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For David Allen life is full of “stuff.” For people who have never heard of David Allen, never tried to read his geek productivity bible Getting Things Done, never wondered how to label a file or categorize their lives, that’s as unhelpful a truism as declaring that work is difficult. But for the followers of GTD, people who have been accused of regarding Allen as a kind of cultic leader (the same kind of leader he himself once saw in John-Roger, leader of the New Age Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness in which Allen remains a minister), it’s an eye-opening revelation. Employ a process that pushes that “stuff” out of the way and what remains will be only the most important elements. Instead of wasting their hours on life’s minutiae, they’ll be able to devote their time to the big things. They’ll get things done.

Mostly though what they’ll be getting done is the process of doing things – and that’s if they can figure out the process. Allen doesn’t just earn revenue from his best-selling book and its sequels. His seminars cost $695 per person, a sign not just that his followers consider his techniques valuable but that they’re so complex they have to fork out almost 700 bucks to figure out how to use them. Allen’s system requires multiple levels of categorization and treatment for every aspect of life from going to the dry cleaners and vaccinating the dog to launching a website and changing jobs. Every task has its moment, sometimes timed to the minute. Every chore receives attention according to its apparent level of importance, but only after you’ve put it through a system that awards it an appropriate priority level.

Getting Things Done, a System Dedicated to Geeks?

43Folders.com, a site dedicated to GTD, has argued that the system is ideal for geeks – people, it says, who tend to be disorganized but “love assessing, classifying, and deﬁning the objects in their world,” who “crave actionable items” but “have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff.” But that’s a narrow definition of a geek. “Geeks” today are more than bespectacled programmers with ponytails, beards and an unhealthy knowledge of Apple mouse designs. They’re specialists, experts in one particular field whether that field is Java programming, gardening or marketing coffee beans. They’re not interested in creating order in their day; they’re interested in seeing the results of their creation.

For followers of GTD, nirvana lies in the process of organization. For geeks, process is the means to an end and nirvana for them is in having nothing left to organize at all.

The difference lies in two key ingredients missing among the files, folders and labels of GTD: creativity and vision.

Every successful business begins with an idea. But ideas are common, successful businesses relatively rare. Between the concept and the IPO, the buy-out and the private Caribbean island lie years of small achievements: websites built and tested, products designed and prototypes checked, clients won, satisfied and retained. Those small steps are the sorts of things that GTD was designed to deal with, organize and prioritize, but while plenty of corporations have invited David Allen to put on his seminars to organize their workforce, it’s hard to identify a list of entrepreneurs who have relied on GTD to build their path to success.

GTD Gets Things Done, Outsourcing Gets Results

That’s because a successful entrepreneur develops a vision of his end goal and is able to maintain it all the way through the process of building success. The same creativity that gives them a picture of what they’re trying to achieve also enables them to see the obstacles that can prevent them from achieving it and the force to push those obstructions out of the way. David Allen has described his system as helping users to find their way through a thick forest in which the trees are “stuff” hiding the items of real value.

“Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry,” he explained once in interview with Wired Magazine.

But successful entrepreneurs don’t become successful by picking berries. They build success by having a vision of what lies through the forest to the meadow at the end. There may be “stuff” in the way in the form of emails that need to be answered or dogs that need to be vaccinated but the smart, successful types don’t waste their time writing those tasks down, giving them labels and filing them in special folders. They trust in their ability to achieve success, make an investment — and pay someone else to do it for them.

That’s perhaps the biggest difference between people who focus on getting things done and those who manage to achieve great things. David Allen might be the guru for the type of geek who wants an uncluttered life but a more appropriate guru for a geekpreneur who wants to turn their commercial vision into a functioning business might well be Tim Ferriss. His book The 4-Hour Workweek might have had a misleading title, and outsourcing your dating life to Indian underlings is taking things a little too far, but his approach of only doing the most important and valuable tasks yourself and leaving everything else to paid helpers is a system followed by more successful types than those who use GTD. In fact, it’s a system followed by just about every successful type who has ever turned a one-man concept into a thriving company. The system – if outsourcing can be called a system – requires an investment of time in the form of training, and money in the form of payments to freelancers, but if it means you don’t have to waste time on “stuff” or on organizing “stuff” then it’s more likely to free up the time to not just get things done but to actually do things. And that, after all, should be the result any productivity system.

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iAds and the Future of Mobile Apps par alex Mardi 6 Juillet 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Describing iOS 4 at the WorldWide Developers Conference 2010, Steve Jobs kept one of the most interesting of the system’s upgrades until point seven. But the launch of iAds, the iPhone’s new advertising platform, may well be its most influential feature. While multitasking and folders will all be very useful, the incorporation of a native advertising program designed specifically with iPhone apps in mind could well have a huge effect on the 200,000-plus apps already in the App Store, and the thousands of others still to come.

The ads, demonstrated through the use of samples created for Nike, Target and Toy Story 3, aim to bridge the gap between the interactivity of digital ads and the emotional engagement of television advertising, Jobs explained. Initially, they look similar to ads currently distributed by Google’s AdMob service, appearing as a small banner at the bottom of the screen. When users click that banner though, they’re given a whole different experience. They’re no longer whipped out of the app as they would be when clicking on a Google ad. Instead, the app is frozen and the user is taken into what looks like a new app that may contain a number of different features, from mini-games and animated timelines to videos and wallpaper downloads. The features may be as inviting and enjoyable as the app itself, providing a reward for a user who clicks on them. And with the original app frozen rather than closed, there’s no penalty for clicking, pleasing the advertiser.

Apple’s Takes a Bite from Both Ends

But it’s in the benefits for the developer that things start to get really interesting. According to Advertising Age, an industry magazine, AdMobs currently charges between $10 and $15 on a CPM basis. Advertisers who want to buy CPC campaigns can expect to pay 15-30 cents a click. iAds however is expected to charge $10 CPM and $2 for a click, passing 60 percent of the revenue to the app developer.

That’s a big leap in the price of mobile advertising (and in practice, advertisers looking to catch the first wave of ads will have to pay even more: with the iAds Developer Kit still to be released, ads can only be developed by Apple, a service for which the company is charging $50,000 -$100,000 for advertisers spending less than $1 million.) But it’s also a big leap in revenues for app developers.

One of the first challenges developers faced when the App Store opened was whether they should give their programs away for free and live off the advertising or charge the buck or two that seemed to be the standard rate for the iPhone. It was a puzzle that was solved pretty quickly: AdMob and other mobile advertising systems just couldn’t generate enough revenue for developers to make it worthwhile to give their products away for nothing. It always made financial sense to charge something — even just 99 cents — than to look to the ads to make cash.

If iAds can make free pay more than 99 cents, then the effect on the App Store, on mobile advertising and even on mobile computing would be enormous. For one, there will be a lot more free programs available. According to Greg Yardley of PinchMedia, a firm that supplies analytics software for iPhone apps, free apps are downloaded on average 7.5 times more frequently than paid apps, although they’re also used less.

But not only would more apps become free, those apps would also need to change to maximize revenues.

Free but Slow

Apple has estimated that the average iPhone user spends about half an hour every day inside apps. Steve Jobs has talked about showing one ad every three minutes, exposing iPhone users to an average of ten ads a day. The more time a developer can keep a user on his or her app, and the longer they can make that app last before it’s removed to make way for something better, the more ads they can show and the more they can earn on both a CPM and a CPC basis.

Some apps are going to find that easier to do than others. Although all apps now pause when a user clicks an ad, users will still be more likely to click when their eyes are free to wander to the bottom of the screen, something that happens more often while playing strategy games without a timer than action-packed first-person shooters. Similarly, users are more likely to keep the game on their iPhone and return to it — even once the game has been completed — if the developer continues to release regular updates that extend its life.

Three immediate results of a functional iAds system then may be an increase in free apps, an emphasis on apps that exercise brains rather than the speed of fingers, and a greater reliability on frequent updates — all good news for dedicated Sudoku fans looking for a regular free fix.

But developers will also want to extend each play session in order to have time to show more ads. That may mean longer cut scenes between levels or more time in which little happens, moving characters from one place to another. The games may be freer and longer, but they may also turn out to be less exciting.

All of this though depends on iAds living up to its promise. In practice, it may not. Greg Yardley says that he used to be a fan of the potential of advertising on iPhone apps until he crunched a few figures and found that apps needed to show a CPM of around $8.75 in order to be successful. That’s a much smaller amount than the $30 CPM that advertisers can expect to pay for an iAds campaign (according to Advertising Age’s) figures, but much higher than the current 50 cents-$2 CPM that developers have seen from AdMob. iAds then could have a radical effect on the nature of mobile phone apps, creating apps optimized for advertising or it might just make a few bucks from lite versions of paid apps — which could be why it was only point number seven in Steve Jobs’ presentation.

(Lire la suite) alex

Facebook Still Get Privacy Wrong par alex Mardi 29 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: suesviews

It might be hard to believe now but when Facebook began, the settings were so restrictive that unless you were a university student you couldn’t even join the site. You could see the names of the elite who could join the site. You might be able to look at their avatars if they’d posted them, but even for other members, almost everything else was kept private. Private was the default setting. Members of the network could see where friends were studying, where they’d worked and what they liked to do, but everyone else was locked out.

Those were the days.

As Facebook has grown so has its troubles with privacy issues. The site now has over 400 million active users, a community that’s about a third larger than the population of the United States. Those people interact with more 25 billion pieces of content, from Web links and news stories to notes and photo albums. They post status updates that keep friends and family informed about what they’re doing, upload pictures and videos that reveal private aspects of their lives, and they use over half a million Facebook apps that often draw on the information they’ve posted.

Fundamental Privacy Mistakes

It’s a huge amount of material that’s both essential to Facebook’s value to advertisers and a giant headache to Mark Zuckerberg, its 26-year-old CEO. You can almost forgive him for making the mistake of offering privacy settings that assumed users wanted everything open but which were also too complex to be changed easily.

Almost, but not quite. Facebook’s mistakes were fundamental, an example of what to do to get privacy completely wrong. The only consolation that Steve Zuckerberg can draw from his failure is that Google made exactly the same mistakes when it launched Buzz. The search company attempted to start with critical mass by attaching itself to users’ Gmail accounts, exposing the email addresses of account holder’s contacts in the process.

Facebook, at least, didn’t do that kind of damage but both companies made the same error. They both assumed that because no one ever reads the privacy policies at the bottom of Web pages, no one ever looks at the EULAs on downloaded programs before they agree to them, and few people in practice ever say anything that could land them in serious trouble with a third party app developer, no one would mind if the default setting was maximum exposure. After all whoever was accessing the information — whether it was an old friend, a new retailer or an exciting app — was only acting in a way that would benefit the user. Privacy is a flexible thing these days and besides, those people who really are paranoid fussy cautious about what happens with their private information could always head to the settings page and change them.

On Facebook that meant playing with a host of different “granular” settings relating to a range of the site’s different functions. For Buzz it looked like it meant clicking a link to turn the system off, but it turned out that just meant you couldn’t see it. To get rid of Buzz altogether, users initially had to leap through one digital hoop after another, hoops they weren’t even aware existed.

Ask First, Share Later

The problem with those mistakes wasn’t that they actually revealed vast amounts of personal data that individuals needed to keep private (although a few unlucky individuals were affected). It made the public aware that they had personal information, and worse, that big companies were interested in it. Website users don’t read privacy policies because they don’t care about their privacy; they just don’t believe that their private concerns are of any interest to anyone else. Until a company comes along and helps itself to their personal data.

So what can companies hoping to amass vast amounts of user data learn from the mistakes of other corporate giants? How can they balance their need to please advertisers and app developers with the concerns of their members?

The simplest strategy is to ask first.

Email marketers aren’t fond of double-opt in requirements because it means they can’t be accused of spamming. They like them because so few people object when they’re asked. For much personal data the response is likely to be similar although much depends on the kind of information being requested (anonymous demographic is unlikely to raise many objections; private purchases might do.) It’s when companies take information without asking that users object and become suspicious.

It’s also important to make the privacy settings simple. As Mark Zuckerberg himself put it in his blog:

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

But the most important thing you can do with privacy is to understand users’ concerns. When Google changed the way it offered Buzz, it went a long way towards showing that it understood those concerns. Leaving it in Gmail however, a place that users think of as a personal space, suggested that the company still isn’t standing with its users. Similarly, Facebook’s simpler privacy settings hand more control to its users, but its recommendation

that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends.

also suggests that it’s still not quite getting it. Many users would consider status updates to be as personal as their pictures.

Facebook got privacy right the first time when it assumed that users wanted to talk only with their friends. The way its mishandled privacy may well end up prompting users to choose to bring those old days back.

(Lire la suite) alex

The Rules for Working on a Plane par sabrina Jeudi 24 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: askpang

If there was a prize available for dedication to the job and the ability to do it in the most trying of conditions then Lee Unkrich would surely have won it. Earlier this year, the Pixar director pasted a photo of himself on Twitter editing Toy Story 3 while sitting on a flight at 36,000 feet. Of course, he cheated. Judging by the snazzy seat back, it looks like Lee wasn’t typing with his knees behind his ears in Cattle Class. He also broke the rules. Not the rules that prevent you from grabbing your bag as the plane touches down and standing by the exit or spending the entire flight in the bathroom, a private cabin where there’s room to stretch your legs, but just about all of the unspoken rules that dictate the right and wrong ways to work on a plane.

The rules are new. They’ve only developed over the last few years as long haul flights have added electricity sockets that make it possible to work without keeping an eye on a computer’s battery level and as some have added Internet access. Now that it’s possible to take an entire office with you in your carry-on baggage and plug it into a plane’s infrastructure, today’s digital, high-flying nomads need to know what they can and can’t do when they’re working in the clouds.

The first thing you can’t do is expect privacy. Take your laptop to a café and you can try to pick a seat with the back to the wall so that nobody is reading over your shoulder. You can certainly expect a table of your own so that no one is sharing your eye-space. Mostly though, you can rely on the fact that the other café customers are too busy with their own lives to show more than a passing interest in yours.

On a plane, passengers have no lives. Their entertainment choices are limited by whatever happens to be on the screen in front of them and their diversions are restricted to the media material they’ve brought with them. With hours to kill, it doesn’t matter whether your job involves creating a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or counting dots on a screen, it’s going to look more interesting than the back of the next seat.

