Category Archives: Southgate Labs

Vend: The end of the beginning

(Image: Idealog)

When we started putting Southgate Labs together, about 18 months ago, one of the first people we spoke to was Vaughan from Vend.

He had first floated the idea for a web based point-of-sale with me somewhere over the Akatarawa Ranges en route to Otaki, as he cycled the length of New Zealand. By the time I heard from him again he’d built the first version and already had a couple of paying customers. Now that’s what impresses potential investors!

In fact they weren’t just customers, they were raving fans. They wondered if the decimal point was in the wrong place in their monthly subscription price, compared to the painful expensive support contracts they were used to, and they found the software itself was beautiful and easy to use.

Finally POS means “point of sale” again.

It was great to have a chance to invest early and allow him to work on the venture full time. We convinced Sam to invest too. I’ve been privileged to piggy-back with Sam on a number of the early-stage investments he’s done over recent years, so it was nice to be able to return the favour.

But, more than that, it was great to have the chance to get involved.

We’ve enjoyed helping him push it along over the last year, working on the product design and user experience, branding and marketing site, making introductions where that has been useful, a number of long planning sessions as we all tried to wrap our heads around the opportunity, and basically whatever was required (as is the nature of a venture like this). It’s been fun to see the product getting better and better and the number of customers increasing.

So, it’s exciting this week to announce the end of the beginning and the beginning of the next phase in the development of the company. From the very early days we’ve been in touch with Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital based in Berlin, Germany.  They have been involved in a number of successful start-ups, including Zendesk, Free Agent and Geckoboard, and it’s excellent to welcome them into the team as investors and advisors, along with some kiwi angels.

The money will allow Vaughan to grow his development team based in Auckland and, even more importantly, grow his sales and marketing team both here and in the US (we’ll be in San Francisco to setup our office there in the next couple of weeks, if you’re in the area let us know!)

If you’re a designer, developer or business development person looking to be part of an exciting start-up then get in touch now.

It’s great to be part of something like this.

Onwards and upwards from here, hopefully!

Vend: http://www.vendhq.com

Mix & Mash 2010

I’m well overdue a post or two about what we’re up to at Southgate Labs. Hopefully there will be time for that in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, a quick “Woo hoo!” on behalf of the team for a couple of awards announced this week …

We’re pleased to be part of the Summer of Tech programme this year. As part of this we have two second-year university students working with us – Nick & Amanda. We were lucky to interview some outstanding candidates for these roles, and in the end were extremely picky, but excited to get our first choice in each case.

One of the projects we got them started on right away was an entry for the Mix & Mash competition run by DigitalNZ.

Our company entry, which won the Best Open Government Service section, is an iPad app called MP Playing Cards. Here is the description from the entry on the site:

“This mash-up is a light-hearted iPad app with an underlying web service, combining statistical data about the current Members of Parliament from a number of different sources, from Hansard to Twitter.

Many of us grew up collecting All Blacks playing cards out of Weetbix packets, and then comparing their vital, but ultimately meaningless, statistics with our friends to see which player was the best. For some reason, there has never been an edition for MPs. Well, now there is!

It’s simple to play. Select two MPs and find out the winner. You can play by yourself, or with a friend, by each choosing one MP. The application uses a complex formula to determine the winning MP. Preference is given to members who are active on Twitter, those who don’t spend too much and who don’t cause trouble in the debating chamber – the application awards yellow cards to Members who raise points of order and red cards to those who have been asked to leave. The results will even show you the Members most frequently used words from speeches.

Underneath this silliness there is a serious question: how should we measure the performance of our elected representatives? The media often seems to encourage focus on travel and accommodation spending, public outbursts and controversy, and other such measures. This mash-up takes that sensationalist approach to the extreme. But is there another approach that might yield better results?

The data used in this app comes from public Twitter profiles and from the New Zealand Parliament website, specifically Debates, Expenses & Bills.

This app is in two parts: 1) an underlying JSON web service which you’re welcome to use for your own purposes. I think there are potentially quite a few interesting apps that could be build on top of the words most frequently used in speeches by each MP; and 2) an iPad app that provides the game engine and some fun graphics and animation (I even managed to squeeze a cheesy audio file in there!)

We’re hoping to make this available in the App Store soon, so I will update the link on here as soon as it’s ready for you to download.

Nick & Amanda, for their sins, also put together a second entry based on an old blog post I wrote here back in 2008.

They created a great one-page visualisation of this idea: Tax Statement 2010

Enter your income, and the site calculates how much tax you pay, itemised by government department, based on the allocations announced in the budget.

They even created a separate stylesheet so that it looks and works great on the small screen of a mobile device.

