This is clever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSjwLmepdtk

Via: Silicon Alley Insider

If you can’t laugh at yourself, I suppose. :-)

How much do you spend each month?
How much do you earn each month?

I’m not talking about your business, I’m talking about your personal finances.

On the surface these are simple questions.

But, I’d bet that you don’t know exactly. Why is that?

Most people can tell you more-or-less how much money they have (or don’t have!) in their main bank account. But, as soon as you throw in a credit card and perhaps a separate savings account or some investments, getting a summary and tracking movements across all of your accounts is not straight forward.

And, while every salary earner can tell you how much they make per year gross, it’s not so clear cut once you deduct PAYE, student loan repayments, KiwiSaver contributions, etc, and then perhaps throw in some interest from a savings account to top it up. If you’re paid weekly or fortnightly it can be difficult.

What’s more, in my experience, it’s surprisingly difficult to answer these two questions accurately without investing serious amounts of time in managing your finances.

It’s not that people don’t care, or prefer not to know.

Consider this quote from a former developer on the Microsoft Money team (the bits in bold are as in his original post):

“The majority of consumers who buy computers claim that personal finance management is one of the top three reasons they are purchasing a PC. They’ve been claiming this for more than a decade. But only somewhere around 2% of consumers end up using a personal finance manager, with Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money dominating the market. Both products have been around for — you guessed it — more than a decade. This dramatic disconnect between consumer demand and actual market penetration is mind-boggling.

Take a guess at what percentage of consumers launch Money ever again, after running it only once. You’ll need to remove a digit from whatever percentage you’re currently guessing. It’s seriously that low. Granted, most copies of Money are actually pre-installed by the OEM on consumer machines, so you’re not exactly dealing with a captive audience. But we’re still looking at a huge discrepancy between expressed consumer desire and actual consumer behavior.”

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2004/07/01/170682.aspx

So, based on this evidence, you’d have to say that the tools are broken.

How do we fix this?

How can software help rather than hurt?

What makes it so hard at the moment?

The popular applications (Microsoft Money, Quicken, etc) are all simplified versions of business accounting packages, so they start with an assumption that you will categorise every transaction. This is where the problems begin…

Firstly, you need to come up with a set of categories that suit your spending habits. On the surface this is easy, but the devil is in the detail. For example, do you have one category for “Food” or do you split it out into “Groceries”, “Restaurants”, “Take Aways”, etc. You are forced to choose between a few high-level categories, which make it easier to categorise but don’t provide so much detail, or a nightmare of categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-categories.

Secondly, you need to get your transactions from your bank into your system. Overseas the tools integrate with the banks to automate this process, but here you need to manually log into your bank, export a file and then import into your application from there. This is a huge barrier to updating your accounts on a regular basis.

Then, assuming you can get all of that right, you still need to invest the time it takes to categorise each and every transaction each month. This is where it can quickly start to get ridiculous. If you tend to use EFT-POS a lot like I do then you’ll have hundreds of transactions to categorise each month. And if you don’t, you’ll need to remember how you spent your cash. For example, if you take $100 out from the ATM and spend it on various things over the course of a week, how do you deal with that? Or, if you buy a chocolate bar from the petrol station does that get split out or grouped in with “Petrol” or “Car” or “Transport” (or whatever category you’ve decided on to track that particular expense).

Some of the newer online tools have tried to use the advantages of the web to address some of these problems.

Wesabe allows you to tag transactions - so each transactions can be logged in multiple categories. They also recommend tags based on their community of users. Mint takes this a step further and tried to automatically code your transactions for you. The downside is that you have less control over the categories used, and have to live with some inaccuracy (they wouldn’t be able to deal with the chocolate bar and petrol example above, for example).

Wesabe has a browser plug-in which partly automates the transaction import for you. Mint fully automates this process by asking for the login details to your online banking site. As far as I can tell anybody who does this will breach the terms of use of their online banking site, and leave themselves exposed from a security perspective, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

There must be a better way!

So, let’s step back and question the assumption that underpins most, if not all, of these problems:

Do you actually need to categorise every transaction?

I don’t think so *.

Go back to the questions that I asked at the top of this post.

To answer those you simply need to be able to add up all of the money paid into your accounts (your income) and all of the money paid out of your accounts (your spending). Any transfers between your accounts can be ignored

Imagine a system which would do that automatically for you - no work required, just login and see the totals, updated each day.