What Happens on the Plane, Stays on the Plane

That limits the kind of work you can do. Putting on the screen anything even remotely confidential is out of bounds — such as a new battle strategy for Afghanistan or the unedited rushes of a brand-new Disney movie. And you can’t write anything about your fellow travelers either. Lee Unkrich went on to tweet that how his neighbor showed little interest in what he was doing, a hint that she was missing a giant opportunity. That was probably just as well. She might have been less than happy to see herself being discussed with tens of thousands of people thousands of miles away. It’s not a good idea to irritate someone you’re stuck next to for seven hours.

If the first rule of working on a plane then is not to work on anything confidential, the second is that what other people are doing on the plane stays on the plane — especially if they’re doing it in the next seat.

The third rule is not to bother anyone, another rule that restricts the kind of work you can do. Making a fitness video using your computer’s web cam is obviously out but so is anything that involves lots of speaker noise, shouts of frustration or pacing around. In fact, if you know you’re going to be working on the plane, it’s not a rule but it is a good idea to book a window seat. Your own ability to take microbreaks will be limited but you won’t be forcing other people to ask you to remove your headphones and lift your computer every time they need to stroll the aisle. That would bother them too. Some working travelers have even been known to take their own thermos flasks of coffee, a choice that means they don’t have to take frequent trips to the galley to load up on fresh beans — an essential lubricant for some when it comes to keeping their main work-muscle greased. (On the other hand, if that coffee means lots of running to the bathroom, then it’s probably best to work without it).

Don’t Do It Unless You Have To

The second most important rule though is to choose the right kind of work for you to do on the plane.

No one, not even the most Donald Trump of bosses, expects an employee to put in the hours while wedged into an Economy Class seat. A flight then is one time when you don’t have to work if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to feel guilty about your choice. You are free to relax with a DVD and to use the seat’s electricity socket to play computer games for seven hours if that makes the journey less painful. If you do think about work, choose something important, that isn’t more irritating than waiting for the flight to end and that needs to be done right away. Adding the final touches to a talk or presentation, for example, makes a good choice. That’s information that’s going to be shared anyway, so it’s unlikely to break any confidentiality rules. It’s likely to be something you’ll need shortly after you arrive so it’s suitably urgent. And it’s not something that requires a huge amount of focus and brain power so it shouldn’t hurt too much. A bit of light-hearted blogging should also work but reading and research make for some of the best uses of flying time.

But the most important rule to follow when working on a plane is not to do it unless you really have to — and unless you don’t mind the rest of the plane thinking that you’re a workaholic who’s too disorganized to take a few hours off. When other passengers see someone working on a plane, as a rule, that’s what they think.

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The World Cup for Business Promotion par alex Lundi 21 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. Thirty-two countries, billions of dollars, a television audience that stretches from South Africa to North Korea, and 90 minutes of 22 men kicking a ball in a sport that Americans tend to dismiss as a girls’ game. The FIFA World Cup, an event that takes place once every four years and captures the imagination of (almost) the entire globe, is now under way in Africa for the first time. Like any event with an audience that runs into the hundreds of millions, it’s also a huge business. According to accountancy firm Grant Thorton, the games could add as much as 0.5 percent to host nation South Africa’s GDP this year, an injection of some $12.4 billion. Much of that will have come from the effects of tourism. About 373,000 foreigners are expected to visit the country during the month-long sporting jamboree, spending about $4,000 each. Most of the money though will have come from government coffers to pay for new stadiums, renovated roads and security. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be not the country, but FIFA itself. The organization’s profits from the last World Cup, held in Germany, were a cool $1.8 billion.

But the international sporting body isn’t the only one making money out of the World Cup. Sellers of vuvuzelas, the plastic trumpets that sound like angry bees and infuriate commentators, and which South Africans insist are traditional musical instruments, are clearly doing well. Earplugs that promise to block the sound are reported to be selling equally fast. Pubs and bars with big screens and expensive beer will do fine too, despite Fifa’s attempts to stop them. Makers of novelty items will struggle a little but websites that discuss the World Cup, optimize their AdSense units or offer decent affiliate products can expect to earn a little income too. Anyone can do that, although they’ll struggle to do well on search rankings when FIFA itself, big broadcasters and media giants are dominating the rankings.

The World Cup on Social Media

The best hope to make some money out of the World Cup then (other than scalping tickets) looks like social media. While Facebook and Twitter might not have done much to influence the UK election (depending on who you ask and how you measure the results), this World Cup does seem to have taken social media to its heart.

The biggest World Cup social media success has been Nike’s “Write The Future” ad. At three minutes, the full length version is too long to be played on television but on YouTube, it’s been viewed more than 15 million times. To reach that sort of audience during a television show would have involved a deep dip into the advertising budget, and even then the company would be lucky to get more than 30 seconds. Nike has managed to persuade an enormous audience to choose to watch an ad that’s three minutes long without having to spend a dime on placement.

It did however have to spend a lot of money on star sponsorships as well on the film itself, which is creative and as professionally-made as you might expect from a multinational footwear giant.

Outside the Xbox

YouTube isn’t the only social media tool that companies are using to spread their name during the World Cup though. Electronic Arts famously launched a soccer management game produced by Playfish, the social media game company it bought at the end of last year. The game, which can only be played across Facebook, may generate a small amount of cash but the real World Cup money for the video game company will come from its console games. 2010 FIFA World Cup sells for around $60 and moved more than 1.7 million copies in Europe in its first week alone, making it the most successful launch ever for a sports simulation. If you’re really looking to make money out of the World Cup, the best approach it seems is to get yourself an official license.

But it can also pay to be think outside the Xbox. Korean company Hyundai has taken a broad approach to World Cup marketing. Describing its marketing activities during the event, the carmaker relegates television advertising almost to the bottom of the list. Perimeter boards are at the top, suggesting a high spend, but much of the focus is on the fans and on activities in which they have to play an active part. “Fan fests” consisting of screens and events around the world will put the brand in front of large audiences, a “fan of the match” will help to whip up enthusiasm, and an online program makes the interaction online too. The aim, the company says, is to “improve the quality of the interactive experience with the brand.”

The broad coverage is not without its risks however. After British broadcaster ITV cut away from England’s opening game in the fourth minute of the match to show a Hyundai ad, viewers were returned to the game to see captain Steven Gerrard celebrating the team’s only goal. ITV took the brunt of the blame for that faux pas but forcing fans to look at you instead of a goal is not going to lead your market to cheer your name.

So if earning from the World Cup has been dominated by companies with the biggest marketing budgets, is there anything left for small firms with deep enthusiasm but shallow pockets? Websites that already have plenty of traffic can certainly match their content to the event. Travel firm Bootsnall, for example, launched the WorldCupBlog, a site that’s managed to reach the first page of search results on Google for the keyword phrase “world cup” and is filled with affiliate ads, banners, and of course, ticket offers. Other sites will have to be a little more subtle with the odd promotion. Nor is it worth working investing too much in World Cup revenues. Unless you can repeat the formula for the Olympics in two years’ time, you’ll only have a month to cash in on your effort. If you’re Fifa, Hyundai, a pub with a big screen TV, or a stall-holder with a pile of plastic trumpets your best bet for making decent money from the World might well be Spain at 9/2.

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AdWords Your Way to Your Dream Job par alex Lundi 14 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Last summer, Alex Brownstein decided to advance his career. He had a job as a copywriter at ad firm Publicis, but he really wanted to work at “a really creative shop for really creative [creative directors].” Rather than follow the usual route of updating his resume, sending it to the human resources departments of other ad firms and hoping that they had an opening, Alex took a route that gave him direct access to the people he most wanted to speak to.

In a move that also showed off his creativity, Alex identified the creative directors he wanted to work for and bought AdWords ads for their names. When the creative directors Googled themselves, the top result was an ad that said: “Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too.” The ad linked to his website, alecbrownstein.com.

Brownstein targeted a total of five creative directors, received interviews from four and job offers from two. He now works as a senior copywriter for Ian Reichenthal at Young & Rubicam’s office. The entire search cost a total of $6. Had he mailed in his resume, he would probably have spent more on postage.

Caught in the Act of Googling Themselves

Brownstein’s approach had several advantages. He was able to put his name and his skills directly in front of the people he most wanted to target. By addressing those people by name, he showed that he knew the industry and was familiar with their work. By using an original strategy, he demonstrated the very creativity that he was selling. And by intruding at a time when the creative directors were Googling themselves, he was also showing that he understood human behavior and how to use it for effect — an important feature for an advertising copywriter.

As a model for other career-minded types to copy though, it has its challenges. Not everyone knows the names of the people who are most likely to employ them, and not all industries are as public with the identities of their key personnel as the advertising industry is. Nor are those personnel likely to Google themselves as often as advertising people might. Brownstein got the idea for the approach after Googling himself, something he told Mashable that he does with “embarrassing” frequency. Marketing manager Karl Sakas estimates that it took Brownstein about six months to land his job. Hopefuls seeking employment in industries staffed with more modest types might have to wait even longer.

But it worked, it cost little and for jobseekers looking for specific positions but who aren’t desperate for immediate change, there’s no reason it won’t work again.

Who Wants to Work for Microsoft?

Google isn’t the only place that creative jobseekers have been advertising their skills though. Even before Brownstein was interrupting the private browsing moments of some of New York’s top ad people, a man called “Eric” was promoting himself on Facebook. He took out an ad that included his picture, a headline that stated “I want to be at [company]”, and text that read “Hi, My name is Eric and my dream is to work for [company]. I’m an MBA/MFA with a strong media background. Can you help me? Please click!” The companies he targeted were Microsoft, YouTube, Netflix, Apple and IDEO.

Despite the difficulty of believing that anyone actually dreams of working for Microsoft, Eric did receive plenty of offers of help from Redmond employees offering LinkedIn connections, the addresses of recruiters, and the job descriptions of specific roles in their division to apply for.

Eric chose Facebook, he says, “because it was unconventional, cheap, highly targeted and offered solid performance metrics.” He was able to limit the ads so that they were seen by people employed at the companies he was targeting, and the keywording would have made sure that a manager at Microsoft didn’t see that he was also dreaming of working for YouTube. The whole process took about half an hour, cost less than $50 and resulted in more than 50,000 impressions and more than 500 clicks. It’s not clear though whether the leads produced a job offer.

This is a very different approach to that used by Alex Brownstein. Brownstein was hoping to land one of a number of specific positions that could only be offered by one of a number of specific individuals. Eric’s approach was broader. He was looking for “help” rather than a job, something that more people can provide, even though it won’t lead directly to the end goal.

The best approach of all then might be to combine the two: use Facebook ads to generate information about individual employers; then use that information to offer Google ads that put your online resume in front of them… eventually.

There is a third method that you can use though. When Web marketer Larry Dinsmore found himself out of work, he went for a scattergun approach that should put even Eric to shame. At one point, he simply opened the Yellow Pages, started at A and worked his way through the listings, emailing his resume to every business with a website. He even thought of printing a stack of resumes and handing them out like flyers. Fortunately, he had a better idea. He printed the words “Damn, I need a job!” on the front of a t-shirt, and placed a short cover letter on the back.

“Put something about yourself on your shirt and not only will they read it they will strain to see it,” he writes on his site damnineedajob.com. “They will position themselves for a better look. Stand in line at a fast food joint and at any given moment someone will be checking it out. I’m telling you people can’t help it.”

There’s no indication that Larry’s approach worked any better than Eric’s but the efficacy of turning yourself into a human billboard will depend on where you choose to stand. It’s the kind of strategy that’s more likely to work at a convention than in line at a fast food joint — unless your dream job is to flip burgers.

Whatever kind of job you’re looking for, creativity is going to be an important part of staying ahead of the pack. That applies to the way you search as much as the contents of your resumé.

(Lire la suite) alex

5 Incredibly Effective Branded Facebook Pages par alex Mardi 8 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Much has been said about Twitter’s ability to build brands, spread messages and create interaction. But Facebook’s business pages have been around much longer, are a lot more flexible and are part of a much larger platform too. Coca Cola’s tweets, made up of slightly creepy greetings to followers and public Coke drinkers, for example, are read by fewer than 30,000 people. The company’s Facebook page, which is filled with videos, active discussions, ad campaigns and all sorts of other goodies, has been liked by more than 5.7 million people.

Creating that kind of following though takes more than a well-known brand and about ten spoonfuls of sugar in every can. It also takes a smart use of the functions available to marketers looking to build their market with Facebook. Here are five brands that are getting it right:

Electronic Arts

One of the most valuable strengths of social media marketing is that companies aren’t just broadcasting their messages to their market. They’re letting their market talk about them among themselves. That’s something that EA Sports 2010 World Cup Edition uses to the full. The company, which is known for its computer sports simulations, was expected to bring out its new management game on consoles. Instead, it chose to use Facebook as a platform, providing a way for the site’s users to face off against each other.

Users can buy “packs” of players for about $1.50-$3 each but the revenue is unlikely to be the main reason that EA have opted for Facebook instead of Nintendo. Console games are more likely sell for around $50 each and points earned during the game can be used to pay for more team members. Rather than looking at cash for this simple game, the company is using Facebook’s horizontal networking — and its $300m purchase of app developer Playfish — to keep people talking about the company and maintain its awareness during the soccer World Cup.

The Facebook page for its main product is pretty effective too.

Dunkin Donuts

Electronic Arts’ new game is powered by a smart app, something that requires plenty of time and money to create. But businesses don’t need to go to that expense to create an effective Facebook presence. Dunkin Donuts doesn’t offer anything on its Facebook page that isn’t available to any other business wanting to make use of social media. Its wall though contains plenty of posts by keen fans, the admin staff have bothered to fill in the details on the info page — something not done by every business (we’re looking at you, Benetton) — and its events widget lists all sorts of local happenings that might interest customers.

Where Dunkin Donuts really excels though is in the steps it takes to reach out to its fans. Users are offered a “perk” for enrolling in the company’s app. Maurice, a talking coffee bean, offers a measure of fun. And most importantly, submitting a picture to the page’s wall puts users in the running to be chosen as a “fan of the week.” It’s a simple way to make customers feel that the Facebook page is about them, and not about the company.

Bushells Tea

A challenge for companies considering using social media to push their brands is the site’s demographic. Facebook started at a college and it still looks like a poor choice for firms looking to target markets whose members are middle-aged or older.

When Australian marketing firm Soap Creative was hired by multinational company Unilever to promote its local tea brand Bushells however, it chose to focus much of its digital strategy on Facebook. Without spending a dime on promotions, the page has quickly built up a following almost 20,000 at a rate of almost 1,000 new fans every month.

