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Dallas Architecture Forum Serves Up Design Goodness at the Nash Sculpture Center

2010-05-19T19:49:00Z

For the visually, spatially and inclined: The Dallas Architecture forum is presenting it’s third annual Dallas Design Symposium this Saturday from 1-5 pm. Speakers include innovative, award winning architects, artists and designers. If design and/or environment play a role in your vocation or avocation, this is a great value at $50.

In particular, I recommend designers from the electronic arena check this out. Most of our metaphors for design on the Web and computers are representations of visual/spatial relationships in the real world. This is true in the software world as well. Stepping away from the screen and listening to architects, artists, and designers in other mediums is a real way to boost your creativity and innovation.

More information is available at the forum’s Web site: dallasarchitectureforum.org

The Value of an Idea Compounds Over Time

2010-02-19T19:57:00Z

By 1954, a Denmark-based toy manufacturer called "The LEGO Company" had established a reputation for making high quality wooden toys. Some five years earlier they had introduced a plastic toy called “the automatic binding brick.” It met a poor reception that spawned prophesies of failure in the industry press. LEGO made good wooden toys; this brick just was not happening.

Then, something funny happened. A junior managing director of the company, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, had an idea. He had just spoken with a toy store buyer who lamented the fact that certain things were missing from toys of the day. Toys didn’t work together - there was no way for toys to interact with other toys. Toys did not provide a system of play.

In retrospect we might think "of course that’s just what’s needed." But this was just an idea. One idea in a toy company that had been around for quite a while doing it’s (toy) thing.

Kirk Christiansen’s idea grew into a new vision for LEGO products. Initially it was outlined in broad terms, without a specific product in mind. As the idea developed, then, the entire LEGO product line – some 200 different toys – were scoured to see which had the best chance of measuring up to the That vision was summarized, according to LEGO, like this:

Unlimited play potential
For girls and boys
Fun for every age
Year-round play
Healthful, quiet play
Long hours of play
Development/ imagination/ creativity
The more toys, the greater their value
Extra sets available
Quality in every detail

LEGO found one product with a real chance to live up to the vision. The time of the automatic binding brick – a failure according to some - had finally come.

The brick was refined. The company developed a precision mass production system around it. The idea spread and grew.

As of this writing, 5 billion hours per year are spent playing with LEGO bricks.

The brick has twice won the award of "Toy of the Century." LEGO based video games are big sellers on systems like the Wii. The bricks are featured in YouTube stop motion video remakes of Star Wars. There are new character lines, and entire movies in an world of LEGO There is LEGOland.

The LEGO brick may be the most widely known - and loved – toy in the world. It is certainly the backbone of one the largest toy companies in the world. The "binding brick" has become synonymous with the company itself.

I say "LEGO", you see a picture of the brick in your minds eye.

It’s another example of the idea put forth in so many other disciplines and arts: that any given idea grow in value over time; that a good idea is worthy of refinement and development. This doesn’t mean EVERY idea is a good idea. It does mean that even simple ideas can have their value compound the way interest compounds on an investment.

When the time is right, those ideas can offer tremendous returns. Just think about that little brick.

Outsourcing 101

2010-02-19T07:00:00Z

Outsourcing effectively allows you manage risk in ways that give you an unfair advantage over your competition.

Here are some tips for successful outsourcing, courtesy the 200+ projects and numerous teams I have managed remotely with team members in Europe, Asia, South America, North America and Australia.

1. Be specific – as in step by step specific. Leave no assumptions. Most of my projects have something like "I will rate you a perfect 10 if you __" at the end (I am not being trite the sites I use to assemble team members solicit ratings). You’ll be happy with the results, the team members will be happy you are happy.
2. Start with microprojects – small chunks of work that allow you very quickly get successes or make course corrections
3. Outsourcing is very inexpensive, create an experiment budget. Some approaches may not work, this model is inexpensive enough you can build that in to your budget and sill be ludicrously under budget
4. maintain focus through each iteration. Wait until an iteration (a microproject) is over before you make adjustments (for example, changing your mind about requirements). Create a new microproject to make the adjustment. This will keep your team sane and force you to think through your ideas in a healthy way
5. Stay literate – ideally you should be able to perform quality assurance yourself. Otherwise hire someone in-house who can
6. Check the results diligently. If you don’t, you will wish you did later when its too late to address issues
7. Keep the projects small unless you have developed a very high degree of trust over time. Even then, small easy wins are great for morale and rapport building.
8. If you are a programmer, don’t fall in to the "I can just do it myself" trap. Create a bunch of ‘selfs’ working in concert to accelerate your ideas. Use your expertise to define the architecture and test that everything works.