And, if you could create a system that people would actually use then there are lots of potentially interesting things you could start to layer on top of that.

You could show trends to show how spending is increasing or decreasing. You could allow people to create “goals” - a savings target, or a specific debt to repay - and display a barometer to track their progress. Or, you could recommend related products or services that are likely to be of interest to that user, based on their earning and spending habits. These are the things that people actually have in mind when they say that they want to use their computer to manage their finances. But they are just three simple examples. I’m sure you can think of others.

Who could do this?

The banks should be able to do this sort of thing really easily, because they already have the transaction data. But, I’m not holding my breath.

Most online banking systems feel more like a thin layer of lipstick on a crappy underlying banking system rather than a web application designed with any consideration for what the users wants to do. And, while it may be a little unkind, I just don’t back a large bank to be able to execute on this sort of application.

And any bank that tried to do this would need to work out how to source transaction data from other banks so that all accounts can be included (this actually isn’t as unlikely as it sounds - when I was in the UK I used Egg.com for my online banking, and they were able to display transactions from my HSBC accounts via their clever Money Manager system).

So I reckon this is an opportunity waiting for somebody to grab it.

Perhaps I should suggest this to the team at Xero?

* If you’re stuck with a system that insists you categorise every transaction, you can get the same results by limiting yourself to just two categories: “Income” and “Expense”.

Related posts (manually generated):

• Who owns you bank transaction data?

Additional reading:

It’s mostly unrelated to the topic of this post, but the MSDN blog I linked to above is actually quite entertaining. He seems to write one excellent blog post each year. I like his style! :-)

I’m spending next week offline.

No email. No RSS. No blogging.

It will be interesting to see how it goes.

I’ll let you know this time next Sunday.

In the meantime, here’s a good story from Sir Ken Robinson’s book “Out Of Our Minds“:

“A well known British journalist was reminiscing about his early days in radio news. He joined the BBC in the 1930s at a time when there was no regular news bulletin. In his first week, a bulletin was scheduled and he arrived at the studio to watch it being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and waited until the time signal had finished. He then announced sombrely: ‘This is the BBC Home Service from London. There is no news’. The view of the times was that news would be broadcast if anything happened to warrant it.”

I didn’t realise it until now, but less is nostalgic.

Congratulations to Tim and the rest of the team at PlanHQ for picking up the “Emerging Gold” at the Wellington Gold Awards this week. The list of previous winners of this category is quite impressive, including Icebreaker in 2001 and Virtual Katy in 2005. Hopefully PlanHQ will live up to the billing and go on to great things.

Celebrations aside, there were a couple of ironic moments for me during the evening …

The last time I attended was in 2005, when Trade Me was nominated in the “Cyber Gold” category.

The speaker that night was the Brazilian Ambassador. So, of course, we all went dressed as Brazilian footballer supporters. I was Rowanaldo (on the right):

It wasn’t such a successful night. Maybe we got ahead of ourselves, but on the night we didn’t even win our category.

If you wanted to be really cynical you might say that it didn’t help that at the time we were completely eating the lunch of the major sponsor (in fact just a few months later, said major sponsor would acquire the company!)

Bit, of course I wouldn’t be so bitter and twisted! :-)

I did have a quiet laugh to myself last night when the introduction video to the same category trumpeted the achievements of Sam and Trade Me, going right back to the famous heater story.

Anyway, it was a good night this time around and we all dressed much more sensibly.

Congratulations to Kiwibank and the other 2008 winners.

Disclaimer: I have a small stake in PlanHQ and also generally support Brazil (unless they’re playing England).

Here’s a useful little utility for OS X:

Monolingual

It allows you to remove languages, input methods and architectures that you don’t require (think: all of the translated help files that you will never use).

It took about 10 minutes to free up about 1.2 GB on my system. Your results may vary.

PS look closely at the list of languages in the screen shot above and see if any of them are familiar. Klingon, anybody? :-)

From Steven Berlin Johnson…

“I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can’t reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I’m kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I’m not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there’s something very cool about the idea. It’s one of the things that’s so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress — even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn’t get actual face time, but my ideas did.”

That’s very cool, and another good reason to write.

More and more I’m enjoying the challenge of trying to put my thoughts into words here.

