Without a Net

Rockets!

2009-12-01T09:34:00.001-07:00

Wow, it has been over two months since I last posted. In some ways, I feel bad about that, but it's really just an indication of how busy I have been at Parallel Path.

Because of this busyness, I was determined to spend the Thanksgiving weekend 'unplugged' and not working, and to get in some quality time with my family. And it worked out just as I had hoped, with lots of throwing the football around, playing kickball, and generally goofing off. One of the highlights was on Friday, when the boys and I (and some other family members) spent the day shooting rockets. It was a beautiful, clear day with no wind; perfect for rockets.

As regular readers of this blog know, for many years I put on Big Science Saturday for the boys. That has waned quite a bit, but we still seem to find time for fun and practical applications of science, and launching rockets is a perfect example. We have been launching rockets (of theEstes variety) off and on for a couple of years now.

What was particularly fun about this launch is that we have started to experiment with getting the rockets to do fun things they weren't necessarily designed for. By doing so, I hope the boys start learning about some of the basic physics involved in rocket flight.

This weekend we experimented with launching an 'astronaut' in the rocket. The astronaut was made from Legos, and you can kind of see him in the lower left of

this photo (thanks to Pawel for all of the pics):

The Lego astronaut had his own parachute that deployed separately from the rocket's recovery chute. We then went through several launch cycles, first by Maddox:

... then by Ryan:

I'm not sure the boys learned much about rocket physics through the activity, but they did learn what happens when you don't put enough protective wadding between the rocket motor and your astronaut. We ended up with a very scorched astronaut dude:

Overall, a tremendous day.

More Mac Hijinks

2009-09-24T21:04:00.011-06:00

Yes, yet another Mac vs. Windows post. Sorry, but I just keep stumbling across interesting stuff.

A while ago I posted on the Apple TV ads that beat up on Windows. Well, it turns out that Apple doesn't confine their shots to their advertising. I stumbled across a subtle shot embedded in my new Snow Leopard operating system update.

One of the few new (visible) features in Snow Leopard is that the cover flow view is integrated into the Finder window. This provides a cool way to quickly view the files and subfolders in a folder. Here's an example:

Today I was looking for some documents on our corporate network using this Finder view. When I viewed the network, I saw several servers in the Finder window:

The first couple of times I saw this view, it didn't occur to me that these images were intended to represent Windows servers. When I realized this, I wondered what the text might be on the screens, so I blew it up:

You may not be able to see the detail, but it's the Windows blue screen of death!

They never miss an opportunity to take a swing. I love it.

Twitter silliness

2009-08-29T10:30:00.000-06:00

I use a web monitoring tool called Filtrbox to search for certain phrases across websites, Twitter, blogs, and other social media. It provides broader and fresher results than Google Alerts, which I used to use, and makes Filtrbox a terrific real-time market intelligence tool.

One of the keyword phrases I monitor is my employer's name, Parallel Path. The daily results of this search have highlighted a thread that has been going through Twitter for weeks that is unrelated to my company. The following phrase has been tweeted hundreds of times over the last several weeks:

"There's a parallel path between friends and enemies, and wenever u cross it u make frienemies"

It appears in various forms of grammatical construction, but the concept is always the same.

I have to admit that I don't get it. At multiple levels, I don't get it. But clearly, the following people do:

@redd_foxx (I thought he was dead. Tweeting from beyond the grave?)

@BackOnMyBest

@WhYYuOnMy****GG (Word removed by FCC censors.)

@rell007

These are people that have tweeted the phrase in the last few days, some several times. The first tweet I saw of this was on July 18, so this has been somewhat viral for over a month.

Quantcast estimates the current demographic profile of Twitter users as follows:

Clearly, I'm not squarely in the demographic center of Twitter users (as compared to the Internet average). I'm not a female African American and I'm on the older side. When I look at some of those Twitter account names above, that mimatch is certainly reinforced. My Twitter account, @tearles, just doesn't fit on the same list with @sKAY_shesPoppin or @MzCitaBaby.

I guess that explains why I just don't get it. (But it highlights to me the beauty of Twitter as a communication medium and marketing tool. That's for another post ...)

Microsoft v. Apple - They Both Win

2009-08-26T20:51:00.003-06:00

(I know it has been a very long time since my last post. The main reason for that is that my work, which I am enjoying immensely, is keeping me very busy. However, I have been thinking about this topic for a while, and it's time for me to actually post about it.)

I had a recent experience with my Mac that reminded me why I own one. But before I get to that, I'd like to discuss what I like about Microsoft or, more specifically, what I like about their new advertising campaign:

Almost a year ago, I posted that I enjoyed and appreciated the "I'm a PC" campaign from Microsoft, a campaign created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky. Crispin Porter excels at communicating both the essence of brand and the value a product delivers to customers. In this case, they're doing the latter, highlighting the configurability of Windows-based machines, so you only pay for exactly what you want. In every commercial, they take a direct swipe at Apple by pointing out that, to get just what you want from Apple, you would need to pay much more than a PC would cost. It's a powerful campaign, and does what I have always tried to do in marketing: highlight my product's strengths while moderating its weaknesses.

Here's another thing that I enjoy about these new ads. I love that Microsoft and Apple are actively bashing each other. Apple has been plugging away at Microsoft for a long time with their "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, and this is the first example of an effective counterpunch from Microsoft. Why do I like this? Because this kind of competition is great for consumers like you and me.

Now, will these ads make me buy a PC? No way, and a recent experience will show why. My wife's sister-in-law celebrated her 25th wedding anniversary, and the family was asked to submit video wishes to the couple. We decided to make a goofy video about an episode from the couple's past. We shot about 10 minutes of very loosely scripted video, and I imported that into Apple iMovie. I then edited it down, inserted opening titles and closing credits, overlayed intro music, and inserted transition effects. I had never done anything like this, and it took all of about an hour. If you'd like to see the video, here it is. (However, it's full of family inside jokes, so I'm not sure you'll appreciate the humor.) [I just noticed that the embedded video doesn't format correctly in either Firefox or Safari. If you'd like to see it on the YouTube site, you'll find it here.]

How does this illustrate why I wouldn't own a PC? Couldn't I do this on a PC? Sure. But I'd have to research the software required to do movie editing, go buy it, install it, figure out how to use it, make sure I had the correct drivers for my camcorder, etc. With a Mac, it was all there, it all worked, and it was intuitively easy.

This was all done on my work laptop, by the way. If I were one of the people on the PC commercials, I would have defined the ideal work laptop for me, which means I never would have included something like Mac's iLife suite. But the fact is, my work laptop is my only computer; it has to do everything in my life. If I had to equip a PC with every application that I MIGHT need in the future, like photo or movie processing or creating PDFs, it would cost at least as much as my Mac, and it wouldn't work nearly as well. Apples-to-'apples' price comparisons have been done many times (like here and here), and generally conclude that Macs and PCs are about the same price, when similarly equipped.

Macs are complete machines, amazingly well designed. And not more expensive than PCs, when measured 'apples' to apples.

Customer service, done right

2009-05-31T22:03:00.000-06:00

Recently, I complained about an experience my wife had at 24 Hour Fitness. On the same day I posted, a senior member of the company submitted a reply to my posting, attempting to make the situation right. There was a bit of piling on by other commenters, but at least 24 Hour Fitness's Harry was trying to do the right thing and provide a remedy. I don't believe Gina ever took Harry up on his offer, so the situation was never completely resolved, but at least he tried.

Similarly, I recently had an interesting customer service experience with Proflowers. I had little or no experience with ordering flowers online, but my favorite local flower shop went out of business and I need something for Mothers Day. I remembered reading an article about Proflowers' unique business model that ships flowers directly from the grower to the customer; something about by eliminating the local retailer middleman, the flowers can be a little cheaper and, more importantly, arrive at the customer's home with more of their useful life remaining.

(From a marketing perspective, it also helped that I was constantly reminded of Proflowers through their advertisements on ESPN radio. Remember, in a post last year I both admitted that I listen to sports talk radio and commented on radio advertising effectiveness. This is another example of radio's effectiveness [although I can't comment on the ROI associated with radio advertising investments].)

I decided to give ProFlowers a try, ordering a bouquet of Gina's favorite flower, tulips, to be delivered for Mothers Day. Well, their arrival was very disappointing. It was basically 15 flowers in a cardboard box. No decorative paper, no flower food, no little water bulbs on the stems, and two of the stems damaged. After we put the flowers in water, they all laid over and never looked right.

I shot off a quick email to their customer service and received a near-immediate response, apologizing for my disappoint experience and offering me a free order, including free shipping. I ordered the same thing, 15 tulips, to be delivered the next week.

When the second order arrived, it was a completely different experience. This time there was flower food and the flowers were wrapped in paper. Most importantly, the flower came with instructions on how to put the flowers in water and support them initially so that they don't lay over. The flowers turned out great.

After the pleasant second experience, I'm willing to assume that I was just the unfortunate victim of a random, errant shipment and give Proflowers another chance.

If they had just offered me a discount on my next order, I would never have made another order because there would have been too much risk associated with it. They removed all risk by providing the second order completely free. They did so because they recognize the lifetime value of a customer, rather than the value of a single sale. It's amazing that some companies focus solely on the value of the sale.

Knowing the lifetime value of a cusomter is good marketing, and can lead to very good customer service.

The future is difficult to imagine

2009-03-17T20:50:00.000-06:00

I came across the following thought-provoking video:

I apologize if you have already seen it, since it has been out about six months. But one thing about the video that struck me as relevant to this blog is the statements it makes about children, that we're training children for jobs that don't even exist yet, or that they will hold so many jobs before their mid-30s.

Is there a stronger statement of generational differences? And I thought there were a lot of differences between my dad's generation and my own.

Why is this relevant to this blog? Because of what I have said about Big Science Saturday and why I do it. (Or, more accurately, did it.) I can't say that my boys are going to be scientists, nor do I care. But I want them to be able to evaluate situations in a structured, critical way, since there is no way we can predict what they'll be faced with.

On a related note, it is Science Fair season at Crest View Elementary. Ryan's is required this year and Maddox's* is optional, although they're always required at the Earles household. Ryan's not a fan of Science Fairs, maybe because I have required his participation every year when only a few of his classmates also participated. However, we found a topic he enjoys, and we made it a little more interesting by suggesting he blog about it. Feel free to read his posts and comment. He loves getting new comments.

And who knows, maybe he'll really take to blogging. Gina and I are trying to use his blogging as an opportunity to teach some writing techniques, grammar, and spelling. But, even if he gets none of that from blogging, it's still fun to see him put himself out there.

*One of these days, I need to learn how to properly write the possessive form of Maddox: Maddox' or Maddox's.

24 Hour Fitness just doesn't get it

2009-03-01T14:24:00.006-07:00

This morning, my wife met her friend at 24 Hour Fitness to take some kind of cardio kickboxing class. Her friend was a member and had a free guest pass for Gina to use.

This 24 Hour Fitness facility is pretty new in north Boulder, having been open only a few months. As with any of these types of facilities, they have a fairly large, aggressive sales staff, since gyms make the most money off of sales to new members. (Of course, they hope these members don't use the facility so they can oversubscribe their asset base.)

When Gina showed her free guest pass, the salesman began giving his pitch. He asked if she was currently a health club member, to which she replied that she was and that she wasn't interested in joining 24 Hour Fitness. He then told her that she would have to leave!

He explained that they only give out those guest passes to those that are willing to go through the sales pitch. Gina pointed out that the pass said nothing about that, but that didn't seem to matter to him. Since she wanted to attend the class with her (now very embarrassed) friend, Gina agreed to listen to his pitch after the class, since it was about to begin. She ultimately just walked out after the class.

The whole thing just left a very bad taste in her mouth for 24 Hour Fitness. Do you think she's going to recommend that anyone else join that gym? Rather, she's probably going to go out of her way to tell potential members to avoid it.

Would it have been very difficult for the salesperson to say, "We normally provide those guest passes for those that may be interested in joining. However, please enjoy your visit today and make sure to tell your friends what you think?" The incremental cost of allowing her to visit was effectively zero. The incremental cost of trying to apply a rule that should not even have been in place (if you're going to have a rule, state it on the pass) was creating an annoyed, but well-networked, active health club member that knows a lot of other health club members. Seriously dumb.

How's this for a different approach? My friend David (his blog Bluerant is here) markets a kids' TV show called Big Green Rabbit. He saw that some fans posted a video from the show on their blog, so he sent them a little thank you package. Here is their response. What do you think that package cost BGR, maybe $20, including shipping? What do you think the value of that family's BGR evangelism is worth?

Businesses are built one delighted customer at a time. They can be torn down quickly by a handful of people with negative feelings.

If everyone's going to see it, make sure it's right

2009-02-03T20:48:00.006-07:00

Twice over the last week, I have had the pleasure of using a Sloan Valve flushless urinal. (I bet you haven't read many blog posts that start with a sentence about urinals, have you?!) The facilities at which they were installed were justifiably proud of their green initiative. So much so, in fact, that at both institutions, they had the following sign hung above each urinal:

Nice, huh? Sure, if you ignore the poor grammar. What poor grammar, you may ask? Admittedly, it's minor, but it bugs me nonetheless:

"... you are helping the environment to conserve ..."

Does the environment conserve? If the environment itself can conserve, then why are we being asked to do so? Let's just let the environment fix itself!

Maybe a better way to word this would be "... you are helping the environment by conserving ...".

Even then, it's not really accurate. Am I, as a user, really helping the environment? I suppose if there were traditional urinals next to the flushless ones and I chose to use the flushless ones, then I can say I helped the environment. But there were no traditional ones, and I wasn't going to go find one because I had to pee.

So it was really the facility owner that was helping the environment by taking away my choice, and they should be applauded for that. The sign should really celebrate them: "The University of Colorado is helping the environment by conserving ..."

It reminds me of when I was publishing an email newsletter for SharedPlan Software. Our newsletter distribution got up to about 20,000 readers, and I would stress out every time I hit the Send button. Any little grammatical error was going to be seen and judged by all those people, so I would critically read and reread several times before sending.

Make sure you get it right before the whole world reads it!

(Author's note: I saw the first of these signs at some facility last week, and it wasn't until I had already left that this grammatical issue occurred to me. I wanted to blog about it, but wanted the picture, so I was glad to come across the same sign today. However, I had never really thought about how awkward it is to take a picture around a bank of urinals. You know, there's just a certain urinal etiquette that must be respected. So I kind of had to hang around until everyone left to avoid any potential embarrassment, but I didn't want to be seen as lurking, either. I ended up washing my hands really, really well.)

The Detonators!

2009-01-25T11:15:00.004-07:00

I recently professed my love for Discovery Channel shows. As the boys and I were lazing away a snowy Sunday morning watching Cash Cab (they seem to love that show), we saw an ad for The Detonators, a new Discovery show starting January 28.

It appears to be the ultimate show for the boys and I. Why? Because all they do is show how they blow stuff up! Really big stuff!

Sometimes, I amaze myself with my parenting skills.

How much can we infer from inauguration speeches?

2009-01-21T16:59:00.001-07:00

My wife and I watched Obama's inaugural address last night, and I thought it had some exceptionally intriguing passages, such as his direct address to the Muslim world, and his several swipes at the outgoing administration. (I may blog about some of the more thought-provoking statements in a subsequent post.) As we all listened to those words, we probably all wonder how much of Obama's presidency is being foretold in his words. Of course, there's no way to know, but I thought it would be interesting to go back and read Bush's first inaugural address to see how much his words presaged his presidency.

I'm no political scientist, much less a presidential scholar, and am not particularly politically active. I have only written three posts, out of over 100, that had anything to do with politics. But for some reason you folks keep reading so I'll plow ahead. I reviewed the transcript and have repeated some of the better statements below:

"It is the American story—a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals." This seems to be a nice swipe at Bill Clinton's foibles of infidelity.

"The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born." Although this could be read as an equal opportunity kind of message, I also read this as a message regarding his anti-abortion stance, which guided his actions over his two terms in a few ways. These include his failed effort on abstinence-only education and probably his most significant political action, his reshaping of the Supreme Court. The latter was one of the items in which he noted special pride in during his final press conference.

"The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth." Another aspect of Bush's legacy was the No Child Left Behind legislation, another legacy item in which he expressed pride.

"And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country. We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity." OK, this is a meaty one that will require more than a sentence to summarize.

The country had just endured a very divisive and deeply flawed election. Democrats thought the election was stolen, and I don't know that we ever saw as much bitter partisanship on display as we did in the days between election day and the Supreme Court's final ruling. This statement would seem to indicate a willingness to try to heal those wounds and reunite the country into a "single nation."

We now know, however, that this was not a statement regarding reunification; that instead the Bush administration worked tirelessly to create a single nation of enduring Republican majority, rather than a bipartisan reunified nation. Karl Rove, Bush's master strategist, has spoken repeatedly of the pursuit of this goal (and has yet to give up on it, even in light of Obama's victory).

The examples of this pursuit were many. For example, we now know the Justice Department illegally used political affiliation in their hiring practices, although no connection has been made to Attorney General Gonzales or his predecessor Ashcroft. (Amusing side note: the liberal New York Times' article on this government watchdog report doesn't mention that lack of connection, yet the conservative Washington Times states it in the second paragraph. Talk about editorial biases.)