Tip of the hat to Will Bunker who first introduced me to RentACoder.com and some great techniques. Thanks to John Humphrey of Pariveda Solutions for encouraging posts on this topic.

Telephones Are Social Media Too

2010-02-19T06:13:00Z

Telephones are a social utility. They are social media. What can we learn from Telephones? Here are some ideas.

1. Every thought is not worthy of a phone call.
2. The use of outbound calling for sales is great if there is structure, a well honed value prop and a targeted list of people
3. Professional phone edicate goes a long way (I am still trying to translate this idea to Web based social media)
4. Misuse burns valuable time
5. Every call is not worth taking
6. Just because it was said on the phone does not make it true.
7. Phones are invaluable tools for collaboration – internally, with customers, with partners, vendors etc.
8. Phones are not the only tools for collaboration

Send your ideas for the list.

Your Closed Source Better Be Perfect

2010-02-17T17:01:00Z

If you want me to buy your licensed widget – any little piece of code you want to productize, it better be perfect. Otherwise give me access to fix problems that may come up it (i.e. open the source). This is critical. It also begs a question of market – some developers are not confident enough to get into the source code for JavaScript object or a Ruby gem. And those guys may not need access.

My colleague Will should get a kick out of this since he’s seen me freak out in the past when I had to dive into source code for the first time.

In any case, if you close your source, make sure it works and throws zero errors. It just seems easier to open the source up.

Technology Agnostic Success Habits: Part 1

2010-02-11T17:14:00Z

There are Steps You Can Take to Increase Web Success whether you have a site that uses a blog platform like blogger or Wordpress, or Joomla, or a custom application written in programming language like PHP, Ruby, or frameworks like .NET or Ruby on Rails. Here is part 1 of the series.

Pull up your favorite word processor or presentation program and let’s make some headings.

We are going to be creating headings that prompt you to write down your ideas and assumptions. Each heading will some explanation below it and bullets where you can type or write in those ideas/assumptions.

The first heading we will use is

The Mission of My [Web site, application, service] is..
The description for this heading: "Why am I doing this? The answer may be a combination of how it serves your larger goals or purpose – financial, altruistic, recreational, or all of the above - how you hope to provide some value and who receives that value is provided."

Time to take a break and complete this assignment. Submit your assignments if you like and I’ll post some good ones.

Zend_Framework Holds Promise for PHP

2010-02-02T14:31:00Z

Attended a great overview of the Zend_Framework and Zend_Tools in particular by Jeremy Brown of Spear One. With every new framework it takes some time to get a sense of the idiosynchrosies of the platform and philosophies behind it…. there is always that initial feeling of taking a drink from a firehose. This time I get a confirmation of my sense that this is a decent-or-better development framework. The Model-View-Controller aspect of Zend connected with the Ruby on Rails enthusiast in me, and the integration with Dojo.js spoke to the UI developer in me, so things didn’t feel totally foreign even at this early stage in my relationship with Zend. It will be interesting to see how the framework develops, especially given some the recent well funded startups I have noticed using it, and Zend listing among it’s partners Adobe, Google, and StrikeIron among others.

Zend is still in it’s 1x phase (1.10 was just released this week) I will be very interested to see what 2x and up look like. More information on the Zend framework is available on it’s site.

Dojo.js – which still seems to handle the more complex data interactions in a Web page most thoroughly and efficiently (as opposed to Protoype/Scriptaculous or jQuery) is available at http://www.dojotoolkit.org/. While Dojo is not always as good looking "out of the box" as jQuery, it does a great job of setting up and updating in-page data stores, and handling itself across browsers during rich interactions.

Have thoughts on Zend and/or Dojo? Drop a line and share your experiences.

Applying Ideas for Non Linear Growth in the Real World.

2010-01-12T10:22:00Z

From Will’s Post to our original Non-Linear Growth blog.

One of the great questions of operating any business is, "How do I grow my business?" How you answer this will determine whether you succeed, how long it will take you to succeed and how much success you will ultimately enjoy.

One of the ways to simplify thinking about this question is to divide the problem into two pieces.

The first piece is, "How many customers can I get to see my offer in a day?"

The second piece is, "What is my average profit for every person that sees what I have to sell?"