The company attempts to get around the reluctance of older Facebook users to engage actively on the site by promoting its presence as part of the conversation that comes with a cup of tea. According to Ross Raeburn, one of the people responsible for the campaign, Soap Creative has seen the self-moderation, community ownership and brand participation that they’ve come to expect from Facebook. The wall is active, the company is learning information about its customers missed by annual focus groups, and Bushells has succeeded in deepening the sense of brand loyalty held by its customers.

CM Photographics

Not all the most effective commercial pages on Facebook are pushing big brands or run by professional marketers. Chris Meyer is a professional photographer who advises other photographers about the benefits of Facebook marketing. The site itself has used him as a case study for the rewards its ads can bring after a $600 spend generated over $40,000 in bookings. But it’s not just his paid ads that are bringing results. His studio’s business page also has a surprisingly large following and an interactive wall filled with comments from customers and friends.

There are no secret tricks here. Chris Meyer doesn’t use an interactive app or even post videos. He just makes regular posts that are upbeat, human and which engage with his followers. It’s a strategy that might not work for companies so large that they struggle to present a human face, but for very small businesses, Chris Meyer’s friendly contact is a good model to follow.

Amnesty International

And finally, it’s also possible to make good use of Facebook’s pages without attempting to earn a dime. Amnesty International uses its Causes tab to publicize its fundraising efforts, the results of its recruiting, the level of its “karma” — a way of thanking supporters — and to list the causes it supports. Its YouTube plug-in makes sharing videos with friends as simple as sending an invitation and a Twitter feed helps to add instant news. Mostly though the page shows how Facebook can sometimes work as a broadcast system and the first step in a viral campaign. Amnesty adds the clips and offers its opinions on human rights issues, and its followers then share them with friends.

If there is a problem with Amnesty’s use of Facebook though, it’s the address. Facebook.com/amnestyinternational leads to the Belgian branch of the organization, a page which isn’t publicly available and which has posted little content. If you want to make the most of Facebook, it does pay to be open — and get your name right.

Facebook’s business pages then can be hugely valuable but the way they’re used does depend on the type of product or service you’re offering, the demographic of your market and the kinds of tools best used to engage and interact with them. There’s no one strategy that can bring results; only a number of tools, and a willingness to press some virtual flesh.

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Making Me Too Products Work par alex Jeudi 3 Juin 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Image: zengame

Being first to market always bring advantages You get to set the standard, establish your brand, create demand, and associate your product with the market. When there are no competitors, you’ll have 100 percent of the market share and the loyalty of satisfied customers. And when competitors do arrive, they’ll have to battle hard to push you off the top. But being second has its advantages too. You get to build on the mistakes made by the pioneer and enjoy a market that’s already been told the benefits of the product. With the right planning, the creators of a “me-too” product can quickly find themselves overtaking a tired front runner and moving from second — and even last — to first.

Stealing that position though will mean some smart preparations and creating a product that doesn’t just copy what’s already out there but which improves on it, exploiting the weaknesses of the current market standard and filling gaps so that your product can compete.

The best way to do that is to offer better quality. When industrial designer James Dyson created a new model of vacuum cleaner, he was entering a market dominated by large companies and in which “hoover” had become a byword for the act of sucking up household dust. By redesigning the product so that suction rates improved by 45 percent, Dyson was able to offer a vacuum cleaner that went on to become the market leader by value in the United States and the fastest-selling cleaner manufactured in the UK. And he was able to do it even though his me-too product is about eight times more expensive than that of his competitors.

When you compete on quality — and offer a significant improvement over competitors — it can be possible not just to steal market share but to change the pricing of the market too.

Be Nicer to Customers

Unlike manufacturers, retailers don’t have the option of offering higher quality products: the items on their shelves will be the same as the items on their competitors’ shelves. But they can beat the pioneers by looking for flaws in their customer service, and filling the gap.

That’s what Zappos did after founder Tony Hsieh had reviewed Amazon’s online bookstore and copied the model to sell shoes and clothing. After making almost no sales in 1999, the company was grossing over $1 billion ten years later. That growth came as a result of a focus on customer service that included return shipping assistance, a 365-day return policy and a call center that was always open and always helpful. So effective was the attempt to help customers that Amazon, which had enjoyed a five-year head start, bought the company last year for $1.2 billion.

Competing on customer service works best for me-too retailers because service is their main product. When customers can buy the same items in a range of different stores, both online and on the high street, the choice of seller will come down to convenience, trust and ease. When your me-too product is identical to something that already exists, then just offering to treat the customer better can be enough to pull ahead — at least until your bigger competitor pulls you in.

Apple is Always Second

Improved customer service usually concerns the relationship between the seller and the buyer. But when you can improve the relationship between the product and the buyer, then a me-too product can really steal the market.

Apple is the master of this technique. The company is never the first to bring a product idea to the market. It wasn’t the first to create an MP3 player, nor the first to use a touch screen nor even first company to offer a tablet computer, which have been around since the early 1980s. It did however improve the quality of products that already existed, but no less importantly, it made them easier to use.

iPods took off when music lovers realized they no longer had to click a button multiple times to find the songs they needed; the clickwheel meant that they could just roll their finger. And the sliding pages and large screen on the iPhone finally made changing functions and surfing the Web — something that other phones had been offering for years — convenient and easy. Although Apple had come in for criticism when it announced it was entering a crowded mobile phone market, its focus on ergonomics and user interaction meant that it was quickly able to dominate the field with a product whose core functions — communications, picture-taking, music playing and Web surfing — were the same as those of established competitors.

Of course, much of Apple’s success is also down to hype and marketing, but that’s another important way for a new product to beat a similar competitor with a first mover advantage. Users of Tivo, for example, may take the company’s dominance in its market for granted but the development stage was characterized by stiff competition from Mountain View pioneer ReplayTV. While Replay picked up the praise from critics and users at tech shows across the country, Tivo’s more business savvy executives were busy showing their player to broadcasting companies, making deals, and assuring them that their advertising revenue wouldn’t be affected. As Replay struggled to sell its player to customers, Tivo already had deals in place with retailers and broadcasters.

According to one survey, me-too products that differentiate themselves with unique customer benefits and superior value enjoy on average, five times the success rate, four times the market share and four times the profitability of the competitors that lack that key ingredient.

Whether you’re planning to mark yourself out with a better quality product, a superior customer service, revolutionary usability or some smart marketing, there’s no reason that being second to market means that you can’t conquer that market. Creating a successful business always means doing better than your competitors. That’s always easier to do when you know what your competitors have been doing — and what they’ve been doing wrong.

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Essential Elements of a Successful YouTube Clip par alex Jeudi 27 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

With more than two billion videos served every day — almost double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined — standing out on YouTube so that your clips win attention, go viral and perhaps even graduate to a meme is never going to be easy. There are a few ingredients though that every YouTube clip needs to have if it’s to beat out the music videos and the lolcats to win views and build an audience.

The most important, of course, is interesting content. That might appear obvious but it’s actually rarer and more difficult to create than it sounds. More than 24 hours of video content is added to YouTube every minute, so information that’s entertaining enough to be worth watching and original enough that audiences haven’t seen it before is actually relatively rare. When it does appear on the site, it quickly snowballs, building up large numbers of views.

Like the secret ingredient of a Hollywood blockbuster, there’s no failsafe formula that makes up good video content. On some clips, it might be a free practical instruction (such as this video demonstrating how to draw a skull); on others, it might be an original use of graphics in post-production (such as in this clip by a professional director which has generated almost half a million views). The good news though is that the quality of content can override production values. Although many of the most popular channels on YouTube are run by professionals — such as Popstar Magazine’s channel, with its exclusive interviews with teenage heartthrobs — YouTube is famous for the home-made appearance of its videos. That means that Geriatric1927, an 82-year-old widower from England, has been able to build up more than 53,000 subscribers and an incredible total of almost 8.4 million views just by sitting in front of a camera and reminiscing about his past. There’s no fancy editing, no graphics and no attempt to bring in friends to shoot the breeze or play with props. It’s simply the ability of unusual information and good stories to attract an audience.

Everyone Loves the Underdog

Part of the appeal of Geriatric1927 is that he’s not supposed to win, any more than Susan Boyle was supposed to have a nice voice. YouTube’s homemade quality has made it the place where the underdog can make an appearance and win the mass support necessary to battle against the big boys. When the production looks enthusiastic rather than professional and the talent genuine rather than manufactured, audiences can feel that they can put one over on industry by pushing forward their own champion. When the champion succeeds, they get to feel that they spotted them first. Their champion’s success is their success too.

The biggest recent beneficiary of the desire of YouTube’s audiences to discover and promote a potential winner is Justin Bieber. After being discovered on the site by music marketer Scooter Braun, Bieber was brought to Atlanta, Georgia to record demo tapes. At that point, the music company would have traditionally taken over the promotion process. But Braun kept Bieber on YouTube, continuing to upload videos.

“I wanted to build him up more on YouTube first,” he told The New York Times. “We supplied more content. I said: ‘Justin, sing like there’s no one in the room. But let’s not use expensive cameras.’ We’ll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it’s theirs.”

That was a bit of smart marketing that combined the professional quality content of Bieber’s teen appeal with the underdog championing that’s unique to YouTube.

Show Don’t Tell

YouTube-manufactured Justin Biebers are relatively unusual, and not everyone can or wants to be a teenage sensation. For businesses, YouTube is more likely to be used as another way of distributing useful information that supplements the content on a blog. That content is often didactic. It teaches viewers something that they didn’t know previously, paying them for their attention with valuable knowledge.

When broadcasters do that on YouTube, the principle for success is the same as that in most storytelling: to show, not tell. TigerDirect, for example, is an electronics store which attempts to build a customer base by teaching audiences about the benefits and features of the products they sell. Its TigerDirectTV channel on YouTube contains a series of videos that discusses cameras, gadgets and computer equipment. Most of the clips are shot in a studio, with the presenter at a desk holding the item he’s discussing. But the channel isn’t afraid to get out of the room and take the camera to the great outdoors. In a clip discussing the difference between G and N wireless routers, for example, three presenters set up two routers on a long empty road and continued driving until the signal from each faded. The presenters could have said that G routers are good for 20 yards, N routers for much further but by demonstrating the difference physically, they created much better — and more memorable — content.

Although success on YouTube can come from an amateur appearance, professionalism can work too.

It would be great to say then that you can either go for shaky camera work and win the support of the underdog or bring in a crew and create a professional-looking show. As long as the content is interesting and entertaining enough, you’ll be a success. But it’s not that easy because there’s another element that’s vital for success on YouTube whatever your approach.

You have to do the marketing.

Put up a video on YouTube and you’re not going to get views unless people know you’re there. That means adding comments – intelligent, helpful comments – at the bottom of related clips. It means talking about the clip on your own website. And it means continuing to add new content on a regular basis so that you maintain your audience and don’t lose viewers just as your popularity starts to build. All of that takes time and effort — which is why it’s so much easier to film your cat getting stuck at the top of the curtains.

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Microsoft and Google Fight in the Cloud par alex Jeudi 20 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Microsoft’s announcement that the latest version of its productivity suite, Office 2010, will have an online component should have been a vote of confidence in the cloud. Currently in Beta, the newest version of Word will allow for co-authoring, and the ability to edit papers “and share ideas with others at the same time.” Users will also be able to “view the availability” of people who are working on the document with them, and “easily initiate a conversation without leaving Word.” No less eyecatching is the ability to access and share documents from “virtually anywhere” by posting them online and opening them in almost any computer or Windows phone using a Microsoft Word Web app or Word Mobile 2010. The suite should be a must-have for just about any modern freelancer working with clients scattered around the globe. In practice though, while Microsoft Office might remain an essential tool, the new version is unlikely to be helped by its new attachment to the cloud.

Microsoft’s move is intended to counter advances by Google, which increasingly sees itself as a competitor to Bill Gates’s firm. The search giant might not have its own PC-based operating system (yet) but both companies have mobile operating systems and Google’s free online office suite, Google Docs, is an indication that it sees the future in terms of Internet-based services rather than computer-based software.

Users Spend Five Minutes on Google Docs

A late 2009 survey by IDC, a research firm, suggests they might be onto something. While just under 20 percent of corporate respondents said that they currently use Google Docs, more than 27 percent expected to be using it “widely” in the following year. How widely they use it though may turn out to be crucial. An earlier survey by Compete found that Google Docs and its Excel-like service, Spreadsheets, had 4.4 million users in 2008. That’s only a fraction of the number of people using Microsoft Office, and a look at how those people are using the online service is even more worrying for Google. According to Compete, only 58 percent of those visitors actually used one of Google’s productivity services, with the remainder stalling at the home page. Worse, those that did use it only stopped by just three days each month — and then for only about five minutes a time.

By contrast, not only does just about everyone have Office on their PCs, they actually use it.

Where Google may be able to achieve some penetration is among a few tech-savvy companies looking to save money on multiple Office licenses. The need to protect those revenues is likely to have been what prompted Microsoft to put its services online in the first place, including a free lite version of Word.

But savings of thousands of dollars aren’t going to be available to freelancers. They might be able to put aside a few hundred bucks by swapping Microsoft for Google, or even OpenOffice, but when Office is their main professional tool, that’s not the place to start looking to make savings. It’s not that freelancers like paying $99 for a stripped down version of Office (or $399 for the full version). It’s that they don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount to pay for a standard professional tool that they’re going to be using every day. If it saves them the hassle of repeatedly explaining to a client why they can’t open the latest format of a Word document without losing all of the formatting then it’s worth the extra money. Nor is it just professional document-makers who are willing to lay out the cash for professional standard software. Paint.net is as free as Google Docs, and Photoshop has an online version, and yet Adobe has little trouble selling its main image suite for around $700.

Freelancers Want Their Work to Hand

One of the reasons for that preference for Microsoft Office over Google Docs is the very nature of cloud computing itself: the idea that everything is on the Internet and nothing needs to be stored on the hard drive. It’s a concept that’s heavy on efficiency and light on an understanding of the way that people actually use their computers. Companies like Google, with vast banks of servers, might be able to put their faith in storage rooms that they never see. Freelancers who have ongoing projects like to know that their work is no further away than their fingertips.