This same watchdog agency has yet to publish their findings on their investigation of the Justice Department attorneys. However, one aspect of those firings that has already been made public is that several of these attorneys had one thing in common, they did not vigorously pursue voter fraud. The aggressive pursuit of voter fraud, whether perceived or real, is one tactic frequently used to suppress minority voter turnout, which could be a component of an enduring Republican majority strategy.

There are other examples of working tirelessly toward a permanent Republican majority, including gerrymandering in Texas, Colorado, and other states, and probably no better example than the Bush's apparent disinterest in crossing the aisle to compromise on legislation.

None of this is anything but politics as usual, and I don't find it surprising that Bush pursued these activities. However, the depth and breadth of it would seem to indicate that Bush went into the presidency with no intention of creating a "single nation" built by reunifying in a bipartisan way, but rather by unifying the nation under Republican rule. Words can sometimes be tricky things, can't they?

"We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American." Bush tried and failed to achieve immigration reform, but he did build a very big wall.

"We will reform Social Security and Medicare, sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent." Bush tried and failed on Social Security, and won a modest victory with the Medicare prescription drug plan. As with immigration reform, he words predicted his efforts, just not his successes.

"We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors. The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom." In hindsight, these words might seem to foreshadow our invasion of Iraq, and there are some that say that Bush had the overthrow of Saddam Hussein on his agenda on the day he entered the White House. Certainly, according to both Clarke and Woodward (and ultimately the White House itself), the plans to attack Iraq began very soon after 9/11, even though there was no connection between the two. Coincidence?

Of course, those same words could have been intended to be more broad and to apply to what he came to call the "axis of evil," and meant nothing more than that Bush was ready to act swiftly and decisively against the threat of WMDs, wherever they appeared.

"Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws." Over the course of his presidency, Bush shifted government funds to faith-based initiatives for fighting poverty and other problems.

So, from several statements in Bush's speech, we can see several concrete examples foreshadowing his goals and intents. And, as can be seen from his statement regarding a "single nation" or possibly his statement regarding WMDs, that foreshadowing can be a little misleading.

What are we to make of Obama's speech, then? One article tries to capture it here and, as I said earlier, I may do a post of my own. What do you think?

Did Nortel fail because of collaborative tools?

2009-01-14T20:48:00.011-07:00

I was surprised and saddened to hear about Nortel's bankruptcy on the radio this morning. Not because I thought they were particularly healthy, but mostly because they were such a big firm, were such an key customer of mine at a couple of past employers, and, most importantly, were such a great equipment supplier for decades.

I read an article about their failure in on businessweek.com, that basically states that Nortel's attempt an innovating away from their past reliance on core carrier equipment was too little, too late and and that they chose the wrong products to develop. One comment caught my attention, however:

Roese used a public blog to communicate with customers and attempt to re-establish Nortel as an innovator.

This is clearly a problem. One key success criteria for this kind of public conversation is credible honesty. I didn't read the blog, so I can't comment on it specifically, but it would have been valid to discuss how Nortel is attempting to reinvent itself and becoming more innovative. Describe that process or journey, and the unique challenges that you're experiencing, but don't jump straight to a presumed conclusion that you have arrived as an innovator.

The 'death' of Nortel happened to occur on a day when we lost another great icon: Khan (Ricardo Montalban). Khan delivered one of the great movie lines of all time in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, when he quoted Melville's Moby Dick:

To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!

KHAAANNNN!

KHAAANNNN!

A little more on social marketing

2009-01-11T11:15:00.007-07:00

OK, soon I'm going to jump to another topic, but I just found two more interesting items on the topic. First, here's a fun little video from a German ad firm illustrating the challenges that social marketing is trying to address:

A short history of marketing from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo. (Sorry, but the video that I inserted was taken down from Vimeo for some reason. However, I found it here, as well.)

Second, John Kembel of HiveLive posted his thoughts on what's in store for enterprise communities in 2009. I tend to agree with his comments, but I would add one more trend:

6. Social marketing companies must make money.

In the current economic climate (and related venture capital environment), marginal business models will perish. This situation will not change dramatically any time soon, so social marketing companies must prove that their firms are sustainable. In other words, they must make money. I would not be surprised if half of the social marketing companies currently in existence are no longer around in January 2010.

Social marketing is not dead

2009-01-07T20:20:00.001-07:00

A new Advertising Age article is spreading doom and gloom about marketing expenditures. Obviously, I certainly can relate to the d&g. The article states that:

...more than half of the marketers surveyed said their budgets will be cut in the coming year, and another 44% said they'll cut or freeze hiring.

Again, clearly I get that.

It does identify some "Pockets of Optimism," however. But not listed among those pockets are social networking and media. In fact, they state that:

Buzzword fatigue has also set in more firmly on an aging set of digital terminology, including "Web 2.0" (19% said they were tired of hearing it); "social networking" (12%); "social media" (11%); "blog" (8%) and "viral marketing" (6%).

Now, I look at those numbers and see that social marketing only has a little more than 10% of the respondents claiming weariness. That doesn't sound very high to me for trendy items like these. In fact, they go on to state that:

However, that doesn't mean those digital ideas aren't important anymore, Mr. Anderson said. "In fact, each of those ranked as a bit more important this year," he said.

Given that I have already stated that I'm a fan of these marketing techniques, I have to say I'm pretty encouraged that they're growing in importance, even if only modestly, in this environment.

Good wiki app for iPhone?

2009-01-05T16:01:00.004-07:00

Gina and I are taking the family to Costa Rica in a couple of weeks, and we have a lot to do to prepare for the trip. Gina suggested that we should create an online collaborative space in which to share ideas and to-do lists. Her idea was to use a wiki.

I currently use a great little application, Evernote, for my own to-do lists, notes, saved web pages, and many other kinds of content that I want to capture, access, and edit later. It runs as an application on my Mac and on my iPhone, and automatically synchronizes the content between the two platforms. I have thoroughly enjoyed using it.

However, for the Costa Rica shared to-do list application, it has two shortcomings:

It doesn't run on Mac Tiger, only Leopard, and Gina's Mac OS is Tiger. (She runs Evernote, but her laptop access is web-based, rather than via their installed application.)
It doesn't allow private sharing. It does allow content to be shared with everyone (and indexed by search engines), but not shared privately with specific individuals or users.

I recently received an email from Evernote describing their feature upgrade plans for 2009, and one of the items involved improved sharing. Here's what they said:

The public notebooks functionality that we launched in 2008 was a timid, first step in our ambitious plans for making Evernote a great tool for sharing your memories and collaborating with your friends and coworkers. In 2009, we're going to greatly expand what you can do with your memories, documents, files, photos and anything else you throw into Evernote. If you're the social type, we're going to grow up from being your external brain to being a telepathic-mutant-super-brain, but with good manners. Of course, you'll always have the option to keep any or all of your info totally private.

Obviously, they're being deliberately vague on their exact upgrade plans, so I built a wiki on PBWiki that we'll use for now. PBWiki is a traditional hosted wiki application, but it doesn't have an iPhone app to allow mobile access.

A search of the iTunes iPhone app store yielded nothing. Any suggestions?

Social networking can quickly spin out of control

2008-12-28T09:42:00.005-07:00

Wow, no sooner had I provided a brief shout out to Room 214, and what they're doing in social media, did they step in their own pile in social networking circles.

To quickly summarize what 'appears' to have happened, one of their employees contacted the owner of the Tweeter username @room214 asking if he would be willing to give it to Room 214. The user then forwarded the request to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, asking for advice or help or something. Kevin then provided that advice via a posting on Seesmic:

That's when it all exploded, with various opinionistas providing their generally-negative two cents on Seesmic, Digg, and other media, calling Room 214 corporate bullies and saying they're surprisingly clumsy, naive, or stupid for mishandling a social networking situation. James Clark, Room 214 founder, has now gone on Digg and his own blog to post apologies and to try to diffuse the situation. All of this appears to have happened overnight from Saturday night to Sunday morning on a quiet, holiday weekend.

I say 'appears' because, like everyone else not directly involved in the situation, I really don't have all the facts. But in the social networking world, it's quite common for that ignorance to be glossed over in the postings of the aforementioned opinionistas because that would tend to discount the validity of their posted rants.

Because I don't know the accurate details, I am not going to comment on what happened, or did not happen, between Room 214 and @room214. But what I find fascinating about the broader situation is the speed and severity of the response, and the implications for Room 214.

Out of the blue, Room 214 now has a multifaceted challenge on their hands. Not only do they have a bit of a corporate image problem in the social networking community, but the situation presents potential implications for their corporate clientele (not to mention the employee-relations issues with the unnamed original protagonist). James Clark has gone a long ways toward addressing the community, but it's the client relations that I find interesting.

I presume that Room 214 offers to help their clients establish and execute social networking strategies, such as establishing Facebook fan groups, MySpace pages, Second Life storefronts, or various other, more intricate campaigns. Their website lists among their current clients the Travel Channel, the Denver Broncos, Alltell Wireless, and Rally Software. A recent press release announced that the Travel Channel just renewed their contract with Room 214 for 2009.

What should Room 214 say to their current clients about this situation? Should they say anything? Should they wait for their clients to stumble across it?

What about prospects that they're trying to sign? Presumably, these prospects will do a minimum amount of due diligence on Room 214 and are probably more likely to stumble across it than even their current clients are.

Here are my thoughts. I would turn the whole experience into a good, solid case study. James Clark mentioned in all of his postings the need to act humbly and honestly, and a case study is the logical extension of that. Admit that a problem occurred, analyze why it occurred, what was done to resolve it, and how it can be avoided in the future.

The process of creating this case study is valuable for many reasons:

This whole thing occurred for a reason, through some lack of company policy or poor communication of that policy or something. Fundamentally, the cause needs to be addressed.
The process of analyzing root cause of the problem and trying to prevent similar occurrences will be valuable for the Room 214 team, building teamwork and strengthening the firm.
Nothing would be more believable and powerful as a marketing piece for current and future clients than an autobiographical case study that effectively says: "Social networking is a powerful tool that, if not carefully wielded, can cause considerable damage. We know firsthand, and we're better equipped to help our clients because of that firsthand knowledge."

The company has the opportunity to become stronger for having gone through this situation. At some point, their clients or prospects will discover the whole thing. Room 214 doesn't need to proactively tell clients about it, but should at least be prepared with a thoughtful response based on critical self-examination.

Totally Gross

2008-12-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

Totally Gross. That's the name of a fun game that Ryan received for his birthday. It's from University Games, and can be purchased in various places.

The boys and I played it this morning and, for a science game, it's pretty fun. Lots of fun science trivia, like the fact that a tick only eats three times in its lifetime, or that frogs close their eyes to help them push food down when they swallow, and just enough actual gross stuff to keep the boys entertained. Good Big Science Saturday stuff.

Have I cursed my kids?

2008-12-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, we celebrated my son Ryan's birthday at a local restaurant. Ryan's turning 10, and we had a small gathering of his friends and family members. Of the gifts that he received, probably 2/3 of them were science related, either science kits or science-related games.

Of course, the reason he's receiving all of these science-related gifts is because of me and my whole Big Science Saturday thing. We've been doing BSS for years, though now it's pretty infrequent. But everybody in the family and everyone in the neighborhood knows about BSS, so they assume that the kids love science.

The truth is, they have no more or less interest in science than any other kids. They're just stuck with a dad that thinks that science, or at least the structured problem solving associated with the scientific method, is a pretty important thing.

So, both the boys get a bunch of science-related gifts. They don't seem to mind, though, and it gives us a bunch of new BSS material for the next several weeks.

And I made sure that his mom and I got him something far more frivolous, a pair of Heelys.

Marketing is a conversation (2 of 2)

2008-12-10T16:55:00.001-07:00

As something of a counterexample, consider Vitesse Semiconductor. I was with Vitesse for a few of their rockiest years, when the company disclosed that they had been backdating employee stock options and had some past financial accounting problems regarding revenue recognition. (I left the company early this year because my job had moved to California, and I didn't want to move or commute.) This led to the company failing to file public financials for a couple of years because they needed to restate so many of their past financial reports. As a result, the company was delisted from NASDAQ and remains on the pink sheets. The former high-flyer of the late 90s, whose stock price exceeded $100, is now trading for less than $1.

Now, many companies got caught up in the options backdating scandal, and for various reasons most of these companies were not hit has hard as Vitesse. But at the end of 2007, I believed that Vitesse had survived the worst of it, that they were close to restarting public financial announcements and, most importantly, they had a strategy for growth and profitability into the future. So at that time, I bought a bunch of shares of the company at $0.84 per share.

The company finally released public financials at the end of September. Those financials showed what I had anticipated, that the company was on the road to recovery. Yet yesterday, the company's stock closed at $0.18. Even if we consider that the broader market is down say 50% in the last couple of months, that might mean the company would otherwise trade at $0.36.

What's happening? More importantly, where's it all going?

That's exactly the problem, there's no real way to know. The company website only has product releases and announcements of upcoming investor presentations, and not very many of either of those. Yet I suspect lots of things are going on within the company that people would like to hear about. Where's the forum for sharing or discussing that information?

Well, there's always the finance discussion boards, like this one on Yahoo Finance. But these finance boards are just full of people shouting epithets at each other, or pumping the stock. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm not even talking about financial information, necessarily, but product information, technology and market discussions, application stories, or the company's view of the world. What did they learn at their last trade show? What does the company want to be when it grows beyond this current financial mess? That's all opaque to an outsider.

In that thundering silence, the stock continues to plummet.

There are lots of technical tools available, including blogs, forums, or podcasts. Why doesn't CEO Chris Gardner podcast? Or Tony Conoscenti, VP Product Marketing, Martin Nuss, VP Technology and Strategy, or CFO Rich Yonker? A biweekly podcast would be a great way to demonstrate leadership and reengage with customers and investors.

Vitesse used to be a dominant leader in their space and still has some strong capabilities. By improving their external communications, they could begin to reestablish thought leadership.

There are several marketing agencies helping companies like Vitesse to redefine external communications beyond traditional PR or, more broadly, to establish communities. One local one is Room 214, who appear to be doing some pretty cool community things. How do I know? I don't for sure, but that's the feeling I get from their blog.

Because they're communicating ...

Marketing is a conversation (1 of 2)

2008-12-09T04:36:00.008-07:00

I had lunch with a marketing colleague the other day. He mentioned a saying that he's fond of: "Marketing is a campaign, not an event." I agree with that, and would an another: "Marketing is a conversation, not a proclamation."

In a prior post, I mentioned that "My marketing focus was:

Understand customer needs and define the appropriate product or service to meet those needs
Use the appropriate promotional tools to drive revenue growth for those products and services"

If you consider those two points together, understanding customer needs, then promoting, that's bilateral communication or, in essence, a conversation.

More broadly, there are many situations where companies need to have conversations with their customers and other constituents.

For example, SharedPlan had some pretty strong views regarding the collaborative aspects of project planning and management. To help us voice those views, we started a newsletter, quickly growing the readership to about 20,000. At the same time, we provided users a voice by establishing a forum and by providing a repository where users could share project plans. Again, bilateral communication .. a conversation.

At Albeo, we began a similar process. In the lighting market, LEDs represent a completely new model for lighting (with regard to economics, lifetime, light dispersion, light quality, energy use, size, heat, replaceability, you name it). The differences are so dramatic that we couldn't even begin 'selling' until we provided some fundamental education to our customers to enable them to interpret our selling statements. So we started the Albeo LED Academy, an educational resource to provide those basics. The plan was to develop the Academy into a series of webinars or live events that would then enable us to build a user community. That user community would then serve to give our customers a voice to begin a broader conversation. We had some visionary ideas about where LED lighting could go, but until we could hear the collective voice of our customers, we couldn't validate those ideas.

Both of these companies benefited from conversations with their customers and constituents. In the second post on this topic, I'll provide something of a counterexample, a company that could benefit from conversations, but does not seem to recognize or enable that.

Robo-calling rich folks with investment advice?

2008-12-06T07:50:00.001-07:00

"Hi, I'm Jim Coleman, and my records indicate you're a qualified investor. If you are a qualified investor, please press 1 ..."

That's the robocall I received on a Thursday morning at 8:30 am. I was getting ready to leave for work and I hung up at "press 1." But then, as I frequently do, I starting thinking about the marketing tactics being employed here.

According to this site, qualified investors are "individuals, trust accounts or institutional funds with at least $5 million in assets to invest." Therein lies my whole problem with this campaign.

I thought to myself that if I'm worth $5 million, do you suppose I got where I did by answering unsolicited robocalls for investment advice? Presumably, I'm either knowledgeable enough to invest on my own, or smart enough to have a real adviser, one that I found through referral or some other more reliable means, not via robocall.

Also, why would they call at 8:30 am when the qualified investor has either left for work or about to do so? Do qualified investors not work? Maybe they're targeting super-qualified investors who don't go to work anymore. But then, that takes me back to my first point: super-qualified investors are even less likely to respond to robocalls from Jim.

That's when it dawned on me. By asking if the call recipient is qualified, then maybe they're trying to target non-qualified suckers who want to become qualified.

It's kind of like Club 33. About 10 years ago, my company had one of the few corporate memberships to Club 33 at Disneyland, and I took my family there several times. The entrance to the club was an understated door with a 33 on it on one of the main thoroughfares through the New Orleans section. To get in, you rang the bell and the host would ask you to identify yourself, then buzz you in.

The sight of my family ringing that doorbell, being identified, then buzzed in, captivated all those around us. A glance back as we walked in showed faces with a range of emotions from curiousity to envy. People wanted to be part of the club because it was exclusive. They had no idea what was in there, they just knew that they weren't in there.

