As the video says:

“Less than 8% of people interviewed know what a browser is”

(via Adam)

These are the people who use the things you build.

Keep them in mind. :-)

You can tell a lot about a company by how they report their results:

Some companies focus on the actual values (size):

“We made a net profit of $15 million.”

Some companies focus on the first derivative (growth):

“Revenues increased by 9%.”

Some companies focus on the second derivative (acceleration):

“We added 100,000 new customers in the last year, 70,000 of these in the last two months.”

There is a time and a place for each. But you can often take your pick, depending on the spin you want.

For example … Skype

This graph from GigaOm showing quarterly revenues:

http://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/skyperevenues.gif

The headline in this case was: “Skype’s growth starts to slow” (acceleration, or in this case deceleration).

It could just have easily been “Skype reports record revenue of $145m” (size) or “Skype increases revenue by 26% compared to the same period last year” (growth).

To get the full picture you probably want to know all three.

A quick re-cap of today’s rugby news…

1. All Black hard man Brad Thorn praised for  ”bruising tackles”
2. Security guard under investigation for a bruising tacking on an idiot who chose to run onto the field
3. All Black Kevin Mealamu suffers a deep cut in the opening minutes and plays the remainder of the match with blood soaked head bandage
4. French player Mathieu Bastareaud requires four stitches to his head after being badly injured in assault, Police seek witnesses

The difference between thug and role model is not as wide as you may think.

If the security guard had used “more force than was necessary” against the people beating up Mathieu Bastareaud would he be under investigation, I wonder?

Either way, I hope the Police find the scumbags who beat up the French player outside the stadium, so we can get back to focussing on the heros who beat up the French players inside the stadium.

This is great:

Here is the “making of”:

It would be fun to be part of a project making something like this I reckon.

(via @cauld)

This is the final part of a three part series about the past, present and future of Windows Media Center.

• Part I – Past
• Part II – Present
• Part III – Future

Over the last couple of years three things have challenged the dominance of Media Center in our living room…

1. Apple

I switched to using an Apple Mac laptop in 2007 and haven’t looked back.

But, one area which has never “just worked” well is getting iTunes and iPhoto to play nicely with the photos and music we store on the NAS. Unlike their Windows equivalents, which are happy to just scan the file system, both want to maintain their own custom database, which makes it difficult to have content like this shared across multiple computers. I’ve tried various hacks to get this to work, but in the end we have reverted to simply exporting new photos and music to the NAS manually. I have setup a Firefly Media Server on the NAS, which gives us an easy way to play the music on the NAS through iTunes, but this is a read-only connection so we can’t add, modify or delete tracks this way and annoyingly cover art and track ratings don’t translate to iTunes.

Solving this seems like such an obvious area for Apple to address. It’s not hard to imagine a modified version of the Time Machine product they already sell acting as a home media server. But this is something that others have been anticipating longer than me, and we’re yet to see any sign of this, so I don’t hold my breath.

And, despite speculation they have a lot of work to do to even match the functionality of our current setup. For example, the AppleTV does not currently include a TV tuner card, let alone an EPG, and the current generation of Time Machines contain a single disk, which would be a step backwards from the RAID storage in our current NAS.

Even Front Row, which is the Apple equivalent to the Media Center interface, is some way behind Media Center in my opinion.  Recently there have been a few third-party solutions which appear to be worth keeping an eye on – such as Plex and Boxee, but these are all still beta products.

The net result of all of this is a feeling that our integrated solution doesn’t work quite so well as it did before we introduced OS X into the mix.

2. Freeview

I was blown away by Freeview during the Olympics.

High definition was great.  But, even more than that, this was the first time since we started using Media Center we watched a TV signal directly off the decoder.  And the difference was more than I realised.

Even at standard definition the picture quality was so much better when connected directly to the TV than when the same signal was run through the Media Center. The Freeview decoder includes an HDMI output, as does the graphic card in the Media Center, but in between the two is a Hauppage TV tuner card which only supports at best an S-Video input.

So, for a while it became a trade-off between good picture quality on Freeview and time shifting on the Media Center.

Until…

3. MySkyHD

MySky solves that problem plus it also includes a program guide that is generally always accurate and up-to-date.

But at what cost? There is also lots not to like about it, in my opinion…

It’s a closed system. It is oblivious to external content – either on the NAS or on the internet – so we’re back to flicking back and forth between different systems to access different content.  Plus, there is no way to access the programs you have recorded which are stored on the hard drive inside the decoder. You can’t increase the storage space and we’ve found that between The Wot Wots, Bob The Builder, and Blues Clues ours quickly fills up – and look out when the program you recorded accidentally deletes those without warning!

I find the interface quite clunky and boxy compared to Media Center. For example, in Media Center the program guide is displayed on top of whatever you are currently watching or listening to (which fades slightly into the background to make the program listings easier to read), where as in MySky you are forced through multiple screens just to get to the listings (on the first screen you have to select from different channel categories, which just adds an unnecessary step to the process in most cases), and the program you are watching is stopped while you browse. Rather than scrolling through channels and listings you need to use the coloured buttons on the remote to page back and forth. MySky seems to consist of lots of top-to-bottom lists which run to multiple pages, where as Media Center takes advantage of the width of a widescreen TV to display more options at once left-to-right. MySky is completely lacking the nice graphical touches and animations which make the Media Center interface look great. And, compared to the back button on the Media Center remote which always takes you back to where ever you came from, the back button on MySky is like a lucky dip option.

It’s also missing the killer feature of digital video recorders (DVRs): the 30-second skip. MySky instead has four different fast-forward or rewind speeds (x2, x6, x12, x30) which require multiple clicks as you go up and down through the gears. With this crazy system, rather than pressing one button once to instantly skip a commercial (or, conveniently, the approximate time it takes for a line out to form) you are instead forced to watch the ads in high speed and then scramble to press the play button in time when the program you want to watch starts again.