The amount of money that you make in a given day is volume times profit per customer.

My favorite commercial that really drives home this point was a Jack in the Box television spot. Jack is at a trade show and there is a booth with a young 20 year old man who has a hand drawn sign announcing that he is a fast food restaurant consultant. Jack asks how much he charges, and the man replies "$500,000 a day." Jack replies by asking "Don’t you think that is too high?" He replies by saying, "Yeah, but I only need one customer."

You have 2 levers available to you to increase business.

Put your offer in front of more customers
get more money from each customer.

The more money could be in the form of making the offer more attractive so more people buy, or it could be getting each customer to spend more when they do buy. The key is knowing which lever will bring you the most rewards.

In the beginning of every business, you have no or few customers. So spending all of your time working on getting more money per customer has a relatively low return. There is one exception to this rule. If you loose money on every sale then obviously getting more customers would be like punching more holes in a boat that is sinking.

Later as you business grows then it becomes a delicate balancing act. The most scarce resource is, generally, the time and attention of your top performers. You know who I am talking about. The people in your business who make things happen. They only have a limited amount of time in a week work on improving results. If you waste their time by having them work on the wrong projects then you will fall further and further behind your competition.

I founded an online dating company back in the 90’s. We raised a total of $30,000. Our largest competitor had a war chest of $10 million. Yet at the end of 4 years we were twice as large as they were. We accomplished that by growing 30% a month for 4 years in a row. This was done by carefully picking which projects our employees worked on.

All of the ideas we had could be classified as more people looking at our product versus making our product more attractive. We would sit down at the beginning of every week and list out our ideas for improving the business.

This can be done monthly or quarterly. In our case, I felt that the feedback systems we had in place allowed a weekly evaluation of our strategies. We would rank every idea by the amount of time or money that it would cost to try it. This would be money in the case of marketing or hiring outside help to implement a new product idea. Or it would be the time of key employees for internally implemented projects. Beside the time/money column we would guess at the expected payoff. In the beginning this is a wild guess on your part. As you get more familiar with your business this becomes more and more accurate.

Usually we would work on 2 types of ideas.

Those that could be done very quickly. You were in and out and had immediate feedback on how well it worked.
Second type would be projects with huge payoff for the effort.

It never takes long to fill everyone’s plate up with growing a business.

Some of the simple payoff calculations would be along the line of. I have 1000 visitors a week and I make $1 for each visitor on average for a total of $1000 profit. If I were to increase my traffic to 1500 that would be an increase of $500. Or I could try and make my site better and get $1.25 per visitor and make an extra $250. If both ideas have the same chance of success then I should definitely work on the traffic.

Google's real play with Nexus? And what about Windows Mobile?

2010-01-06T21:05:00Z

Looking at Google Android, the Google App for the iphone and Google’s developing suite of enterprise applications, I cannot help but wonder: are we seeing the first serious efforts of a company to provide a usable vocal interface. Ok, it is not likely this is the sole motivator, but I am interested to see how quickly things converge.

An interesting note: most of the serious Windows Mobile developers I have met have iPhones for their personal emails. They keep a Windows Mobile device for work purposes.

Great example of customer development and product development linked together

2009-12-18T22:01:00Z

I have been browsing through Google’s various blogs to learn more about how might leverage their tools for our clients. Will has me sold on Google App Engine – a development solution that frees up people to simply innovate without requiring them raise capital.

In my reading, and in my day to day perusal of emails from their Apps team, I am struck by how directly they communicate with me. Check out this blog where they discuss new features and many times the implications. You are getting the guy or gal who was part of the development effort talking to you about it. No marketing schtick, no techie jargon, just a person you can relate to telling you about ways they are working to provide you, the consumer, and themselves with value.

I find this to be a great recipe, and a great example of a company investing in ways to reach part of their audience. They have multiple blogs written from multiple perspectives, covering a wide variety of interests that relate to their products. They ask for feedback, they give advanced information on the latest development.

This is a model worth studying.

Today's Top Trends for 2009 December 17

2009-12-17T17:08:00Z

FierceDeveloper.com shows Apple Iphone overtakes Windows in "smartphone" operating system market share in October. RIM remains on top. Here is the article. Another high level summary is here
CBS Interactive bids ad networks adieu. Affects CBS.com, TV.com and CNET. Via iMediaConnection
Older chart that has been underscored by some client conversations and research recently: Mobile Advertising Spend in the US is forecast to surpass $6.5 billion in 2012, with the majority spent on text-messaging campaigns. See the emarketer chart here
Research suggests 86% of companies will increase social media spend, and 90% site lack of manpower as a barrier to doing more

In Marketing, You are What you Measure.