I appreciate the time you all take to read them. Thank you!

In a recent post, Kevin Roberts asks some interesting questions about the All Blacks’ haka:

“Is it time to change our view on the Haka? Have we spent too much time investing in its cultural implications and the reaction of the opposition?

Should we - a) perform it for ourselves in the changing shed as we did successfully in Cardiff against Wales, b) perform it after the game in celebration of victory as Titch and the Sevens teams do, or c) put it under wraps until we win the World Cup in 2011.”

I think that making it a private thing would be a shame - there is something quite special about the buzz created by a haka in a massive stadium setting. But, treating it as something that is done after a win only seems a great idea.

And this doesn’t necessarily mean that it loses it’s impact as a challenge. Think of it as a challenge to the opposition to lift their game for the next time the two teams meet - playing nicely into the All Black ethos of wanting to win every match.

If you think this is crazy, or that the haka is untouchable, consider that the haka has only been a feature of All Blacks home test matches since 1987 (prior to that it was only performed on international tours, and even then generally badly). And, in the last couple of years it has evolved further with the introduction of Kapo o Pango.

I think we definitely underestimate the impact of the haka as a motivations for opposition teams, and it would be great to re-claim it for ourselves.

What do you think?

Why couldn’t this happen?

Would performing the haka after a victory have the desired impact?

I’m interested in your thoughts.

PS It’s interesting to note that one of the three suggestions I made for re-invorgorating the All Blacks following the World Cup last year has already come to pass with mid-week matches scheduled for the end-of-year tour to the UK. There is also a Bledisloe Cup match to be held in Hong Kong. I expect this to be a huge success - perhaps the prelude to a full Pan Pacific Championships to be held somewhere in Asia? ;-)

There are, in my experience, two types of websites:

1. Websites which are slow; and
2. Websites which are noticably slow.

It’s important to understand which of these categories applies to your site.

If the people using your site tell you that they think it’s slow then you are definitely in the second category.

What you can do about this?

• Measure your current performance
• Identify possible improvements
• Understand best practices
• Realise that you’ll never be finished

Also, you can make sure that you include time in your work plans to make small performance improvements whenever you make changes to the site. This is important because (despite developers expectations to the contrary) it is unlikely that the day will ever come where you’ll be able to stop working on new features or bug fixes in order to just focus on performance.

Making your site faster needs to be part of what you constantly do, rather than something that you hope to have time to work on at some point in the future.

There have been some interesting changes on Trade Me over the last week.

The “cards” used to display lists of items for sale have had a design upgrade, with bigger fonts and bigger photos.

These two simple things have resulted in good improvements in the past, so the team at Trade Me will be hopeful that the same will be true this time.

I think they are a nice evolution and look great!

I especially like the new photo viewer in Trade Me Property, which means you can now view all of the photos for a listing without having to first click into the listing itself. This makes it much quicker to browse.

But, as always opinion is divided on the message boards.

Trade Me will be amused by the comments, but mostly interested in the numbers. They will probably already know if these changes have had a positive or negative impact on page views, bids and length of time spent on the site. In the past all three of these metrics have been improved just by increasing thumb nail image sizes. In time they will be able to tell if it has resulted in more sales. If you’re keen you can follow this yourself using the published sell-thru rates (the percentage of items listed that actually sell).

Meanwhile, the message boarders have moved on to complaining about postage prices.

:-)

Disclaimer: I no longer work at Trade Me or have a financial interest - I’m just an interested observer like the rest of you.

Paul Graham continues to be my hero. Here is a quote from one of his recent articles:

A new venture animal

“Y Combinator is not in the start-up funding business. Really we’re more of a small, furry steam catapult.”

You’ll have to read the whole thing to get the context, but I recommend that anyway.

While we’re at it, here are another couple of interesting Paul Graham quotes about another Y Combinator company, Reddit:

“Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they’re merely floating downstream.”
– From: Six principles for making new things

And:

“[Digg] took $2.8 million, whereas reddit, their closest competitor, has taken only $88,000. (I know because Y Combinator funded them.) And yet reddit is not only able to compete, but has a visibly more authentic, participatory feeling. I read that the top 100 Digg users submit 56% of the frontpage stories. The frontpage stories on reddit are much more widely distributed. And that may be because reddit grew organically, through word of mouth, like Flickr and Del.icio.us did.”
– From: TechCrunch interview

Some of the venues being built in Beijing for this years Olympics look absolutely stunning:

Photos from: New stuff in Beijing

No cake tins to see here!