That’s especially true if they can access their work at any time. Cloud computing might be safer and offer all sorts of multi-access advantages that working with Microsoft and a hard drive can’t provide, but when your ability to access the documents a client is waiting for depends on the reliability of your Internet service provider, it’s no surprise that freelancers choose to safeguard their work themselves. Large businesses can have large back-ups and plenty of insurance; freelancers need to deliver the assets they’ve been creating if their business is going to have revenue. Google’s announcement in May that it was phasing out offline support for Google Docs would hardly have won the confidence of freelancers.

None of this though has stopped some aspects of freelance work doing well on the Web. Hunting for clients through services like Elance and RentaCoder make job searching easy, but apart from portfolios, these services store little on servers that belong to the freelancer. oDesk’s attempts to turn a virtual workplace into a real cubicle, complete with snooping boss and time-punching, show how little some companies understand about freelancers and their motivations.

If anything could shift a preference for personal responsibility towards trust in a cloud, it’s the rise of mobile devices. As tablets and smartphones become better at allowing document and spreadsheet editing, freelancers may find themselves looking to access their work not just in more than one place but also on more than one device. That’s the opportunity that Microsoft is hoping its new suite will benefit from. It’s more likely though that Google will be kept in its place, and freelancers will be doing a lot of wireless syncing.

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The Real Value of Trending Topics par sabrina Mercredi 19 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Image: docpop

Twitter’s trending topics were meant to be its jewel in the crown, a way for anyone to see a snapshot of the zeitgeist, to understand which are the most important issues of the day, and to see breaking news topics as soon as they happen. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Unless Justin Bieber is the most important thing happening in the world right now and the three words to say after sex are what’s really on everyone’s tongue at the moment, then Twitter’s list of trending topics — highlighted on its website — have been a mighty fail. But even if trivia remains top of the trending topics, marketers can still pull some value out of the list — provided they know how to analyze the information they’re gathering and what to do with it once they get it.

Twitter at least appears to have recognized the failure of trending topics to produce usable information. Recently the site changed its trending algorithm to focus on “emerging trends” rather than the most popular subjects over a period of time. So far, the change has made little difference. Instead of Nick Jonas winning a spot in the trending topics list, “Jick Nonas” has made the popularity charts as fans look for ways around what they believe to be Twitter’s keyword blocking software. And hashtags like “#thatswhyyoursingle” are still dominating the list.

Listen to Real Conversations

The reason for the consistent failure is trending topics’ strength. Search sites have always marketed trending topics as an opportunity for marketers to overhear real conversations and understand the subjects that are actually moving people. These are topics that people want to discuss, not the subjects that media editors and producers think that people should discuss. But what people generally want to talk about on the Web are generally the same kind of subjects they talk about in college canteens, school playgrounds and around the watercooler: sex, sports, and rock and roll. That changes a little when a major news event, such as a natural disaster or an election, happens but the list soon reverts back to the usual combination of pop stars and cheesy phrases.

It’s tempting to believe that the failure is Twitter’s, that the site no longer has the kind of sophisticated audience that its initial 30-something, educated, slightly geeky demographics suggested. But trending topics aren’t limited to Twitter, and other sites are suffering from a similar failure to provide information that’s obviously useful to marketers. Google’s Trends should also be providing similarly useful data but like Twitter, its top lists are filled with searches for sports matches, television programs and celebrities.

One option for marketers and businesses then may be to ignore what’s on the list and simply aim to break into it. That’s always been part of the strategy of Twitter’s hashtag giveaways in which companies hand out a freebie at random to someone who wrote a tweet containing a particular hashtag. Twitter however was quick to spot this attempt at trend manipulation and appears to block hashtag giveaways from making the trending topic list. Giveaways have also become so common now that it’s harder than ever for a company to gain the kind of traction that would even qualify it for a trending topic. And there’s some evidence that the exposure generated by an appearance on a trending topic list doesn’t always translate into extra business.

A better option then may be to look beyond the top trending topics — which are likely to remain trivial and entertaining — and use the information to compare different businesses in the same field.

Google Compares Trends

Google differs from Twitter is in its ability to allow marketers to compare searches for their products to those of their competitors. A comparison of Blogger.com, WordPress.com and WordPress.org, for example, shows that the free WordPress blogs are more popular than the Google’s own offering. That might be interesting for bloggers wondering which software is more popular with other users, but it’s also an important piece of information for developers thinking about where to target their plugins. (A search by keyword, rather than by website, shows that interest in WordPress outgrew interest in Blogger back in late 2006 and has continued to outpace it ever since.)

Neither of those companies though are trending topics. Facebook’s privacy issues might push it onto the list briefly but in general, they aren’t likely to trend. One way then of using trending topics is to focus not on the most popular items that succeed in bubbling through the trivia but to mine search information, look deeper and make comparisons.

But perhaps the most important value of trending data doesn’t lie in an analysis of the information itself but rather in an understanding of what it reveals. The criticism of trending data isn’t an attack on the sites that produce it. It’s an expression of disappointment in the subjects that people find interesting enough to share in large numbers on social media sites and search engines. Companies might be disappointed to find that they’re not the main talking points among the general public, but they should hardly be surprised.

And yet, many of the items on the trending topics list are products. Justin Bieber is no less a product of the entertainment industry than Windows is a product of Microsoft. His record company have made him into a trending topic by making him trendy enough to build the kind of deep loyalty that other marketers can only envy — and which is just about unique to the music industry and its teenage fans. If trending topics reveal anything is that it’s not easy to create products that have mass popularity, and no list is going to provide a shortcut to instant success.

But the most important lesson is that a marketer’s goal shouldn’t be to join the conversation by attaching a product to a popular topic. It’s to be entertaining enough to change the conversation. When your competitors are sex and rock and roll, that’s not going to be easy either.

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Twitter Promotions: Winners and Losers par sabrina Vendredi 14 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Josh.Liba

Moonfruit’s tenth anniversary promotion set the standard for Twitter-based marketing. The content management and hosting company promised to give away a Macbook Pro every day for ten days. To enter the competition, twitterers only had to include the hashtag #moonfruit in their tweet; the more they tweeted it, the greater their chances of winning. It was a giveaway that caused a Twitter stampede. At one point, helped by additional prizes for creative entries, tweets with moonfruit hashtags made up almost 3 percent of all the tweets being posted on the site. Overwhelmed by the popularity of the contest, Moonfruit called an early halt to the campaign, giving away the remaining Macbooks in a one-day bonanza. Since then, other companies have tried to copy the model. In particular, recognizing that prizes have to be desirable — and that everyone desires Apple products — the launch of the iPad looked like a golden opportunity, a chance for any company to gain instant exposure by giving away tablets and cashing in on Apple’s hype. Their failures have provided a textbook on what works on Twitter, what doesn’t and how the site is changing for businesses looking to use social media for marketing.

Choose Your Hashtags Carefully

Part of the problem was a poor use of hashtags. Software retailer Nothing But Software invited twitterers to simply include the hashtag #NBS in their tweets in order to stand a chance of winning. That hashtag though could have stood for anything. It was short enough to be added to any tweet, even one on unrelated topics, but not interesting enough to encourage readers to find out what it meant. It looked like a technical tag for people in the know rather than a fun theme that others would want to join. Had the tags reached the trending topics list, the company might have been able to cash in on some useful publicity. But it didn’t, and considering that even #moonfruit had mysteriously disappeared from the trending topics list, it was always unlikely to do so.

Hashtags might look like convenient ways for giveaway software to pull out winners but they’re also the main marketing message that users will be distributing, remembering and seeing. It needs to be a catchword that creates curiosity and looks fun, rather than a group of initials with no obvious meaning.

It wasn’t just careless hashtag choices that caused the iPad giveaways to fail though. They also lacked momentum. Giving away one giant prize every day for ten days meant that people whose tweets weren’t chosen on the first day felt that they were still in with a chance. Seeing someone else win each day showed that people were receiving their prizes — and that if those lucky winners could win, they could too. A lottery that can point to previous and current winners will always find it easier to continue attract players. It’s the near miss as much as the win that keeps gamblers coming back.

While a series of giveaways is always likely to be more expensive than a single offer of a solitary prize, however big, there are ways to keep a giveaway rolling without breaking the bank. Starting with small but valuable prizes such as iPod nanos or free consultations that lead up to the big prize can help to build interest and prove to followers that your timeline is serious about passing out the freebies. iPads aren’t cheap but handing out five over five days would have made for a $2,500 promotion. That’s an amount that shouldn’t take too long to earn back depending on the company .

Deliver What You Promise

Some of Moonfruit’s copycats didn’t learn from experience in the same way that Moonfruit did. The Internet company wasn’t the first to orchestrate a giveaway. It was preceded by Squarespace, a direct competitor, which had promised to give away thirty iPhones in thirty days. Like Moonfruit, they too reached the trending topics list but the handouts didn’t happen. Instead of receiving shiny new phones, winners were given less shiny gift cards — nice, but not the same thing and nowhere near as exciting. There’s a reason that people prefer gifts on their birthday rather than gift cards, even though the cards are more versatile. Specialist blog iPad Insider made an even worse error by promising to give away a 32GB iPad on April 2. By mid-May, there was still no sign of a happy winner. Promising to give away a product but not actually doing so might make for the cheapest way to attract attention but it’s also the quickest way to ensure that the company has no trust after the competition ends.

It’s unlikely though that iPad Insider intended to keep its iPad to itself. It’s more likely that the publishers looked at the number of new followers the promotion was providing, calculated how much they were paying for each and decided that they were too expensive. With little more than 1,600 followers altogether, the site could have been paying as much as 37.5 cents each if all the followers were new. Assuming the site had an advertising clickthrough rate of 3 percent, those new followers would need to click ads that paid $12.50 to make the promotion worthwhile. It probably looked cheaper for the site to sully its reputation among the relatively few people who noticed the promotion than wait for the ad revenue to pay for it.

That might suggest that expensive giveaways on Twitter should be restricted to companies with expensive enough products to recoup the expense. Moonfruit started its campaign with around 750 followers. The numbers rose to 47,000 followers before dropping back to just over 21,000 but its traffic increased by a factor of eight. With prices that range from $4.49 per month to $23.99 per month, it had a much higher chance of recouping the roughly $15,000-$20,000 the company would have spent on the promotion.

It would be tempting to say then that the rules have become clear — make the prizes desirable; make the hashtags interesting; create a series of giveaways rather than one big prize; ensure the cost of the promotion matches the value of returns — but it’s possible that giveaways have had their day on Twitter. When everyone is giving away an iPad, the opportunity doesn’t look special. And when users know that they can create a new timeline without followers and use it for hashtag promotion tweets without bothering anyone, the benefits to companies are minimal. The biggest loser of Twitter-based promotions may be Twitter-based promotions themselves.

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The Strangest iPhone Apps par alex Mercredi 12 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

You’d have thought that turning the world’s neatest smartphone into a million-dollar whoopee cushion would have been enough for iPhone developers. Not a bit of it. While some coders have been busy creating games that mimic air traffic control, recreating Microsoft Word on a tiny screen or turning an iPhone into a race track, others have been thinking up some of the most bizarre things it’s possible to do with a mobile phone.

Here are five of the strangest:

iLickit Licks the Competition

One of the things that has made the iPhone so special is the way that users interact with it. A touch screen combined with an accelerometer means that you can operate the device with just fingers and wrists. For Halihow, the makers of iLickit, however, that’s not enough. They think that iPhone users should show their appreciation for the iPhone’s flexibility by operating it with their tongues.

The game pulls up a picture of a food item which players must then lick away in the fastest time possible. Commenting on a review which suggested that playing might not be very sanitary, the company’s blog suggested wrapping it with kitchen foil or cleaning it with an alcoholic wipe. It certainly sounds like alcohol was an integral part of the development process.

iLickit is billed as “the first ever game on the iPhone… for your tongue.” It would be nice to think it’s the last but with 60,000 downloads in three days, we might not be so lucky.

Flychat’s Flies Make Very Small Carrier Pigeons

If iLickit has any admirable creative element it’s the way in which the developers have tried to come up with an unusual way of operating the iPhone. “Everyone uses their fingers,” they must have thought. “What else can they use?” If they had come up with a better answer, their creativity might have been a bit more laudable. FlyChat does something similar to create a text-based version of a social media service that’s a cross between Twitter and ChatRoulette. Type a message, tag or theme it, and attach it to a fly. The fly will then buzz off to someone else’s app, delivering the message to a complete stranger.

That’s two odd elements in one. On the one hand, why would anyone want to send a message to a complete stranger — or read one sent by a complete stranger? And why would they want to attach the message to a fly? What was wrong with carrier pigeons? Or how about dogs? Flies aren’t the cutest messengers in the world and they’re more likely to carry disease than something you’d want to interact with.

And yet millions of people do read messages written by strangers on Twitter every day and flies do get everywhere. Even it seems into your mobile phone.

Holy Cow, That’s a Strange Idea!

FlyChat might be odd but it has the distinction of being complex. The developers have had to come up with categories, think of a way to send the messages to other phones and display them. And someone had to come up with the fly idea too. Programmer Andrew Kaluzniacki doesn’t appear to have given himself too much of a headache thinking of features for his iPhone app. Holy Cow displays a picture of a cow. Touch the screen, and the cow moos. That’s it. No chickens, no goats, not even a picture of a field. You get one cow and one moo (although there are no limits to the number of times you can play that moo.)

It would be nice to say that a moo was the worst sound you can get out of your iPhone, but there are, of course, the fart apps. At least the cow only moos.

Quick, Go Pee!

Not all strange ideas are bad though. RunPee is odd, but it’s a very good idea. The free service, based on a website, lets cinemagoers search for the film they’re about to watch. The app then tells them the best time to nip out for a quick break without missing anything important. They’re told the cue, advised on how long they’ve got and can even read a synopsis of what they missed when they get back. And if they keep on drinking their gallon-sized buckets of soda, they can keep looking at their phone to learn the time of the next missable boring bit.

The next time a silhouette of someone’s head pops up while you’re watching your downloaded movie then, you can thank RunPee.

Help Ruben and Lullaby Stay Together

Other strange ideas are less useful but they do at least have the distinction of being beautiful. Opertoon’s Ruben and Lullaby is a kind of love story with an ending defined by the player. A couple are having a fight. Shake the iPhone and you can make one of the partners angry, forcing a reaction from the other. Stroke the screen, and you can calm them down. The images are made up of some neatly drawn graphics, turning the app into a kind of interactive comic strip with music that matches the mood of the characters.

As ideas go, this one couldn’t have come much odder. It would have been easier to see how the same concept could have been applied to a battle between a superhero and a supervillain: shake to land a blow; stroke to build up strength. Instead, we get the kind of relationship trouble that video gamers are more likely to turn to their iPhone to avoid.

