I might be able to skip the book it as the title just about covers one of the most important strategic imperatives of any company. ”
by Roy M. Spence, Haley Rushing
Popularity: unranked [?]
I tried to grab one more day on my KTM before the snow took over for realzie but unfortunately I was beset with personal mechanical failures.
Y’see I’m not real handy around the house. I replace a light bulb if it isn’t over shoulder high but after that I’m hiring someone who understands things like why smoke detectors beep for years after the battery is removed.*
So I attached the KTM to my new UltimateMX Hauler and within fifty feet it popped a wheelie like a circus freak and looked at best unsecure and even more likely that it would do a full el rollo before cartwheeling down I-15 until some Suburban cleaned it out like a gnat. Of course I didn’t discover that until my first refill.
I didn’t exactly follow the directions. I don’t generally. I think if a product is any damn good it shouldnt’t need a book to tell you how o use it.
I have never heard or seen anyone read the directions on a urinal. It’s designed in such a way that we all figure out how to make it go. So I assumed the MX Hauler would be much the same. But I was wrong and it was past midnight and time to give in. Now I have to figure it out while my neighbore makes comments like, “wow, you put it on all wrong.” Yeah, I got that. That’s why I’m in Ranch Place instead of ripping to the top of Wile E’s favorite Mesa.
*(Handy tech tip when a smoke detector just won’t shut up; detach the offending smoke alarm and remove the nine volt battery (it won’t do anything but makes it lighter.) Take the smoke alarm and put it inside three large freezer Ziploc bags. Then drive the largest car you have over it back and forth at least 20 times. This won’t have stopped the noise but it is now half the volume and has a backbeat that could make it a hit for Bjork on the laughable improbability of man.
Open the bags and fill with pumpkin pie filling, carnation concentrated milk, and beets. These ingredients do little to stifle the noise, maybe 25%, but at least you have used only items from your pantry that you wouldn’t eat unless it was a full-scale thermonuclear war. Put these bags in the freezer. It’ll still beep every once in a while, but muted to such a level that it’s livable. Wrap them at Christmas and send them to your least favorite cousin.
Popularity: 7% [?]
I borrowed $2,000 from my Mom for a white box 486/66 with four megs of memory and with it I started a newspaper, a journalism career and my first Web site. The white box was the theoretical bottom limit that could run Windows 3.1. And it could, sort of. It was all you could do, if you went to open a big program like notepad the whole system would crash with the screeching of failed temp storage on the itty-bitty hard-drive. Going from four megs to eight remains the greatest upgrade I’ve ever made. Suddenly I could compute…write articles, open up one of the thirty daily AOL or Compuserve disks I’d get. (76762@cserve.com or something like that).
I’m a bit geekier than average but still what I tote in my backpack isn’t wildly out of the ordinary:
Top Ten Items to Maintain Minimum Computing and Connectivity
1. Macbook Pr0 15.4″. Anything smaller is just annoying for spreadsheets and any larger and you can’t use it on an airplane. It’s simply the best laptop made for the hardcore business user. It’s intuitive, has long lasting batteries, huge piles of ram and every few months it just gets cooler. It’s the centerpiece of your geekdom.
2. Mac Air – Why both? Well they’re for totally different purposes. The Air is a beautiful engineering excercise. It starts in a nanosecond, grabs a wireless connection before I can say Linksys and just generally works beautifully for 90% of my computing needs. It’s great to pass around the couch with a must-see You Tube clip and it for some reason is less offensive to bring to bed than than the MacBook Albatross. But it heats up fast in your lap and just doesn’t have enough of a graphic card. I love my Air so much that I’m not sure which one I’d grab in the event of a fire.
3. iPhone- Simply the best phone made today. The day I got my iPhone was as important as the day I got email. And it just keeps getting better. The camera is astonishing and the UI is an entire doctrine on simplicity as the soul of usability. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the product gurus who took us from the Motorola Rokr to the iPhone. That’s like going from the Pinto to the Bugatti Veyron. It simply can’t be done.
4. Kindle DX- I love the Kindle. I love it’s one way-ness. I love that it buries me by Whispernet under an avalanche of content and yet doesn’t really allow me to create a single email response. I am not looking for another computer, I’m looking for a tool that will help me organize and get through some small percentage of the many blogs and books I hope to read. Amazon has give me back the gift of reading.
5. Verizon MiFi 2200 – It’s a cellular modem/wireless hub the size of a credit card. It can support five concurrent connections, be they iPhone’s or laptops. It has a four hour battery built in and the speed is reasonable. It’s perfect in my RV and allows me to get rid of the relatively bad Autonet wireless hub.
6. Apple TV – I don’t know why it doesn’t get better reviews. Since I got this I don’t need cable any longer and with the MiFi it works in the car. No more scratched DVDs.