Still, I’m not sure they beat my current favourite, the Allianz Arena in Munich.

This amazing structure lights up in different colours for night games depending on who is playing.

White when Germany are playing…

Red when Bayern Munich are playing…

And blue when TSV 1860 are playing…

Of course, during a local derby the stadium is neutral…!

More: http://www.allianz-arena.org/en/presse/bilder-service/

Then:

Now:

Does that make you feel old?

:-)

Via: Cynical-C

Peter Norvig (the Director of Research at Google) started off his ETech presentation with a diagram showing how things used to be (back in the old, old days … like 1994):

At the core, in the past, was the algorithm. Inputs were pretty simple (mouse clicks, keyboard entry). Outputs were equally simple (text, user interface). Data was used simply as a store of input and output. All of the effort and focus went into creating smart algorithms.

However the massive data sets that Google now has access to allows them to flip this model around. Rather than creating complex, elaborate, (and probably inaccurate) algorithms by hand they instead use a simple statistical model and let the data do the work.

He gave several examples. The most obvious is the Google spell checker which using this approach can guess what you might have meant, even where the words you’re looking for don’t appear in any dictionary (e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=rowan+simson).

Another is their translation tool which can be trained to convert any text where there are enough examples to “learn” from. Ironically, the limiting factor now with this approach is not the software but the quality of the human translators used for training.

In each case being able to do this simply comes down to having enough data.

This is one of those ideas which is so obvious after you’ve seen it:

If you have lots of data the way you think about algorithms changes completely

Phil from Xero pointed me at this article about XMPP (a.k.a. Jabba):

XMPP (a.k.a. Jabba) is the future for cloud services

What do you think? Has anybody done anything interesting with this that you’re using or know of?

It would be interesting to hear about how you find it.

When I first started to read the business pages in the Dominion the editor was Bernard Hickey.

(As an aside, I’m often surprised by how people who read the business pages assume that everybody else does too. Anecdotally, that just isn’t the case. But, I wonder if there are any hard numbers to prove or disprove this?)

Later I briefly crossed paths with him during my time at Trade Me. He was then Head of Digital at Fairfax Media and was part of our advisory board.

He now works as the Managing Editor at interest.co.nz and seems to be popping up as a commentator all over the place (good PR for the site, I suppose).

He also still runs a blog that I enjoy on stuff.co.nz:

www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/showmethemoney

Lately the business and finance news has thrown up a number of great topics for him to get stuck into. Here are a few that have caught my eye over the last couple of months…

On why a capital gains tax is unlikely:

“Why wasn’t there more of a debate about the issues behind the serious [housing affordability] proposals?

My theory is that the New Zealanders who run the place haven’t really confronted and don’t want to confront the ugly truth. I’m talking about the generations who graduated in the 1970s and 1980s and who now run both central and local goverments, who run the media and who generally set the parameters in a national debate.

These are the generations who graduated without student loans into good jobs when a home loan cost less than 40% of after-tax pay to service. They bought houses before 2003 and are now sitting on massive capital gains. Many have become semi-professional landlords with fancy Loss Attributing Qualifying Companies that allow them to offset operational losses on their rental properties against their salaries to reduce their tax bills. They have become addicted to the tax free capital gains on these properties. They’ve started consuming some of those gains in the form of holidays, electronics, cars and boats financed through their mortgages.”

– Helen’s lucky and selfish generation

On the meltdown on Wall St. and it’s implications for NZ:

“Put simply, panic and fear rule in the world’s financial capitals right now and it will cost us all in one way or another and sooner or later.

In previous periods any panic on financial markets affected us most directly through our stock market. When Wall St fell, that hit the New Zealand stock market. Back in 1986 we had a lot of money invested in stocks, proportionate to our total net worth. Reserve Bank figures showed that 50% of household net wealth was in financial assets in 1986, mostly in shares. The other 50% was in the value of our houses. So when Wall St sneezed we caught a cold fast.