And yet, the app itself is beautiful enough to be a winner, and who knows, it might even help some poor lover save his relationship — when he gets bored, puts down his phone and shows his partner some attention.

The app store is filled with racing games, fart machines, platform games and measuring devices. Many of them look roughly the same. It takes creativity to come up with a new idea, and even if not all of those ideas are useful, even the strangest can be their own source of new inspiration. Just steer clear of the cows.

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The Biggest Client Killers par sabrina Jeudi 6 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

One of the downsides to freelancing is the loose connection between buyers and suppliers. Finding a good replacement is never easy but for clients, freelancers are much easier to fire than permanent employees who have contracts and might demand compensation. Once you’ve managed to persuade a client to pay you for your work, you want to hold onto them — and you want to avoid these giant client killers that will soon have you pitching for new gigs.

1. Promising What You Can’t Deliver

The usual advice given for success in business is to underpromise and overdeliver. And the usual discovery of business owners is that when you underpromise you don’t get to deliver anything.

The problem though is that when you promise more than you can do, you only get to deliver once, and clients aren’t too keen on handing over the cash.

It’s a mistake that’s just too easy to make. You look at the specs, assume that you can do most of the tasks and tell yourself that you’ll either learn the rest or charge enough to outsource those elements you can’t do to someone who can.

But when the problems start, they quickly mount. It’s hard to gauge how long it will take to learn something you don’t know how to do, so the first symptom of being out of your depth will be a delay. The second symptom, and the one that will really kill off the relationship, will be amateur quality on delivery: if anyone could learn how to do the task in minimal time and get it spot on with no experience, the client would have done it himself.

The easiest solution is not to bid on projects you know you can’t do but to regard each spec as describing the skills you should be learning if you’re to dominate your niche. The real difficulty comes though, when it’s established clients who are asking you to do something that falls outside your skill sets. Saying no to someone who relies on you weakens their dependence — they now have to find someone else. But it’s still a better bet than committing and failing.

2. Disappearing from View

The result of promising what you can’t deliver will be a sinking feeling that this project is never going to get done. At that point, the temptation is to hide. Emails from the client asking for updates are stored for later, then ignored and never answered. When they’re not sure about the best way to explain a delay, some freelancers prefer to say nothing, hoping that if they can complete the project properly eventually, they’ll be able to repair any damage caused in the meantime.

It rarely works that way, especially when the product comes in substandard. At that point any forgiveness or polite requests for change are likely to be replaced by anger at being kept out of the loop about the difficulties as they came up.

It’s easy to disappear when you’re freelancing for a client at a distance but it’s smart business to stay in touch even when things are difficult.

3. Disloyalty to the Firm

When you’re an employee, passing your resumé to a competitor would be grounds for instant dismissal — or at least a quick search for a replacement and then instant dismissal. Freelancers have a little more freedom than that. Clients assume that they’re working for others and possibly even for competitors, but they also assume confidentiality. Sometimes, they’ll even nail that trust down with a non-disclosure agreement. So while you should be free to work with another business in the same field, you’re not free to share the information you learn working for other people — however much you think the client might love you for the gossip.

When a current client hears you’ve been talking behind their back, you can be sure it won’t be long before they’re giving you a kick in the rear.

That’s a problem because professional small talk can help to cement relationships between a client and a freelancer who rarely meet in person. One solution then is to share either old stories about related businesses or anecdotes about non-competitive fields. So a programmer working for two security companies might talk about the work he did as an in-house programmer before he went freelance and he could also discuss the work he does for a law firm on a very different kind of program. Those stories might still contain lessons that could benefit the client but if they’re not sharing any confidential information , they won’t cost you the trust of an established buyer.

4. Disturbing the Peace

Good clients always say that if you have any questions they’ll be happy to answer them. And good freelancers always know their stuff well enough to rarely do it.

This goes to the heart of the reason the client is hiring a freelancer in the first place: they want to offload the project onto someone else so that they can concentrate on doing something else. If you’re constantly sending them emails or calling them up to ask questions, you’re taking up time that they could have spent doing the work themselves.

That doesn’t mean you should never ask a client questions. It’s better to check than to get something wrong, and it’s better to stay in touch than to disappear. But it’s best of all to get all of the information you need right at the beginning of the project so that you can work on the project undisturbed —and without disturbing the client either.

Freelancing, by its nature, is a precarious way of making a living. You need multiple revenue streams and multiple clients. But most important of all, you need the skill, the talent and the reliability to hold onto the clients you’ve got.

On the other hand, freelancers might be easy to fire but they’re not very easy to replace and for the client there’s no guarantee that their next choice won’t bring out one of these giant client killers too.

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The Seven Types of Café Workers par alex Mardi 4 Mai 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Samikki

You can find them in every café that has a wireless connection. Hunched over their keyboards, today’s digital nomads have managed to turn every coffee bar into an office and every table with more than one chair into a meeting room. But while they might all be typing in similar places, café workers come in a number of different flavors. Here are the seven types of café worker you can expect to find in your local latte bar:

1. The Networker

The Networker wants to be friends with everyone. He (or she) will see everyone else with a keyboard as a potential contact and every other café-worker as someone who can help them find a new client, a new partner — or even a proper job. So they’ll smile and be friendly, introduce themselves and chat — and do it all when you’re keenest to get down to work.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for an introduction or want to know what the Geek in the corner does, then the Networker is the person to know.

2. The Nomad

The Nomad is always on the move. She (or he) will turn up, drop their bag, open their laptop and disappear. The computer will sit on the table, humming away but they’ll be nowhere to be seen. After a few hours, they’ll return and either pack up their bag or have a swipe at the mousepad to bring the computer back to life before vanishing again.

It’s as though they expect the computer to do the work for them while they enjoy the day, which — if it were true — would mean that we’d have to call them “The Genius.”

If you’re really lucky, you might even come across the Indebted Nomad. A Nomad sub-species, these don’t just leave their computers on the desk, they also ask other people to watch them. You’re then left wondering whether you’re responsible if someone steals it while you’re getting a refill and find yourself feeling your sense of responsibility battle against your bladder.

3. The Hog

The Nomad takes up one spot on a table and one electricity socket but for the Hog, an entire café isn’t big enough. They’ll take a table for four, even when a table for two is available, plug every gadget ever made by Apple into all of the electricity sockets (before trailing the wire for their laptop halfway across the café), and regard other seats as coatstands, bag racks and additional desks. Most frequently found in Starbucks, where busy baristas are less likely to move them on, Hogs are famous for the dirty looks they give when you ask them very nicely if they wouldn’t mind terribly letting you plug your laptop into a socket before it dies.

The answer is usually, yes, they would mind. Their supercharged iPod Nano is more important.

4. The Socialite

For most café workers, their biggest friend is their laptop — and they don’t need anyone else. If they want conversation, there’s Twitter or, if they’re really desperate, they can ask the waiter for another drink. But when you’re serious about work, you want to keep the word stuff to a minimum.

The Socialite disagrees. For this brand of café dweller, watering holes are places not just to work but to meet, chat and sometimes to meet and chat about work. So while you’re trying to focus on your screen, at the next table four people are planning global corporate domination, sketching out their new development or watching a presentation.

They even have the cheek to give you dirty looks if you try to listen.

5. The Talker

Socialites chatting up a storm at the next table are annoying enough, whether they’re talking business or pleasure. Talkers though are far worse. These café citizens travel alone but are connected to the rest of the world through their mobile phones — which are almost permanently attached to their ears. As soon as a conversation ends and the phone hits the table, it immediately rings again, giving the rest of the café a chance to hear once again their very impressive Lady Gaga ringtone.

It’s not so much that the talk that can be so irritating to other café workers, it’s that they only provide half the conversation. Following a meeting organized by socialites can be interesting. You get to feel like you’re gatecrashing someone else’s board meeting. Trying to listen in on a conversation that only gives you one half of the chat however, is an exercise in frustration. And distraction.

6. The Moaner

One of the trickiest things about working in a café is finding the right café. Some places are filled with shoppers and tired children — you don’t want to try to work over the sound of gossip and screaming. Others are packed with students cramming for exams. They’re usually the worst kinds of Hogs, Talkers and Socialites. The key is to find a café that’s quiet enough to work, where you’ll be generally ignored, and which has enough power points for you not to have to fight someone for electricity.

Some café workers though ignore the search, pick the first café they see and try to change it — by complaining constantly. Moaners ask for the music to be turned down, the air conditioning turned up, the door left open, then closed. They’ll send back their coffee and say the croissant is too cold, ask the children at the next table to keep it down a bit and frighten the daylights out of the waiters. It makes for fun watching but not the best office mate.

7. The Geek

But the worst type of café worker by far is the Geek. Their fingers never leave the keyboard, their screen never flits back to the delights and temptations of the Internet. They’re focused on their work and they’re getting things done. Absolutely undistractable, they’re the superheroes of the café-working world — the people who come to a café and actually work.

Other types of café worker will try to console themselves by telling themselves that the Geek must be on a very tight deadline or that he doesn’t have any kind of home office — or even a home — but the fact, is the Geek is just the kind of focused, driven worker who achieves things, even when working alone in a café.

On the plus side, if they’re alone it’s probably because no one like geeks.

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Benefiting from Twitter’s Ads par alex Jeudi 29 Avril 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Twitter always had a strange business plan. In fact, it doesn’t seem to have had any business plan or development plan, let alone revenue model at all. The service was created after a brainstorming session when Odeo workers Biz Stone, Even Williams and Jack Dorsey found themselves lacking passion about the service they working on. The infrastructure was built in two weeks and used initially as an internal messaging system before exploding at the 2007 SxSW festival.

Throughout Twitter’s growth since then, the policy has always been to build and watch what happens. The initial idea might have been Jack Dorsey’s but the way the service works in practice has been the result of users reinventing it, figuring out strategies and deciding the sorts of messages that help to build their communities, gather followers, and — if they’re commercial users — push their brand. From hashtag chats, in which twitterers can discuss a topic in real time, to Twitter’s giant suite of third party add-ons, much of the way that Twitter is used has been created by twitterers themselves. When an idea has come from within Twitter and delivered from the top down, such as lists, users have often reacted by questioning its purpose — and ignoring it. Twitter might well be the first genuinely crowdsourced social media site.

That makes introducing a revenue model all the more difficult. Unlike add-ons that allow for multiple account management, hashtag chatting and keyword alerts, developers aren’t going to create a system that allows Twitter to make money. Biz Stone and Evan Williams have to do that themselves — and hope that users like it.

Twitter Handles 600 Million Search Queries a Day

The launch of ads in search results then, announced a couple of weeks ago, marks a difficult moment for the company as it tries to figure out how to make money from the 55 million tweets that pass through the system every day. Users may understand that Twitter needs to generate income but there’s no way of knowing how they’ll react to sponsored tweets appearing at the top of search results.

Twitter has done its best to increase the chances that users won’t find the ads intrusive. The messages have to be natural tweets that are part of Twitter’s ecosystem, they have to show interaction if they’re to continue to appear, and they’re currently only being served by a handful of selected brands. Those limits may help Twitter’s community to accept the presence of ads on the site without finding them too commercial.

Most interesting though is the fact that the ads are currently only served in search results.

According to an announcement made at Chirp, the Twitter developers conference held in mid-April, Twitter’s search engine conducts some 600 million search queries every day. That’s a remarkable number that, if true, would place Twitter second only to Google as the Web’s most popular search engine. Yahoo, in third place, generates around 9.4 billion searches every month to Twitter’s 19 billion.

And yet, Twitter’s search engine is weak, difficult to use and not a natural place to find information on any topic. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand dug a little deeper and found that those search queries aren’t the same as the type generated on Google or Yahoo. Most, he discovered, took the form of automated alerts and widgets placed in Web pages whose API calls are recorded as search queries. The percentage of searches actually conducted by users through Twitter’s search engine — where the ads will show — is in the “low double-digits.”

Looking for Britney Spears on Twitter

And when people do search on Twitter, the kinds of searches they’re conducting aren’t the type that are most likely to attract advertisers. In April 2009, Hitwise found the most popular topic looked for on Twitter was entertainment, which made up 29 percent of the top 75 searches. It’s no surprise that “Starbucks” and “Virgin America,” two of the keyword phrases that now generate ads, showed no sign of making the top 75 that month (or apparently any month).

As Dallas Lawrence of Levick Strategic Communications argued on Mashable, companies looking to advance themselves through Twitter can’t rely on paid advertising as a useful shortcut. Sponsored search placement alone won’t be enough to give a company a platform; firms will still need to invest in accumulating social capital through regular tweeting, communicating and chatting on Twitter if they’re going to spread their brand through social media. That’s especially true when the ads are only shown to that low percentage of users who happen to search on Twitter — and the even smaller percentage who happen to search for the company’s brand.

Clearly then, Twitter’s new advertising model is going to have a limited use as it stands. To make real money for Twitter — and to generate real exposure for advertisers — the sponsored placements are going to have to appear in timelines and not just in search results. It might be nice too if they then generated income for the twitterers and not just for Twitter and the development companies on whose products the ads will one day appear.

The most important lesson to take away from Twitter’s first foray into creating a meaningful revenue platform then isn’t what they’ve done — which is likely to change — but how they’ve done it. Like the system itself, Twitter has started small, tossing an idea out there to test the reaction and see what happens. If the ads generate interaction and if users don’t find them too obtrusive, they’ll be rolled out across the network and opened to other advertisers. By taking their time and giving an opportunity to Twitter’s users to pick up the ads and play with them, Twitter is increasing the chances that they’ll come out with a product that will work, rather than launching a system that will fail (as Facebook embarrassingly did with Beacon).

Twitter might have an unusual attitude towards a business model and a unique bottom-up approach to development but as a way of creating a growing business with a strong foundation, it’s a model that other companies might well want to copy.

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China’s Secret Hi Tech Market par sabrina Mardi 27 Avril 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: kurzonis

When Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit for $1.75 billion in 2005, it felt as though the world really had changed. Here was a Chinese company that few people in America had heard of buying up an American icon of the twentieth century, a company that for many of the previous decades had epitomized the United States’ technological advantage. Now it would become part of a business whose biggest shareholder was the Chinese government. IBM would be working for the Chinese. Today, Lenovo is the largest seller of PCs in China with more than 28 percent of the market. Its sales for fiscal year 2008/2009 were almost $15 billion, and it’s the fourth largest seller of personal computers in the world. The sight of IBM notepads carrying the Lenovo brand name no longer seems unusual. And yet, when it comes to high tech, other Chinese manufacturers are largely invisible outside Asia. They’re also different, big and coming this way.