7. Motorola Droid – I hate that I love this phone. It’s a mishmash of usability errors combined with raw genius. It hints at the Jetson-like future of mobile Internet.
8. Valentine One radar locator– I keep waiting for something better but it’s still the best thing to keep you on the right side of Johnny Law.
9. Oakley Thump sunglasses, V1. They’re so bad they’re good. It’s like the M-frame all over again. When you turn up the thump nobody bothers you. They look away painfully and make mullet jokes and that’s worth big money. Poison sounds especially good on those.
10. Party Blimp– Every remote control airplane I’ve ever flown has died in the first five minutes. The party blimp, filled with helium from WalMart, cruises slowly around the house safely bumping into everything and breaking nothing. It’s a remote controlled vehicle for someone with my limited skills.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.
As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.
The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple’s App store. But it’s cool.
There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.
The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.
Popularity: unranked [?]
I’m not sure when it happened but one day after years of making beautiful cars Ferrari suddenly became the province of the gold chain, Members Only jacket, Polo wearing crowd. I think it may have been the day that Magnum P.I. first burned grass and rubber in Hawaii in his 308. Over the years I think it evolved and Robin Masters replaced it with a 328 Quattrovalvole near the end of the shows run. But that seemed to be enough mass market exposure and Ferrari went from being cool to an embarassing thing that one doesn’t want to be seen in…or near. Since then Ferrari has done a beautiful job of fighting out of that hole by making ever more amazing cars and raising the prices to astronomic levels. And it’s helped. But Porsche has helped more.
I always wanted a Porsche. Since I was old enough to read I studied every car magazine, memorizing the specs. I could rattle off the 0-60 numbers of anything with wheels. And I’d read these magazines in the back seats of my Dad’s seemingly endless Volvo wagon’s; always colored the same as some form of human effluent. I can’t imagine how he could go down to a dealership loaded with blue cars and red cars and black cars and come home with some new shade of brown. The 70s were a dark period.
The Porsche Turbo was the coolest thing ever. So much power that many magazines said it wasn’t safe to drive. That sounded perfect for me. But then over the years Porsches became the province of the gold chain set. One day I realized I no longer wanted one. They had become the new Corvette.
And now Ferrari is releasing their new car and I have to say it’s beautiful beyond words. I covet one again.
Ferrari 458 Italia
Popularity: 6% [?]
What’s a content blob? Oy, well, it’s just one of those made up terms that I use as a placeholder in my head for how dynamic content should work on ecommerce sites in the future. The best example I can see of one right now is on NFL.com.
Any page should be a live application, constantly changing as the world changes…with advertising melded in in such a way that it doesn’t ruin or distract from the experience. The NFL has at least started down the road.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Finally the US cellular world is settling down. It used to be a mishmash of companies and technologies; Analog, TDMA, CDMA, GSM, UMTS, EVDO, EDGE, GPRS, CDMA2000, etc. ad infinitum. But reall it was a silly mishmash of acronyms that brought no value to the consumer other than confusion.
Now we have settled into a simple world that seems to be summed up something like this:
1. AT&T – Its network sucks but they have the iPhone and it’s so much better than anything else that its customers are willing to suffer two dropped calls a week and the insufferable rudeness of not offering tethering.
2. Verizon – It begged borrowed and stole to create the largest network and it would have stomped or assimilated AT&T if it weren’t for those meddling kids at Apple. Its strategy appears to be to throw so many iPhone-like things at its customers that they will be tricked into trying something touch-screeny and that’ll lock ‘em down for another two years until it can build an actual user friendly mobile internet phone. Remember people, it’s not like thunder dome, “Break the deal, face the wheel.” All that happens if you abandon Verizon is usually a $100 charge that you can often talk AT&T into paying. Don’t be a droidiot.
2.1 Yes, I know about the Droids. I’ve got one sitting next to me but Verizon doesn’t have much coverage in Paia so I can’t use it. It’s got some cool features but overall it’s just a heavier dumber iPhone with a much worse app store. Version 3.0 of Android will be an iPhone beater if Apple sits still. And that’s what they’re known for, just kicking back in Cupertino and resting on their laurels.
3. Cingular – Really? Are they still around? Does anyone use them? is gettig a Cingular phone like getting a tattoo when you’re drunk? You wake up and realize you have a symbol for the devil on your ass, but damn, what are you gonna do. It’s gonna take two years of laser treatments to get it removed.
4. Sprint/Nextel – Push to talk? Wow, that still makes me laugh. I had push to talk when I was 10. I used it a a communication technology that came right after my tin can and string communication phase. It was excellent in walkie talkies in my boy scout tent…on the floor of my bedroom for sleep overs. But it’s hardly the basis for a global communication strategy. I haven’t seen whether Sprint is growing or shrinking but I don’t know anybody with a Sprint phone. Do you?
