reassemble your own ideas repeatedly before they make it to the market. It’s quite likely that you’ll combine the “resonant” parts of two ideas into one cohesive concept (CD’s by mail bad, DVD’s by mail good) that resonates in the marketplace. Be willing to play around with your ideas and allow them change over time.

Waiting It Out

One of the reasons the success rate for startups is so low is that we have taught entrepreneurs to set up housekeeping with the first viable idea they encounter. The societal pressure to be doing something (so, what are you up to these days anyway?) is very great and people want to perceive and project themselves as successful.

Idea Gardening is something that we as a society have decided is only a valid occupation for people like Richard Branson or Oprah Winfrey. And even they have specific ongoing successes that they can point to that seem to validate their modi operandi.

Gardening takes time — time for sunlight, for seed, for rain to converge in fecundity. The same is true of Idea Gardening. Patience is required for ideas, people, and resources to converge in a way that releases stored energy. If you’re having to use too much pesticide (lawyering) or fertilizer (cash) to make your idea work, you’re likely going against the forces of nature, and not taking advantage of the energy of the marketplace.

Don’t overextend yourself by sinking resources into the first idea you have that looks to be viable. As a committed gardener, you will have many sprouts and leads that are viable. Put your attention to the ideas that seem to be the strongest, and use all of your available resources to drive multiple ideas forward in parallel. Otherwise you’ll have the kind of fragile and brittle all-beet monoculture that will have a hard time surviving market conditions.

Over time, you will find that there are projects that you need to cull. Often, an idea is just premature for the market. But that doesn’t mean you can’t nurture it and keep it going in some form until conditions are right. Often, that is not a very expensive proposition and if you are passionate, it can be very fruitful in the future.

Sunk Costs

People are suckers for sunk costs; this is the instinct that makes folks want to double down in Vegas to recover their losses. But losses are losses, whether measured in time or in money, and chasing after a failed idea to recover yourself to some perceived baseline is a mistake.

In the past, entrepreneur failure often meant sunk costs in the form of infrastructure and time wasted. These sunk costs could run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Entrepreneurs, wanting to perceive themselves as successful, very rarely will walk away from this kind of situation willingly or rationally. Likewise, investors (less often) sometimes fall into the same trap. It’s these kinds of sunk costs that keep good money chasing after bad in countless businesses.

Clearly the only rational thing to do is to stop burning money and move on to something that will work. It’s not your fault it didn’t work out — the market didn’t want what you were selling. So, without pride or prejudice, stop the bleeding and move on. It may be your idea is still viable, but it might be viable for someone else, someplace else, at some different point in time. Put it on ice and return to it then.

The key to avoiding the trap of sunk costs in the Idea Gardening model is to minimize costs until an idea looks to be viable. If you have 10 ideas you’re experimenting with, and 4 show promise, what can you do to put a minimal amount of investment in only those four that will advance them to a stage where you can learn more about their prospects?

After that round, it may be that only two show promise at that moment. What can you do to put a minimal amount of investment in only those two ideas that will advance them? It may be that one of those ideas is really ready to explode and is ready to accept a major investment. Do that. By adopting this methodology, all of your investments will be right-sized and appropriate to advancing your concepts. With the disciplined use of this approach, one could theoretically achieve a 75+% entrepreneurial success rate , rather than a 75% failure rate!

This is an entirely different approach to entrepreneurship. For the software developers out there, this is the agile approach to business. Start small, iterate, and follow the market need. This also means that failures, when they occur, happen quickly. And that is the best thing any entrepreneur could hope for.

Cost Control

Besides for only investing time and money into ideas that have promise, it is now more possible than ever to experiment with concepts for very low costs. Free, open source software like Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Linux have made it possible to prototype complex concepts extremely inexpensively. If you know how to code the ideas yourself, you can lower costs even further. An entrepreneur who is also a software developer is uniquely positioned to try out dozens of ideas and let the market decide which ones will work.

