Month: May 2007 Page 1 of 2

Now this sounds like a good idea.

Google Inc. (GOOG) said on Wednesday it had created Web software that runs both online, and offline, marking a sea change for the Internet industry by letting users work on planes, trains, spotty connections and even in the most remote locations.

The technology, called Google Gears, would allow users of computers, phones and other devices to manipulate Web services like e-mail, online calendars or news readers whether online, intermittently connected to the Web or completely offline.

By bridging the gulf between new Web services and the older world of desktop software, where any data changes are stored locally on users’ machines, Google is pushing the Web into whole new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), leader in the desktop software era.

While I remain delighted by my Mac and the applications that I use on it, I often find myself taking advantage of Google’s various on-line applications. And my wife uses those apps extensively in her business, so that she and her partner can communicate with each other and share info all the time no matter where they are.

So the ability to get that usefulness and apply it in situations where you don’t have web access sounds like a new “killer app” to me.

Here’s the link to the full story.
Technorati Tags:
Software, productivity, Google

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has posted a new Alertbox article called The Myth of the Genius Designer. He makes the case that even the best designer is not a replacement for sound user testing of a Web-based product. (Or other product designs, for that matter.)

It’s an argument well worth considering while you’re putting together your own plans, whether you’re working on a new piece of software, or a user guide or an event plan. Putting the end user’s needs firmly in control of the process will benefit everyone, as Neilson points out:

The real question is not whether you should use a good designer, but whether using a good designer eliminates the need for a good usability person. It doesn’t.

It’s wrong to rely solely on a “genius designer” for several reasons:

* You must run your project with the team you actually have, not the team you wish you had. In most companies, you won’t find one of the world’s top 100 interaction designers waiting around to work on your project.

* Design is an inexact science; even if you have a superb designer, not all of his or her ideas will be equally great. It’s only prudent to reduce risk and subject design ideas to a reality check by user testing them with actual customers. (Remember, new ideas can be tested at low cost through techniques like paper prototypes.)

* How do designers get to be good in the first place? By learning which of their ideas work and which don’t. This feedback requires empirical data, which usability testing provides.

* Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail. And how can designers find out what customers need? Through user research.

* Nobody’s perfect. Even a very good design can be improved when you follow an iterative process of continuous quality improvements. For each step of the design, you should conduct a usability evaluation (testing or guideline review), and use the resulting insights as the step-climbing metric to drive your user experience to the next level of quality.

Several decades’ experience with quality assurance says that the best results come from following a systematic quality process, including reality checks every step of the way, rather than simply hoping that you got it right.

If you aren’t familiar with Nielsen’s usability work, I recommend you visit his website to find out more. He’s a guy who really practices what he preaches. For an example, read this explanation of why his site has almost no graphics.

Technorati Tags:
usability, design

When I’m struggling to find the right words for a particular project, I’ll grab just about any idea if it will help me get going again. Try googling Writers Block for a sample of just how desperate I can become.

But really, there’s nothing that works better than sitting down and reading something good. I get energized by writers who are in control of what they’re doing. I know that a lot of work goes into coming up with breezy, effortless prose that moves the point along to its inevitable conclusion. Like some wonderful things we come across in our daily life, it’s an art form. And the best artists make it look easy.

Today, searching for some relief from my temporary blocked-up-ed-ness I came across an article by Garrison Keilor in Salon.com. Keillor is the star of NPR’s Prairie Home Companion and a story-teller par excellence. He writes about what it means to be a writer, especially one with a deadline looming. And he’s got some good advice on how to deal with stress.

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? And the readers you most want (youth) are fixated on screens, not on paper. This is so depressing you want to tie a rock to your ankle and jump in the Mississippi, and if you remembered how to tie the knots that could hold a rock you might, but a long walk can bring you around.

I love the image of a writer caught in a trap chewing his leg off to avoid the looming deadline. There’s plenty more. I recommend it even if you’re not blocked up.

Link

Technorati Tags:
productivity, Writing

A telemarketer’s worst nightmare

Have you ever had the urge to turn the tables on a telemarketer? You know, make him or her wait on the other end of the line or figure out a way to make them feel as annoyed as you do?

Well, I found this recording of one guy who came up with quite the little scheme to make this telemarketer’s life really interesting.

Give it a listen by clicking this link.

Let’s slow things down a bit

Seriously slow. Remember years ago when you first saw those amazing pictures of a drop of milk exploding when it hit the ground? Or a speeding bullet, captured by a high-speed camera? I’ve always been captivated by slow-motion. Watching all the things that are happening so fast that you never realize what’s happening.

Well, now they’ve got cameras that will slow things down by up to 1000 times. That will stretch a second of action out to 15 minutes!

This short video gives a good sample of what they’re capable of. I don’t know what program this is taken from, but I’d like to see the whole thing. Let me know if any of you find it before I do.

Here’s the link.

Some serious guitar boogie

I haven’t featured a guitar video for awhile…but this one is worth the wait. Maybe it’s because I was tooling around on my own the other day, but listening to what a single guitar is capable of is a lot of fun. And if you like boogie, you’ll like this clip. It’s a bit long, but it will get your toes tapping.