Non-qualified investors want to be qualified, even if they don't know what qualified is. So they "press 1." That's the only thing I can conclude about that campaign. Maybe next time, I'll take the time to press 1 to learn more.

HM has died, but he left an amazing legacy

2008-12-05T22:19:00.006-07:00

I heard on NPR that HM (Henry Molaison) died recently. I had never heard of HM before this story, so I read the Wikipedia entry. What a truly fascinating and tragic story. (His story was apparently the inspiration for the movie Memento, although I doubt there was any killing involved with Henry.)

I can't get the story out of my head, how he went in for brain surgery at age 27 to correct an epileptic seizure problem, and was so irreparably harmed that he was institutionalized the rest of his life. Yet if you spoke with him, he would seem completely normal. His speech was normal, and he could remember things from before the surgery, but nothing from after. He could learn new motor skills, but not remember how or when he learned them. He couldn't remember what he had for breakfast that day, or what he did yesterday, or anything from after the surgery. The oddities go on and on ...

One of the people featured on the NPR story is writing a book on HM, who contributed an immeasurable amount to our understanding of the brain. It's incredibly sad though, the price that he paid to provide us that understanding.

I'm all about revenue growth

2008-11-22T20:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial (yes, I admit it again, it was on sports talk radio) for the Chevy Volt. I was only half listening to it, but it caught my attention when it said something about "those guys that were so good at chemistry are now working on the batteries for it." It then went on to say that the Volt will come out in the 2010 model year.

I realized that I was listening to an ad for a car that won't be available for a year! This ad is from the same car company that just went before Congress and stated that they won't make it to the end of 2009 without a congressional bailout. So, my first thought in hearing this ad was "shouldn't they be trying to sell the cars they have, rather than cars they don't?"

Then I thought, "maybe they're trying to revise their brand from 'uninteresting, middle-of-the-road cars for the masses' to 'leader in clean automotive technologies.'"

But this post is actually not about GM's advertising, it's about branding. As in, I'm not a branding guy.

That ad made me realize that, for more than a decade, I have been a marketer focused on revenue growth, rather than branding. My marketing focus was:

Understand customer needs and define the appropriate product or service to meet those needs
Use the appropriate promotional tools to drive revenue growth for those products and services

There's nothing in those two items about establishing and building brands. That's because many of the companies I worked for were small, even startup, companies where revenue was King. (Actually, cash was King, but revenue was a very close second, probably Queen.) We didn't have the luxury to invest in establishing a brand.

It's not that I don't appreciate the value of branding and would enjoy the opportunity to establish and build a brand. In fact, if you read several of my past posts on advertising, I am frequently referring to branding. Examples include my recent posts on a couple of radio ads, one discussing Microsoft's new I'm a PC campaign, or the one discussing La Quinta (whose brand apparently is 'hotels for idiots.')

I would love to do some branding work, but at the end of the day I'm a revenue growth marketer.

Love those Discovery Channel shows

2008-11-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

A 24-hour bug has been working its way through our house, so last weekend we found ourselves on the couch watching TV. We ended up watching Discovery channel all day. We were already fans of Mythbusters (which we have TiVo'ed for some time now) and Dirty Jobs. On Saturday, we also discovered Time Warp, How Stuff Works, and Prototype This!.

We (the boys and I .. I'm not sure I can include Gina) love these shows! We are clearly in the channel's demographic. Big Science Saturday has pretty much stopped since we started working on Destination ImagiNation this season, so maybe Discovery Channel will replace BSS.

TV can be just as stimulating and educational as science experiments, right?

Another good BSS event

2008-10-31T06:19:00.002-06:00

It's not quite NCAR's Super Science Saturday, but there's another fun Big Science Saturday event coming up.

Each fall and spring, the first-year engineering students at CU host a Design Expo to show off their design projects. The projects are judged by working engineers from various companies around the area. For three hours during the day, though, the Expo is open to the public and the public can vote on their favorite project to win the People's Choice Award.

You can find more information on CU's Integrated Teaching and Learning Program website. It's another good opportunity for me to expose the boys to science and engineering in action.

We'll see you there!

Brilliant viral video from MoveOn.org

2008-10-30T11:45:00.003-06:00

Someone just forwarded to me a viral video from MoveOn.org that I love. In fact, I forwarded it to about half a dozen people myself. As I write this post, their counter states that it has been sent to 9.2 million people (one can never trust counters like that, by the way).

I love it because it is entertaining and pretty effective, at least in delivering a message. I don't care about the particular political position it takes. I love it because it's a very entertaining way to send a message to people to get out and vote. I would love to see if it actually delivers votes, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I would love to use a viral video like this in a marketing campaign, but there's one problem. The ability to predict the popularity of a video is very limited. The Jib Jab guys never were able to replicate their original success with follow-up videos, and YouTube is a graveyard of attempted viral hits.

As I mentioned in my radio post, home runs are hard to predict. To extend that baseball metaphor a little further, base hits are far more predictable and drive in just as many runs.

Radio ads really work (2 of 2)

2008-10-30T08:22:00.008-06:00

On the last post on this topic, I mentioned that one of the reasons that these two ads work is because of sheer repetition, which is required in almost all forms of advertising. We're all familiar with single commercial events that leave a lasting impression, like the Apple Orwell's-1984-with-the-sledgehammer-through-the-TV-screen ad. But the likelihood of an ad becoming iconic like that is less than one in a million. For instance, can you name another Super Bowl ad from that year? I'm sure there were others that spent a lot of money on high concept ads.

The point is, you can't count on single ad home runs, much like you can't count on videos going viral. You can count on repetition, however. But I've already pointed out that repetition isn't enough. While necessary (if you don't want to bet on home runs), repetition isn't sufficient. So what else makes these ads successful?

They're also successful because they're unique. The Lennox Financial owner/spokesperson has a southern accent, speaks with authority, educates when he speaks, and has an attention-grabbing presence. His simultaneous authority and folksiness serve to make listeners pay attending and trust him. Most chief executives do not have screen or radio presence, but this guy does, and they have made the most of his abilities.

The Advanced Tax Solutions ads are equally unique, but in a very different way. There is no company representative in the ads. Instead, all of the ads are read by Irv. Irv's an old guy, a kind of grandfatherly character of whom you're never quite sure if he's still all there. But when Irv's folksy, clumsy delivery is combined with actual customers describing their situations and the company's successful resolutions, it comes across as very believable.

Obviously, uniqueness works well for these guys. Of course, uniqueness doesn't always work. Remember the Quizno's rat-like things?

Radio ads really work (part 1 of 2)

2008-10-28T08:33:00.013-06:00

First, a two-part confession:

(i) I have never had the opportunity in my marketing career to use radio as an advertising medium.
(ii) I listen to sports talk radio. Not exclusively, but enough to seriously compromise my snooty, high-brow, elitist literati posturing.

So, I found myself thinking today about two series of ads that I have heard forever on sports talk radio. One is for a mortgage company, Lennox Financial, and the other for Advanced Tax Solutions, a firm that helps people who are in hot water with the IRS.

Here's what I find interesting about these two series of ads: I can tell you the name of those companies off the top of my head.

Not that I'm the market for either of these services, mind you. I have no need for a new mortgage (and I already have a great mortgage guy, Bill Zuetell at Lendmor), and I have been a dutiful citizen with regard to the IRS. I don't think about these services at all. Ever.

But if the need arose, or if someone asked me about these types of services, I am able to come up with the names of these firms and have a good enough feeling about them to call them. That is the definition of effective advertising.

So why do these work? I think there are a couple of explanations.

The most obvious is repetition. These ads have been on for at least a couple of years with the same theme. However, there are lots of ads that have been on the radio for years with the same theme that are not nearly as memorable, so there's something else that works for them.

Each of them has a unique ad design that they have kept constant over the years. The Lennox Financial ad features the company owner describing the current state of the mortgage market and the implications for the homeowner. And he always closes with the same line: "It's the biggest no-brainer in the history of Earth."

Similarly, the Advanced Tax Solutions ads are also a constant, seemingly unchanged over many years. They come on during Irv and Joe and, in fact, are all read by Irv. They always feature client testimonials, with the actual client on the air responding to questions from Irv.

These ads have been on forever, so they should have made an impression in sheer repetition alone. But I'm sure there are other ads that have been on these stations forever that I can't recall as well. Why is that? I'll discuss that in my next post on this topic.

Separate quality control from sales?

2008-10-28T07:10:00.004-06:00

Our refrigerator died yesterday. Actually, it didn't die, but it was very sick, with a compressor that couldn't keep it cold enough anymore.

The cost of a new compressor was well over $500, and almost half the cost of replacing the fridge. We decided to replace the compressor, rather than the whole fridge, although someday I'm going to revisit the economics of that decision. For now, it just annoyed me to have to spend SO MUCH money just to keep an old appliance alive. The repairman also was in our home until almost 10 pm doing the work.

Although the repairman was helpful and doing his best to be empathetic, I was in a bad mood about the whole experience and couldn't wait to get this guy out of our house.

After he presented the invoice and accepted payment, he handed me a customer feedback form for me to complete, insert in an envelope, and seal. I took a minute or two to do so.

The first couple of questions were about the quality of service: did the service person explain the problem clearly, was he courteous, on time, etc. I gave the guy some credit because, other than taking longer than he estimated, I thought he did a good job.

Then the next several questions, taking up about 2/3 of the entire sheet, were questions for selling new services:

Does anyone in the home have allergies?
Dry skin?
Does the air conditioning keep the house cool enough?

On and on ...

Was this a quality assurance questionnaire, or a sales questionnaire? There were so many sales questions that it made me question whether the company really wanted to measure service quality at all. I think they couldn't care less. They just want to put me on a mailing or phone list for having my heating ducts cleaned or to have my air conditioning serviced.

At the end, they had a numerical rating scale for their service quality. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would have given the guy an 8, even though I was annoyed with having to pay all this money and have this guy in our house all evening. But after being hammered with more sales questions, I gave him a 6.

Not that they care or that they'll even look at it. They'll mostly be annoyed that I didn't answer any of their sales questions.

While selling should be a regular part of a company's interaction with a customer by any employee, there is one area where the presence of sales is inappropriate. Sales should not be part of quality assurance, other than the implicit message that the customer should want to buy more because the company is so focused on quality.

Missed the Red Bull Soapbox Derby

2008-10-25T22:00:00.003-06:00

I just realized that by choosing to go to the NCAR SSS, we missed the opportunity to see the Red Bull Soapbox Derby, which looked like it would be crazy, goofy fun. The boys would have loved it and I would have had the opportunity to show them the wacky, fun side of science. (And, as a marketer, I really respect what Red Bull has done in their market.) Oh well, we can't do it all.

NCAR's SSS was great

2008-10-25T19:55:00.008-06:00

The boys loved the event, much more than they did two or three years ago when we went last.

Their favorite exhibits were the velcro wall and the TV weathercaster demo. Here are Maddox and me, just after I threw him at the velcro wall (sorry for the quality .. I only had my phone with me).

And Maddox in front of the 7 News weathercaster green screen reading his cue cards:

And the boys enjoying the final video product:

They also enjoyed the stormchaser truck, the hand-cranked kid train, and the tornado maker. After closing with a visit to Mustard's Last Stand, I have to say it was a terrific day.

NCAR's Super Science Saturday is tomorrow

2008-10-24T20:37:00.004-06:00

As you all know, my family has long held Big Science Saturday (BSS). Not to be outdone, the National Center for Atmospheric Research will hold their annual Super Science Saturday tomorrow here in Boulder.

According to a flyer that Ryan brought home from school, they will perform experiments and demonstrations with various energy sources, highlight the sustainability of natural resources, and teach kids about the effects of their energy choices. They'll also have a hand-crank kid-powered train, Segway rides for older kids, and a super sticky velcro wall.

It's no BSS, but I think we'll have to drop by to check it out.

I finally finished voting

2008-10-21T07:53:00.006-06:00

When I started this blog, I never intended to post about political issues, but ...

The citizen initiatives in Colorado are out of control. I just spent about two hours going through all of the issues on the ballot. On the ballot for Boulder city residents, in addition to the national, state, county, and city candidates, there were:

14 proposed amendments to the Colorado constitution
4 proposed amendments to Colorado statutes
2 Boulder County issues
7 Boulder city issues

Don't we have a representative form of government? Why am I having to decide all of these issues? Isn't that why I elect city council members, county commissioners, state legislators, and governors?

The reason people are putting these issues on the ballot is because they don't like the decisions made by their government, so they're attempting to go around the government directly to the voters.

The problem with that is that voters don't have enough information to make sound decisions. The complete text of the ballot issue is far to complex and dense for the average voter to ever get through, and the summary text and summary arguments for and against each measure can never capture all of the important implications of the measure. (I'll ignore for the moment the dozens of related TV and radio commercials, every single one of which is misleading, generated as a result of these measures.)

This is a recipe for bad laws to be passed that take forever to unwind.

I consider myself more politically aware than the average citizen, and I happen to have a little free time on my hands right now to give considerable thought to the issues, but when I sealed up my mail-in ballot, I had a queasy feeling that I had made some mistake or that I had missed an important consideration. Voting should make me feel like I'm advancing the interests of my state by taking part in the electoral process. It should not make me feel like I just contributed to my state becoming a social, cultural, political, or economic backwater due to silly citizen-enacted laws.

The way to get better laws enacted is to change the people making the laws, not to go around them. Colorado needs to raise the bar on citizen initiatives to make them more difficult to get on the ballot. In that way, only the truly important issues will be considered. This will also require voters to think harder about who they elect as their representative, hold them to a higher standard, and demand more accountability.

Lawmakers get paid to understand and interpret all of the implications of important issues. If your representative still doesn't do what you want regarding an issue important to you, run for office yourself. Don't try to push the decision responsibility on an ill-prepared electorate.

Microsoft finally did something right

2008-10-16T09:18:00.005-06:00

I have to say I really like the new Microsoft "I'm a PC" commercials (here is an example), which were created right here in Boulder by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. These have been written and blogged about ad nauseum (including the recent revelation that they were created on a Mac), but I'd like to throw in my two cents just to raise the nauseum level one more notch.

(Full disclosure: I'm a fan of Apple products.)

Building your brand requires that you emphasize your strengths while moderating your weaknesses. Microsoft's strength is that its software is ubiquitously deployed and forms a complete solution, particularly for the enterprise. There are several weaknesses with Microsoft's products, including not seamlessly integrating with different media types, forcing customers into a lockstep upgrade path, and a history of unreliability or instability. Microsoft as a corporation is also seen as a monopolistic corporate bully. All of these weaknesses, and more, have been highlighted in Apple's 'I'm a PC/I'm a Mac' commercials (see them all here).

From Microsoft's press release, they state that the new ads highlight "real people celebrating their connection to the community of one billion Windows users worldwide," and they achieve that by featuring an amazingly broad array of users, clearly highlighting Microsoft's ubiquity.

At the same time, they are moderating some of their weaknesses with their choices of users to feature. They show a hip, urban DJ, thereby implicitly addressing the media integration weakness. They show schoolchildren in Africa, addressing the corporate bully issue. This is great stuff.

Do the Mac commercials do the same (highlight the strengths, moderate the weaknesses)? They certainly highlight their strengths in ease of use, stability, and media capabilities. Some of Apple's weaknesses include lack of enterprise solutions, price, a closed iTunes system, and a narrower set of third-party applications. I just reviewed about a dozen of their ads, which hammer on their strengths, but saw very few examples of effectively addressing weaknesses.

For once, I have to give the slight edge to Microsoft.

Starting a job search

2008-10-15T20:19:00.004-06:00

Yes, that's right, I'm no longer with Albeo. In an effort to conserve cash in a very difficult funding environment, they eliminated the marketing department.

So I now find myself looking for the perfect marketing opportunity in Boulder. I'm actually looking forward to (most of) this process, because I enjoy learning about the exciting, creative things people are doing here. In fact, many of the readers of this blog are people that I met during a similar exploration in 2001, and I look forward to meeting many more this time.

Hiking with my dad

2008-09-23T02:30:00.000-06:00

Last month, my dad and I went hiking in southwestern Colorado. Specifically, we spent one day in Black Canyon of the Gunnison and one hiking Grand Mesa. Dad and I hadn't done a trip together, just the two of us, probably ever. And I learned a bunch of stuff about myself, my dad, and a part of Colorado I had not experienced.

Black Canyon may lack the size of Grand Canyon, but is certainly not lacking in grandeur. The sheer walls of black volcanic rock, cut with pink stripes of quartz monzonite, are striking. My photographic skills really don't do it justice.

The vertical drop is so precipitous that the river bed at the bottom shows no evidence of human occupation, ever, even as the Ute Indians lived all around the canyon rim for hundreds of years.

The only way down to the bottom is down some very steep trails (the park service won't even use the term 'trail' to describe them) with pitches up to 60 or 70 degrees. At one point, they have even installed an 80-foot chain to help you descend or ascend a particularly steep section.

We only went about a third of the way down because we didn't have enough time. That was enough, however, for me to be as impressed with my 77-year-old father as I was by the natural surroundings. That's him working the chain ...

The next day we hiked Grand Mesa, the largest flat-top mountain in the world. Because the mountain top is nonporous lava rock, water is trapped on top of it, forming 300 lakes. Dad grew up in the area and used to go fishing up there.