5. Blackberry users– Okay, it’s not a wireless provider but it is cult like. Blackberry’s are like some disease that we know the cure for but it’s just going to take a while to stamp out. They spread like wildfire through the business world and ironically business thinkers are not real leading edge folks. It’s so painful when some Blackberry user shows me that he can too browse the web. And then on his itty bitty little screen he shows me Google with a proud expression like dog bringing you a bone when you get home from work. You pat them reassuringly and say, “good boy, yes, you’re on the mobile web, good boy.” And then you look away awkwardly.
6. Microsoft –Okay, we’ll save the hardware vendors for another post but simply: BAHAHAHAAHAHAHAA!
Popularity: unranked [?]
Here’s a video about how we used to market at Backcountry.com circa 2007. It’s kind of a B- performance. Sorry. There is some good data in here though:
This is a link that may or may not work to a speech to a BYU entrepreneurship class circa 2007.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Wow. When Goliath finally decides to step up and kill David you expect some fireworks. I mean Motorola isn’t exactly new at cell phones. They practically invented the Bat phone and those huge things that Crocket and Tubbs lugged around on ‘Vice. So when Google and Verizon and Motorola teamed up for the wireless Malachi Crunch I expected something really cool. Unfortunately the first go round with it suggests that it kinda sucks.
I remember my two year-old son was able to operate my iPhone and unlock it on his own. He was quickly navigating through the interface without any help. I was able to make the iPhone work without resorting to a manual. I was annoyed by the touch screen typing but I got used to it in a few weeks. Already I’m jonesing for my touch screen QWERTY. The Droid is confusing and awkward and lacks, well, UI. As the CTO at my company often says, “soft is hard”. And boy the User Interface just plain stumps someone with my room temperature IQ.
The hardware is okay. The flash on the camera is nice and the speaker is better. There’s a nice use of vibration/haptics in the interface that I like. And it’s got a nice heft to it so when I finally get annoyed enough it’ll go clear through the window as opposed to bouncing off as the iPhone might.
I will say it’s better. The iPhone has forced the rest of the world to raise the level of their game. But all you Verizonites who can’t seem to understand that it’s only about $100 to break your contract will be happier on the Droid than on the DOS like Blackberry. But it’s no iPhone. The droid is the Corvette of phones…which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing.
The game isn’t over.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=04e0f59a-0c75-48d2-9fd2-3d9eb2d2beb2)
Popularity: unranked [?]
I came across this text on one of our sites last night..in the cart:
Sorry the item(s) in your cart are unavailable. The item(s) have been removed from your cart.
Ouch! The previous text is in red for those who are RSS readers. I think red text is as offensive as the blink tag. It actually makes me nostalgic for the blink tag.
Lets just never use it again. And lets stop using plural(s) like this…oy.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Ten years late mCommerce has arrived. Due to our convoluted quilt of 12 wireless technologies like the laughably bad TDMA (AT&Ts previous technology that could manage only eight calls per cell) we find ourselves arriving a decead after iMode revolutionized Japanese pop culture.
Apple’s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store. Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.
Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.
What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.
Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.
And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se
e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.
And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.
Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=90b928b2-2f8a-49d7-96d6-68760feea5ff)
Popularity: unranked [?]
(Full disclosure: I’m long goog and aapl).
Two billion downloads. You can’ t really say that enough. It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude. Most of my life growing up I watched the Mcdonald’s sign change from 10 Million Hamburgers Sold to 100 million and finally a billion. Then one day they gave up and just said, billions of hamburgers sold…but that took me from the 70s to the 90s. And yet Apple served up two billion iPhone apps in less than a year. It can’t be overstated, this is the fastest consumer growth the world has ever seen. It’s amazing.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Aren’t you a little bit tired of the green’ocrisy. The shameless annoying hypocrisy of the greenies. I can say with some certainty that the cloying phrase, “social responsibility” has jumped the shark. Check out McDonalds.com’s post reminiscing about the spirit of Woodstock. Awesome.
Well thank God for a movement on the wane. Yes, lets save the planet; duh, we live here. It’s like putting put up banners that say, “save the living room!” It’s a given. We need to do it with every bit of energy we can get from a supersized #2 meal…which, in it’s day was two cheeseburgers, fries and a coke; back before the notion of supersizing.
The hemp wearers can quibble amongst themselves and they might disagree as they see their one career avenue going up in smoke, but the simple truth is that when McDonald’s co-opt’s the phrase “social responsibility” you can be certain that it’s days of hipness are over. Shane McConkey called it when he ended the life on the term Extreme Skiing. He did it when Taco Bell launched it’s “Extreme Value Meals”. He was right and Freeskiing was born. How about it Max?
Oh and if Vanity Fair and Madonna are asking the question then it’s far too late:
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f68b38e8-25d9-465e-a8c6-ff8498f7ea2b)
Popularity: unranked [?]