They did an excellent job, and I’m pleased they got the recognition by winning the Best Newbie Mashup section. To borrow from the judges comments:

“Tax Receipt 2010 is simple in concept, presentation and design but incredibly powerful. It addresses a single question, “How is my tax being spent?” and provides straightforward answers. The information is summarised and presented clearly and simply. The visualisation is powerful because it provides a personal context for the nation’s spending. It’s a great conversation starter around public expenditure.”

Hopefully you find both of these little apps interesting, or at least entertaining.

Enjoy!

UPDATE (14-Dec):

Here is TV3 Nightline’s take on the Mix & Mash competition:

Can you make Government data creative?

UPDATE (19-Dec):

Here is a Radio NZ story on the competition:

Arts on Sunday, 19 December

UPDATE (23-Dec):

The MP Playing Cards iPad app is !

Top Three for iPhone

This is not new, but it’s worth repeating…

Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building an ark counts.

It’s not enough to know what to do, think about doing it, put it on a list. It turns out that all of those are very common.

The only thing that separates you from the pack is actually completing things.

To be successful, it seems, you just have to do the things that most people don’t. And, unfortunately, most people don’t do much.

So, how do you get better at this?

At the end of 2007 I published a post here titled De-clutter. It has become one of the most read things I’ve written. It was a simple list of advice, and included this tip:

“Remove the chaff from your to-do list, and focus on the three or four really important things that you can achieve today.”

The link I included was to a blog post written by Marc Andreessen (the founder of Netscape) which is unfortunately no longer available online. However, I found this Lifehacker article about it which includes all of the important quotes:

“Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3×5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day. And then, the next day, do those things.”

“Once you get into the habit, you start to realize how many days you used to have when you wouldn’t get important / significant / meaningful things done during a day.”

I think that is a really elegant and simple idea, and pretty much the polar opposite of every productivity system and to-do application I’ve used. Rather than combining more and more complex ways of capturing, storing, sorting and retrieving lists of tasks it starts with a focus on completing important things.

And so, I’m pleased to announce Top Three for iPhone, a new app that replaces the index card and helps you change the way you manage your priorities. Every day you get three new slots to fill. Choose the most important things and tick them off as you complete them. At the end of the day, or the end of the week, look back and see how many of your priorities you actually completed.

View today's tasks

View today’s tasks

Add a new task

Add a new task

See how you've done

See how you’ve done

Available on the App Store

This has been an interesting app to build, not because it’s technically difficult1 but because it’s functionally simple, and as a result there is a constant temptation to add more features. I’ve intentionally left out just about all of the things that you’d normally expect from a to-do app. It doesn’t let you tag and categorize, it doesn’t let you search, it doesn’t let you order and re-order (beyond the three slots you see), it doesn’t let you set due dates and it doesn’t let you schedule tasks for far into the future – you can add and edit tasks for today and tomorrow and that’s all. There are literally hundreds of to-do apps in the app store, and this may be the most simple of them all, but I’m hoping that it’s amongst the most useful as a result.

I’ve been using this myself for a few weeks and while it’s a v1 app I’ve already found it really useful. It has been humbling and a little surprising when I look back to see that I’ve only ticked off about half of those things that I thought were the most important. But the feedback loop that it creates is also motivating me to get better at picking the things I want to work on and staying focussed on completing them (did I mention I’m a big fan of feedback loops?)

I have some free copies to give away to the first people who email support@southgatelabs.com – I just need you to tell me what your existing to-do app is (if any) and also promise to send me some feedback telling me what you think of it once you’ve been using Top Three for a week or two and to post a review on the iTunes App Store, positive or negative – you decide (note: these codes are valid in the US App Store only).

Either way, if you decide to download the app and use it I’d love to hear from you. I hope you find it useful.  Thanks in advance for giving it a try.

[1] It’s really not! Although I did choose to use CoreData just for the challenge and learning. :-)

Related Reading:

Hugh’s Daily Quota – Hugh McLeod

“I try to complete four basic tasks every day- the basic M.O. to keep the gapingvoid ship afloat.”

Kill Your To Do List – Leo Babauta

“Those who have to-do lists usually manage them constantly, or if they don’t they fall into disuse and get dusty and become worthless, while the person who’s fallen behind in maintaining the list feels constantly guilty. For those who keep up with the lists, they spend a lot of time on the lists they could be spending … doing something important.”

TimeGT: Method-Agnostic Time Mgmt App for the Masses – LifeHacker

TimeGT is an excellent example of everything Top Three is not:

“Adding tasks is a simple affair, and they’re easily sorted and searched once they’re in your system. Hunt around for action items via tag, context (@home, @work), order of importance, or deadline. Filter tasks according to project, urgency, things your waiting for, or things you hope to get around to one day—the sky’s the limit.”

Productivity Hacks – Fred Wilson

“I’ve never been able to make a “to do” list work for me because it gets so damn long I can never get them all done. I really like the idea of three a day and no more.”