The direct link is much more muted now. The most recent Reserve Bank figures show financial assets, again mostly shares, made up NZ$186 billion or just 31% of household net worth in 2006, whereas housing (minus housing debt) makes up $407 billion or 69% of household net worth. But that housing debt is now much more important than it used to be. Whereas in 1986 we had $65 billion worth of financial assets, we had over $150 billion of housing debt at the end of 2006.

What does that all mean? It means we care more now about interest rates and how they affect house prices than we do about share prices. But this global financial crisis is affecting both of these things too. It’s just not as direct and immediate as in previous crises. This global credit crunch has increased interest rates globally and that’s how this financial crisis is hitting us this time.”

– What panic on Wall St means for us

On Fonterra’s decision to suspect their plans to float part of the company:

“This decision shows that the most important single group of investors in New Zealand (the 11,000 farmers who own Fonterra) don’t have faith in the managers of Fonterra, don’t believe in our capital markets and don’t have the ambition to become a truly global company.

Just like so many investment decisions made by our mostly elderly investing classes, they are so obsessed with property valuations and their own searing experience of the 1987 stockmarket crash that they can’t bring themselves to take any risk associated with the equity markets and the professional managerial classes. Instead they are more than happy to take enormous risks with debt-fund investments in property they can walk on. It shows a lack of imagination and, frankly, intelligence.”

– NZ investors addicted to medioricity

On the prospects for property prices:

“The property-owning generation who do know the famous line from Dad’s Army have been reciting it to each other and their real estate agent friends for a few months now.

“Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring (yes the spelling’s right, although it is pronounced Mannering),” they’ve been saying about the threat of falling house prices. It will never happen here, they say. We have never had big falls in prices before and it won’t happen this time, they say. We’ll have a period of relative stability and then we’ll be back up, up and away on our merry way. Sit tight, they say.

But they are wrong. The latest batch of statistics say they are wrong and any rational examination of housing affordability in this country shows they are wrong. Prices here are currently at least 30 per cent over-valued and it’s now a question of how much and how fast they fall rather than if they will fall.”

– Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring, don’t panic

Idealog Talkies debut this week with an interesting piece about Ray Avery from Medicine Mondiale.

http://idealog.co.nz/talkies/ray-avery

Ray is an impressive guy.  He and his team are trying to do some great things - as the intro to the video says “changing the world from his garage”.

Earlier this year Kathryn Ryan interviewed Ray about his life and work on Nine-To-Noon:

Feature Guest: Ray Avery, 04 Feb 2008 (~28mins)

One of the better things I’ve done in the last year (thanks to an intro from Sam) is agreeing to help them out with a small amount of funding for the infant nutrition project they are working on, which they talk about in the video link above.

It will be exciting to watch and see what they can make of their ideas.

If you have an idea, here are some question you should ask yourself before getting too excited about it:

• How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Is it clear why people should use it? (i.e. what’s broken)
• How much value can you ultimately deliver? (i.e. how deep could it go)
• How many people may ultimately use it? (i.e. how wide could it go)
• How will people learn about your product?
• How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Do you really want it to exist in the world? (i.e. is it personally compelling)

I think the last question here is perhaps the most important of all.

All of these come from Evan Willians, who has some credibility in this area as the founder of Blogger (subsequently sold to Google), Odeo and Twitter.

In national news today:

Family claims largest ever Lotto prize

They won the $19m Powerball jackpot over the weekend.

The parents have said that they wish to remain anonymous.

The son said he thinks he’ll buy an Aston Martin.

One of them is wrong, I guess!

Related posts:

• On having something to be excited about, 24 February 2007
• Maserati Smaserati, 22 June 2007
• Never compare your inside to somebody else’s outside, 9 July 2007

One of the great things about this blog is that it’s easier for people with interesting ideas get in touch with me.

One of the crappy things about having more people contact me about their ideas is that I end up saying ‘no’ most of the time.

So there is now a growing group of people who are in line to buy me this t-shirt when they make it big with their venture:

From: VC Wear

Found via: Josh Koppleman

To help avoid falling back into past traps I’ve decided to create an account on de.licio.us where I’ll post any interesting links I come across. That will hopefully allow me to focus on longer form posts here.