It doesn’t even have all of the channels. Because of an on-going dispute between TVNZ and Sky, TV One and Two have only just switched to HD, despite being available in HD on Freeview since last year, and TVNZ 6 and TVNZ 7 are not available at all.

And, last but by no means least, it’s expensive, with a hefty installation fee and monthly subscription. Even if you don’t want the DVR and EPG functions in MySky you are forced to pay for them anyway in order to get the HD decoder.

Because Sky has complete control over this platform, it seems like wishful thinking to hope for any of these things to improve materially in the short term.  As long as they can limit access to their EPG data, which makes it difficult for other options to compete, they don’t really have any real incentive to innovate.

So, where to next?

None of the options I’ve experimented with have been able to tick every box.

I still think Media Center is a little bit magic, but increasingly prefer the picture quality and program guide reliability of MySky and Freeview.

MySky does okay, but just doesn’t excite me for lots of small reasons. Having to go elsewhere to access our photos and music and other online content, especially, feels like a backwards step.

Our Apple Macs, meanwhile, remain frustratingly orphaned.

Maybe there is a new option on the horizon which will shift the balance again? Windows Seven, or Tivo, or something open source, or something from Apple.

Or perhaps there is an alternative that I haven’t seen.  If anybody has experimented with other options I’d be interested to hear about your experience.

But, in the meantime, a little boy waits.

It all seemed so promising in Amsterdam.

I would have expected the future to be here by now.

This is the second part of a three part series about the past, present and future of Windows Media Center.

• Part I – Past
• Part II – Present
• Part III – Future

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Here is the very simple Media Center setup that Jay and Hoani from Mabode helped me put together in 2006:

(full size)

There are lots of other more complicated things that people have done with Media Center – for example, connecting in home automation systems, phone systems, security systems and various extenders to send content to other parts of the house. But, my preference has been a simple system for the living room that works reliably and quietly and doesn’t require constantly flicking back and forth between different systems to access different content.

Perhaps the most important part of our setup is a small NAS where all of our data lives – in our case as NetGear ReadyNAS, which gives us about a terabyte of RAID storage.

Getting all of our photos, videos and music in one place has provided great peace of mind – they are no longer stored on a single hard drive, and they can be much more easily backed-up.

(I’ve even been experimenting a bit with setting up an automated “trickle” backup into the cloud, but that’s a topic for another post on another day).

We haven’t yet come close to filling this space up, but if required it could easily be expanded by swapping out one or more of the hard drives. While this little box can get a bit noisy, it can be kept anywhere provided it’s connected to the network.

The Media Center itself is also connected to the home network, just like any other computer, so it can access all of the content that is stored on the NAS.

The Media Center can be trained to work with any external decoder. We’ve used both Sky and Freeview decoders without any problems. The decoder is connected to the Media Center in two directions – the TV signal out connects to the tuner card in the Media Center and there is also an infrared repeater which allows the Media Center to send a signal to the decoder, e.g. to change the channel etc. As a result we only need one remote, which can control both the Media Center itself (via a USB reciever) and indirectly Freeview/Sky.

There are now tuner cards which can decode a Freeview signal directly inside the Media Center, meaning no external decoder is required. Something like that would simplify this sort of setup even further. (I’d be interested to hear from anybody who has this working with Media Center).

But, perhaps the most important part is the case – ours is an HFX Mini, which looks more like a stereo component than a computer, and contains a big heat sink to cool the components inside rather than fans, so is very quiet.

It’s been interesting how having this sort of setup has changed changed the way we consume content, both broadcast and our own.

The ability to time shift television, and instantly skip quickly over ads, changed our viewing habits a lot. Apart from sport we rarely watch live TV anymore. And, overall we watch considerably less.

Our photos, videos and music are all much more accessible, and get seen and heard a lot more than they would locked away in albums in the cupboard or on a computer in another room.

We’ve even been able to put a couple of the kids favourite DVDs on the NAS and setup Media Center to access these, so they can play them without having to worry about swapping disks in and out.

Also, we are able to much more easily access content directly off the internet. Three examples…

1. We can download video – i.e. when the new Where The Hell Is Matt? video was released, we downloaded it to the Media Center where we could all watch and enjoy it together (okay, I’ll admit, dance along!)
2. We can watch live video streamed off the web – i.e. live triathlon coverage, which is not screened in NZ but is streamed on the ITU website. The picture can be a bit jumpy and grainy on the big screen, but it’s better live than not at all.
3. We can mix and match different audio and video – i.e. for a bit of variety during a live rugby test we have mixed the sound from the Alternative Rugby Commentary (streamed) with the pictures from Sky (broadcast).

Of course, things don’t stand still.

A setup like this can quickly get out-of-date…

Next: Media Center – Part III: Future?

This is the first part of a three part series about the past, present and future of Windows Media Center.

• Part I – Past
• Part II – Present
• Part III – Future

I remember the exact moment that I fell in love with Windows Media Center.

I was at TechEd in Amsterdam in 2003.

I had a few hours to spare one afternoon and so ventured into the exhibit hall. I didn’t get any further than the Microsoft stand, where they a Media Center setup complete with big leather sofa and a large LCD TV.

Like all great software, when I first saw it and used it, it seemed like magic.

When you boil it down it’s just a computer connected to a TV and remote, but the way you interact with it makes it feel like something completely different.

Microsoft talks about Media Center having a “10 foot” interface. In other words, an interface which is designed to be used from 10 feet away, as opposed to the standard “2 foot” interface that you use sitting at a desk.

What’s different?

Firstly, everything is big.

All of the buttons and text is super-sized, so everything is clear and obvious even from a distance.

There are significantly fewer elements in the user interface than you would normally expect.

It is designed to be navigated quickly using a remote control rather than a mouse and keyboard.