Voice Mail, Folders and To-Dos – Mark Suster

“If you really want to accomplish tasks you need to narrow down the list to the most important ones you want to accomplish and make sure that they take priority to everything else that “comes up” during the day.  If you get 3 things done every day it adds up to a lot more within the month.”

Come in Wingman?

wingman-down

We pulled the plug on Wingman yesterday.

It was an itch.  We scratched it.

We never really got it working to our satisfaction, and as a result we never really got to the point where we were comfortable pushing it harder.

We launched with an incomplete product.  Possibly too incomplete?

I still believe that if you launch and you’re not a little embarrassed you launched too late, but I’m coming around to the school of thought that says you shouldn’t launch at all.

We put a throttle in place to ensure that we were not slammed by too many users before we were ready (a simple “enter your email address and we’ll send you an invite link when we’re ready”).  We got slammed anyway.

I’d probably try and do that differently, given the opportunity.

Lots of people signed-up and used the service, kicked the tyres briefly, but moved on too quickly.

We never really had a product that was compelling or a business model that was obvious.

So, given the futility of flogging dead horses, this was an easy decision.

But, as always seems to be the case when things don’t work out as you hoped they might, there are some positives too:

I enjoyed working with Koz.  I’m fortunate to be involved in other ventures that he is also working on and look forward to working with him again soon.

I got my hands dirty with some code again for the first time in ages.

I feel like I could hold my own now in a discussion about Rails and Git (two tools I hadn’t previously used).  And I know a little about some of the challenges of creating an add-on for Firefox.

I found a great font!

We came up with a great structure for the venture, which is well suited to this sort of prospective product build I think.  I will definitely use this sort of arrangement again in the future.  When I get some more time I’ll write more about this.

We formed a company that will live on in a new guise to fight some future battles (some of which are already brewing!)

And, we spent so little that the venture was almost profitable even without any revenue! :-)

So, we move on …

Validating is like flossing

How often do you floss?

Honestly!

For me it’s one of those things that I know I should do, but which I don’t actually do nearly as often as I could.

Validating HTML is the same.

We web developers all know we should, but so often don’t.

Why?

Is it because we don’t think standards are important?  I know this is true for a small minority, but I don’t think this is the reason for most, because I think smart developers and testers understand how having valid code makes life easier for both them and the people using their sites.

Is it just too hard?

When we were migrating Trade Me to .NET we decided we would take the opportunity to improve the quality of the underlying HTML as we touched each page.  The intention was to validate all pages using the free tools provided by the W3C.

But, as we quickly discovered, this is no trivial undertaking.

It’s fine when you’re working with a mostly static page. But, as soon as you’re working with a dynamic data driven page the number of different variations of the page can quickly become overwhelming.

If you have pages which require authentication (either on the server or in the application), or requires a user to post information into a form, it becomes more or less impossible.  If the validator can’t reach the page directly you have to save a local copy of the HTML and upload this manually to the validator.

Who has time for that?

Even when you do make the effort the results often confuse more than they help.

Validators are (almost by definition) pedantic, and as a result do a generally poor job of differentiating between things that make a real difference to users and things that, while strictly and correctly identified as errors, are not so critical.

And, there is no easy way to keep track of the errors that exist on a page over time.  So, when you’re presented with results it’s difficult to identify those errors which are new or to easily exclude results you’ve seen before.

This is not so bad if you have a page that is normally fully compliant, but a much more common scenario, unfortunately, is working on improving a page that is full of invalid code.  In that case it’s a nightmare.

The tools really don’t make it easy.

So, what do we do? Continue on wishing we could be more diligent, but lacking time and tools?

I think we can do better!

A while back I wrote about an idea I had for solving some of these problems.

I was stoked when one of the smartest developers I know put his hand up.  Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on turning this idea into a real working tool.  And now we have something to show you all…

We’re calling it Wingman.

It’s a Firefox browser plug-in, which automatically sends the exact pages you visit to the server, making it trivial to validate.

And, it’s a website which organises the results, making it easy to identify the errors you’re interested in, and to spot trends so you can fix things as soon as they occur.

Plus, it’s designed to get smarter as more people use it, by aggregating information about what types of errors are commonly ignored across all users.

In time we imagine a system which runs various different types of validation, including potentially hooking into validations services which are hosted outside of Wingman itself.  But, for starters, we have implemented a simple HTML validator, based on the service created by validator.nu.  CSS and Javascript validation are the next obvious candidates, but we’re really interested to hear your ideas for what other things we could include in this mix – for example, a spell checker, a test for basic SEO rules, or an outbound link checker are three ideas that have been suggested to us already.

Today we’re opening up a free invite-only preview of the service, so we can start to see how people might use a tool like this.

If you’d like to have a play please register on the site.  We’ll be sending out the first group of invite codes shortly.

I’ll look forward to hearing what you think!