There are miles of healthy forests, with no sign of the beetle-kill that has ravaged Colorado. And almost no sign of people either. It's quite a treasure that I had never seen before.

As I described in my previous post, Dad was a hiking stud. Those two days of hiking wore me out, and overall it was a terrific four-day weekend with my dad. We're going to have to do it again next summer.

Just keep picking 'em up and putting 'em down

2008-09-07T17:43:00.007-06:00

When I was in high school, my dad took me backpacking. I remember it as a great trip, but also a long trek with a heavy, uncomfortable pack. I also remember Dad telling me to "just take it one step at a time" as I grumbled and whined about the load. "Just keep picking 'em up and putting 'em down." It drove me crazy.

Then, a few weeks ago, he and I went hiking (more on that in another post). It turned out to be a long hike, about 5 or 6 hours, and he was telling me a story about leading his Marine squadron on long hikes with 90 lb. packs. You know how he did it? He just kept taking one more step.

So, this weekend, I was hiking with Ryan and he was complaining endlessly about being tired and wanting to quit. I told him that when I'm riding my bike up a mountain, I never focus on the top or how far I have to go. Rather, I just concentrate on turning the pedals over one more time.

Of course, that didn't do any good, and Ryan just kept complaining. I think it really just drove him crazy.

And that made me realize one thing. I realized that, in so many ways, I am clearly becoming my dad.

I think that's a good thing.

Looking for companies that get it

2008-09-04T22:08:00.004-06:00

On Sustainablog, a recent posting said:

A North American organization of energy experts issued a report that found that building more green buildings is the best way to cut carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), one of the major contributors to global warming. In fact, green buildings could cut emissions more deeply, quickly and more cheaply than any other global warming mitigation effort.

So what’s stopping the change? The report found that capital and operating budgets are often kept separate, instead of a government or other institution taking into account the lifetime budget of a construction project. This separation creates a disincentive to build green.

This is a problem we deal with every day at Albeo. Albeo's LED fixtures present an opportunity for terrific operational savings in energy, maintenance, inventory, and disposal costs. However, they're relatively expensive compared to traditional lighting, and the investment in the fixtures would be a significant capital expenditure. Getting capital approved for operational efficiencies can be surprisingly challenging. Some companies get it, some don't.

We just need to find those that get it.

As a marketer, am I breaking the Golden Rule?

2008-07-18T19:19:00.014-06:00

At Albeo, I'm planning to start a direct marketing campaign that will include direct mail and telemarketing, and possibly some email. Why? Because direct marketing works, and that's my job.

It raises a personal question, however. Since I don't enjoy receiving direct mail or telemarketing calls, am I planning on breaking the Golden Rule by doing unto others what I don't want done to myself?

I get annoyed with all the credit card mailings I receive. I don't like telemarketers any more than anyone else, and always hang up on them. But I also recognize that annoying marketing can be effective marketing.

For instance, as I have been watching the Tour de France on Versus Network this week, there's a Saab commercial that has run several times on each episode. (You can see the commercial here.) It's very annoying because it is very sparsely narrated, but repeats the same line three times:

"For the perfect balance of fuel efficiency and performance, we take energy from exhaust and recycle it.

For the perfect balance of fuel efficiency and performance, we take energy from exhaust and recycle it.

For the perfect balance of fuel efficiency and performance, we take energy from exhaust and recycle it.

Turning repetition into joy. The efficient performance of the Saab Turbo."

The repetition of the main line and the repeated airings of the commercial mean that that line is seared into my brain. Yes, I get it, the turbo provides a mix of fuel efficiency and performance.

It is amazingly annoying. On the other hand, as I pointed out, that line is seared into my brain, which means the marketers did their job. (Of course, there's a point at which they could move beyond message recognition into negative feelings.)

I guess my bottom line is that I recognize that some marketing tools can be annoying, but they're effective, and that's why I'm OK with breaking the Golden Rule.

Conflict resolution at the Earles household

2008-07-13T06:12:00.006-06:00

My two sons, Ryan and Maddox, are ages 9 and 5, respectively. They are each other's best friend, which is wonderful to see, but like any brothers, they occasionally fight, and sometimes these fights become physical. It is never very serious, but it's also something that I want to address quickly and effectively before it gets out of hand.

My next older brother is 1 1/2 years older than I am, and he and I constantly fought as we grew up. I have 'fond' memories of him shooting me in the neck with a BB gun, and me embedding a dart in the back of his head. (Just a flesh wound, honest ...) Unfortunately, our little sibling rivalry never mellowed, and grew into an emotional barrier that took many years to overcome.

One of my neighbors has big, oversize boxing gloves that he gives his kids to help them 'fight' in a harmless way and get out their aggressions, but I don't like the idea of my boys hitting each other, even if it doesn't hurt. I'm not convinced that there wouldn't be residual resentment or other hard feelings at the end of one of these boxing matches.

We have tried various means to resolve conflicts between Ryan and Maddox, but the most effective technique is also the most fun: sumo wrestling.

Really.

The idea grew out of our unsuccessful experiment with Ryan and Jiu Jitsu. We were looking for a way to help Ryan develop some strength, coordination, and physical self-confidence, so we considered various martial arts. I chose Jiu Jitsu because it doesn't have the typical punching of Tae Kwon Do or other forms; it's much more about grappling and leverage. While Ryan didn't take to Jiu Jitsu, he enjoyed the wrestling aspect of the classes.

About that time, I happened to see some sumo matches on late night TV. The next time the boys had a fight, an idea was born ...

Now when they get into some kind of scuffle, rather than yell at them, we just mark out the circle (dohyo) and have a Sumo match. We have now watched enough sumo on TV that they even know how to set up, performing the leg-stomping, hand-clapping shiko exercise to drive out the evil spirits.

It took us a while to find a competitive balance in the matches, since Ryan is 20 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than Maddox. However, Maddox is strong and Ryan doesn't have great balance, so I taught Maddox to go in low, grab Ryan's knee, and just hold on tight until Ryan falls. They're now pretty evenly match.

I can't describe exactly how comical it is to watch my skinny boys go through this, and this is part of the charm of the whole activity. There is just no way that they can stay angry at each other after sumo. Occasionally, they have even stripped down to their underwear to mimic the mawashi that the sumo wrestlers wear. When they do this in our back yard, which is open to the street alongside our house, we get some very strange looks!

Just when I was beginning to doubt BSS

2008-06-15T08:05:00.001-06:00

Reflections on Father's Day ...

Most of the time, the boys love Big Science Saturday (BSS), particularly when we do stuff like rockets or bugs. Sometimes, though, they're not really that into it, and I wonder if I'm really wasting my time.

In my past post about Ryan's rocket birthday party, I mentioned that I didn't really care if Ryan loves rockets as much as I did when I was a kid, but I just wanted him to be exposed to them.

With regard to BSS, I also don't care if the boys go into any kind of scientific pursuit like I did, or have any interest in science whatsoever. When I talk with them about why we do BSS, I tell them that all I'm trying to do is get them to ask questions about their world and to have some structure around how they seek answers to those questions. To me, it's all about curiousity and critical thought.

A couple of months ago, I went to Ryan's science fair. At his elementary school, science fair is only required for fourth and fifth graders, but for our family, science fair is required in all grades. Ryan is not a big fan of this and gets a little grumpy about it, but we came up with an experiment that was kind of fun. We measured how fast Maddox, Ryan, and I went down a waterslide at a local rec center.

Ryan hypothesized that I would go fastest because I was the tallest. That's how the data turned out. However, Ryan was slower than Maddox, although Ryan is taller. As we discussed the results, he could not see the inconsistency in his data. Although I found that a little frustrating, he was quite content with his conclusion and that's what he went with.

So, recently I have been asking myself if it's worth all the trouble and if I'm getting through to these guys. Well, Ryan brought home his report card at the end of the year. It had threes ("proficient") in about 20 categories, had a couple of twos ("partial achievement"), and two categories in which he received fours ("advanced"). One four was in a reading category, something about recognizing words, and what do you suppose the other four was for? "Scientific Process and Inquiry -- Draws logical conclusions and writes about scientific investigations."

I guess his teachers saw something that I hadn't, and I really love that.

Robots!

2008-06-11T20:05:00.000-06:00

(This post looks back a couple of months, but I saw something today that jogged my memory about it. I apologize for the delayed post.)

A few years ago, Ryan and I used to enjoy watching Battlebots on TV together. That show isn't on anymore, but we really enjoyed those compact creations of mayhem and destruction. (According to the Wikipedia page linked to above, the TV show will be returning, for at least one competition, in November 2008!)

One day during this spring break (we didn't do anything special for spring break this year, since we had gone to Puerto Vallarta a month prior), I happened to read about the FIRST Robotics regional competition taking place at University of Denver over the weekend. We went down on Saturday for our Big Science Saturday (BSS) activity, and the kids loved it!

The robots were built by high school kids with corporate mentors. The sophistication of the robots was very impressive, as good as we ever saw on Battlebots. (So much so, that it made me wonder how much design and manufacture was done by the kids, versus by the corporate sponsors.) You could go down into the 'pits,' where the teams were very helpful in describing their robot designs.

The robots were designed to compete on a specific event that involved racing around an oval track and picking up and carrying large exercise balls. It wasn't clear how the scoring was structured, but they seemed to get points for the number of laps completed, picking balls off the racks, and pushing them around the track.

Our favorite robot was one that wasn't even designed to deal with the balls at all. Once the designers abandoned this activity, they were free to design a very specialized little bot that did one thing very well. It zipped around the track three to four times faster than any other bot. It was very fun to watch that little guy.

The boys loved their robot-themed BSS. There was even a demo table there from a Lego robotics club, and the boys talked about finding a local chapter to join. We'll see how that turns out ...

Although it wasn't about sales leads, it was a huge success

2008-06-09T06:33:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, for Albeo, Lightfair was not about sales leads. It was about our coming out as the only LED light fixture uniquely focused on the hardest problems in lighting: big, bright, efficient fixtures for industrial applications. From the perspective of showing the lighting world who we are and that we’re credible, it was a terrific show.

We had great press and analyst interaction. We had the best press kit in the press room, and appeared to go through more than anyone else. We participated in about press 12 interviews, which should generate 6 to 8 editorial pieces from now through September. I also had a terrific conversation with an LED lighting market analyst. Her firm published a large market analysis report in early 2007 which did not even mention the industrial market through 2012. I made the argument for the market opportunity and positioned Albeo as the one most able to serve that opportunity.

We had great investor engagement at the show. It was interesting to see so many venture capitalists walking the aisles of a lighting show. I'm sure it was the first visit to a lighting show for almost all of them. It was particularly valuable for Albeo to be able to encourage potential investors to visit all the other booths to see if they could find someone addressing a similar market need with the same set of capabilities.

We also connected with some strong reps in regions where we had no coverage (SoCal, New England). These new relationships are already paying dividends.

In summary, it was a successful opportunity to establish strong, clear corporate positioning with customers, competitors, and channels.

Having said all that, it wasn't a bad show for sales leads, either. Our booth was mobbed all three (exhausting) days. We came away with 200 to 300 leads, a mix of end users and potential channel partners, that we're currently going through and qualifying. We have found some valuable nuggets in there.

However, the most valuable aspect of Lightfair for Albeo may not have been raising awareness with customers, editors, channels, or investors, and may not have been generating sales leads, either. The most valuable aspect of this show was all about the team.

We're still a very small company, so putting together this kind of trade show presence, with all of the required products (several new products shown for the first time) and materials, was a huge undertaking for us. Every member of the company helped make this happen, and to have all their hard work pay off in such a big way helps to confirm the value of each individual's contribution. When they also saw how well we were received by the various audiences, it highlights that their continued efforts are likely going to help change the world in some way.

I found it, but a little too late

2008-06-04T21:30:00.001-06:00

Back in January of last year, I proposed a business that I wanted to see someone start to help me out with Big Science Saturday (BSS). Wouldn't you know that I finally found it? The Young Scientists Club is exactly what I described, a subscription, home-delivery science kit program that sends you a new kit every couple of weeks.

If I had found this service early on in our BSS, I would have been a lot more consistent about having it. At this point, however, we have done many of the experiments in their program, so it doesn't make sense for us. However, if any of you are just thinking about starting something like BSS, this sounds like a terrific deal.

I can't vouch for the quality, but clearly the concept is great. I'd like to take credit for it, but from their website, it looks like they might have been around since 1999. Great minds ...

Trade shows are not always about sales leads

2008-05-16T05:12:00.000-06:00

We're doing our first trade show at Albeo in a couple of weeks. It's a large lighting industry show, Lightfair, that targets lighting specifiers, mostly architects and lighting designers. When I have discussed this show with various people, I frequently find myself explaining that the purpose of our exhibiting at this show is not to generate near-term revenue or sales leads.

There are innumerable reasons to do a trade show, and certainly one possible reason is to generate sales leads. But it is not the only reason, nor necessarily the most important.

For example, I had a memorable trade show experience earlier in my career. We were marketing fiber optic transceivers to the data networking, voice networking, and data storage segments. Similar to Albeo, we were a venture-funded startup, competing mostly with other venture-funded startups like ourselves.

We did two trade shows a year. One year, over all of marketing's strenuous objections, our CEO insisted that we gather as many leads as possible during the show, and follow up on and qualify every lead.

We dutifully gathered several hundred leads, and began calling every one after the show. Not surprisingly, through the first 50 or so, we found exactly zero new, valuable opportunities. Why? Because the characteristics of the industry and our segment were not consistent with using trade shows as a sales prospecting tool.

In each of the three segments we served, there were, at most, eight companies in the world that could generate significant demand for our products. At each of these companies, there were maybe two or three design teams that were responsible for projects that might include a product like ours. In other words, our sales force already knew every possible customer and was aware of every existing project that represented any meaningful revenue. If we weren't working to close those known deals, then we were working on the wrong things.

Then why participate in trade shows, you might ask? One important reason is because that worldwide handful of potential decision-makers wanted to be reassured that they're buying from a market leader and a company that was going to be around for the long term, and a trade show was an effective tool for positioning ourselves as that leader. It enabled us to show advanced, market-leading product or technology concepts, for instance. And the mere implied expense of exhibiting communicated some level of financial stability.

In Albeo's case, any sales leads we generate at Lightfair would represent possible 2009 or 2010 revenue, which is not our greatest concern. Rather, we're launching several new products into a new market segment, and a large trade show like this one represents an efficient way to get the message about this launch out broadly and quickly to multiple audiences. So our most important metric is not the number of sales leads, but rather our success in connecting with the editorial community, the venture community, and some other important audiences. Our success metrics will be around these efforts.

Oh, and did the total failure rate in those first 50 qualification efforts convince my past CEO that it was a futile effort? No, he was convinced we were missing that one golden nugget, so he made us complete the task, which took several days. Let's just say he and I didn't see eye-to-eye on much, and we soon parted ways.

Destination Imagination

2008-05-05T21:29:00.000-06:00

Recently, my son Ryan completed his Destination Imagination (DI) project. DI is a creativity and problem-solving organization for kids of all ages. Before Ryan participated, I had never heard of it, but now I love this thing!

The five members of Ryan's DI team chose the "Hit or Myth" challenge to prepare over the course of a few months. With no help from adults, they had to:

Choose a myth that they would prove or disprove using the scientific method (OK, that sold me right there)
Write an 8 minute play, during which they would perform an experiment, of their own design, to prove or disprove the myth
Construct their props out of recycled material

There were several other requirements, as well. The team then performs their play for judges in a big, all-day event at a local school, and the top two teams from each age group proceed to state and national competitions.

I was amazed at what his team of five third-graders came up with. The creativity was stellar. During their play, they proved that a tongue sticks to a frozen metal pole by using a pig tongue and a section of metal pipe that they had stored in dry ice. They wove this experiment into an eight-minute story about Queen's Day in Amsterdam, and had a cardboard replicas of the Amsterdam Palace and tulip fields.

He loved the entire experience, and we're both very excited for next year's DI challenge!

What's Their Message?

2008-05-03T14:22:00.001-06:00

OK, I don't really get the La Quinta ads. (You can see all of them on La Quinta's site.) I had seen two of these on TV, one where a guy's pen leaked in his mouth when he chewed it, making his entire mouth and lips blue, and another where a man forgot his luggage and was forced to wear his coworker's dress. The tag line for these ads is "wake up on the bright side." The leaky pen guy laughs off his blue mouth because it's now the company color, and the guy in the dress brags about how good he looks in it.

So, they're kind of cute and kind of funny, but these situations make these guys, and everyone around them, look like idiots. They don't make me think, "Hey, they really made the best out of a bad situation." They make me think, "Hey, these guys are idiots."

So what's the message conveyed about La Quinta? I can think of a few candidates:

Idiots stay at La Quinta.
Horribly embarrassing things happen at La Quinta.
Embarrassing things happen at La Quinta, but by waking up "on the bright side," you're able to deal with these embarrassing things by being an idiot.

I suspect that none of these is actually the intended message. The message that I don't see is "wake up on the bright side."

The ads are cute, but their message eludes me.

I wish everything were an auction

2008-04-12T21:44:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, I had a discussion with John Ives about his startup, Storage Markets, and the challenge of setting price for an unprecedented offering. I'm now experiencing exactly the same thing with Albeo.