If you want to subscribe to the de.licio.us links you can use this RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/delicious/rowansimpson

My existing feed for blog posts is:

http://rowansimpson.com/feed

For advanced users (!), if you’d like a blend of posts and links I’ve created a new feed using Yahoo Pipes which combines the last 10 blog posts and the 20 most recent links:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/rowansimpson/postsandlinks

If you have no idea what RSS is, or how to setup a feed reader, you might find this useful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

For people reading this in technicolour on rowansimpson.com I’ve updated the links under the ‘Subscribe’ section on the right.

Enjoy!

Today is 2 years since the Trade Me sale (the sale was announced on 6th March 2006 but completion wasn’t until 3rd April).

Given that, I thought this link was appropriate:

“It’s never clear when the perfect time to sell is until it’s passed.”
– Fred Wilson, When to sell?

Lance highlights a problem that needs to be dealt with by all Apple aficionados.

Broadly speaking, Apple are a company that make amazing new products which will be released soon.

They often don’t announce release dates until they arrive. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, they don’t seem to have any issue with selling the old version of the products right up until that date. As a result there is a lively ecosystem of rumour sites which offer up various advice about which products to buy when and why.

This is an extreme version of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice - not only do you have to choose between the various products and options that are available to buy now, you also need to consider what might (but also might not) be available to buy at some near point in the future.

What can you do?

For a while I subscribed to a few of the rumour sites and tried to keep up with it all, but that got too tiring. I’m obviously not a true fan-boy. I abandoned that when I culled my feeds. Life, surprisingly, has gone on.

Thankfully I didn’t labour the decision when I got my iPhone. I didn’t even have to choose between the 16GB and 8GB model, as they only had the 8GB model in stock the day I was at the Apple Store in San Francisco. As per the book referenced above, one choice means far less room for regret.

So, Lance, my advice …

Buy an iPhone. You’ll love it. There are lots of reasons for this, which I’ll save for a future post, but suffice to say it really kicks ass. You can afford it. What’s more, I doubt the 3G version if and when it’s released and available here will be so much better that you’ll wished you waited, and if it is, you can always sell the old one and upgrade then.

Here’s an interesting response to the great Marc Andreessen post on Product/Market Fit (which I can’t believe I haven’t linked to from here before now!)

“What’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does either, though some are foolish enough to think that they do (and that’s why you can beat them).

What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery. Whatever works, works.”
– The most important thing to understand about new products

I like the idea of humble product design.

Paul used to work for Google and was the guy who wrote Gmail.

His own story is a goodie:

“I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.”

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to meet Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian in the last 12 months, first at Morgo and more recently at Kiwi Foo Camp.

He is a nice mix of very smart but still approachable. I like that.

Atlassian are an impressive company, and a good role model for a couple of the businesses I’m working with.

He recently blogged about an experiment they are running at the moment where they are allowing staff to spend 20% of their time on their own pet projects. This in itself is obviously not an original idea. What makes this interesting is that, unlike Google, they are going to be open about how it works for them in reality:

Atlassian’s 20% Time Experiment

Lots of companies talk about doing this sort of thing, but hardly any I’m aware of have actually gone as far as trying it out. Doing so in the open is pretty brave. Here is what they say about the potential impact on customers:

“What does it mean for customers?

In the short term, this will mean slower or smaller, but more innovative releases. How much slower, smaller and more innovative? We’re not sure - we’ll find out and be honest in communicating it here.

(From my back of the envelope calculations, for 7 products we’ve made over 50 releases in the last 12 months.)

The long term thinking is that some of the 20% results will filter into the products and outweigh the short term release slow down in terms of customer benefits.”

You have to give them credit for that at least.

I wish them luck, and will watch with interest to see how it goes.

I like this quote from the Sky Sports Magazine advert:

“If you want to drive like a maniac, beat someone up, fire guns, punch a man in the head, shower naked with a group of men … you can. Just tell them it’s sport.”

Can you add anything else to this list?

How about:

Dress up in lycra…

Photo: scoop.co.nz

Or a nappy…

Photo: freakingnews.com

Or a tux…

Photo: snooker.org

Wear pink shoes, a pink shirt and a pink hat (at the same time)…

Photo: Ian Poulter from lebloggolf.com

Or sport a beard and mullet and drink beer (as you become world champion)…

At darts!

Photo: tribuneindia.com

Dress like a clown

Photo: www.jasperlionsrodeo.com

Or worse

Photo: pbs.org

Just tell them it’s sport!

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments below. :-)