When you select an option on the screen whole viewpoint changes, often with an animation to make it obvious that you’re moving from one place to the next.

Spaces are filled with gradients, colour and very subtle animation rather than grey boxes and whitespace. The background animation, which you won’t even notice unless you’re really paying attention, also serves as a screen saver of sorts.

The menus are specifically designed for larger widescreen displays – so the items tend to run left-to-right rather than top-to-bottom – meaning they make use of all of the space available.

Most importantly, the interface brings together all of your content and puts this front and centre - all of your photos, all of your video, all of your music, and all of your television, with an integrated electronic program guide (EPG) and the ability to record and time shift shows plus pause and resume live television.

Needless to say, I wanted one!

When I got back to NZ it became my project.

If you want to see the future of technology look at things that the hobbyists are tinkering with. In 2004 Media Center was definitely in that category.

Nobody was selling Media Center as a complete off-the-shelf package, so I had to buy the various components, including TV tuner card, infrared receivers and remotes, and try and put it all together myself. It took me several iterations to get it working at all, and even then that was only by the loose definition of “working”.

I spent a lot of time on forum sites like The Green Button looking for help with various problems (the name comes from the green button which is on all Media Center remotes as a one-click was to go “home”).

Getting the electronic program guide (EPG) to work reliably was a constant and complicated dance.  Various people had hacked together different solutions and it was a matter of trying one option until it broke and then switching to the next.  Even today, several years later, there is still no official EPG data feed for NZ, so getting it to work requires a bit of patience and knowledge of secret handshakes.

But by far the biggest issue was what people in the industry call WAF, or the Wife Acceptance Factor. This is not a project you can play with in the safety of your shed – you are putting a PC in the living room! When the TV blue screens at the wrong time it’s a very bad look.

And then there was the noise. I tried several different case designs, including a Shuttle PC and a funky looking Silverstone case, but all of them had cooling fans which created a constant, and very annoying, hum.

By the end of 2005 I was almost over it.

I decided to throw in the towel on the DIY approach and get some professional help…

Next: Media Center – Part II: Present

The quality of form design, in general, on the web continues to be a huge source of frustration for users and an embarassment for all of us who are involved in designing and building sites.

Here is a payment page that I needed to traverse recently…

Firstly, as originally served:

And, here once I’d disabled CSS:

It took me a few attempts to even work out what was happening. Initially I just assumed that the page had somehow not completely loaded.

Then I highlighted the area where the labels should be and realised that they were actually white text on a white background!

I’m guessing that in this case the design is incompetent rather than malicious. 

Perhaps it works fine in Internet Explorer? Who knows.

I was determined, so worked it out.  But, I expect I’m an exception.

If they measured their conversion rates on this page, surely they would find that a significant number of people simply give up, unable to work it out.

So, you have to assume that they probably never bothered to measure.

Of course, none of the intelligent and experienced people who take the time to read this blog would ever make a mistake as outrageous as that. Would you?

You might be surprised …

Let me try and debunk some axioms of registration page design, and in the process highlight a simple mistake that I would guess many of you have made without even realising it (I can only say that with confidence because I’ve made it myself many times).

To start, a question… what is the difference between these two forms?

Form A: with tick-box

Form B: without tick-box

Which is easier to use?  Or, to ask the same question in a more measurable way: which would have a higher conversion rate?

As we’ll see there is evidence to suggest that Form B is a much better design.

So, why are registration pages like Form A nearly ubiquitous?

Here are some possible reasons I can think of (if there are others, please let me know)…

Legal reasons

In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a lawyer!

If there are any lawyers reading I’d be interested to get an informed opinion on this.

My guess is that it doesn’t make any material difference.

Just think about how this would sound in court: “But, your honour, they ticked the box when they registered!”. Yeah, right.

And, even so, at what cost this additional legal protection? How many fewer registrations can you afford before it’s worth taking the risk?

Because everybody else does

This is probably getting closer to the major reason for the ubiquity.

And, there is something to be said for consistency. But, surely only when it doesn’t hurt!  Lemmings!

Just because everybody else does something, that doesn’t excuse us from measuring and understanding the impact of our design decisions.

How hard is it to tick a box?

Now we’re getting to the interesting bit…

I was recently talking to Nigel about some of the work he did on improving the StarNow registration page. This is the first example I’d come across where somebody had actually taken the time to measure specifically where people were failing on this sort of registration form.

It turned out, in their case, that 27.9% of people didn’t tick the box the first time, and as a result got a validation error. What’s more this only compounded other problems. When the tick box validation error was displayed the password fields were reset (as is common, unless you explicitly set these values when the page is returned, which is frowned upon by security types). So, of course, many people would read the error message, scroll down and tick the box, only to find that the form still didn’t submit successfully as they also needed to re-enter the password.

Does this sound familiar? I know I’ve been through this exact dance myself many times, and I consider myself a pretty savvy web user.

Overall they found that over 34% of people who attempted to complete the page (i.e. pushed the submit button at least once) abandoned the site without successfully completing their registration process.

By making simple changes they decreased this to 17%. That’s a staggering 26% improvement!

So, some suggestions:

1. Ditch the tick-box from your registration page.
2. If your lawyer complains ask them to justify the cost, which you will now be able to quantify.
3. Re-populate password fields on post-back. Or, if you’re not comfortable doing that for security reasons, at least highlight the fields that people will need to re-enter to avoid further error messages.
4. Most importantly: take the time to measure and understand exactly where people are failing on your site, then do something about it!

Xero has had a lot of media coverage in last couple of months.

They have announced a big capital raising and a number of new marketing partnerships, won some prestigious awards, and most importantly have signed up lots of new paying customers.

So, is now a good time to buy some shares?

Last week they announced that 70% of existing shareholders decided to buy some more in the recently completed round, at 90c per share (the market price as I type is $1.30).