LED lighting is dramatically different from traditional lighting. Here's a list of differentiators we use occasionally:

Reduced energy consumption; 10 times less energy than incandescent
Reduced maintenance costs; 10 to 100 times less maintenance
Reduced thermal loads; 10 to 20 times cooler than other lights
Longest lifetimes; for 50,000 to 100,000 hours
Highly resistant to shock and vibration; no glass or filaments to break
Extremely safe; low voltage, no EMI, low temperature
No recycling costs; no mercury
Full scale control of light level; adjustable from off to full on
Smallest form factors
Widest range of operating conditions; -40 to 70 degrees C
Easy to integrate with electronics; micros and sensors
All colors available; high color purity, all whites

Clearly, LEDs provide a very different lighting solution from traditional lighting. However, they cost maybe 10 times more to manufacture. So, how does one price LED offerings?

I'm going through that process now for several new products we're about to launch. Setting price is one of the most difficult things a marketer does. I strongly believe in setting price before I learn what a product costs to manufacture. It is very easy and common to base price on cost, even if one does so unconsciously because he knows the products' cost. However, our customers don't care what our products cost to make, do they? They care about what the products do for them; the value they deliver.

The ultimate way to determine the price is with an auction. Not that I want to sell our products on eBay, but why can't everything be an auction? It would make my job so much easier.

Getting the message right, revisited

2008-04-06T22:01:00.000-06:00

A year ago, I posted about Albeo being interviewed by BCBR and us not doing the appropriate messaging prep work to get our story across clearly. Although the BCBR article turned out OK, we were determined to do better in the future.

I recently mentioned that the local TV station, 9News, did a story on us. It came up quite suddenly; they called us at 9:30 and arrived an hour later. (We had to run home to put on our dress-up clothes, since we were looking pretty shlubby.)

Before Ward and his cameraman showed up, we reviewed the key messages we wanted to deliver, and even wrote them up on the white board in the conference room where the interview took place. Jeff (Bisberg, Albeo's founder and CEO) methodically worked them into his responses to Ward's questions, and I was quite pleased as the interview progressed. By the end of the interview I was confident that, no matter what material they chose to use, our messages would get through.

Then, something weird happened. Ward realized that they hadn't yet filmed a 15-second teaser that would run in the half-hour leading up to the news program. Ward and I worked up a two or three sentence script for that while the cameraman set up the shot.

During that five minutes of shot preparation, Ward chatted about some vandalism problems occurring in his neighborhood. He lives out in the boonies on several acres of land with a driveway gate that's not visible from his house. He was thinking about putting a camera out on the gate, in addition to the current intercom, to check out visitors remotely. He remarked that there's not adequate light out there for the camera, and I pointed out that he could install Albeo lights with integrated motion sensors so they would light up as soon as someone came up to the gate. I also noted that Albeo's lights are rugged enough to stand up to potential vandals.

So, what happens next? The cameraman gets the shot set, Ward picks up the mike, throws out the few sentences that we wrote together, and ad-libs the teaser with something about Albeo's "vandal-proof" LED lights. Vandal-proof?! Among our top ten important differentiators, that may be number 25. Seriously, he leads with vandal-proof?

After carefully staying on message for 45 minutes, we slip off message for a few minutes at the end and we get stuck doing vandal-proof lighting. Obviously, we're targeting that huge prison lighting market.

Clearly, the moral of this story is that one must always stay on message. Always.

Looking forward at the next few months

2008-04-03T21:54:00.000-06:00

Now that I'm blogging again and have joined Albeo full-time, I have several topics that I think I'll be writing about soon. These include:

How solid-state lighting breaks the entire lighting industry product and channel structure
Thinking about expanding Albeo internationally
Destination Imagination
Albeo's first trade show
Guitar lessons

Of course, there will be much more that comes up that I'll feel the need to write about. I have to say, I certainly enjoy being back online. I hope you keep reading, although if you don't, I'll probably still post.

Catching up on open topics

2008-04-02T05:30:00.000-06:00

There are a couple of topics I left open when I stopped blogging last year, so I thought I'd wrap those up a bit.

Yes, I still do BSS with the kids, although not nearly as frequently. We did get to tour the 9News newsroom with Ward Lucas. Ward had done a story on Albeo (make sure you check out the video), and I was chatting with him between shots, telling him about BSS, among other things. He graciously offered up the tour. Last weekend, we also attended a robotics competition, which I'll post about soon.

I also completed my personal trifecta: the Elephant Rock Century, the Triple Bypass, and the Copper Triangle. I had made a public commitment to the Triple, but privately I committed to the whole package. For those of you not in the Colorado cycling community, these are all difficult events, from 80 to 120 miles, with several thousand feet of climbing, much of it over 10,000 feet.

The experience of doing three difficult events in a season had several positive benefits:

I worked myself into my best cycling shape ever
I achieved a couple of personal cycling milestones on the side: (i) sustaining more than 20 mph on a closed loop for an hour, and (ii) riding up the world's highest paved road to the peak of Mount Evans.
I had an excuse to get ride of my ten-year-old, heavy road bike and get a new climbing machine

The downside of the whole trifecta thing was that it was a tremendous time commitment, particularly when I had little extra time (hence the lack of blog posts). If you're going to ride strong over mountains, then you have to spend practice time riding over mountains.

That commitment played a part in one decision I made, which I will publish here for future reference. I'm not going to do Triple Bypass again. That's just too big of an event for a recreational rider like me. The logistics are complicated, the weather risk is big, and the potential for stomach discomfort is high (you need to eat a lot of calories to fuel yourself for 8-10 hours of hard exercise, even though you don't feel like eating anything). I have proven twice now that I can do it, but I don't get enough from it to do it again.

I think that wraps up any open topics from my last posts. Of course, it's not like these are the only things that happened over the past year, so if I recall anything you might be interested in, I'll be sure to post about it.

Did you miss me?

2008-04-01T08:06:00.000-06:00

Yes, I'm back. As you can see, I haven't blogged for a year. I know my scores of readers have all put their lives on hold during my hiatus, and I deeply apologize for the resulting national economic slowdown.

So, let me explain why I disappeared for a year. As you know from several postings, I was working with Albeo Technologies when I disappeared, and I still am. However, I was doing so as a volunteer on my 'free time.' I had a day job the whole time, however, which happened to be in Colorado Springs, about 100 miles from my home in Boulder. Between Albeo, my day job, commuting, cycling, BSS and general parenting, blogging ultimately had to take a back seat.

Well, things have changed dramatically, and I am tremendously excited! First, my day employer sold the Colorado Springs division to another company, but retained my products. They requested that I relocate to California to work in the headquarters or at least work from my Boulder home. I decided against those options and agreed to a retention package through today, March 31. This set the stage for me to make a change.

As March 31 approached, another fortuitous thing happened. Albeo closed their first major funding round, which enables me, along with several others, to join full time and really hit the accelerator. I can now focus on executing for one company, rather than having such a schizophrenic work life.

In my next posts, I'll catch you up on other news and take a look forward at likely upcoming topics.

Thanks for sticking with me. I'm happy to be back.

The birds and the bees (and the fishes)

2007-04-29T20:46:00.000-06:00

Wow, it has been exactly a month since I last posted. I apologize for that. Or, is it presumptuous of me to apologize for not posting, as if you readers have somehow been inconvenienced by my lack of blabbery?

My posting hiatus was due to both being very busy, with Spring Break in Florida and then catching up from that excursion, and not having a topic that compelled me to post. I'm a big believer in only writing when I have something to say, rather than when the calendar pressures me to do so.

Having said that, today we had a terrific impromptu Big Science Saturday (BSS, and yes, I know it's Sunday today). BSS had also been on a bit of a hiatus the last couple of weeks as Ryan and I had been working on his science fair project. His project was really fun; he successfully trained a roly poly to go through a maze. But it warmed my heart this morning when Maddox said that he missed having BSS and wanted to restart them.

We decided to ride our bikes to the nearby gliderport at the Boulder County Airport. It's a great place to watch the gliders take off and land, and you can wander among them and occasionally the boys even get to sit in them.

On the way, we rode by a pond and heard some splashing in some trees. I glanced down and some some activity right by the waters edge. We stopped our bikes to check it out, and it was a bunch of fish, probably carp, spawning (if that's the right word). They were paired off, and making a large commotion in the very shallow water at the pond's edge. We were able to walk up and watch the action from about 6 feet away.

It was a wonderful nature moment that doesn't happen often enough in the city environment. Because Boulder has large public open spaces surrounding the city, we have more than most, including seeing a coyote last week and the ubiquitous prairie dogs, but this was pretty special.

I was worried, though, that we would have to explain the whole birds and bees thing, but the boys seemed satisfied to know that the fish were "making babies." Dodged that bullet for now ...

We're your government, and we're here to help

2007-03-29T17:21:00.000-06:00

Albeo has spent the last few weeks trying to unwind the 'help' that the government is providing us.

Recently, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has begun publishing a series of test results of solid state lighting (SSL) efficacy. Among their stated goals are to:

Provide objective product performance information to the public in the early years, helping buyers and specifiers have confidence that new SSL products will perform as claimed
Guide the development, refinement, and adoption of credible, standardized test procedures and measurements for SSL products

We recently found out that the DOE had purchased an Albeo fixture for testing, and they provided us with their results of that testing. We were dismayed, although not completely surprised, to learn that their results differed dramatically from our own results; results that we had touted in our marketing materials.

Why are the results so different, especially since Albeo's results were measured by an independent testing lab? (In fact, the lab we used was just selected as one of five candidate laboratories in the country to conduct SSL product tests in support of the DOE SSL Commercial Product Testing Program.) There are two major reasons for the discrepancy:

The DOE includes the power supply in the measurement. Albeo does not, because we buy these power supplies from a third party, or our customer supplies them. (California does not include the power supply in its Title 24 efficacy standard.)
Efficacy results can vary dramatically with the product options (desired color temperature, use of a lens or a diffuser) and with lot-to-lot variations of LED component efficacy.

It turns out that the DOE ordered a version of our fixture that has the worst possible combination of characteristics. It's not wrong from them to do so, but it provides the opportunity for confusion among our customers.

For that reason, last week we published a news release to try to clear up the confusion. What's more frustrating is that, for our customers, efficacy is not commonly one of the top selection criteria for our part compared to other alternatives.

To be fair to the DOE and Jim Brodrick, Manager of the DOE's Lighting Research and Development program, (according to this article) they're just responding to a request from the solid state lighting industry for assistance. According to Jim,

“We have planned a number of commercialization-assistance activities to make certain that the DOE’s substantial investment in new SSL technology results in widespread use of these technologies and in large benefits to the US economy.”

However, isn't the free market better equipped to provide this kind of information, or to even decide if this information is useful?

If SSL is going to succeed, it will do so on its own merits when it is compared other available alternatives. The market is ruthlessly efficient in sorting these things out. It doesn't really need 'help' from Uncle Sam.

Getting the message right

2007-03-26T18:25:00.000-06:00

The other day at Albeo, we were interviewed by a writer for the Boulder County Business Report. While the reporter was nice enough and we chatted a long time, I'm not sure we got our points across. That's our own fault, because we hadn't identified what those points were.

I have posted in the past that I'm a marketing fundamentalist. One of the marketing fundamentals is identifying what your important corporate messages are, and making sure those messages are communicated at every opportunity. Well, we hadn't taken the time to do that and I think it will show in the final printed piece (due out in a week or so).

BCBR is not going to make or break us as a company, and the piece that gets printed will probably be fine. However, we will do better next time because next time might just be a make or break opportunity.

Keep it clear - use an elephant

2007-03-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

I saw a commercial yesterday for an insurance company. It was an eyecatching commercial because it had a huge talking gorilla in it. (You can see the commercial here.)

Actually, the gorilla caught my eye, then confused me to the point where I missed the product and the company. I had to use Google to track it down to reference it here.

Here's my problem with the ad. The basic setup is a guy leaves his company retirement party, gets into an elevator, and there's a huge gorilla in there telling him that his retirement nest egg isn't what it should be. Again, I missed the details on the product because I got hung up on the "800 pound gorilla in the room." It seemed like the ad was getting the metaphor mixed up with the elephant in the room.

The 800 pound gorilla is a metaphor for a large, uncontrollable force, like being partners with Microsoft. But that's not what the ad's gorilla was supposed to symbolize. He was supposed to symbolize the uncomfortable, unspoken, but obvious problem. That's the elephant in the room, not the 800 pound gorilla.

Then I looked up elephant in the room on Wikipedia, which states that it is "Also sometimes seen is the variant 800 pound gorilla in the room. This is a contamination from a separate idiom, '800 pound gorilla,' meaning a powerful contender."

So, if you're creating a commercial to get a message across about a product, do you really want your audience struggling with your 'contaminated idiom,' or do you want them listening to your message? Just use an elephant.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe everyone else got it.

More on artificial barriers to the free flow of goods

2007-03-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

Generally, I don't intend to use this blog to make political statements. My posting yesterday was a rare exception, but now that I brought up the issue of free trade (or artificial barriers to it) it has come up again and I can't stop myself.

Today, NPR broadcast a story (here's a summary) about how the Bush administration is trying to make the distribution of food for aid more efficient. The administration is trying to change the Food for Peace program to allow food to be purchased closer to where it is needed than requiring that all food in this $1B program to be purchased from US farmers. American farmers, of course, are fighting this hard.

The thing that drives me crazy about this kind of stuff is the awkward consequences of these artificial barriers. According to the story, it takes an average of six months for food to arrive at the needed location after the request has been made. This could be reduced by months if more local sources are allowed. Are we trying to help the starving people, or the American farmers? Why don't we take the money that we save in shipping American produce (and thereby artificially propping up US prices) and use it to retrain the impacted American farmers to pursue alternative employment in a more needed area?

The best part of hearing this story on NPR is that I had a chance to describe it to my 8 year old son and discuss it with him over dinner. I like sharing with him difficult problems with no clear answer as a bit of a mental and philosophical exercise.

His solution was remarkably simple. Buy a limited amount of local produce to only meet short-term needs, then replace the supply with American food when it is able to arrive. In that way, we help both the starving people and the American farmer. Brilliant.

Capitalism or communism?

2007-03-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

I just returned from several days in Shenzhen in southern China. This is only my second visit to China, and I find it a confounding country.

The Chinese people seem to be very entrepreneurial, always looking for opportunities for profit and willing to start new businesses at the drop of a hat. The Chinese government appears to encourage this behavior, giving the impression of supporting, even nurturing, capitalism.

But everywhere you look, you see the economic inefficiencies of the communist system of government. For instance, the way I got into Shenzhen was to fly to Hong Kong, then I took a bus across the border into China. Of course, at the Chinese border, I got off the bus, went through passport control, then reboarded my bus on the other side of the border. I thought that was it and we would then drive right into Shenzhen.

However, when we got to the edge of Shenzhen, the bus stopped again and they checked papers again. They seemed more concerned with the Asians on the bus than westerners like myself, and I asked my Chinese host what was going on. He stated that Shenzhen is a special economic zone and that Chinese citizens from other parts of the country were not allowed to enter without the proper papers.

I don't know what criteria they use to define that permission, but any artificial barrier to the flow of labor capital (or currency, or information, or anything else) means inefficiencies and inequities to me. (Can you tell I'm a free trader?)

Other examples of labor inefficiencies were everywhere. The new, modern, beautiful hotel where we stayed had a spa that covered one floor, with a pool, workout room, and spa service rooms. At the pool, there was a "California Juice Bar," where a woman stood ready to serve up smoothies. However, I never saw anyone in the pool the whole time I was there, but she stood there at her bar all day long.

Another example was the woman whose job seemed to be to clean off the tops of the stone benches in the formal garden across the street. That's all she did, all day, every day that I was there. How can that be a good use of the labor resources?

These are the kinds of stories we used to hear about the old USSR, and we know its fate. If China somehow manages to smoothly transition away from centralized planning to true capitalism, they will be a formidable economic power. But they need to remove these types of artificial barriers, and it's hard to see how they can do that and remain consistent with communist rule.

I'm making a public commitment

2007-03-01T17:33:00.000-07:00

I hereby announce that I am going to do Triple Bypass again this year. For those of you who don't know, it's one of the most difficult citizen's bike rides in the nation, with over 10,000 feet of climbing on a 120 mile course through the Rockies.

I have done the Triple Bypass once, in 2001. It was amazingly difficult, and I spent a couple of months in physical rehabilitation recovering, but it was one of the greatest events I have ever done.

I am finally getting around to committing the time to do it again. The reason that I'm telling all of you about it is that the more people I tell that I'm going to do it, the more likely it is that I actually will. Training for Triple is a huge time commitment, and it's very easy to let it slide when other things come up. This announcement is just my small way of ratcheting up the pressure on myself so that I follow through.

Maybe soon I'll publicly commit to writing that Next Great American Novel that's been floating around in my head.

Act like you've been there before

2007-02-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

The Albeo team spent a day this week with a very large furniture manufacturer that is considering replacing the fluorescent fixtures in their furniture with LED fixtures. They have been actively researching LED fixture companies and have visited several to help identify one with which to engage.

Early in their investigation they discovered that LED innovation is not coming from large, established lighting manufacturers but from small startups like Albeo. (I'll describe the reasons for this in a later post.) Since they are a manufacturing powerhouse, they have a healthy concern about partnering with a small company that is new to manufacturing, and they brought along a supply chain management representative specifically to characterize that risk.