The high tech gap between China and the West may best be seen in gaming. European and American gamers have long been used to firing up their Japanese-made game consoles but the most popular games have tended to come from Western manufacturers. Activision, with its $1 billion Call of Duty franchise, started building games for Atari but it’s an American company majority-owned by French company Vivendi. Electronic Arts, founded by Trip Hawkins and based in Redwood City, is as American as John Madden’s favorite sport. Overall, the gaming industry in the US posted sales of over $19.7 billion in 2009.

American Gamers Don’t Like Cheats

China though is surprisingly close behind. According to a report by accountancy firm KPMG, already in 2006, its online gaming industry was worth $970 million, a sizable amount for a country whose GDP per capita is about one-ninth of America’s. But the kind of games that Chinese players like to play tend to be different to those bought in the West. Few gamers in Shanghai, Beijing and Urumqi are signing up to battle bad guys across Call of Duty’s online servers. Instead, they’re more likely to be playing Westward Journey, a game based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

And the form of playing is different too. As ChinaGeeks, a China-related blog, points out, few Chinese gamers own dedicated game consoles and even PCs are still relatively rare — at least outside the larger cities. Playing then takes place in long sessions at Internet cafes (which don’t serve coffee), with progress saved on the game’s servers. And while American gamers are reasonably happy to pay monthly subscriptions, they balk at playing free games alongside other players who have paid for magic items, the revenue model popular in China.

Just as gaming forms in China and the West are worlds apart, commercial operating systems are different as well. Chinese computer users do use Windows, Leopard and Linux but outside China, you’ll be hard pressed to spot a user of Kylin, an operating system developed at China’s National University of Defense Technology and based on Mach and FreeBSD. A report for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission suggested that the program’s main purpose might be related to cyberwarfare.

Chinese users even search the Web differently. Google’s decision to stop abiding by the Chinese government’s censorship rules following cyber attacks on the email accounts of human rights activists might have looked like a supreme act of moral self-sacrifice but with a market share of around 35 percent in comparison to local search engine Baidu’s 58 percent, the company wasn’t giving up a leading position.

Chinese Online Shoppers Go for the Tea

And even as online retailing has grown in China so the way of buying and selling on the Web has evolved in a unique direction. One of the most common items bought online is tea, located on sites like Alibaba’s TaoBao, paid for through AliPay and delivered by scooter. Ebay and Paypal barely get a look in.

It may seem then that the Chinese hi tech world is a unique ecosystem as distinct from the West’s way of using the Internet as the Galapagos Islands is different to Iceland. But there are similarities and there are overlaps. World of Warcraft is as loved by Chinese gamers as it is by Western hack-and-slashers. Farmville, Facebook’s social media game, is a copy of the Chinese game Happy Farm. Kingsoft, creators of a suite of productivity software, as well as some of China’s most popular games, has recently announced that next year, it will launch its Lost Temple and JX3 Online games into the European and North American markets. Despite the Chinese cultural associations of those games, the company seems to feel that if the story is good and the gameplay enjoyable, then people anywhere will want to play. They may well be right.

Perhaps the most intriguing development though is in mobile technology. The phone in your pocket may be running the iPhone’s OS, Android or Symbian but few mobiles have the capacity to boot up more than one operating system. (Nokia’s N95 managed to do it with a little developer trickery). The Chinese Sunno S880, however, packs a 3.6 inch WVGA display, WiFi, GPS, an 8 megapixel camera with lens cover, 256MB of memory and an 806 MHz CPU. And it can run both Android and Windows Mobile. If they can get Kylian on it too, they might just have something.

It’s no surprise that technology in China has developed in a different direction to the way it’s grown in the West. Regulations have made it difficult for some companies, such as Paypal, to operate. Cheap transport costs that allow cross-city deliveries to be made within the hour for as little as 73 cents mean that it’s worth ordering some forgotten grocery on the Web in a manner that doesn’t pay in the West. The question though is what will happen in those areas where those two worlds converge. IBM won’t be the last company to find it’s working for China.

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iPad Boycott Makes its Point par sabrina Mercredi 21 Avril 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Yutaka Tsutano

With more than half a million iPads sold within a week of launch and European rollout delayed to cope with the unexpectedly high demand, it seems as though the question of whether there’s space for a third type of product between the laptop and the mobile phone has been answered. People do want tablets in general, and they want iPads in particular. But the new gizmo hasn’t gone down so well with everyone. While the fanboys have been lining up to get their fingers on Apple’s screens, others have been looking to hit the new device out of the park. Some have done it literally but others have been pulling the shutters down on Apple’s tablet, banning people from using it. A number of bloggers and tech types too have called for a consumer boycott.

The most comprehensive ban on the iPad took place in Israel, a country known for its hi-tech industry where Intel’s chips are designed and ICQ pioneered instant messaging. After initially allowing people to bring the device into the country, advising them only to declare it at customs in order to pay VAT, Israel’s Ministry of Communications then confused everyone by announcing that iPads were completely prohibited and would be confiscated at entry. A number of devices, dutifully declared by their owners at Ben Gurion airport, have been seized and placed in storage until the owners remove them from the country. The customs authorities are even demanding storage fees of around $12 per day.

Asked to justify the ban, the only national lockout imposed anywhere, the ministry noted that the iPad wireless system is made according to US standard, not the European standard followed in Israel, and could cause disruption. It’s an issue that doesn’t seem to bother any European countries nor does it worry the ministry when people enter the country with US-purchased laptops, iPhones and other devices.

The iPad Ban is “Nonsense”

The explanation has caused much head-scratching around the world, with Time Magazine quoting one Israeli technology lawyer describing the decision as “nonsense.”

“I went to the FCC website and saw that the iPad already correlates with the European standards,” said Aviv Eilon.

In fact, the bizarre nature of the ban has led to a number of conspiracy theories, with some commentators noting that iDigital, Israel’s sole official importer of Apple products, is owned by the son of President Shimon Peres. Others have speculated that the iPad’s wifi system could conflict with military communications.

The ministry though has received some support in the form of smaller bans elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal has reported that both Princeton University and George Washington University have banned the iPad following concerns about security. Other colleges, including Cornell, have reported problems with connectivity and bandwidth overload.

It’s likely though that all of these bans will be repealed at some point. Once the iPad is launched in Europe, Israel’s Ministry of Communications will no longer have a reason to keep it out of the country — and if it tried, the people made angry would then include the President’s son as well as its Apple fans. Colleges are likely to strengthen their security and wireless systems to cope with the demand and some are even offering students a choice between Macbooks and iPads on registration.

More worrying though are the calls from bloggers for a consumer boycott of Apple — worrying not because people might actually heed the call but because the calls aren’t entirely wrong.

Open Source Versus Closed Stores

The complaints are two-fold.

The first problem is Apple’s new SDK Agreement which bans “applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer.” In effect, it pulls the drawbridge down on Adobe’s CS5, a workaround that would have allowed developers to put Flash on Apple’s products. It’s a surprise move that led even Techcrunch to accuse Apple of “playing dirty.”

It’s certainly a nasty case of bullying by one company against another. But it’s also a sign of Apple’s desire to exact complete control not just over the way its products are made but what users can put on them after they’ve bought them. That’s the second reason that people have called on consumers to boycott the iPad. By forcing developers to submit all applications to its app store for approval, and by preventing any other way of adding programs to the device, Apple prevents creativity and blocks competition. As Fionn Dempsey, creator of Facebook’s Boycott iPad group states:

“They want use [sic] to throw away our netbooks for a device on which we cannot install whatever software we like, cannot watch video on the internet for free, cannot use flash applications and games, but must instead, in all cases, pay for the alternative service that Apple offers.”

Buying an iPad (or an iPhone or an iPod Touch for that matter) is a bit like buying a Dell PC then discovering you can only add software from Dell’s own software store.

Apple’s response, of course, would be to point to its long lines of raving fans, the iPads piling up in Israeli customs warehouses and an app store with hundreds of thousands of programs that no one can ever find. It would say that when people buy its products, they want a very cool piece of hardware but they also want the confidence that comes from knowing that every program has been checked for bugs and problems. Those consumers are really not interested in how the apps reach their devices as long as there’s plenty of them (and despite the restrictions, there are far more apps available for the iPhone than programs for Google’s Android operating system which is open source.)

And most pointedly of all, they’d note that Fionn Dempsey’s group has only 90 members promising a boycott in contrast to its half a million iPad buyers.

There may be good reasons then for boycotting the iPad (although the Israeli government seems to struggling to find one) but when it comes to Apple, those who want to make a point about the importance of open source and free access are always going to be outnumbered by consumers who just want to point their fingers at the screen.

(Lire la suite) sabrina

Creative Ways to Find New Freelance Clients par alex Mardi 13 Avril 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Ask a marketing guru how you can land more freelance clients and you’ll hear the same thing again and again: get referrals, build a website, pay for ads, do some networking, etc., etc. Like we aren’t doing all of that already. Some people though are acting a little smarter. They’re not just telling clients that they’re creative, they’re showing off their creativity with some out-of-the-box marketing ideas. They’re skipping past the conventional marketing strategies to create new channels, produce innovative ideas, and generate messages that prove their value. It’s the kind of thing that can quickly turn an empty schedule into a bursting calendar — and it’s fun too.

Here are five creative ways to land new clients that will have you wondering why you didn’t think of them yourself.

1. Share Your Love

David Airey is a brand identity designer with clients around the world. He writes two monthly blogs about graphic design that bring in more than 250,000 visitors and generate around a million monthly views. He also pitches for work on his site, inviting clients to contact him to talk about a project. So far so routine — even it’s been done unusually well. But David has also turned the content on his blog into a book. If Amazon’s sales ranks are anything to go by, it’s selling reasonably well but that’s not the point.

The point is that as the author of a book about branding, David looks like an expert. He also has something to give to clients that’s more interesting than a portfolio. But most important of all, his book shows that he’s passionate about his subject. There are a lot of good designers around but only a few have bothered to put that passion on the page and get it published — or even to publish it themselves. David’s book helps him to win clients not just by showing what he knows about his subject but by proving how much he cares about making his subject work for his clients.

2. Sell Stuff

David Airey’s book is for sale but the only people who will see it being used are the people reading it. Retail stores have long boxed a little cleverer than that. Buy a shirt in your local mall and it will be placed in a giant bag emblazoned with the company’s logo. As you stroll around the streets, you’ll have paid to become the store’s walking billboard. That might not have been the idea behind designer Chuck Anderson’s t-shirts but it could well be part of the effect (especially the design that incorporates the name of his website.)

It’s true that only a tiny portion of the people who see the t-shirts are likely to be leads, but make the products good enough and people will talk about them. Even if the profits on the sales are small, the buzz generated by the desire to own really cool items can be loud enough for clients to hear.

3. Brand an iPhone Game

Advertising companies weren’t slow to spot the sticky quality and mass appeal of iPhone games, creating apps for Dr. Pepper, Ford and even deodorant product, Axe. Few have been successful. Created on the cheap and sometimes with little connection to the brand, they failed to compete against the tens of thousands of other games available in the store. One game that has done well though is Waterslide Extreme. Based on a television ad for Barclaycard in which an office worker travels home by waterslide, shopping with his credit card without breaking his journey, the game generated more than four million downloads.

According to Advertising Age, an industry newspaper, there are rules to creating a successful branded app. The game has to be good; it has to be linked with the service it advertises; and it has to be marketed. But if you can come up with a game idea related to your work, you could be putting your name in the hands of clients around the world.

4. Challenge the World to Beat You

When something as creative as an iPhone game does well, it’s not just the client who benefits. The firm that came up with the idea, produced the product and pushed it to the top of the charts also gets an opportunity to show people what it can do. It was an opportunity not missed by Dare, the digital marketing agency behind Waterslide Extreme.

They set up a YouTube channel and challenged the public to create their own version of the ad. It was a competition that benefitted the client, who got more publicity for their brand, but it also benefitted Dare which was closely associated with the competition. Views of the top entrants totaled over 1.5 million and picked up over 1,000 comments.

Whenever you do something amazing, you can be sure that people will want to beat you. Give them a way to try and you’ll show that you’re confident, talented — and available.

5. Kill Santa

Or someone like him, because Mettiamoci Latesta, an Italian campaign to encourage businesses not to cut their advertising budgets has already beheaded him. The image, showing a decapitated Father Christmas, complete with bloodied beard, a tag marked “Claus, Santa, Dream Developer” and the slogan “Don’t cut a dream” was intended to shock. It took the idea of cuts and pushed it to an extreme to create an image that was eye-catching, creative and unforgettable.

As a strategy, shock is difficult to implement and each success raises the bar higher for the next campaign. But when you can make an idea related to your business look like a life-or-death issue, you’ll get noticed. And that notice should translate into new business.

There are lots of ways to win new clients, strategies that go beyond playing with AdWords keywords and posting updates on Twitter. The more creative you can make your client-winning approaches, the further your message will reach. And as you’re stretching to reach them, the effort alone will show that you’re worth hiring.

(Lire la suite) alex

The Worst Freelance Clients par sabrina Mercredi 7 Avril 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: J. Star

Running a freelance business is like being continually unemployed. You might have a full schedule, you might have all the work you need right now, but you never know what tomorrow will bring and if you want to keep your career moving forward you need to bring in new clients all the time. That means being alert for interesting opportunities, persuading people to give you work, and starting new jobs on a regular basis. And like anyone starting a new job, you get the thrill of being chosen — and sometimes the horror of discovering you made a bad choice when you accepted the gig.

Just as some bosses are sweet and supportive while others are spiteful and slave-driving so some clients turn out to be less than the freelancer hoped. And just as it’s difficult to spot a bad job when you fill in the application form and even harder to leave once you’ve got your feet under the desk so it’s not always easy to spot a bad client before you take him or her on, then walk away once you’re counting the billable hours. There are though a few signs that a client is going to be more of a pain than a pleasure — and one great way of heading for the door.

The worst kinds of clients, of course, are those that don’t pay. But they’re also the smallest problems. Smart freelancers make sure that large projects for new clients are divided by milestones, with one payment up front and others paid out during the course of a project. Failure to cough up on time means that work stops and while some time will have been lost, the damages are restricted. In effect, the client is dumped until he stumps up the next installment — and is likely to be dropped at the end of the project anyway. Arguments over money owed always cause enough bad feeling for both sides to want distance.