Despite all that has been written there has been very little independent analysis of the company and its prospects. It’s been difficult for me to find information to point people at when I’ve been asked about this. So, I’m pleased to see the analysis that Sam Stewart has published on his blog.

As Sam correctly points out the key numbers to keep an eye on are:

1. Average Revenue Per User (APRU), or how much the company earns from each customer (currently this is ~$33 per month).
2. Operating Expenses, or how much the company spends to run the business (in 2008/09 this was $8.3 million, but this will increase as they hire more staff).

Depending on what you think will happen to these two numbers in the future you can can calculate how many customers you think they would need to break even. Or, looking even further ahead, to provide a return sufficient to compensate investors for the risk they are taking by investing at this early stage.

Sam thinks the first magic number is 28,000 customers (they currently have 7,500). But, there are lots of variables and assumptions, so I’d encourage you to read his post and play with the spreadsheet he has put together and form your own opinions.

The general advise to anybody who is investing in risky early-stage ventures like Xero, or thinking about it, is this:

There is a chance that the company will one day be worth a lot more than it is today. And, there is a chance it won’t. Make sure you are comfortable with either outcome.

What do you think?

For the sake of full disclosure: I am a shareholder in Xero. I was not part of the recent capital raising, but I did subscribe for the maximum number of shares available to me under the share purchase plan. I also worked at Xero from May 2007 until February 2008, but I no longer have any day-to-day role in the business. Naturally, as both a shareholder and interested observer, I continue to hope that they are able to build a significant and profitable business.

I am in equal parts excited and terrified by getting to this point today:

Mail

Things

Reader

I’ve been talking about this for a while.

De-clutter, Inbox Zero, Disconnect, Spring Clean, Unsubscribe (again), Less TV (again and again), Sell Yours,  yada yada yada.  

All well and good … but then what?

Do you remember when rugby players wore tight shorts and loose tops, and international teams played games against provincial teams, and test matches started at 2:30pm?

This short film from NZ On Screen might take you back…

Here are a few different ways to fund your start-up…

The “Burn Baby Burn” Approach

This approach involves raising as much money as you can up-front, and then spending it aggressively in the pursuit of revenue.

If you go down this road, it’s important that you can paint a big picture, because people who invest a lot of money into this sort of venture will need to believe there is a chance they will get an even larger amount of money back in time. So, hype it up!

The problem with this sort of approach is that it’s a big punt. Perhaps there won’t be quite as many customers as you think, or perhaps it will take you longer than you thought to convince them to buy. Either way, there is a possibility that you will spend all of the money you raised before you get enough revenue to cover your costs into the future.

If that happens you’ll find yourself needing to move from a high-cost model to a low-cost model, which is hard (especially if you’ve hired people you like). As Bernard points out, the big media companies are the latest group to experience this.

And, unless you can demonstrate momentum and find a way to talk an even bigger story, you’ll probably find it difficult to raise more money down the track if that’s required.

Of course, if you can get to break-even before you burn through all of your fuel, then you will have used other peoples money to fund the business to that point and hopefully have held on to enough of a stake for yourself to make it interesting.

The “2-Minute Noodles” Approach

This approach is all about keeping your costs as low as possible for as long as possible (i.e. living on 2-Minute Noodles), and trying to quickly get to a profitable position.

Maybe you fund it yourself from savings, or maybe you find a kind benefactor who is prepared to invest a modest amount of capital. Either way, it’s all about making a small amount of cash go a long way. Ideally all the way to a profitable business (or at least “ramen profitable”).

However, there are two obvious problems with this approach:

Firstly, it’s only really possible if you’re young (or stupid!) The rest of us already have too many expensive tastes and responsibilities.

Secondly, it can take forever, literally, so you need to be patient. In the meantime perhaps somebody else will come along with more resources (see “Burn Baby Burn” above) and take your customers before you can get to them.

Or, maybe it would require more investment (time and/or money) than your limited resources can provide?

Of course, if it does work, you are left owning most of a business that’s paying for itself, and generating cash. That puts you in a strong position to talk to potential investors, to re-invest in growing the business further yourself, or to simply sit back and enjoy the profits.

The “Hybrid” Approach

This approach involves using revenue from the consulting part of your business to fund your venture.

In other words you spend some of your time working for other people, so you have enough money to spend on your own ideas.

There is one big problem with hybrids, as Shai Agassi said in his TED talk this year (he was quoting Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault/Nissan, and was referring to hybrid cars, but the metaphor is relevant here too):

“Hybrids are like mermaids: when you want a fish you get a woman and when you need a woman you get a fish.”

The obvious risk is that you find it difficult to wean yourself off your dependence on the comfortable salary your consulting work provides.

Or, perhaps you find it difficult to say ‘no’ to work when it is available, and as a result the consulting work comes to take all of your time leaving little space for anything else.

Of course, if you can find the right balance, this is a great way to fund a business without having to constantly scrimp and save and do everything cheaply, and without having to raise money from external investors.

There is no right answer

There are examples of companies that have been successful using each of these approaches. So, asking which is “best” is the wrong question, I think.

If you talk to people who have been successful in the past, I think you’ll tend to find that they will simply recommend the approach that worked for them. So, be careful in whose council you take.

The important thing is to choose.

Pick the option that seems right for you, and go with it.

Whatever you do, don’t get stuck halfway between – i.e. taking on investment (with the associated expectations that brings) but not really raising enough money to really go hard, or taking a “hybrid” approach as well as taking on external shareholders, etc.

And, don’t forget, how you fund your venture is ultimately irrelevant unless you make something people want.

“If you count something interesting, you will learn something interesting”

- Atul Gawande

Last year I read two excellent books by Atul Gawande:

• Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
• Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

I recommend them both.

One idea that has stuck with me from these is the power of simple tests or checklists.