Additionally, phone services like Google Voice and various other outsourced business services ranging from PayPal to GetFriday and Amazon Mechanical Turk enable incredible things to be done at rock-bottom prices. Cloud computing resources like Amazon EC2 and S3, and Google’s App Engine allow for fast and affordable scaling of ideas at very reasonable prices.

There has never been a better time to be a technology entrepreneur but many of the same forces help all entrepreneurs keep costs down. You won’t get trapped by sunk costs if they are very low; you will walk away from $10,000 sooner than you will $100,000 or $500,000.

More Thomas Edison than Henry Ford

Many of the great industrial entrepreneurs of the last 100 years have been uniquely positioned — as much by accident as by anything else — to capitalize on emergent trends. Carnegie, Mellon, Fricke, Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, all took advantage of (and helped to create) massive trends that could be pushed through society and thereby capitalized on.

You’re not those guys. The odds of any of us finding some “megatrend” that we can exploit profitably for very long are quite slim.

Look instead to Thomas Edison’s approach.

Edison put himself into the Idea Gardening business. His labs in Menlo Park, New Jersey were a virtual playground for engineers. They generated more than 1,500 patents and went on to form General Electric. He was famously quoted as saying that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” but this is often misunderstood.

Edison wasn’t saying that entrepreneurship was driven by “hard work” of the Sisyphean kind — no one can sustain that kind of load and be that prolific. Rather, he was suggesting that the hard work of invention lay in hoeing the rows and planting countless seeds of innovation so that, in time, the best ideas could bear fruit and thereby transform the world.

So entrepreneurs, plant your gardens. Give them sun, water, and time. The rest will follow, and you, too, will go on to transform the world.

Internbot Chronicles #2

2009-03-30T15:06:00Z

The past few weeks have been quite a lot of fun here in Boston. I gave a little talk on Git to some our training students, attended some fun Boston.rb events, hacked on some of Thoughtbot’s open source projects, and tested a lot. Yeah, a lot. I think I’ve spent more time writing actual test code than real code in the past 2-3 weeks.

When testing first becomes a mode of development rather than a ‘nice to have’ or an afterthought, it’s certainly jarring. So far it’s been tough to learn and wrap my head around, but I believe in the long term the benefits are fantastic. I really do like the Red, Green, Refactor cycle, and being around some other awesome developers who are doing this daily helps immensely.

The process I’ve been going through in pair programming sessions and when I’m flying solo is usually this:

Create a new feature branch in Git.
Write out the Cucumber feature for whatever you’re planning to do.
From here, if you’re not sure what to do, spike for a while and toss that away once you’re done. (Time boxing is nice for this, but I think throwing the code away is more important.)
If you find it necessary to write more than simple view or configuration code to make steps pass, drop down into functional/unit tests. Write a test, watch it fail.
Make it green with the actual implementation, and only write enough code to make it pass.
Back out to the acceptance test, if it still fails, back up to Step 3.
Commit when you’re in a good state, or at a decent break point.
Try it out in the browser as a final test, then merge (or rebase and squash) your changes into the mainline.
Make sure to at least run tests again before pushing your code up.

What’s really awesome about this process is the amount of feedback that you get. From testing inputs/outputs of methods in models, giving good and bad data to individual controller actions, and out to integrating the entire stack with Cucumber steps, you get a great sense of how your code works and what it can withstand. Beware though, this feedback loop is addicting! I couldn’t really imagine coding in a different way now that I’ve experienced this. I certainly wouldn’t want to take a step backwards and not test anymore, but I am curious as for what’s the next evolutionary step.

The biggest roadblock I’ve ran into so far is with mocking and stubbing. The technique as a whole is somewhat new to me, and although I see how much it helps especially with speed and isolation of tests in general, I do fear that I’m doing it wrong sometimes. Hopefully over the next few months I’ll get some great experience with Mocha and maybe even RR.

If you’ve got a similar coding feedback cycle, or are trying to achieve one, let me know in the comments! I’d also be interested in hearing about other issues you’ve run into with TDD in general.