Sweating the Small Stuff

More subtle are clients who negotiate over small amounts. If the best clients are those who understand the value of your work and accept your rates without a quibble, among the worst clients are those who assume that any quote is up for negotiation. There’s always room for flexibility when the project is big and interesting enough but when a new client starts asking for a discount for work that amounts to no more than a few hours a month, that’s a sure sign that you’re going to be spending as much time talking about the work as you’ll spend doing it. When that happens, you’re taking on a client for free.

It’s not just the pay a small client can create big fights about though. They can also make outsized demands, submitting a request on Friday afternoon, for example, and expecting the work to be ready by Monday morning. Big clients get to make big demands — especially when they only do it occasionally — but small clients who make demands bigger than their budget are another kind that freelancers really want to avoid.

Expecting priority (over other clients, over family, over sleep…) is common enough among bad clients but even more common is mission creep, when the agreed parameters of a new project suddenly start expanding. It usually begins with something small — so small it’s not really worth charging for — like adding a banner to a large website or producing a logo in a different color. Slowly though, those small extras start to grow. Soon, the freelancer is being asked to add more pages or change the design of the logo, and because she didn’t charge for it the first time, it’s hard to charge the second time — and even harder the third time.

When the mission creeps sideways like that, it’s not long before a significant portion of the day is lost to work that doesn’t appear on the invoice.

Mission Creepers Aren’t Bad Clients

Mission creep alone though isn’t necessarily a sign of a bad client. It’s a sign of bad planning. The freelancer can squish the problem by listing the work on the bill once the time becomes meaningful. A bad client is one who then argues about it, protesting that the price wasn’t quoted in advance, or worse, assuming that the extra was a freebie and that he wasn’t going to be charged for it at all. That’s a sign of one of the worst kinds of client: someone who believes the freelancer is working for him only because he likes him, because he enjoys the work and because, like him, he wants the venture to succeed. Freelancers should like their clients, enjoy the work and look forward to seeing the venture they’re helping to create go on to conquer the world — but they work because they need the money and good clients recognize that.

The worst kinds of bad clients though are those who are the hardest to spot, and that’s true of clients who suddenly go silent for long periods of time. As a freelancer, you’ll clear your schedule, count the money and get ready for a couple of months of reliable work only to find that the project you thought was in the bag has effectively been put on hold. You won’t be told it’s been put on hold, only that they’re doing market research or talking to the marketing team or finishing up another project, and that they’ll be back in touch next week. Then they disappear and you’re left wondering whether you can take on another job or wait for that client to come back. The lack of reliability alone should tell what you need to do: what you should always do when you realize you’ve spotted a bad client…

Get busy enough to say “no” when the bad client returns — the best way to dump the worst of them. Of course, that means bringing in new clients, and trying to spot the signs that they’re bad ones.

(Lire la suite) sabrina

When Freelancing Sucks par sabrina Mercredi 31 Mars 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Freelancing has to be the best job in the world – at least in the eyes of cubicle workers. There’s no commute, no single boss, no enforced schedule and no office gossip. You can wear what you want, work when you want and bring in the projects you want. You’re in total control of your career and your life. There’s no better way to work.

If only. Freelancing has its moments but it also has plenty of bad times, enough in fact to rival the worst aspects of a regular job.

There are the holidays and vacation times for one. Or rather, there aren’t any holidays or vacation times. While it’s true that freelancers are able – in theory – to take time off whenever they want and without asking for permission (or a doctor’s note) in the way that an office worker does, they do face a couple of restraints. Deadlines in particular tend to dictate work schedules tighter than even the most tight-fisted boss. Start missing milestones and those Easter breaks, planned days off, and even weekends and evenings start to look like useful hours to catch up and get the project back on track. While friends and family are tossing cans around the barbeque, freelancers are often sitting at the desk, slaving over a keyboard and wishing they had the kind of office that locks out workers during the breaks.

Freelancers Pay $150 for a Picnic in the Park

And if they do manage to pull time off – perhaps as a reward at the end of a big project – there’s no one to pay for it. Freelancers don’t have holiday pay and they certainly don’t have time-off pay. Choose to spend the afternoon in the park, and you can count the amount of revenue that time off has cost you. Charge $50 an hour, for example, and three hours on the grass, eating sandwiches and tossing a Frisbee in the middle of the week will have cost $150. So much for the freedom to set your own hours as a freelancer. With that sort of bill, there’d better be caviar in that picnic.

So other people’s holidays are one bad time to be a freelancer. Your own holidays are another. And the end of every month is a third. Freelance income is unreliable. A good freelance business should have a solid base of regular work large enough to cover the expenses, but when no two month’s work are ever the same, no two months’ income are the same either. Life as a freelancer means binge-paying. While salaried workers know exactly how much they’re going to receive each month, freelancers can find that one month they’re barely making ends meet, and the next they’re flush with cash. It requires a whole different way of planning a budget and balancing the bank account – one that makes many freelancers, especially the breadwinners, look with nostalgia at payslips with permanent figures to match the stability of their expenses.

And those permanent figures can always go up in return for years served, good behavior and solid effort. The same isn’t necessarily true for freelancers. The flipside of being in control of your own career means that development doesn’t happen unless you make it happen.

That’s harder than it sounds. It doesn’t just mean pitching for bigger projects, taking on staff to outsource the lower-paid work or expanding to supply supplementary services. It means being ready to ditch older clients who aren’t growing with you and being brave enough to invest in marketing, equipment and products. As an employee, the only danger of asking for a pay raise is that you might not receive it – and become aware of exactly how much the company thinks you’re worth. For a freelancer who tries to advance by spending more time pitching for bigger projects, building a new website or learning new skills, the risk is direct and financial.

The result is that it’s often easier to stick with what you’ve got, cling to your old clients, continue doing work that doesn’t make the most of your abilities and be grateful that you’re making a living out of freelancing. Careers – unless you’re prepared to take risks, or get lucky — are for people in the corporate world.

Swapping One Boss for Lots of Bosses

And of course, there’s the time to pay for the benefits. When it comes to pensions, healthcare, insurance and even travel expenses, the self-employed have no one to chip in except themselves. Salaried employees tend only to look at the bottom line of their payslips, forgetting about the additional contributions paid by their employers; freelancers have to cough those fees up themselves, sending their bottom line even closer to the bottom.

If all that wasn’t enough, cubicle types might complain about their boss, but at least they only have one of them. Freelancers have as many bosses as they’re lucky to have clients. And each of these bosses is pulling in different directions, demanding extra time, wondering why they aren’t getting it — and looking for their dream freelancer who will work only for them, for a pittance and full-time, no benefits included.

So freelancing sucks. It sucks because there’s no free time – only time that brings in money and time that doesn’t bring in money. It sucks because there’s no regular pay – only the billable hours you’re able to invoice at the end of each month. It sucks because there are no benefits – only the benefits you’re prepared to pay for. And it sucks because there’s no boss – instead, there are lots of bosses, each with their own deadlines, demands and sources of further instability.

In fact, freelancing is so bad there’s only one thing worse than working for yourself, without a contract and on your own time, and that’s working for the man. Because if freelancing was really that bad, we’d head back to the cubicle and make our complaints there.

(Lire la suite) sabrina

Top Gmail Tricks (You’ve Never Heard of) par alex Mardi 23 Mars 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

When Google launched Buzz in February 2010, it tried to take the easy route to critical mass by placing the social media service inside Gmail. The 176 million or so users who opened their email accounts to find their contact lists compromised might not have been too pleased but they shouldn’t have been too surprised. Gmail has always been packed with all sorts of extra goodies from video chat to SMS messaging, including many that few people are aware of. Here are five tips, tricks and techniques to help you get more out of Google’s free email service:

1. Kick out the Ads

Gmail might be free but it still rakes in giant piles of cash for Google. They make their dough by reading your messages (electronically, of course) then placing ads on the page that match the content. It’s not a terrible thing but it is a little intrusive and it does remind you that a robot is going through your email at the same time as you.

There is though a neat little trick that you can use to get rid of those ads.

Google, being a nice sort of company, doesn’t serve ads in messages that contain very bad news. Inserting a sentence or two that includes keywords such as “suicide,” “death,” or “fatal accident” can be enough to warn the ad server to steer clear. Including the terms in the header won’t work but you can put the sentence at the bottom of the email and in a text color that matches the background color so that it can’t be seen by – or frighten – your recipient. Just in case though, it’s probably a good idea to include a sentence that explains what you’re doing.

2. Use Gmail as a Hard Drive

When a company gives you giant gigabytes of free storage space, it seems a shame not to use them – rude almost. And when you know that anything you put in that storage space is going to be safer than a bank, and certainly safer than your own home-based storage bank, not using Gmail as a free storage service looks like a waste.

The easiest option is always to email your most important files to your Gmail account. Label them as back-ups and you’ll be able to pull them down with relative ease should the worst happen. But that sort of backing up is always a little sporadic.

Better options are Softpedia’s Gmail Drive Shell Extension which, despite its unfriendly name, provides a very neat service. The freeware creates a virtual filesystem in Windows, allowing you to drag and drop your files into Gmail using Windows Explorer. It actually emails them to Gmail later, but the action for the user is very familiar. You can also use Gmail-Backup but Softpedia’s program is cooler.

3. Back up Your Friends’ Emails – and Bookmark Your Own

Backing up your files on Gmail will keep them safe if your hard drive crashes, and the emails you’ve received and sent will be safe anyway. But what about your friends’ emails? You can’t back up all of them but when you conduct a search in Gmail for a message, the email’s address is a permanent link that can be shared.

If a friend says that he can’t find the email you sent him with the project specs, for example, you can search for it in Gmail then send him the message’s URL. Of course, you could also just send him the message again, but having a permanent link means that you can also bookmark your most important messages and keep them just a click away.

4. Create Multiple Addresses and Track Spammers

If you’ve ever tried to create more than one account on Twitter, you’ll recognize the problem. Each account requires a different email address so to set up multiple accounts, you’ll need multiple addresses. Fortunately Gmail supplies them all – automatically.

Insert periods into your Gmail address, for example, (so that yourname@gmail.com becomes your.name@gmail.com or your.na.me@gmail.com) and you’ll have created an entirely new email address. Gmail though will ignore the periods and send all messages to your usual account. It also ignores the difference between @gmail.com and @googlemail.com, giving you another option to play with.

More interestingly, if you insert a plus-sign into your Gmail address, Gmail will also ignore everything between the “+” and the “@” symbol. Register for a newsletter from a sleazy marketing company, for example, and you can give them the address yourname+sleazymarketer@gmail.com. When that address starts receiving adverts for Canadian meds and male enhancers, you’ll know who sent them.

5. See All Your Unread Messages First

Open your Gmail account and the top of your inbox list will show your latest messages, the ones you haven’t read yet. Ignore some of them and they’ll gradually drift down the page, through the pages and disappear into your message pile. Next to your inbox, you’ll have a nagging reminder of the number of emails you’ve ignored but you also won’t have any way to find them. Because you don’t know who they’re from or what they contain, you can’t search for them, and unless you feel like browsing back through page after page of read emails, you’ll have no way to dig them up.

There is a search string you can use though that will pull up your messages.

Search for “label:unread label:inbox” and all of those ignored message will be at the top of your inbox – ready for you to ignore all over again.

(Lire la suite) alex

Ustream for Deeper Engagement par alex Mercredi 10 Mars 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

The biggest benefit of social media marketing isn’t instant sales, identifying your keenest buyers or even better customer service. You can pick up all of those on social media sites, but none of them is as powerful as the ability to build a close connection with your market. When you’re in touch with leads daily – through tweets or through Facebook discussions – your business will be on their mind when they’re ready to buy. But while social media can create relationships, those connections can be relatively loose. It doesn’t take much for someone to stop following a company’s tweets and once that’s happened, it doesn’t take long before that company is forgotten. It’s not just the number of connections that count in social media, it’s the depth of the engagement as well, and that’s something that even Twitter, with its brief posts, struggles to build. A number of leading social media types though have found a way of adding a uniquely deep level of engagement to their Twitter streams by teaming them with Ustream.

Formed in 2007, and now boasting 40 million monthly viewers, Ustream is a kind of live YouTube. Rather than recording videos then uploading them for others to view, users of Ustream can broadcast live, allowing anyone to watch them through the site. The videos are also recorded, making them available to be seen later by people who missed the original broadcast. It’s an approach that allows for spontaneity as well as all the excitement and unpredictability that’s a part of any live show. Groups as big as Black Eyed Peas and the Jonas Brothers are using Ustream to broadcast live to their fans while the American Music Awards used the service to beam stars live from the red carpet.

For businesses though, the real power of Ustream comes when live broadcasting is combined with two-way interaction. Earlier this month, for example, professional blogging expert Darren Rowse told his 90,000-plus Twitter followers that he would be on Ustream soon for “an impromptu Q&A session.” He tweeted the URL, and for 50 minutes answered questions delivered through Twitter while on air:

From Ustream to iTunes

Andy Brudtkuhl, “Chief Web Guru” at 48Web, a web strategy and internet marketing firm, takes this approach even further. Every Friday, he and his partner Doug Mitchell of createWOWmedia put on a live broadcast through Ustream, taking questions from viewers while they’re on air. But they also use that broadcast to push content in a number of different directions and drive their audience to take action. The audio track of the broadcast is recorded using GarageBand, turned into an MP3 and pushed to iTunes. The video of the broadcast is embedded into a blog post. A chat room allows viewers to interact with each other while they watch, as well as with the broadcasters. Using CamTwist, Andy can switch the feed to demonstrate an activity on his desktop, adding more variety to the on-screen presence than a pair of talking heads. And an opt-in form next to the video turns casual viewers into regular visitors.

“It’s also one more reason for people to come to our site,” Andy told new media marketing expert Jason Van Orden.

All of those extras certainly increase the power of the broadcast, making it available to more people, adding another level of interaction and engagement, and even providing a way to pick up some immediate benefits from viewers in the form of joining a mailing list. But it also requires a bigger investment of time and effort. Darren Rowse reported that while his 50-minute live chat had been fun, it had also been exhausting — and that was just a simple chat.