An example he gives in “Better” is the Apgar Score, created by Dr Virginia Apgar in the early 1950s as a quick and easy way to assess the health or otherwise of a new born baby.

It is almost certainly the first test you passed in your life!

Prior to this many babies which were the wrong size (too small) the wrong colour (blue) or not breathing, perhaps as a result of a difficult birth, would die because it was assumed that nothing could be done to save them.  At the time, remember, over 3% of babies died during child birth.

The concept of the test was more or less dismissed when she first suggested it because it was thought to be too simplistic to be useful, but today is used all around the world, and has had a massive impact.  

Here is a quote from the book:

“The score turned an intangible and impressionistic clinical concept – the condition of new babies – into numbers that people could collect and compare. Using it required more careful observation and documentation of the true condition of every baby. Moreover, even if only because doctors are competitive, it drove them to want to produce better scores – and therefore better outcomes – for the newborns they delivered.”

He was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10191

Here is an extract from that interview, where he talks about the same idea, this time in the context of general surgery: specifically a checklist used by surgeons at key points during a procedure, and the massive difference it has had to the outcomes where it has been used:

“We introduced a 90-second checklist that happens right before [the patient goes] to sleep, and then right before an incision, and right before [the patient] leaves the room, kind of like before takeoff, after takeoff and on landing.”

“It checks 19 things that if we missed them, we will harm you.  But it turns out we miss one of those steps about two-thirds of the time, and using the checklist in every hospital we put it in – we put it in eight hospitals that range from rural Tanzania to Seattle, Washington – and each hospital it went into reduced complications by double digits, on average by about a third.”

Something that was easy and made such a big impact would be popular, right?  Actually no…

“Q:  And how is the medical profession responding to this?”

“A: Well, there are two kinds of reactions.  We surveyed the teams afterwards, asked them what did you think.  And about 80 percent said, you know, in the end, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.  It was swift.  I thought it improved care.  But there was a solid 20 percent who said, this is a waste of my time.  I don’t think it improves anything.  But then we asked them one more thing.  We said, if you were having surgery, would you want the checklist?  And 94 percent said they would want it.”

It makes me wonder what other things we dismiss as being too simple to be useful.  Or, what things we oppose for ourselves but which we would think others should do.  ”Do as I say not as I do” perhaps, or is it “I’m an expert, so I don’t need it”?

I’m sure this same idea could be applied to a wide range of different things.

For example, imagine a simple test that you could do at the end of each day which measures the impact of your actions on your own health:

1. Did you eat well?
2. Did you exercise?
3. Did you get enough sleep?
4. Did you spend time with family and friends?

How would you score?  

Would you want to know?

Maybe you would even share your results with others, in order to be able to compare?

And then, having created a false sense of competition, wouldn’t you be incented to do better?

Clearly keeping score can be pretty powerful, as long as you choose the right score to keep.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I’m enjoying following the adventures of Vaughan Rowsell, who is now more than two weeks into his attempt to ride the full length of New Zealand “uphill” (i.e. starting at the bottom and finishing at the top).

Here are the videos he has posted on his blog summarising the distance covered so far:

Week 1 – Stewart Island to Mosgiel

Week 2 – Mosgiel to Waikouaiti

He also has some route maps on his site.

What make this so exciting?  Just that he’s doing it.  

In other words: what sounds impossible is actually quite achievable, which is not to say easy. 

The only thing that makes him different from you (and me!) is that he has managed to bridge that massive gap between thinking about doing something great and actually making it happen.

From Twitter:

“I do feel like I am doing something impossible! Something I never thought I was able to do. It’s such an awesome feeling. Try it.”

– @rowsell

It certainly beats sitting on the couch feeling fat and lazy and generally sorry for yourself.

I got to know Vaughan a little when we worked together on the first part of the Travel Bug project (then going by it’s code name “Jandals”) 

He’s a pretty unassuming guy who deserves all of the credit and support that I hope he gets (en route he is raising money for The Agency for Spinal Concern). 

I don’t know if he is thinking this far ahead yet … possibly only when it gets really hard grinding up a big hill or into a headwind in the rain … but the feeling he’ll have when he gets to the end is going to be crazy awesome.

I’m really looking forward to spending a day riding with him when he gets to Wellington.  

Maybe two, if he’ll have me?

UPDATE (21-May)

I rode with Vaughan from Wellington to Otaki.  It was a cold wet day, and the route we took over the Akatarawas was pretty brutal, but it was fun anyway.  His blog has some details.

Since then he has continued on up the country and is now into the final week or so of his ride.  

If you are in the Auckland area get out this weekend and support him as he rides across the bridge.

And, where ever you are, you can support his charity by donating through his page on Give A Little.

How long, do you think, before we see the All Blacks involved in one of these…

Cruel.  Awesome.

Via Hadyn Green on Public Address

There hasn’t been nearly enough of this kind of thinking lately…

Link via Andy Lark from earlier this year.

So, I enjoyed this, from the Last Word section of yesterday’s Dom Post, quoting a question about the swine flu put to University of Warwick Professor Andrew Easton by London’s Science Media Centre:

“Q: Are we all going to die?
A: Yes, but probably not of the flu and more probably not of this virus”

PS you really should read Andy’s post – it explains why the “Keep calm and carry on” message is so much more effective than “Don’t panic!”, no matter how friendly the type face

PPS there’s plenty of stuff you can buy on Trade Me if you want to spread the word

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 …

I love the buzz of a big crowd.  It’s exciting to soak up the atmosphere created when lots of people are all in the same space at the same time.

If you’re lucky enough to be the band, or sports team or speaker who is the focus of the crowds attention, then that is quite powerful.

(Or terrifying, I suppose, depending on their mood!)

If you design or develop software it’s much harder to get feedback like this.

But, it’s still useful to think of crowds to help you visualise the audience of people who are using what you’re building.