The day was pretty successful for Albeo, and a big part of that success is because we nailed that issue. Not because we have terrific manufacturing processes in place; we are truly a small company and we are still developing these methods. However, our manufacturing guys were very effective in showing this potential customer that we know what terrific manufacturing processes are and we are on the road to implement them. In other words, we showed them that we are a big company in the making; we have been there before and we know how to get there.

We clearly impressed them, and it really made me wonder what they saw when they visited our competitors. To me, this doesn't seem like rocket science. To become a big company, you do the (good) things that big companies do, even when you're small.

David Cohen recently posted on his Colorado Startups blog about startup ideas, in which he made the point that it is rare for a successful startup to have a completely unique idea. Rather, startups typically have several competitors with similar ideas, and the successful ones just execute better. In his words, "embrace competition, then go kick some ass. Do it better, smarter, or make it easier."

To me, a big part of that is acting like you've been there before.

I'm a marketing fundamentalist

2007-02-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me yesterday how I can be comfortable marketing such a wide range of products. Over my career, I have marketed semiconductors to the data networking, telecom, and storage markets; telecom equipment to the carriers; branding consulting services to various companies; project software to small and medium businesses; and now LED light fixtures for residential and commercial applications.

I thought about it for a bit and concluded that it's because I'm a marketing fundamentalist. What does that mean? It means that the fundamentals of marketing apply no matter what the product, service, or market. The fundamentals are the things we learned in business school, like the three Cs and the four Ps, and Porter's five forces. If you can really understand those fundamentals and can intelligently apply them, then you can really market anything, and that's what I try to do with any product or in any market. I know that if I get the fundamentals right, I'll do well.

What I am not is a market visionary. These are the people that can see the future, that can anticipate customers' needs before the customers do, that can extrapolate from where things were, through where they are now, to where they will or won't be. I love working with people like that, because I complement them well. They envision, I execute.

Another terrific Martini Group

2007-02-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

We got together for another Entrepreneurs Martini Group a couple of nights ago at Laudisio, and it was terrific because it reminded me what I love about these people. I haven't spoken to many of them since our last gathering sometime in the fall, but they started three completely new companies started in that time!

I don't know how much I can say about any of these companies, so I'll refrain from saying anything. (You'll have to come to the next one to learn about them.) But I am continually amazed by the group's creative energy and willingness to take on absurd levels of risk to create something really cool. I love the entrepreneurial culture of Boulder.

(And wow, the new Laudisio is so dramatically different from the old one in North Boulder. I love the new one. The bar area was comfortable and perfect for our group. Gina and I had dinner there after the group disbanded, and the food was as terrific as it has always been. But the atmosphere is completely different. The old Laudisio was charming and intimate, where the new one is big, bustling, modern, and urban. Not bad, just way different.)

The problems with MLM

2007-02-16T05:18:00.000-07:00

A while back, I posted about Dragonfly Innovation. In that post, I mentioned that their sales channel strategy was multilevel marketing (MLM). If you're unfamiliar with that term, it refers to the old Tupperware sales model, home parties put on by commissioned sales reps, with a multilevel commission structure where reps get paid not only on their own sales, but on the sales of reps that they recruited. I promised in that post to share some thoughts on MLM, and running into the Dragonfly founders Scott and Susan Dalgleish at the Entrepreneurs Martini Group last night reminded me that I hadn't done so, so here goes.

MLM is a very popular sales model for many companies. It is overwhelmingly targeted at the stay-at-home mom, because it provides her a part-time income that she can scale as she desires and that she can work on according to her own schedule. That kind of flexibility just isn't available anyplace else.

Because MLM is targeted at these moms and, for the most part, they're going to be selling to other moms, the products and services tend to be oriented toward moms: indulgences like beauty products, jewelry, clothing, or lingerie; children's products like Dragonfly or Discovery Toys; or kitchen products like Pampered Chef. (I have also recently seen MLM plans for investment services, although I'm not sure I understand that model.)

My impression, backed by no data whatsoever, is that there has been an explosion of MLM offerings in the past decade. It could just appear that way to me because I have come to a point in my life, married with two young kids, that I'm in the middle of the target zone for these kinds of offerings. Or there could actually be far more offerings because of various social or economic trends, and I believe this is the case.

The desire for higher standards of living (bigger cars and houses, better vacations, etc.) has led to a dramatic rise in two-income households, which has put immense pressure on family life. MLMs offer at least a partial income alternative that allows moms to stay at home, easing those family pressures, but still helping the family checkbook. And the promise of MLMs is that, when the mom wants to increase her income, she just needs to increase her effort, signing more reps and having more parties. This is why I think there has been a big rise in MLM offerings.

But, as in so many things in life, it's not quite that easy. If the mom has preschool-age kids, then she doesn't have a lot of time during the day to work on sales or recruitment, but in the evening she's exhausted from taking care of the kids all day. If her kids are in school all day and she has some more time, she has the opportunity to put in the hours to grow her business. However, her parties, the events that actually make her money, are almost always in the evenings, which takes her away from her family, when spending more time with her family is why she's not working full-time anyway.

And then, after she has worked through her entire personal network of friends, she needs to start essentially cold-calling acquaintances or friends-of-friends. That's hard. That's real sales, not just selling to friends, and most people just aren't cut out for that.

There are obviously exceptions to these issues I raise, but I'm just pointing out that it's not necessarily a perfect option for the rep mom.

It's also not a perfect option for the startup company trying to establish sales channels. If there has indeed been an explosion of MLM offerings, then how do you make yourself stand out from the others? Marketing dollars. And if you want to grow fast, then you'll need to hire paid, direct sales reps in each region in which you want to get established. Sales dollars. Lots of dough to spend in a crowded marketplace. That's a tough road.

A terrific physics science kit for BSS

2007-02-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

I have probably cursed my kids to always receive science-related birthday presents because everyone knows we do Big Science Saturday. For Ryan's last birthday, he received a physics kit and we finally got around to giving it a go yesterday.

This is one of the best science kits of any kind that I have ever used. It's the Physics Workshop from Thames & Kosmos. What makes it the best?

The build quality of the equipment is very high.
There are 37 unique experiments included that all appear to build logically on one another. Although we only did the first so far, a quick skim of the workbook indicates that they each experiment appears to be entertaining and informative.
Everything is included, except the occasional household item. (Yesterday's experiment required thread, a couple of potatoes, and a wooden matchstick.)
The experiments are sufficiently entertaining that Maddox, who's four, is able to participate, even though the kit is designed for kids eight and up.
Best of all, the workbook is terrific. At 64 full pages, it clearly explains how to perform each experiment and provides a narrative that the kids can understand.

One potential shortcoming was highlighted to me by Scott Dalgleish of Dragonfly Innovation in a brief conversation last night. (I'll write about some of his other comments in a coming post.) He asked if the experiments encourage the kids to explore follow-on steps based on what they learned.

For instance, yesterday we learned about gravity and how gravitational force, mass, and acceleration might be related. The creative next step that Dragonfly would provide is to encourage the kids to find other examples of how force, mass, and acceleration might be related. For instance, remember when we launched rockets and lost our rocket? Lots of force, not much mass ... lost rocket.

Given that relatively minor shortcoming (which I should be able to creatively address myself), I love this kit. I hope their other kits are of the same quality, because I'm looking forward to buying one of their chemistry kits next.

Is it martini time already?

2007-02-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Entrepreneur's Martini Group is getting together again, following a brief hiatus. We're gathering in the bar area at Laudisio's at 29th Street (303-442-1300) on February 15 at 5:30. If you're a startup junkie in the Boulder area, please stop by, introduce yourself, and toss one back with us.

SharedPlan is number one

2007-02-04T14:15:00.000-07:00

People sometimes forget that project management software does not have to come from Microsoft. In the world of alternative PM software suppliers, SharedPlan was recently ranked number one by www.project-management-web.com.

That's the good news. The bad news is that many of the features and benefits that make SharedPlan truly unique, like a private project server for improved collaboration, or an issue tracker for monitoring items related to a project, were never mentioned.

We still have some marketing work to do.

BSS project - making paper

2007-02-03T17:05:00.000-07:00

For Big Science Saturday today, the family made paper. It was much easier than I expected, and our papers turned out terrific. See for yourself.

The boys now know how paper is made, sort of. They know how it's made from recycled paper. I tried to explain how it's made from trees, but they didn't seem to have that look of recognition in their eyes. And it was pretty hopeless explaining how continuous paper production might work.

Oh, well. All I hope to do is expose them to concepts. I'm not a teacher. I just like this stuff.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

2007-02-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the NY Times (registration may be required) started off with this single line:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Brilliant stuff. Why? Because, even though the article went on for twelve (twelve!) pages, it summarizes what the author is trying to state about what people should eat for maximum health. If you don't get it from that line, the author explains everything you need to know in the first paragraph:

Eat food. Real food, whole food. Not prepared foods. Not processed foods. Not fortified foods.
Not too much. Pretty self-explanatory.
Mostly plants. Meat should be approached more as a side dish than a centerpiece.

I will probably remember that line for the rest of my life, and even attempt to put it in practice. (We generally don't do too badly in our house, but there's certainly room for improvement.)

Why is this line so important to me? Because, as a marketer, it is the holy grail of messaging, the simple, instantly memorable phrase that says everything that's important, and nothing else. It is a remarkably difficult thing to achieve.

It is now inserted into my personal lexicon of aphorisms, right next to "Bears get rich. Bulls get rich. Pigs go broke."

How do they treat cabin fever in Minnesota?

2007-02-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

The consensus in Boulder seems to be that we've all had enough of this winter weather. Enough already. Seriously. It's not funny anymore.

My wife and I met in graduate business school in New England, and moved to Boston when we graduated in 1993 (still dating at the time). We lived downtown in a couple of very fun neighborhoods, surrounded by many of our fellow alumni and having a terrific time.

Then came the winter of over 100 inches of snow. Cold every day, with the snow never melting, and the sun never shining. Mounds of plowed snow, brown, smelly, probably hiding dead animals, and eating up precious parking spaces. It sucked.

Gina and I decided it was time to move. I grew up in Colorado, and knew that Colorado was a much more tolerable winter state than Massachusetts (or Chicago, where her family lives). What makes Colorado winters so livable is the regular sunshine (Colorado gets over 300 days of it a year) and warm days throughout the winter. Sure, we'll get a big snow, but two days later it's gone and we're riding our bikes. Colorado was the place for us, and we moved to Boulder in 1995, and we love it here.

But not this winter. This is that same Boston winter that we left. It has been cold and snowy since December 20, with only a couple days of sunshine and no sight of even 50 degrees. I have shoveled our driveway and walk at least 10 times so far this winter (we're not even halfway through it!), and I probably only do that 6 times any other year. My four-year-old son told me at dinner this evening that he needs a Bahamavention. It's really bad.

So, my question is, how do they do it in Minnesota? This must be what their winter is like every year. What do they do to avoid insanity? You can't tell me that hockey is the answer. Or the Mall of America. Or ice fishing. What else is there?

I don't get it, but I need some answers fast or I'll need a Bahamavention too.

A new SharedPlan milestone

2007-01-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

Early in 2006, SharedPlan established a public repository for project plans. Users can download SharedPlan's free version, OpenPlanning, create plans, and save them in the public repository. Alternatively, they can open someone else's plan and use it as a basis for their own plan.

Why would they do that? Because people love to share information, and love to learn from others.

How do we know? Because we now have over 1000 plans in the repository. 1000!

Now, many of them are simple test plans saved by users trying to learn about the tools. But there are plans for building and landscaping houses, putting on a wedding, doing chemistry experiments, and many other things. There are also a few wacky ones, like this new one listing a Brit's lifetime goals.

We don't know how all of this is going to turn out, or what the repository is going to grow into, but it fun watching it.

The promise and challenge of marketing at Albeo

2007-01-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

You have probably seen LED lighting. I'm certain you have seen LEDs.

Red, green, and blue LEDs are the power-on indicators for your consumer electronics, and high-power LEDs are used in traffic lights, auto brake lights, and bicycle headlights. Over the last decade, LED manufacturers have figured out how to make them white, and they continue to make them ever brighter. This has enabled them to begin being used in general lighting applications.

Compared to traditional incandescent, fluorescent, or halogen lighting, LEDs are still the most expensive light source (per lumen), but they have some unique, valuable characteristics:

They are as efficient as fluorescents
They have no glass to break
They don't break when vibrated
They only use safe, low voltage
They last many years before they die
They are cool to the touch
They have no hazardous materials (fluorescents have mercury)
They are quite small

So, here's the marketing challenge that Albeo faces: finding the niche applications that value some of the above features enough to pay the price for LEDs. Or, more accurately, choosing which of the several dozen niches that Albeo should pursue.

The phone rings all day long at Albeo with new customers interested in Albeo's lighting products. This is good news and bad. It's certainly good that there is clear demand, but it is very taxing on a small company's limited resources to try to sell to a very broad range of customers.

Many of these niche applications, while they can be quite large, are very independent of other applications. For instance, one market that would likely value LED lighting is the RV market. RVs tend to shake most forms of lighting to early failure, and they need efficient lighting to run on batteries. This sounds like a perfect solution for LEDs, particularly in high-end platforms.

The problem is that the channels used to sell to the RV market, and the communication vehicles used to reach it, are completely independent of those used for any other vertical application. That means that the company would not be able to leverage any marketing and sales investment in the RV vertical into any other vertical. For a small company, these investments are precious, so choosing the markets to pursue for early and maximum ROI becomes a critical decision.

Not that I'm complaining, because these are great problems to have. LEDs are going to displace many other forms of lighting over the next couple of decades. We just need to make sure we position Albeo to be the leader of that transition.

Another startup I'm working with

2007-01-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have posted several times here about SharedPlan Software, whom I have been working with for a couple of years. SharedPlan continues to develop and release products that deliver on their vision, and their revenue continues to grow.

However, like many entrepreneurs, I tend to be involved with more than one startup firm at a time because they develop at different rates and have different needs over time. For this reason, I also started working with another startup, Albeo Technologies, Inc., a few months ago. Albeo is developing and marketing a range of white LED light fixtures for use in the residential and commercial marketplace.

Working with two different startups simultaneously certainly can be taxing, but I find it keeps my marketing tools sharp. Marketing software over the Internet and light fixtures through various traditional channels would seem to be very different exercises, but at the end of the day it's still all about marketing fundamentals: identifying needs, defining products to meet those needs, and telling potential customers about those products.

In a subsequent post, I'll describe some of the challenges Albeo faces right now. I'm excited about the opportunities for LED lighting and looking forward to helping define the strategy to pursue some of those opportunities.

SharedPlan had an enormous 2006

2007-01-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have been playing with SharedPlan's new Issue Tracker, a new web-based issue tracking and reporting capability within TeamServices. It's a terrifically flexible, useful tool, even if the issues are not associated with any particular project.

As I was using Issue Tracker, it occurred to me what a huge 2006 SharedPlan had. While the company did not meet all of its business goals, it certainly exceeded all product development targets. Roger compiled a list of the accomplishments on his blog. When one considers that list in light of the very small number of available resources, it's truly remarkable.

Roger also requested suggestions for what users would like to see in 2007. I think those suggestions will be bounced against some of the recurring items that pop up in the support forum to help define the future direction. I'll be interested to see what makes the list.

Hats off to the SharedPlan team for a great 2006, and I'm looking forward to an equally creative 2007.

Someone please start this business

2007-01-03T20:14:00.000-07:00

I have an idea for a business. I have so many other things on my plate that I don't have time to pursue it myself, so I offered the idea to a few of my friends and relatives to see if they were interested. Since no one has yet taken me up on it, I'm now providing the idea to you readers.

I have often heard that the best startup business ideas come from someone looking to buy a product or service and realizing that it's not available. This is an example of that. That's not to say that I think it's the best startup idea ever, because I don't think it's a BIG business. However, I want someone to start this business because I want to be a customer and there must be others like me.

So, what's the idea? A home-delivery science kit subscription service.

OK, I hear your collective "Huh?," so here's the deal.

In a prior post, I described Big Science Saturday (BSS), my on-and-off weekly science experiment fun time with my two sons. In another post, I described how we're now having fun with rockets.

I'm not trying to replace their traditional school science education, and it's difficult for me to say whether or not that science education is good or bad. I do this science stuff for other reasons.

I'm trying to expose my kids to science in as many fun ways as I can. Even if they're not going to have a technology-based career or work with science in any direct way, I want them to be comfortable with it. Obviously, technology is found in absolutely everything we do today so no matter what they choose to do, technology will have an impact.

In addition, engaging with my kids in doing science experiments allows me to interact with them in an intellectual way that is just not available through the other activities we do, like riding bikes, or going to ball games. Even going to zoos and museums or my helping them with their homework does not provide the intellectual engagement combined with fun in the way that performing experiments together does. Science and technology form such a large part of every aspect of my life that I can't imagine living without it, and I want to be able to relate with them on that level.

For these reasons, I have probably performed 30-40 BSSs over the last 2-3 years. Now, while my motivations for doing BSS may be somewhat unique among other parents, I believe the concept of BSS would be widely popular. As evidence of this, when I was doing BSS regularly for several months, other parents in the neighborhood started asking if their children could attend. Eventually, I had 5 or 6 kids on any given Saturday, which indicates that the interest might broader than just oddballs like me.