Here’s the link

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags:
Friday fun

I’m in the fortunate position of not being inundated with e-mail anymore, thanks to not being part of a large organization. But in the past, I’ve been faced with dealing with hundreds of e-mails daily and struggling to figure out how to stay on top of it all.

Even now, with my daily email load significantly less, I’m still tempted to check my email more often than I should. As a result, I often let relatively insignificant matters derail my best intentions for getting things done.

So I’m always attracted (or is it distracted?) to articles with advice on how to gain back control of your in-box and other time-saving advice.

Here’s the latest. It’s an essay from the folks at ChangeThis, an interesting site that sends out regular collections of articles (or manifestos, as they refer to them) about living in today’s digital world. They say their mission is to spread important ideas. It’s a bit eclectic, but usually interesting.

Given my attraction for time-management articles, how could I resist something with this title when it showed up in my in-box?

The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-mail Overload and Triple Productivity in 24 Hours

(Click here to download the .pdf directly.)

It’s written by Tim Ferriss, author of a book called “The Four-Hour Workweek.” (And if you’ve never heard of Tim Ferriss, check out this Google Search on his name. He’s a high-profile geek, to say the least.)

Ferriss’s advice is not new or startling, but it’s written in a straight-forward manner and backed up by some solid research. Here’s a sample:

Though selective ignorance has several facets, we’ll focus on the low-information e-mail diet (here forward called the “low-information diet”), as e-mail is the single greatest time waster in modern life. Before we get into specific guidelines, the two fundamental principles of selective ignorance are
worth mentioning:

1. If you don’t define your goals clearly, everything seems important and requires action. If you define your goals clearly, especially your single most critical goal, almost all things are of little or no importance and few things require action.

2. Trying to make everyone happy—besides being impossible—is the surest way to make yourself miserable.

There are then three specific steps for following the low-information diet that we’ll explore in descending order of importance: decreasing frequency, decreasing volume, and increasing speed.

I’m intrigued by the low-information diet. I don’t expect to implement it immediately, given that my volume of email is not that bad right now.

But if you or your clients are struggling with managing the daily flood of digital information, you should read the article. Your co-workers will probably thank you.

Technorati Tags:
e-mail, productivity

Rick Segal is a Canadian venture capitalist who writes a blog called The Post Money Value, which is a Canadian’s take on the high tech industry. It’s an interesting perspective from an industry veteran.

Rick is also an airline junkie — he’s forced to fly all the time. Lately, he’s been using Air Canada’s unlimited North America pass.

In this post, he offers an intriguing view of Air Canada – everyone’s favourite airline to hate (as I can attest to). It’s called A Tale of Two Airlines – Air Canada. But it’s not really about the airline. It’s about what makes great customer service, and how important it is that companies understand what it takes to make them great.

Air Canada does know what it takes to give great customer service – as Rick can attest. But all too often (as his daughter points out in the other “tale”) Air Canada fails to deliver. And what’s worse, they don’t seem to give a damn.

Rick wraps up his post with three points that every company should ask itself about how it deals with customers (these make more sense if you’ve read the whole post):

Are you paying attention to who you think matters to your business? You can say, everybody is equal, we strive for it, etc, but every person out there has, at one time or another, received amazing service over somebody else because of price paid, section of the venue, etc. Rachel would fly on WestJet in a second if they flew in/out of LA. Could AC doing anything to make her loyal? Should they? Again, I offer the questions not my opinion as my opinion doesn’t matter in running your business.

Are you setting tone? The right tone? What struck me about the ‘pillow lady’ was her smile and her genuine, no problem, attitude. It was so easy to give me that pillow with, here you elitist, make 10x more money, drive nicer car, eat better cat food, than me attitude, but she didn’t. It was genuine, here you go, thanks for your business. That attitude should be present for the $99 (or less) air fare. Just because I’m a Super Elite, that is not a license to dump on others. For your start up? Set the right tone with your folks. Encourage and embrace those that go the extra mile for customers. The Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) sends an acknowledgement when you file your taxes. The letter notice starts off with Thank You. I know, there are a billion smart ass remarks you want to say, but the point is tone/attitude.

Are there lots of stories out there that mention your company? I’d probably be laughed at if I said the Air Canada pillow incident was a purple cow for me. I suspect that is a reach but my point is how many amazingly good stories are coming out of your team? David Sifry, (CEO, Technorati) many years ago, when I just fired up the blog, personally called me after I emailed in a random tech support question. Home email, cell phone, nobody blogger. He didn’t know (or care) I was a VC or that I knew the toll booth lady on the GG bridge. He just dived in and answered the question. Purple Cow. How many stories about your business are being created this week? Today? An hour ago?

I’ve written about customer service – good and bad – before but I don’t think it ever gets worn out as a topic. Think about how often you come into contact with a company via their front lines – a receptionist at an office, the ticket agent at the counter, the voice on the other end of the phone. Those are the contacts that will make or break the relationship. They have to be good.