This was the idea behind the photo I use in the header this site.

Another from the same shoot is below, for those of you reading via my feed:

These come from a 2006 article about Trade Me in Idealog, and were taken at the Westpac Stadium in Wellington on a wet and wild day (hence the slightly damp windswept look and the Icebreaker jacket).

The stadium seats about 35,000 people when it’s full.  At the time there were about that many people online at once every evening on Trade Me.

(As I type there are over 80,000 online, showing how much it has continued to grow since then!)

When you think of that many people all in one space together, and the noise and activity they generate, it changes the way you think about the people using your site.

One of the things that software developers do all the time is dismiss a percentage of their audience as unimportant for one reason or another, without thinking of them as a distinct group of people.

If you don’t think you need to worry about people stuck using IE6 (for whatever reason) or a dial-up connection, or people who struggle to read small fonts, or people who are colour blind (or completely blind), or people who don’t know how to use a command line, or people who are still nervous (paranoid or otherwise) about entering their credit card details into a website, or people who want help from a real person, or people who use Firefox on a Mac … because on a percentage basis they are not that many … calculate just how big that group is (take your unique visitor count and multiply by the percentage, however small), and then imagine standing up in front of that group and telling them to their face that they don’t matter to you.

If you don’t think it’s a big deal for your site to be broken or off line while you make changes … think of all of the people who happen to be visiting at that point and imagine what it would feel like to have them all in the room with you while you flick the switch.  No matter how small the number it would probably feel like a lot of people.  And, you might be motivated to get the site back up more quickly if they were all standing behind you impatiently looking over your shoulder.

You can use the same technique to help put other numbers in perspective.

It’s amazing the difference it makes when you start thinking of your metrics as real people.

For example…

• 2 people = your mum and dad!
• 5 people = a car full
• 15 people = a rugby team
• 30 people = a school class
• 100 people = a bus full
• 120 people = a parliament full of MPs (actually 122, to be precise)
• 380 people = all of the passengers on an Air NZ 747-400
• 550 people = the audience at Webstock earlier this year
• 1,500 people = capacity of the Aotea Centre in Auckland
• 2,500 people = all of the students at Auckland Grammar school
• 6,000 people = capacity of the TSB Arena in Wellington
• 10,000 people = population of Gore :-)
• 12,000 people = capacity of the Vector Arena in Auckland
• 18,000 people = all of the students at Otago University
• 20,000 people = population of Levin
• 25,000 people = the crowd at Augusta National each day this week
• 35,000 people = capacity of Westpac Stadium in Wellington
• 60,000 people = capacity of Eden Park in Auckland, post-renovations
• 100,000 people = capacity of MCG in Australia (also, incidentally, approx. the number of people who voted for NZ First at the last election)
• 250,000 people = capacity of St Peter’s Square in Rome
• 475,000 people = population of greater Wellington region
• Etc, etc.

Help me out with some more examples…

I’ve been trying to write fewer posts that are simply re-quoting stuff that others have written.

Instead, if you want to follow some of the links I come across which I think are interesting, feel free to check out my Delicious bookmarks, or FriendFeed.

Today is the exception.

Here are some quote from three excellent “How To…” articles that I’ve stumbled across in the last few weeks, written by Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky.

If you’re working on, or investing in start-up companies, or would like to be, I recommend you read all three…  

How to be a Start-up Founder – by Paul Graham

“I’ve figured out how to express the quality [of being a good start-up founder] directly. I was writing a talk for investors, and I had to explain what to look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They’d be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That’s not enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to have keep trying new things.  Be relentlessly resourceful.”

“If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I’d tape to the mirror. “Make something people want” is the destination, but “Be relentlessly resourceful” is how you get there.”

How to be a Program Manager – by Joel Spolsky

“Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.”

“[Jabe Blumenthal, a programmer on the Mac Excel team in the late 80s] noticed that software development was getting so complicated that none of the programmers had the time to figure out how to make software that was either usable or useful. The marketing team was ranting and raving about customer needs and nobody had time to talk to them or translate their MBA-speak into actual features. There was a lot of product design stuff that took a lot of work: talking to users, running usability tests, reviewing competitive products, and thinking hard about how to make things easier, and most programmers just didn’t have the time (nor were they particularly good at it).”

“A good rule of thumb is that it takes about one program manager for every four programmers.”

“The number one mistake most companies make is having the manager of the programmers writing the specs and designing the product. This is a mistake because the design does not get a fair trial, and is not born out of conflict and debate, so it’s not as good as it could be.”

“… being effective as a program manager means you have to (a) be right, and (b) earn the respect of the programmers so that they concede that you’re right.”

How to be an Angel Investor – by Paul Graham

“Don’t spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. That’s not how you win at this game. When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they’re not saying “He got a 4x liquidation preference.” They’re saying “He invested in Google.”  That’s how you win: by investing in the right startups.”

“How do you decide what valuation to offer? If you’re part of a round led by someone else, that problem is solved for you. But what if you’re investing by yourself? There’s no real answer. There is no rational way to value an early stage startup. The valuation reflects nothing more than the strength of the company’s bargaining position. If they really want you, either because they desperately need money, or you’re someone who can help them a lot, they’ll let you invest at a low valuation. If they don’t need you, it will be higher. So guess.”

“Ultimately it doesn’t matter much. When angels make a lot of money from a deal, it’s not because they invested at a valuation of $1.5 million instead of $3 million. It’s because the company was really successful.”

“To be a good angel investor, you have to be a good judge of potential. That’s what it comes down to. VCs can be fast followers. Most of them don’t try to predict what will win. They just try to notice quickly when something already is winning. But angels have to be able to predict.”

“The most successful angel investors I know are all basically good people. Once they invest in a company, all they want to do is help it. And they’ll help people they haven’t invested in too. When they do favors they don’t seem to keep track of them. It’s too much overhead. They just try to help everyone, and assume good things will flow back to them somehow. Empirically that seems to work.”