2009-12-15T14:25:00Z

I keep seeing beautifully done presentations and videos extolling the virtues of various social media – primarily Twitter and Facebook. While I have seen both venues work for marketing, I am left wondering sometimes about how different companies measure success – or if they measure success. Having blog does not automatically translate to success. Tweeting incessantly can actually dilute your messages.

It is reminiscent of the rush to get online in the late 90’s.   One of the big lessons from that time: just because everyone is moving online doesn’t mean everything you do online will be useful and or profitable.

From my perspective, the questions to ask are a) What are your specific goals, b)How is your performance measured and c) How does your process allow you to iterate and improve what you do based on feedback you get from the metrics in (b).   We have some clients who needs little more than a Web presence to see ROI from their marketing dollars. For others there is a trial and error process. Magic bullets and secret sauces are not as easy to find as service companies sometimes want you think.

In everyone’s excitement about the new platforms and their adoption right, there seems sometimes to be an emphasis on being a part of the rush, versus coming up with ways to truly connect with customers/clients and build value.

The point of this blog: don’t forego setting specific goals and measurement just to jump on the social media bandwagon. Facebook, Twitter and a few others are here to stay. They offer great ways to connect with your client/customer base if you use them intelligently to enhance your relationships with those groups. If you are just using the scream louder at them, I would not be so certain of your success.

And in the rush to ‘social’, don’t sleep on mobile – adoption of ‘mobile’ apps and text-based programs is on the rise as well.

Profiting from Web application frameworks

2009-08-30T18:26:00Z

This will be a quick post for reasons because we currently have multiple projects wrapping up. At the same time that fact is central to this post, which is about the power and profitabiliy of using a solid Web application framework.

If you deal with multiple projects at one time, process is a critical thing. I don’t mean process documentation which is the act of writing out all of your processes. What I mean here is having a process that you can follow without thinking, a process your team can follow without thinking and without requiring you to berate them.

Ruby on Rails is providing us with just such process improvements. The conventions used in the framework encourage consistent development processes. The way Rails implements model-view-controller architectures allows you to know where files and business logic will be found. Plugins and gems allow for fast project start up and great support…and I cannot say enough about the power of object relational database mapping, or the object-based thinking the framework encourages.

I have driven efforts in the in the past to achieve this type of consistency across an enteprise. Any of you who, like me, have been thrown into situations where you have unravel a corporations disparate (and inconsistently built) applications can appreciate the value of a consistent and practical system of organization and coding. The costs of maintaining or working with such applications are great.

So great in fact I once made a living championing efforts to create consistency for Lotus Notes (way back in the day) and Microsoft asp code, and later .NET. The problem is that vendors like IBM and Microsoft sometimes make decisions in order to protect their market share…which means you can find yourself in a world of hurt two years after standardizing on their technologies…

to enable a person or a company to have multiple projects in play, at multiple stages

Issue with form buttons and IE8

2009-08-07T17:00:00Z

If you use <button> tags in a form with JavaScript to handle submission, there is a new issue with IE8 that I haven’t experienced with other browsers. Evidently there is a type attribute that can be set to "submit", "reset" or "button". IE8 defaults a button to type="submit" and will submit the form on top of any action that your Javascript does. The fix is as simple as setting the type="button" so it will behave as you expect. This has been bothering me for weeks as we are getting weird url’s that amounted to IE auto submitting peoples forms. Of course it only happens to the customers that are actually trying to use our product!!!

Favorite approaches to "getting started" on a Web site

2009-08-06T16:25:00Z

Here are some of my favorite examples of helping someone get started on the Web. If you like 25 cent words you can also file it under "usability", "user interaction" or even "heuristics".

Tumblr – love their start up screen for the first time user
Shopify – love their little floating explanation div’s that you can close
Posterous – can it get any easier to set up an account and get started? I think not.
Google Mail and Google Calendar – they make all the bells and whistles unobtrusive, yet available. Have you ever set up a Notes or Exchange server? Google apps is a crazy simple contrast to the same functionality.
Squidoo – love their 1st 10 days emailings to walk you through getting started.
heroku.com – really like their approach to saying what their company does and value prop – its very well targeted to their audience. Also like pricing options page

Share your favs.