Seth Godin is another marketing guru I quote often. (He’s the guy that coined the “purple cow” term that Rick Segal mentioned in his post.) Last week, he had a post that talked about how to be a great receptionist. The advice works for a lot of positions. And it brings up two challenges for today’s corporations. First, how to get your managers to buy into this concept? And the second is how to get employees to feel the same way? Hint — They’re not different answers.

Got any ideas? Use the comment button below to share your experiences.

Technorati Tags:
Air Canada

Last week, I was a day late with the Friday fun Upload, and here it is, over half the day gone and I’m only now sending out this one. Oh well…as you’ll see from some of the items I found for you this week, time is a bit of a premium for me right now. No matter when you’re reading this, take the time to enjoy noodling around. There’s some fun stuff here.

Strange Statues

There’s not much point in introducing this segment. The images are pretty self-explanatory. And the site title says it all — these are some weird (and wonderful) statues.

– Link

Clock

One thing I’m short on right now is probably the same thing everyone else is. Time. There just isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Money’s like that too, now that I think of it. But you can have fun with time, if you know what you’re doing. If anybody can figure out how to turn this page into a screensaver, let me know.

– Link

Express Yourself

Are you a budding Picasso? Or just want to express yourself…take a look at this site. And be sure to look at some of the other paintings that have been done before. It’s a cool application.

-Link

The end of it all

And finally…It’s the long weekend here in Canada. We call it Victoria Day. Or in some parts of the country, the May Two Four weekend. We care about things like this in the Great White North. But enough research. It’s time to step away from the computer and go outside and enjoy the weekend.

-Link

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags:
Friday fun

Sadly, Kelly and her teammates on the Louisville Cardinals Division 1 Womens’ Rowing team are not going to be going to the NCAA championships in two weeks.

The NCAA announced the 16 teams that would be attending, and the Cardinals are not on the list.

Kelly’s response, not surprisingly, was short and pointed.

“Absolute b#%@#*%@! Nobody made it. This is ridiculous and unfair,” she wrote me in a furious text message minutes after the news was posted on the Internet.

The team’s hopes had been high a few weeks ago that they would finally be invited to the prestigious national championships for the first time. But in the last few weeks, they have been frustrated by the weekly rankings, which seemed to be ignoring their positive results, while other teams they had beaten seemed to get the benefit of the doubt.

It’s not the first time the Cardinals feel like they’ve been denied a place they should have received. The news was similar last year. Fortunately, the selection process is supposed to change next year, when it will be based on a more transparent system which should get rid of these kinds of controversies.

Alas, the subjective nature of the ranking system means that no one really knows the criteria that go into the final decision. So although there seemed to be a lot of competition among the schools, the predictable teams will be there again this year.

The championships will be held May 25-27 at Melton Hill Lake in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

For Kelly, that’s the end of her freshman collegiate rowing season, which has to be ranked as a tremendous success. She gained valuable experience and scored personal bests several times in her erg scores. And she’s got three more years ahead of her.

She’s heading up to Hamilton for a couple of weeks, then she’s going to be coming out to Victoria for the rest of the summer. She’ll be rowing with the UVIC team here over the summer and participating in the Henley Regatta in St. Catherines in August.

What about your other kids, Dave?
Good point. It’s been awhile since I updated any of you on Jaime and Cory, isn’t it?

Cory is now living at our cottage in Buena Vista, just outside of Regina. He moved out from Hamilton in February and settled in at the lake as soon as the weather warmed up. He’s enjoying the place a lot.

In a couple of weeks, he’ll be starting work in the oil fields in Alberta, which he’s looking forward to. He’ll be on a 2 weeks on, 1 week off cycle and he’ll be at the beach when he’s not at work. It’s hard work, but compared to what he used to be doing as a bricklayer’s apprentice, it should be a piece of cake.

Jaime has just started another work term with the provincial government here in Victoria as part of her recreation and health program at UVIC. She’s taking some time off from competitive rowing this spring in favour of working full time. And she’s loving every minute of it. After 7 years of getting up at 5:00 am every morning, heading off to work seems like a breeze.

She’s not sure whether she’ll be rowing in the fall again or not. Only time will tell.

And me? Well…let’s just say that I’m not rowing either. But we finally got some roof racks for our kayaks, so look out!

Technorati Tags:
Proud Papa

Well, I’ve now been cut off Pandora, unfortunately.

After I wrote last week about Pandora sending out notices to people outside the US, I was happy to notice that I was still able to get the service. But it didn’t last.

Yesterday, I got this note from Pandora founder Tim Westergren:

Dear Pandora listener,

Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora’s streaming service from Canada. We began blocking access from almost all countries outside the U.S. last week and had originally hoped to maintain access to Canada. However, it has become clear in the last week that we just haven’t been able to make enough progress to continue streaming.

It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.

I really hope that they are able to work out licensing arrangements in Canada. It’s a great service and I’ve enjoyed discovering new music through it.

Technorati Tags:
Pandora, Internet Radio