“I reckon an education notice can’t just say “don’t do that”. It needs to include what to do instead otherwise it’s not education. “

– Br3nda via Twitter

“The biggest threat to an author is obscurity, not piracy.”

– Tim O’Reilly

I was overseas and missed the bulk of the debate about Section 92a of the new Copyright Amendment Act.

But the outcome was pretty interesting, even from a distance.

The #blackout campaign, initiated by Creative Freedom NZ and supported by a huge number of people, managed to get a lot of coverage of the issue and convinced the government to delay the implementation of this part of the Act.

And then, earlier this week, they announced that they were scrapping this altogether and going back to the drawing board.

So, here is a question for everybody that supported the campaign (i.e. everybody who changed their avatar in Facebook and/or Twitter):

Now what?

The current wording of s92a is dumb.  All agreed.  But, how should it read?

I’m not sure that I’ve heard anybody propose a solution that everybody would support, which I assume means that this is a much more difficult problem than we think.

The Creative Freedom site lists three goals:

1. No “guilt upon accusation” law
2. DRM Free NewZealand
3. No companies snooping on your internet 

These are fine goals.  

I think everybody would nod in furious agreement as they read those.

(If you haven’t already I encourage you to follow the links above read the details).

And I think that most people would also agree that the groups representing the various rights owners have to be part of the solution, even though they have not seemed very willing to engage in the debate (for example, when RIANZ CEO Campbell Smith describes a requirement to provide evidence of copyright infringement as “impractical” and “ridiculous” he just looks silly).

There just doesn’t seem to be a middle ground at the moment.  

So, it’s a stalemate.

On one side we have people who consume content who, it seems, would probably prefer to keep the status-quo where they can reasonably freely download and share whatever without risk of being caught (it’s hard to beat free, eh!)

That might be unfair, but I haven’t really heard anybody on this side of the debate come out strongly against copyright infringements and say “we think it’s terrible that it’s so easy to steal, and we think it should be enforced like this …”.  

Perhaps it’s a case of people in glass houses being a bit cautious about throwing stones?  

On the other side are the content producers and rights owners who seem incapable of grasping the size of the opportunity they are missing out on by sticking to their old business models and a mindset of having to hold on so tightly to the content they own.  

As Elan from Plex said so well in his recent open letter to media companies…

“You have to stop being scared that I’m going to steal your content, because I’m already stealing your content. Your goal should be to get me to give you the money I’m already giving to others.”

And

“There is a holy trinity of things I want desperately from you, because I can’t get them anywhere else: availability, quality, and metadata. By availability I mean give me access to full catalogs of content. More is more. If I can’t get it from you, I’m going to have to go elsewhere, and you don’t want that. Secondly, give me quality: why would I go to you for SD content when I can get HD content elsewhere? Why would I go to you for ad-laden content when I can get ad-free content elsewhere? Lastly, give me rich metadata: reviews, related content, recommendations, transcripts, and credits. And give me an API interface to that data. In return I will give you my money every month, and I’ll rub your feet at least once a week.”

And stuck in the middle of all of this are the ISPs of various flavours, who would, I suspect, much rather just invoice monthly than have to get involved in the messy business of being adjudicator and enforcer.

That seems like quite a big gap to try and bridge.

How do we break this deadlock?

What’s the next step forwards?

Are there examples from overseas that we think would work here – i.e. the American model (which gives a bit more power to the rights owners) or the European model (which gives a bit more power to the consumer)?  

Or perhaps we try our own hybrid, with some form of industry self-regulation?

Would that work?

Or do we just think it’s all too hard, and so stick with the status-quo by default?

Interested in your thoughts.

This month it is 10 years since Trade Me was launched.

Last night there was a party for staff to celebrate the milestone.

As part of this they kindly invited a few of us who were there in the beginning to tell some stories about how we got involved and about the early days of working on the site.

Here is my part of that (the extended director’s-cut edition) …

—

In 1999 I was working as an IT consultant in Sydney and really wanted to move back to Wellington.

In those days to find a good flat you needed to get up really early on a Wednesday or Saturday and buy a paper and hit the phones – and by lunch time normally all of the good ones had been taken.

So, that obviously wasn’t very convenient for me over in Australia.

This was also the middle of the dot-com bubble, and I had this nagging fear that I was missing out on something, and was really keen to get my hands dirty and try to build my own website.

So, I put those two things together and came up with the idea for Flathunt.

That was all good. 

The first version of the site was a bit rubbish, but I was proud of it.

Then, in a moment of madness, I decided to quit my job and work on Flathunt full-time.

I had an exit interview with the senior partner at the firm I was working at, and in as many words he told me that he thought I was throwing my career away.

In a way you could say he was right, because since then I’ve never worn a suit and tie again!

Anyway, I just put my head down and tried to make Flathunt as good as I could make it.

I called every property manager and real estate agent I could find, and asked them to list on the site.

And, surprisingly a few of them said “yes” and the site slowly started growing.

Soon after it launched, we actually found a flat for ourselves through the site – it was listed at 2pm and we went and saw it at 4pm and signed the lease that evening.  Which was great, except that our new landlord straight away took the listing down, and at that stage I was a bit desperate for all of the listings I could get.  So, that was a bit annoying!

After about 3 months my girlfriend (now my lovely wife) got a bit sick of paying all of the bills.

Flathunt was making enough to cover costs, but not enough to pay me a salary, so I had to go out and find some paid work.

Around that time I had lunch with Sam, who was an old friend from school, and with Phil McCaw who along with his colleagues from AMR had just invested, and they told me what they were doing with Trade Me. 

I’d seen the “Only Turkeys Pay For Classifieds” billboard. 

I thought it sounded exciting.

So we did a deal around Flathunt and they hired me as a developer.