The popularity of BSS with my kids and others led to the problem that begs for a business solution. In essence, the time and effort required to come up with new and interesting experiments got to be too great. Yes, you can buy all kinds of science kits, but to create a regular activity based on one-off science kits, while ensuring a quality learning and fun family experience, continuity of concepts, no redundancy, etc., is a huge commitment that a working parent just can't provide.

So, there's my long-winded reasoning for why a subscription science kit service makes sense. Here are the some aspects of the service:

Customers would purchase a subscription to receive an experiment kit, probably once every other week.
The kits would include all required materials (except for maybe common household materials, like baking soda), complete directions, an explanation of the science for the parent, and an explanation of the science for the child, including suggested follow-on questions or projects.
The kits would follow a logical progression, i.e. a curriculum, that is geared to the age of the child. For instance, when a customer subscribes, they provide their child's age, and they'll start receiving kits appropriate for that age. Over time, the kits would work through topics in physics, chemistry, plant biology, animal biology, etc.

The company (let's call it Big Science Saturday, Inc., or BSS for short) would not necessarily have to create the experiments itself. There are lots of quality science materials available, and BSS could work with these existing suppliers to make minor alterations to their kits to fit within the BSS program.

Alternatively, BSS could partner with someone like Discovery Science stores to provide another revenue stream. BSS may even be able to get some startup capital from educational grant money.

I recently blogged about Dragonfly Innovation, which is developing creativity kits and marketing them through multilevel marketing techniques. There may be a potential partnership there, as well.

So, there's my idea. Someone please do it, so I can be your first customer. You can even have the name Big Science Saturday. Just do it, please.

Google is the "serious" search engine?

2006-12-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

This morning, Roger pointed me to this blog posting about the top search results for 2006 for three of the major search engines. While the posting is pretty humorous, it may explain SharedPlan's pay-per-click (PPC) results with Google and Yahoo.

Because SharedPlan transacts all sales through the website, PPC advertising is the largest component of the company's marketing spend, and the company advertises on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Even though the search terms SharedPlan purchases are about the same on all of them, the productivity of each engine is dramatically different.

For search-only results (ignoring content results so that I can compare apples to apples), Yahoo provides about half the number of clicks that Google does. (MSN numbers are so small that I'm not even going to describe them.) Given their relative share of total search volume, that may not be that surprising. However, they differ dramatically in their clickthrough rates, with Google providing six to seven times greater clickthrough rates. The difference becomes more magnified when you consider the rate a which these clicks become conversions, which in the case of SharedPlan means when the prospect downloads trial software. The conversion rate for Google is 2.5 times that of Yahoo.

There are a lot of factors that may lead to these differences, like the ads for Google are structured and displayed differently than for Yahoo, even though we use the same messages in each. Alternatively, the explanation could just be their different users, as illustrated by Nicholas Carr's list.

Or it could just be black magic ...

A birthday spectacle like I've never seen

2006-12-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

Gina's graduate school roommate, Cathy, is turning 40. Her husband, one of the founders of a large hotel operating company, decided to throw her a huge surprise party. They live in Old Greenwich, CT, and held the party at a New York boutique hotel, the SoHo Grand.

Gina and Cathy and their other two roommates still get together for girls' weekends every year or two, but other than that our families don't really interact that much. However, I was intrigued to go to it, mostly to see the spectacle.

And what spectacle it was.

The day started with a small group of friends joining Cathy for some beauty pampering. This was the diversion to let Cathy think that her birthday was going to be a more low-key affair. Given that they booked the penthouse suite of another boutique hotel, the Tribeca Grand, for the day and brought in all of the stylists and equipment from a smoking hot local salon (whose clients include Gwynneth, Gisele, and several other name-dropping-worthy celebs), I'm not sure "low-key" was achieved.

120 of Cathy's closest friends gathered at the Grand Lounge at the Soho Grand (all rooms were gratis), where we started eating and drinking at 6. Delicious appetizers, including one of my favorites, caviar, were served by lovely young women dressed as elves. That is, the kind of elves Santa needs if he's only giving lingerie this year. The birthday girl arrived promptly at 6:30.

At 8, we moved to a different room where dinner was served, including lamb chops, seared beef, salmon, sushi bento boxes, on and on. As we were eating, we were treated to a brief performance by the Manhattan Transfer, who stopped by on their way to another concert. The freakin' Manhattan Transfer!

At 10, we moved up to the penthouse suite, where we were treated to yet a third round of food, including White Castle style 'sliders,' crab cakes, and on and on (again). The elves accompanied us upstairs and were joined by some go-go dancing elves, wearing even less and platform dancing to the live R&B band.

At 11, we were treated to a video montage of Cathy's life and a three-tier cake that looked remarkably like a wedding cake.

At 12, the police arrived to shut down the band because neighbors were complaining from the street, 17 floors below.

At this point, Gina and I were beat. Please recognize that we were still on Colorado time, so our biological clocks were screaming that it was almost 10:30, far past our bedtime. We went down to our room, which happened to be on the 16th floor, directly below the party. Gina claims that she woke up at 2 to lots of screaming upstairs, so I guess it went at on at least until then. I did not wake up to share the experience with her.

Oddly, the whole spectacle had much the same feel as a wedding. Probably the most enjoyable aspect for me was to see the Connecticut couples that lead such different lives than I do. For instance, we heard several conversations comparing nannies and discussing corporate mergers and acquisitions, and not a single one debating carbon fiber versus titanium road bikes.

I truly appreciate the opportunity to attend the spectacle, and it was good to catch up with some old friends. For my 40th birthday, Gina took me to dinner with about four other couples that we're close to, and it was one of the most memorable evenings of my life. Memorable for quality moments shared with good friends, not for the Manhattan Transfer and caviar. That's really more my style.

The loss of neighborhood culture

2006-12-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Our friend Mary Ann lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She's a block from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and across the street from the Czech embassy. (Strangely, there was a twelve-foot inflatable rat on the sidewalk in front of the Czech embassy. I can't say that I fully understand the cultural implications of that.)

She's on the corner of 83rd and Madison Avenue, and along Madison Avenue there are many tiny little retailers: butchers, bakeries, delis, wine stores, shoe and specialty clothing stores, on and on. Gina and I spent a few afternoon hours exploring some of these little nooks. We noticed, though, that there were large Banana Republic and Gap stores in the neighborhood, as well.

That evening at dinner, Mary Ann complained that, as rents increase, the small shopkeepers were being forced to move out and were being replaced by large chain retailers. The independent commerce that made this area unique is dying, being replaced by the same products that anybody can buy anywhere. This is why I have a big problem with franchise or chain restaurants, and I avoid patronizing them.

Now, I'm a big fan of small business owners, and I recognize that many local franchises are owned by local businesspeople. For instance, I have a friend that owns a Quizno's and another with several Supercuts stores. I also recognize that large national chains became successful because they have a product or service that works and that people want.

But because of their scale, when Macaroni Grill enters a local neighborhood, they have such large economic advantages over the little family Italian restuaurant that it becomes nearly impossible for the local restaurant to compete. A high volume restaurant, like Chipotle, has supply cost leverage that an independent local restaurant can't match, allowing them to, say, have a person that does nothing but make salsa, so the salsa you get is always the freshest possible. A small, independent family Mexican restaurant can't do that and still maintain the same profitability.

A couple of years ago, Tucson recognized that they were losing their local restaurant base and its associated culture, so the mayor formed a buying cooperative for independent restuarants. The cooperative allowed the independents to get some supply chain economies and helped improve their competitiveness.

The bottom line is that, unless the chain restaurant gives me something I can't get at the independent, I'm going to keep going to Murphy's or the Golden Lotus, rather than Red Robin or PF Chang's. I don't want to live in a world without the independents. Small is beautiful.

A run in Central Park

2006-12-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I got up and did one of my favorite travel activities; I went for a run. We were in NYC for a birthday party (much more on that later), and we stayed at our friend Mary Ann's home on the Upper East Side, a block from Central Park.

I have only been to New York a couple of times, and had never been in Central Park. It was a perfect morning for a run, with clear, sunny skies and about 60 degrees. There was actually a race going through the park at the time, with several thousand participants, but I avoided that. They close the streets through the park on weekends, so there are lots of runners and bikers.

The reason I love to run when I travel is that I see a city in a very different way when I'm running, and the distraction of the sightseeing makes the running time just fly by. I have run in Honolulu, London, Calgary, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, the French Alps, and Nice.

Central Park is not as big as I pictured it to be. It's big, maybe five miles north-to-south and a mile east-to-west, but the impression I've always had from maps, movies and TV shows made me think it was larger. I think it's just that the Manhattan island is pretty small.

There were cyclists riding a circuit around the park, which has to get pretty boring, but I was still envious. As much as I enjoy running through a new city, cycling through one would be even better.

One of the best things about living in Boulder and running in Central Park is that I felt like I could run forever. I did about five miles and could have done several more, even though I haven't been running much. I quit because my knees would have made me pay for it later. And since I found out that the opening band for this party is Manhattan Transfer, something tells me that I'm going to have to do some dancing later.

Has anyone seen our rocket?

2006-12-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

We enjoyed shooting our rocket so much last weekend that we decided give it another go, this time with the biggest rocket engine that would fit in it. I was curious how high it would actually go.

Has anyone seen it? Because we never saw it come down.

Using that engine in the Alpha III rocket is supposed to lift it over 1000 feet. Yes, 1000 feet. But I thought we were being pretty smart by using an engine with a very long delay before it blows its parachute. That way, even it if went up 1000 feet, it would have lots of time to fall back down to a more reasonable height before popping its chute, and the wind wouldn't carry it a mile away before it hits the ground.

The problem is that you can't see this rocket from 1000 feet. All we saw was a trail of exhaust smoke that went straight up into nothingness. It may actually have achieved low earth orbit. I hope it didn't interfere with the shuttle's work on the International Space Station.

We gotta buy another rocket. Maybe this time we'll write our phone number on it in case someone finds it.

Rockets are the greatest

2006-12-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but the combined commitments of the holiday season and Ryan's birthday always tend to wipe me out in December. Ryan's birthday is too close to Christmas, so we try to celebrate it early in the month. We did so yesterday.

When Gina and I discussed what kind of party we should throw for him, we discussed some common themes like going to some 'fun center' or something like that. I can't tell you how much I dislike those kinds of kids birthday parties.

As I posted recently, I'm always on the lookout for ways to expose my kids to science. I decided that it would be cool to shoot rockets at his party. I made and launched a lot of rockets when I was a kid, and thought it would be fun for him to experience the same thing. We asked him and he agreed, although I don't know if he really understood what it was all about. And I know Gina didn't know what to expect.

I took him to a local hobby shop and we bought a starter kit from Estes Rockets for about $35 or $40. It comes with everything you need for two launches, except for a few batteries. We also bought a few extra engines in case it was a big hit and the kids wanted more launches.

In the days leading up to the party, I played it up a little to make sure he was still excited about the rocket theme, and he certainly seemed to be. However, when we assembled the rocket, it took a lot more time than I expected, and he seemed to get a little bored with the concept.

Until we launched the first one. Holy cow.

Yesterday was a classic, beautiful Boulder winter day. We had just received about 8 inches of snow over two days, but Sunday was cloudless and perfectly sunny, if a little cold. We launched from a snowy park a couple of blocks from the house.

This thing shot several hundred feet in the air in about two seconds, disappearing to a little pinpoint in the blue sky, and everyone went crazy. It started to reappear as it fell, then the nosecone blew off with a little puff of smoke and the parachute deployed perfectly. The kids chased down the falling rocket, and we had three more perfect launches.

As I watched that rocket shoot up into the deep blue sky and smelled the sulphur in the exhaust, I was struck by a flood of childhood memories. I remembered the fascination of seeing my rockets disappear into the sky and trying to imagine what it would be like to ride one into that great unknown.

At that age, I wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot. I even thought about applying to the Air Force Academy, going so far as to get a recommendation from Colorado's Senator Gary Hart (remember him?). Eventually, my focus turned more to science than flying, but shooting that rocket brought so much of that childhood fascination back.

I don't know if Ryan is going to be as fascinated by it as I was, nor do I care. But I want to give him the opportunity to be, and I think I helped to do that. The party seemed to be a big hit with Ryan and his friends, and his buddy Jake told me that he was going to ask his dad for a rocket party for his next birthday, as well.

(But nobody got as big a kick out of that first rocket launch as Gina did. I think she thought this thing would pop up 50 feet in the air and fall down, and when it launched nearly out of sight, she went nuts. I love it.)

SharedPlan - the evil Huns

2006-11-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered this goofy website that identifies interesting mnemonics that can be made from your phone number.

I put in SharedPlan's phone number (303-845-4861) and the most interesting result was "30 Evil Hun 1."

If you need any help with SharedPlan, feel free to call the 30 Evil Huns at extension 1.

A day at the aquarium

2006-11-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

I avoided Black Friday by taking the boys to the Denver Downtown Aquarium. (I don't really get why they need the word "Downtown" in the name. It's not like there are many aquaria in the metro area.) We had not been to the aquarium since its former incarnation, Ocean Journey, and it has changed dramatically. In fact, although I only went to Ocean Journey a couple of times, there is little of Ocean Journey that I recognize in the new aquarium.

I say that even though the big exhibit tanks, with the sharks, coral reefs, and tigers haven't changed much, and the flash flood simulation is still there. But gone are the large displays of Colorado river life, i.e. 10 kinds of trout. Good riddance.

They have crammed many more revenue-generating activities in every possible area. Balloon animal-makers, palm tree climbing, much larger gift shop, sit-down restaurant, bar, gold-panning, etc. are everywhere. It's a little claustrophobic, but if it keeps this version of the aquarium solvent so that my kids can enjoy it for a few more years, I'm OK with it.

Overall, it's significantly improved, even with all the nickel-and-dime stuff everywhere. We had a terrific time.

Andy Goldsworthy

2006-11-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

Every several months, my lovely friend Loui accompanies her husband Rick on his sales trips to Colorado, and Gina (now nicknamed Rockhead, but that's the subject of another post sometime) and I always try to get together with them. Loui is always a very thoughtful gift-giver on these visits. For instance, on her last visit, she gave us Keb Mo's Keep It Simple, introducing us to this wonderful artist. I have since recommended this CD to several people.

This time, she introduced us to Andy Goldsworthy, by giving us both a book and a documentary DVD of his work. Both the book and the DVD are mesmerizing descriptions of how Andy creates art in nature and of nature, using materials he finds out in the woods or by the sea to create sculptures in the same environment.

These pieces often are soon destroyed by the same natural forces, such as the tide or the sun, that gave them life in the first place. I now can't get this concept out of my head, and I see parallels to it in so many things.

Don't worry, I'm not going to go all intelligentsia on you. I mean, I'm still the same guy who loves Old School, Evanescence, and Limp Bizkit. But Goldsworthy's ephemeral works are truly bewitching.

Changing the voice of the website

2006-11-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

At SharedPlan, we have been discussing our website a lot lately. In particular, Roger realized how the text sounded a little stiff and cold. We want the website to not only tell people what we do, but to do so in a way that we would do if the visitor were sitting in the same room with us. In other words, we want our website to reflect a little of the personalities at SharedPlan. So I have been gradually changing the 'voice' of the site over the last week or two, and I will continue to do so.

I make these changes, and really any website changes, with a little bit of trepidation, however. It's probably easy to take things a little too far, and all of a sudden we'll find ourselves written about on webpagesthatsuck.com.

I'm a big fan of that website. Today, they called out msdewey.com, Microsoft's horrible new search engine front end. Roger also highlighted this one on his blog.

Maybe I should think about it a little differently. In the spirit of "there is no such thing as bad publicity," maybe we should try to win one of their Worst Web Design Techniques Featured on WPTS in 2006 awards. Then again, maybe not.

Buyer's remorse

2006-11-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

Last night, Gina and I joined several friends to attend a fundraiser for Dental Aid, a local organization that provides dental health services to those who can't afford them. The black tie event included both silent and live auctions.

The silent auction included dozens of items, including dinners at local restaurants, spa services, gift baskets, all kinds of stuff. Gina donated a gift subscription to her Flying Five Coffee (and she was very pleased that it sold for quite a premium over the retail value).

The big-ticket items were reserved for the live auction, which was MC'ed by a professional auctioneer. The items included a denim jacket that had been hand decorated by Dave Matthews, various vacation packages, and other unique offerings.

This was my first live auction like this, and the auctioneer certainly had a gift for whipping up the excitement in the room. I think both Gina and I were a little too caught up in that excitement.

This morning, we're both nursing healthy doses of hangover and buyer's remorse. Neither of us is a budding photographer, so did we really need that 6-hour photography workshop?

I guess it all goes to a good cause ...

"Share the Road" license plates

2006-11-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

I am an avid recreational bicyclist. In particular, I'm a road cyclist. In good years, I'll get in over 2000 miles riding on the shoulders of our local streets and highways. (My current bike has over 13,000 miles on it, so I think it's time to upgrade. That's a whole other post, though.)

Bicycle Colorado is a terrific and effective local advocacy group. For instance, they recently worked closely with the Colorado State Patrol and convinced them to rescind their new cap on the number of cycling event participants.

They're now sponsoring a petition to create a "Share the Road" Colorado automobile license plate. Proceeds from each plate will fund bicycle safety education programs across Colorado. If you'd like to sign the petition, go here.

And thanks for sharing the road with me.

Microsoft just doesn't get it

2006-11-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I posted about my father-in-law Fred's search for an MP3 player. At the end of that post, I said:

"I will enjoy seeing the failure of Microsoft's new Zune player, as I enjoyed seeing the failure of Dell's."

It's not that I wish ill on Microsoft (although I strongly dislike how their monopolistic behavior has stifled software innovation over the last two decades), I just believe that they don't get it. If they are unable to push their view of the world onto the consumer, then they don't know how to compete. They fundamentally don't know how to define and market products if they don't have a huge market share hammer to wield. So, when I say that I will enjoy seeing Zune fail, I mean that I will enjoy seeing them schooled in a competitive marketplace.

What made me revisit this topic? I just read this article on Forbes.com, which has several examples of how the folks at Zune just don't get it. Granted, it's an opinion piece based on sketchy hard data, but the examples are exactly what I would have expected from Microsoft.

[Just after I originally posted this, I stumbled across an actual review of the Zune. This author makes several similar points as the one above, but he closes with an interesting thought:

"Version 1.0 of Microsoft Anything is stripped down and derivative, but it is followed by several years of slow but relentless refinement and marketing. Already, Microsoft says that new Zune features, models and accessories are in the pipeline."

Of course, as Zune is working hard to catch up to what iTunes/iPod already has, Apple continues to march onward.]

Got any Big Science Saturday ideas?

2006-11-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

About two years ago, my older son was given a science kit of some kind for his birthday. It had about a half dozen experiments, most of which needed adult assistance to execute. We performed an experiment each Saturday until we had worked through them all. We started calling that time "Big Science Saturday," and both boys seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

Since then, we have worked through a few other kits and lots of kids' science books. Big Science Saturday (BSS) comes and goes as we have materials or ideas and as I am able to work it into our schedules. We have probably performed more than 50 different experiments.

Ryan is now approaching eight years old and Maddox is now four. We haven't done BSS for a few months. I'd love to restart the event by moving into more exciting experiments, with electricity, rockets, explosions, or other things that might capture the imagination of an eight-year-old (as well as a four-year-old).

I haven't had a chance to do a thorough search online yet, but can anyone point me in the right direction?

Training in Boulder for marathons

2006-11-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article (free registration required) on the training scene of top professional marathoners in Boulder. As always, I'm a little awestruck that these running superstars all converge on Boulder. (Check out my earlier post on the Japanese runners.)

My parents used to live in Albuquerque, and we would go visit them a couple of times a year. While I was there, I would frequently run around the perimeter of a local private school campus, which apparently was a favorite training loop from some Kenyan runners. (Albuquerque is at about the same elevation as Boulder.) They once passed me with their long, easy strides like I was standing still. At least, I think that happened. I'm not quite sure because I generally run in a haze of gasping exhaustion.

Airfares are suddenly really high

2006-10-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

My family lives in the Denver area, and my wife's lives around Chicago. Her aunt Yolanda's family lives in Rome, and Yolanda winters in Florida. We tend to alternate between Denver and Chicago for Christmas, but this year I thought it would be fund to spend Christmas with Yolanda's family (including Giulia) in Ft. Lauderdale.

Then we checked airfares. Wow. I expected something around $300 each, but it was more like $500. Even Chicago is high this year.

I'm not sure what the plan is now, but I think Florida is out. Bummer.

How to use SharedPlan software tools

2006-10-27T08:36:00.000-06:00

Based on the emails and phone calls that we receive from prospective SharedPlan customers, our product offerings can sometimes be confusing. We have put a lot of energy into addressing this problem in various ways:

We completely reworked our website in late August and early September, making it cleaner, simpler, and with a more logical flow. Based on various indicators, we believe the new design is working better. For instance, Google Analytics (see Roger's post on Analytics) are telling us that: our pageviews per visit have increased from about 3 in August to over 4.5 in October; and in August 50% of visitors stayed less than 10 seconds and 30% more than a minute; in October, 45% stayed less than 10 seconds and 33% more than a minute. In other words, visitors spending more time and seeing more of the site than before. Hopefully, this translates into better understanding of our products.
We created a special web page with brief usage examples. This page seems to work pretty well, because 87% of those that visit the page move further into the site.

We're not really finished with the process. I'm current writing a white paper which will go into much more detail about different project management environments in our target markets and how SharedPlan tools fit into that environment to improve project performance.

This is a continuing effort and if you have any constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it.

Giulia and the new Hamilton Wing of the DAM

2006-10-23T16:27:00.000-06:00

Gina's (that's my wife) cousin Giulia works at the Denver Art Museum. Giulia has a couple of degrees in art history, and she has a gift for describing art in terms that the average man (that's me) can relate to.

For example, her family has lived in Rome for years, and Gina had a small family reunion there a couple of years ago. (Gina's entire extended family is quite small, less than 20 people. I probably have twice that many cousins that I haven't even met. The Earles clan knows a little something -- or maybe not enough -- about procreation.) Giulia guided the family on a spectacular tour of the Vatican. If you have never been to the Vatican, it is filled with art, to the point where it all starts to look the same. By telling stories about the artist, the era in which he lived, and what he tried to do with the piece, Giulia was able to make each piece come alive, and weave all of the pieces in to a tapestry of culture and history. By the end of her tour, our little eight-person family group had swelled by 20 or 30 eavesdroppers.

I experienced something similar with Giulia at the grand opening of the DAM's new Hamilton Wing, the architectural marvel designed by Daniel Libeskind. We went to the event with several friends, none of which are particularly art-inclined. We saw some interesting, odd things, none of which we really understood. For instance, we spent some time in the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection, which is full of some truly bizarre, if not a little disturbing, pieces.

For instance, there's a large installation piece when you enter the room that has about two dozen headless, lifesize, identical Buddha (?) statues that look just like the two-thousand-year-old ones. In the place where the head should be, there are tiny little doll and action figure heads, suspended a couple of inches above the Buddha's necks. While all the statues were identical, each head was unique.

I'm looking at this thing, not knowing what to think. And the whole room is full of wonderfully bizarre pieces like this. Then Giulia gathered us together and explained that the Logans assembled pieces that illustrate the artists' interpretation of modern mixing of cultural or racial backgrounds and influences. For instance, the artist that created the Buddha piece is Asian, but raised in a Western environment, and was trying to comment on the Western influences on Asian culture. When viewed in the light of this tiny sliver of knowledge, the entire collection came alive for me, and I can't wait to return and spend more time with it.

I can't wait for my next opportunity to experience some of Giulia's enlightenment.

Braver than I

2006-10-20T17:26:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to post a photo of my son at the Butterfly Pavilion, a unique facility in Westminster, Colorado where you can commune with all kinds of bugs.

As many times as I have taken my boys to the Butterfly Pavilion, I have never been able to bring myself to let that tarantula (her name is Rosie) walk on me. He's a braver man than I.

Desperately seeking salesperson (Susan?)

2006-10-19T20:46:00.000-06:00

SharedPlan is on the verge of something big. After years of product development, and the introduction of some building-block products, we are now introducing the products that begin to deliver on the vision of the founder, Roger Denton.

Our initial products, SharedPlan Personal and Professional, were mostly sold to individuals, with a small percentage of sales being multilicense transactions. However, the new offering, ProPlanning, is an complete solution for midsize and larger businesses. We now need to change our selling strategy to address that market segment, so we have been putting feelers our for a salesperson to help us do so.

I recently forwarded the following email to some local groups I know:

SharedPlan Software (www.sharedplan.com; www.sharedplan.net) is a startup software company looking to accelerate our sales growth. We currently have over a thousand license holders, all of whom were captured using online marketing techniques and transactions with no salesperson involvement. We are now seeking to hire an experienced software salesperson.

Past sales came from products that we view as 'foundational' products; they were created as a means to get to where we are now, but not as final end products. We have just launched the new products that will now begin delivering on the company’s vision. We are now poised for significant growth and we are looking for an experienced enterprise software salesperson to drive that growth.

This position will initially be compensated with company equity only. SharedPlan is completely bootstrap-funded, with initial revenue but limited cash. We have four current contributors, one of which is full-time while the others have 'day jobs.'

The initial engagement would be part-time, working out of the candidate's home or from SharedPlan's world headquarters (the founder's basement offices), with flexible working hours. This is an ideal position for someone working in another position that wants a low-risk way to 'test-drive' a startup, or a stay-at-home mom looking for a way to re-enter the workforce.

If you'd like to learn more, please contact me directly.

If you know of someone in the Boulder area that fits this description, please point them my way.

I love Halloween

2006-10-19T15:51:00.000-06:00

I recently realized that I won't be home on Halloween. Halloween is a big event at my house, and trick-or-treating is huge in my neighborhood. We generally have 200-300 kids visit the house.

Usually, I go around with the boys while my wife stays home to greet the trick-or-treaters. I always wear a costume, and over the years my costumes have gotten ever more elaborate. Here's a shot of last year's, with my two boys:

My costume looks pretty unremarkable, but it was really cool (if I do say so myself) because Oscar the Grouch was a puppet. My arms are inside the trash can and controlling Oscar, and the arms in my sleeves are fake. As I said, it looks unremarkable, but in person, when Oscar popped up out of the can, people were mesmerized.

I had started planning this year's costume a month or two ago. (I always have some candidate ideas that I'm batting around in my head.) But now I'm going to be away on business. While I will be attending a couple of Halloween events on the prior weekend, it's just not the same. I guess I'll just have to table those costume ideas until next year.

The human capital VC

2006-10-15T07:14:00.000-06:00

I was recently introduced to Brian Tsuchiya, the founder of FirstWheel Venture Group. FirstWheel is a unique venture firm that, rather than providing capital in the form of cash, helps you raise human capital, essentially employees that work only for equity (sometimes called angel employees).

While angel employees are pretty common in early startups, the FirstWheel model is much bigger. Brian developed this model for his own company, Walking Orbit, which hired almost 100 people working for equity only. These people were located around the world (I think they were mostly software developers), and he spent many dollars and hours assembling the legal, financial, and technical systems to implement the business.

The issues that Brian had to resolve are very complex. For example, if the equity is distributed based on the employees' ongoing contribution, then the IRS is going to view that as income and want to tax it, which is a big problem for employees. Also, the company's equity structure can become exceedingly complex with so many shareholders with dynamically changing ownership. The systems Brian had to put in place must have been very robust.

He has now taken these systems and started FirstWheel as a new alternative to a traditional venture firm. He was recently written about in the Denver Business Journal. I spoke with him on the phone the other day, and he mentioned that he's pursuing patents on some of the technology he developed, and that he has a 41-page contract that angel employees sign that defines their participation and compensation. More broadly, his intent is to help companies like ours to implement this model, rather than seeking cash only. In exchange, we would pay his firm fees and equity.

I haven't yet met with Brian, but am planning to do so within the next week or so. I'm not yet convinced that this makes sense, either overall or for SharedPlan.

For instance, we coincidentally met a woman who had worked as a project manager at Walking Orbit. Her comments on the model were pretty mixed. On the negative side, she said that some potential employees either balked at the 41-page contract, or at least were concerned enough about it to feel the need to pay an attorney to review it for them. She also described the challenge of trying to manage projects to completion when her human resources all had other jobs and were working on her stuff when they could. Their availability was never very predictable.

I'll be interested in learning more when I meet with Brian.

Bring Freikers to your school!

2006-10-10T20:20:00.000-06:00

My older son, Ryan, is seven years old. I have been trying to develop his interest in riding bicycles, both because it's something I love to do and because I think it's something he could eventually be pretty good at it. Mostly, I think it's a great way to extend his horizons so he can explore more of his world.

So, we do a lot of family bike rides, probably three or four times a week all last summer. Most of those were pretty short, maybe just around the neighborhood or to the tire swing and treehouse about 2/3 of a mile away. I haven't been able to convince him to ride his bike to school yet, though. It's a longer ride, about two or three miles, pretty consistently uphill.

Recently, however, a local Boulder citizen started the Freikers (rhymes with "bikers", as in frequent bikers) program. The program offers prizes to kids to ride their bikes to school; the more they ride the cooler the prize. The riders tape a small RFID tag to their helmet and when they get to school, they just walk or ride their bike below a sensor that registers their participation that day.

Although Ryan showed a little interest in the program, he still balked at the possibility of riding all that way. But then he started seeing packs of kids riding by his bus stop on their way to school, and he saw all of the bikes in the bike racks (it's really amazing!), and realized that several of his classmates were riding.

So we finally all rode as a family to his school for the first time last Friday. It was definitely a little hard for him and we had to take it easy, but he did it, and he was very proud of himself. And I can't tell you how proud I was of him ...

I hope the Freikers program grows and spreads around the country, because it is so sorely needed, for so many reasons.

The need for a lead

2006-10-09T16:22:00.000-06:00

I had been considering writing a post on some of the challenges we at SharedPlan have faced on the fundraising front. Specifically, we have worked hard to find a lead investor that 'gets' our segment and business model.

David Cohen has just written an inciteful post on the "emotional angel investor," which pretty much exactly describes who we have been looking for. Of course, it's easy to understand the process to find that person, it's another to execute ... and still drive the business forward.

Fred's MP3 player search

2006-10-09T07:24:00.000-06:00

My father-in-law, Fred, recently wrote an email to the family requesting advice on MP3 players. He wants to buy one, and he's going to both buy music on line and rip his own CDs. You should also be aware that, while Fred is a long-time computer user, he's no techie or gadget guy.

I recommended the Apple solution to him, the iPod and iTunes, because it is brain-dead simple to use the complete solution. The software is easy to use, the store is cleanly integrated with the software, and the click-wheel controls and menus are all absolutely intuitive. In addition, the accessory offerings, like external speakers and carrying cases, are much broader because of iPod's market leadership position.

My sister-in-law, Laura, enjoys her Creative Zen Micro, which she uses to listen to her own ripped song collection.

Coincidentally, the NY Times published a review of the non-Nano MP3 players. While the title, "Singing the Praises of the Non-Nano," would indicate that they had raves for the other players, I certainly didn't get that feeling, particularly when you consider the complete offering.

The bottom line for me is that I have tremendous appreciation for Apple's design abilities, and even though I also sometimes bristle at their "sledgehammer marketing" (including their digital rights management stance), I will continue to lust after and buy their products.

And, I will enjoy seeing the failure of Microsoft's new Zune player, as I enjoyed seeing the failure of Dell's.

Entrepreneurs drinking martinis

2006-10-05T06:43:00.000-06:00

Last winter, Jeff Bisberg (a very smart guy, cofounder of Albeo Technologies, and a former coworker of mine at Picolight) and I started getting together for the occasional beer or martini to discuss our respective entrepreneurial activities and challenges. We were occasionally joined by SharedPlan's founder, Roger Denton, and we very much enjoyed the free-flowing conversation, ideas, and of course, cocktails.

At some point, Jeff suggested that we start inviting a broader set of people involved in, or at least interested in, entrepreneurship in Boulder. We did so, and 'officially' formed the Entrepreneur's Martini Group. (Someday, in a future post, I'll describe my fondness for the classic martini.) The group has now grown to an invitation list of about 25, and we typically get 12-18 at any event. We meet every 6-8 weeks at a local watering hole.

I enjoy these meetings immensely, because I get very jazzed by the creative energy of these people. Some that have attended in the past include:

Pete Rast, founder of Stratasearch, a stock technical analysis software tool
Pawel Osiczko and John Horne, who together are a fountain of business ideas and are bound to eventually find the one that works for them
Scott Dalgleish, who, along with his wife Susan (who should also attend in the future), founded Dragonfly Innovations
Steve Cox, formerly engineering director of Crosswalk but who is now starting something involved with multiprocessor ICs
Andrew Funk, who started C-Port, an IC company that was acquired by Motorola, a few years ago and is currently looking for the next opportunity
John Ives, founder of a market prediction company (I'm not sure how public he is about the company, yet)

Lots of fascinating conversation, and always good drinks. I feel humbled to be around such smart, fun people, and lucky to live in a place that fosters such entrepreneurial spirit.

If you would like to join us at our next outing, feel free to comment below.

Tech financing trends in Colorado

2006-10-01T20:58:00.000-06:00

I recently posted that I went to a Rockies Venture Club meeting. The main event of the evening was a panel discussing the state of technology financing in Colorado. The panel included Seth Levine of Mobius Ventures, Gary Held of CTEK, and Alice Kotrlick, Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

I won't bore you with a synopsis of the evening, but the panelists made a couple of points that I thought were significant.

Seth spoke a little about the cost of starting a Web 2.0 company. Part of why he mentioned this is because I had just pitched SharedPlan as such a company. It has been a bit of a challenge to estimate how much cash we will actually need, so I was keenly interested in these comments. He first stated that enterprise software companies always require $25 million got get going; that's just what they cost. (Salesforce spent about $50 million before generating positive cash flow.) However, the social network dynamics of Web 2.0 let those companies have significantly smaller marketing budgets than traditional companies. Seth stated that these characteristics might mean that they need $8-10 million, rather than $25 million. Sharedplan has some social aspects, since we're building online project communities, but it's difficult to predict the benefits of communal viral activity on our cash flow.

Gary also made an interesting point. He started by describing the growth of organized angel investor groups like CTEK, stating that there are something like 90 of them nationwide now. But then he went into the funding success rates of those who pitch to these groups. Nationwide, the average less than 2%, and West Coast Angels, probably the best known of these groups, last year examined over 600 investment opportunities, but only funded 3. Gary was quite proud that CTEK funded 5% of the companies they saw in the last year. I find those numbers remarkably low. Are there really that many problematic startups out there, or is the process broken?