I became the first employee who wasn’t a Morgan, and got to work.

And, there was no shortage of things to do.

Within the first year we completely redesigned the site: we put in place a new design – coming up with the yellow sidebar and tabs and the “Kevin the Kiwi” logo etc which are still more-or-less in place today, we introduced charging, and usernames (rather than just showing everybody’s email address on the site) and built photo uploading, and autobidding, and the first incarnation of text bidding (which nobody really used apart from us)… and a whole bunch of other stuff.

It’s hard to imagine today that the site would have worked at all without all of those things, but somehow it did.

We even built a Japanese version of SafeTrader, of all things, but that’s a story for another day.

We were just making it up as we went.

Sometimes we’d have an idea while we were out at lunch and rush back and try and build it and deploy it before we went home.  It was incredible that the site didn’t break a lot more than it did.

All the while the business was growing at a ridiculous rate.

But we were still impatient.

One day Sam decided to try and get on Fair Go … as you do.  So he called the producers and said “I really want you to come and film a story about Trade Me”.  They didn’t really know what to say, I don’t think, because the people they were used to dealing with would normally try and lock the doors or punch the cameraman.

But they came in anyway and filmed some interviews.

Then we panicked.

We were not really prepared for the sort of traffic that a top-rating prime time television show might generate.  I think the site was running on a single server at that point.  So we quickly rushed out and hired a bigger server and then braced ourselves.

We invited some family and friends into the office the evening it aired for some drinks, and we setup a projector showing the number of people online.

And, if I’m correct, that was the first time we ever had more than 1000 people on the site at once, which was an exciting milestone.

Anyway, it was a crazy time.

I’ve never worked so hard or had so much fun. 

We got to experience a business growing at an astonishing rate, although what we didn’t realise at the time was that this was just the beginning.

It was a privilege to be part of it.

Trade Me Home Page Retrospective

(click for full-size screen shots)

1999:

2000:

2001:

2002:

2003:

2004:

2005:

2006:

2007:

2008:

Talking with an American recently I referred to a third-person as: “a bit of a Muppet”.

They were obviously a bit confused about what I meant, and when I dug into it I realised that we didn’t have the same interpretation at all.

To me it was derogatory (i.e. a little gormless, unable to think for themselves). 

To them it was something else entirely (i.e. cute, uber-friendly, anxious to teach you things … like counting and co-operation).

I had to admit they had a point.

I wonder how this came about?  Why are we so negative about Muppets?

And, is it just a kiwi thing?  Or, are there other places in the world that disrespect the Muppets like this too?  (I’d be interested to hear from readers from abroad on this issue!)

Either way, be warned.  If you intend to offend pick your words carefully!

I wonder: how far into what we now call the Great Depression did they start to call it a Great Depression as opposed to a regular old recession?

The US stock markets just recorded their worst month since 1933.  The amount of money that has been wiped off the value of listed companies around the world is staggering.

As this chart from Financial Graph & Art shows, this is now the second worst bear market when measured by the percentage decline in values, but we still have some way to go to match both the length and severity of the market drop between 1929 and 1932.

This is clearly somewhat uncharted waters.  And, it’s interesting to see what different countries around the world are doing to try and address this situation.

Having spent a few weeks in the US recently, it feels like we’re much less optimistic here in NZ.  Obviously the recession/depression is dominating the news over there too, but the mood is still “yes we can!” rather than “gulp, we’re stuffed!”.

For example this (from the New York Times)

“Wrapped inside the economic stimulus package is about $80 billion in spending, loan guarantees and tax incentives aimed at promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, higher-mileage cars and coal that is truly clean. As a stand-alone measure, these investments would amount to the biggest energy bill in history.”

Not sure about the “truly clean coal” part, but that does seem positive. 

And, it makes the 9-day-fortnight proposal seem pretty modest.

On the other hand, I’m not necessarily sure much of the optimism is warranted.  

What are they going to do about their auto industry?  More bail outs?  Or let them fail?  Neither seem like especially attractive options.

While I was there Hyundai were running a series of positive TV ads highlighting their assembly plants based in Alabama, employing lots of Americans, etc, etc (and without saying as much noting that this was all without government bail outs).  As Fred Wilson pointed out: “the auto sector has the potential to be the ‘Vietnam’ of his energy plan” and “when a portfolio company acts like [GM] in our business, they are dead on arrival”.

Whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, it’s difficult to disagree that this is a horrible mess.

So, what are we going to do about it?  What are you going to do about it?

Do you feel like there is anything you can do, or is this something that they have to solve?  And, if so, who is “they“?

Think about the things you have already personally done: do you think they have made things better or worse?  For example, if you have stopped spending so much on stuff you can do without, what’s the impact on the companies that used to make and sell that stuff, and the people who work for those businesses?

Amongst this carnage, where are the opportunities?  Remember: Trade Me was launched in 1999, just as the first tech bubble burst spectacularly.

And, is anybody else worried that we’ve all started to feel that things are inevitably going to get worse?

If you want to understand how this whole mess has come about, here is an excellent animated overview:
 

http://www.vimeo.com/3261363

Interested in your thoughts.

“Don’t post unless you add more value than the attention you consume”
– Tim Ferris in How to use Twitter …

I’m back in Wellington after spending most of February overseas.

I took the opportunity while I was away to neglect my inbox, which was great, but I have some catching up to do.

I will get back to writing again shortly.  That is, as soon as I think I can satisfy the rule above, which I think is excellent advice.

For now, this cartoon from Jessica Hagy:

Btw, does it still count as a holiday when you don’t have a job?

Previous posts with cartoons by Jessica:

• Fun with graphs, 22 Jan 2007
• Tax fraud vs. Online dating fraud, 29 May 2007
• Europa, 4 Dec 2007
• You can always ask for forgiveness, 6 Feb 2008