More importantly, it was also spontaneous. That’s an important aspect of Ustreaming that can be missed by over-eager broadcasters. Put out programs on a regular basis and as the broadcasts become more common, they — and their content — become less valuable. It doesn’t matter if you miss a program or decide not to watch a recording if you know there will be another one along in a week’s time (and probably discussing similar content). One of the attractions of Darren Rowse’s live chat was that no one knew it was coming (even Darren) and no one knows when the next one will take place. It was a rare chance to ask a leading professional blogger about the best way to make money from a website.

Watch Me Drive to Work

That spontaneity means that there’s a value to broadcasting almost anything at any time. And the ability do it even from an iPhone makes it possible to broadcast almost anything at any time. Joel Comm, creator of iFart Mobile, has picked up viewers who watched him Ustream his drive to work and a trip to buy a new television for his office. If the kind of trivial details that make up much of the small talk on Twitter help to build relationships, then there’s a value too in inviting members of your market even deeper into your life.

Ustream then is flexible. It can be combined with Twitter, or even email, and used as a mass two-way communication tool, allowing an entrepreneur to address thousands of leads at a time. You can think of it then as a live online conference, complete with Q&A session. You can use it as a content creation device, a way of shooting an interactive video whose contents can later be pushed out in a range of different directions and through different channels. And you can use it too as a way of allowing your leads to see exactly who you are and how you lead your life. It might not leave much room for privacy but it might well lead to the kind of close and unforgettable relationship with a market that translates directly into sales.

(Lire la suite) alex

User Interfaces That Changed Design par sabrina Mercredi 3 Mars 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: raneko

Designers like to say that there’s only one truly intuitive user interface: the nipple. Everything else has to be learned. Anyone who’s ever had to teach a confused newborn how to eat however, knows even that isn’t true. The challenge for any designer then is to produce buttons, knobs, menus and signs that allow users to apply functions with the minimum of fuss. Some, like MySpace, got it horribly wrong with ugly modules and confusing functionality, a trick that Facebook tries to copy with every redesign. Occasionally though, a company gets it exactly right, not only allowing users to get what they want (almost) instinctively but also setting a new standard for others to follow. Here are five of the best:

Google

After a period in which Yahoo! ruled the Internet with a directory made up of categories, odd sub-categories and long descriptions that never seemed to have anything to do with the content you were looking for, Google’s search field and submit button was always going to be a winner. It couldn’t have been simpler (except perhaps for the “I feel lucky button” — really, does anyone ever use that?), allowing users to enter their search term and see a targeted list immediately. There were no checkboxes, no radio buttons and if you wanted to go Boolean, you could enter the symbols without hitting the advanced search page. Even the results were helpful.

Since then, things have got a little more complex with links to images, video, maps and other Google tools cluttering the page but even these have been shoved away to make the text field prominent. For text input, one field and one (not two) buttons is now the standard.

iPhone

Apple didn’t invent the mobile phone. It didn’t even invent touchscreens. But, as always, it took existing technologies and combined them in a way that created an entirely new experience.

Before the launch of the iPhone in June 2007, much had been said about the increasing complexity of mobile phones — and much too had been said about how difficult those additional functions, from Web surfing to games playing, were to reach and use. Apple’s use of icons to open applications, an onscreen keyboard, and touchscreen Web navigation created a new future for smartphones. Nokia and other manufacturers might have to battle the giant in the room but without Apple’s revolution in UI, the fight would have been limited to executives flashing their RIMs.

Delicious Library

If setting a standard for others to follow is one sign of an effective user interface, then Delicious Library’s wooden bookshelves have to qualify as a great design. Like other great designs, the library is simple, intuitive and familiar. Instead of displaying content as a list of menu items, the e-books the program contains are placed on a graphic background designed to resemble wooden bookshelves. Users get to enjoy book covers in the same way they do in a bookstore, and the books themselves are accessible with just a click.

The design of the shareware became such a standard that other digital book apps asked designer Wil Shipley if they could use it on their apps too. One company, however, used it without asking. When Steve Jobs showed off iBooks on the iPad in January 2010, the program’s design looked remarkably familiar. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Many of Delicious Library’s staff now work for Apple.

Word 2007

A good rule for designers — and others — to live by is “if it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.” So when Microsoft launched Word 2007 with a completely revamped user interface, the reaction was generally negative. Gone were the static buttons and drop-down menus, replaced by scrolling ribbons located under newly titled tabs. For users familiar with the traditional design the new Word meant having to learn almost from scratch a program which they were used to using without a second thought.

The idea behind the redesign, said Microsoft, was to make visible features that users requested but which were already present in the program. The company, said Microsoft, was constantly receiving emails asking why a particular function wasn’t available in Word when in fact it was buried several menu items deep.

The biggest challenge for the design was familiarity with the old way of doing things. Once users got used to the ribbons though , and discovered where to find the features they needed, it became clear that Word 2007 was a much better design than Word’s previous versions. It would have been better though if it had been Word’s original design as well.

The Mouse

If simplicity is a sure sign of great design then the computer mouse has to be in the running too. A ball that registered movement and a couple of buttons for selection and feature access made using a computer as simple as moving a hand and lowering a finger. The addition of a trackwheel, a third button and side buttons for gamers hasn’t altered the ultimate simplicity and usability of the mouse. Even Apple’s own line of mice, with its distinctive single button (later replaced by a scroll ball and four programmable buttons), failed to show up the inherent benefits of a design that was already familiar and simple to use.

The rise of laptops however, has gone some way towards killing off mice but even their replacement — the touchpad — is modeled on the same principle, and shows that good user interface principles remain even as the technology changes.

Good UI design is always a challenge. What developers find natural and intuitive can often be the result of familiarity with their field and a ready understanding of how to use their own equipment. It’s not until the products hit the market — and users start tripping over their thumbs — that the effectiveness of a design is really tested. These five designs passed the test and often made it a bunch of later products easier to use too.

(Lire la suite) sabrina

Learning from Google’s Education Apps par alex Mardi 23 Février 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Sergey Brin and Larry Page owe a lot to the education system. Stanford University wasn’t just the place where they met, it was also the place where Google was born. The site started as a research project for their doctoral theses and the search engine’s first address was google.stanford.edu. It’s certainly possible to argue that that debt has been repaid. When Google went public in 2004, the university was holding more than 7,500 Class A shares and over 1.65 million Class B shares, valued then at $179.5 million. A quick sale of some of those shares brought in $15.6 million, further venture capital investments in the company are said to have earned the university an additional $200 million, and Stanford will continue to earn royalties from Google until 2011. That school of learning, at least, has little to complain about.

But Google’s founders haven’t stopped at paying back their alma mater. Since 2006, the company has also been making its suite of apps available to all educational institutions for free. Holding everything on its own servers, Google lets universities and schools use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Video on the school’s own domain.

It’s not entirely pain-free. The Quick Start guide describes a six-week process of goal-setting, implementation and roll-out, but that may have more to do with the size of education institutions rather than the complexity of the apps. And it may also reflect the size of the benefits for those institutions. London’s Westminster University, which began using the system in 2008, for example, has reported savings of £1 million and a reduction in time spent on systems and user support. Google’s apps are simple enough for students to use without having to pick up the phone to find out how to create an email account.

Teachers Are Talking, Students Are Learning

The service’s functionality has been useful too. The university has described how one student used Google Sites’ codeless Web page creation tool to build a site for other students wanting to study medicine at postgraduate level even if they haven’t studied it for their undergraduate degree. Staff too have improved collaboration when gathering feedback about the students they tutor.

“Feedback has been difficult to collate and is not always available in one place meaning we can fail to spot common trends, identified by many different course leaders,” explained Professor Roger James, Director of Information Systems at the university. “Personal tutors want the full 360 feedback.”

Those benefits have been seen lower down the education system too. Before New York City’s Intermediate School 339 started using Google’s education apps, the “School of Communication Technology” was relying on a mixture of computers running various types of vintage software. Since implementing the service, students have begun submitting their homework and receiving feedback from teachers through Google Docs, memos forgotten in mailboxes have been replaced by real-time chat, and even academic results have improved. Behavior is better, attendance is higher, and suspension levels have fallen.

“We’ve moved from 22 percent of kids being on grade level in math to 47 percent,” said Principal Jason Levy. “Writing volume and quality are both on the rise, and we anticipate seeing improved ELA scores.”

It’s hard to argue with benefits like these and considering that 85 percent of children at NYC IS 339 qualify for free school lunches, it’s perhaps foolish to try. Intel hardly benefited from its spat with the One Laptop Per Child program which accused it of selling its low-priced Classmate PCs below cost in order to block the program’s advance.

But while Google has a non-profit arm, it’s a public company, not a charity. The app suite is free for education institutions (as well as for non-profits with fewer than 3,000 users) but paid elements are never far away. Google Message Security, a system that allows administrators to filter messages based on their source, their destination or their content, is free now but the offer ends after June 2010. Google Message Discovery, a useful extra that archives all domain messages, is available to schools from Postini… for a 66 percent discount. Using the system for alumni only requires enabling ads.

Where’s the Competition?

Those additions though are optional. More worrying is that Google’s free system crowds out competition. It’s little different to Microsoft stuffing Windows with its own free software, restricting the ability of competitors to bring out better programs. Only companies with the clout and pockets of a Google or a Microsoft can afford to create loss-leaders like these and offer them on such a broad basis and to such large clients. There is a danger then that with one system offered for free from one company, the educational programs available in schools may not develop with the kind of dynamism usually seen in the tech field. The Westminster University student who built a Web page about medical studies, for example, could have done the same thing with any one of a number of other programs, many of them better than Google Pages.

But perhaps most worrying of all is Google’s targeting of young people. Google isn’t a sugary, fizzy drink that will make kids obese and send them to the dentist, but putting their products in schools will make children familiar with them. When they leave school, it’s more likely that those former students will continue using Gmail, Google Chat and the other systems they’ve become accustomed to using at school. Google’s Education Apps provide a way for a large company to place its products in the hands of millions of young people, making their products the default choice for life.

It’s certainly possible that Google was motivated by nothing more than a sense of goodwill and a desire to improve the world’s education establishments through better communication and improved collaboration. Those benefits have certainly resulted. But there’s also no question that Google too is benefitting from working with schools and universities — and by pushing aside competitors as it puts its product into the hands of young future users.

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The Principles of Product Design par sabrina Mardi 16 Février 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Image: blip .

It would be great if a product’s success was all about the idea. Come up with the right concept and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like as long as it does the job. But the opposite is usually true. A product that looks appealing can often sell more than one that does the job better. An apple will squish a hunger flatter than a candy bar will, for example, but it’s the Hersheys that are next to the supermarket cash desks, not the fruit stands. A candy designer knows how to put temptation on the packet; an apple grower, not so much. If look-and-feel are so important for the success of a product then, every entrepreneur with a smart idea needs to know at least a little about creating products that don’t just work well but which look attractive too.

That starts with understanding constraints. Video game developer Dino Dini has identified two kinds of constraints that dictate a product’s design: non-negotiable constraints are the product’s essential functions – a dating site, for example, has to be able to hold data, display profiles and allow members to communicate; negotiable constraints are the optional extras around which the designer can get creative. The site’s colors, for example, the way that profiles are displayed and even the decision to include video chat or instant messaging are all negotiable constraints. The site has to allow members to get in touch but how they do it and what they’re looking at while they do it are negotiable.

Get the non-negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t work. Get the negotiable constraints wrong and the product won’t sell.

The first stage of thinking about a product’s design then is to separate the functions from the extras, then let the designer figure out how to make those extras stand out.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Simplicity is usually important too. One of the most popular design approaches is summed up by the acronym KISS: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” The phrase is said to originate from Kelly Johnson, lead engineer on the plane design team Lockheed Skunk Works, for whom it meant “Keep It Simple And Stupid.” He intended the jets he built to be simple enough for an engineer with just a handful of tools to repair. Today though, the approach has a much simpler requirement: designs have to be basic enough for people to use without getting confused and turning away.

That’s easier agreed than done. Products tend to start out with one simple idea. As competition heats up, more features are added so that a page that used to contain just a search box, ends up with links to images, maps, news, iGoogle and more. And an email option that allows users to receive and send messages becomes a place where everyone can suddenly see who each other is emailing.

That isn’t to say that growth is a bad design concept. But growth that gets in the way of the non-negotiables, making them harder to use, is always a bad thing. It’s important to identify what your product needs to do at the start of the design process but it’s vital not to forget those features as the design and the product develop.

The first steps are particularly important. The home page of a website, for example, can lead to a range of different actions. Visitors can be asked to sign up, invited to search, tempted to download and offered a video to play to name just four. When a user reaches a site then, he’s got no idea what he’s going to have to do next. Smart design makes that understanding simple so that the user can find his way to the site’s most important goal quickly. Often, that means hiding all of the alternative options or making the most vital one stand out more prominently with a large button or central positioning. Google, for example, might now have a much more cluttered home page than it once had, but the main option is still offered first and it’s placed front and center. The home page of hosting company GoDaddy is much harder to navigate. Should users search for a domain name, buy a cheap one, or click on any of the dozens of other links on the page? A product might have more than one non-negotiable function but if users can’t reach the most important one immediately, they’ll go elsewhere.

Build Personas

Understanding what it will take to move a user to reach that goal though means understanding the user. That’s a vital part of design that’s often overlooked. Marketers like to focus their efforts on demographics, but too often developers will forget about the sort of person who’s actually going to be clicking the buttons as they focus on the shape of the buttons themselves. Addressing Bar Camp in London in 2008, Amanda Jahn, Yahoo! Answer’s Lead UX Designer, talked about using data from user testing, customer service emails, search logs, blogs and suggestion boards to create personas that include their likes, dislike, background and behavior. Some of those “personas,” she said, are going to be more important to the success of the product than others so designers need to make sure that their needs are met first. It’s not enough, it seems, to make things simple; you also have to make things simple for a particular group of users.

Design is usually something best left to professional creative types – the people who spent years at art school doing strange things with their hair and getting invited to parties while the geeks were busy coding. But it’s not something that only they should understand. Good design is such a vital part of the success of any product that every developer and entrepreneur needs to understand the constraints of their product, how simplicity can deliver users to those functions and what sort of users they need to appeal to.

That’s just good design.

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Design, Development and Smart Marketing Make Products Cool par alex Mardi 9 Février 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Steve Wampler

When it comes to listing a product’s unique sales points, there’s always one point that’s sharper than all the others. It doesn’t matter how many features the product has, how many problems it solves or how much it will change the user’s life, if the market believes the product is “cool” it will fly off the shelves. So what makes a product cool, can coolness be created and what can a developer do to add that all-important ingredient to its offerings?

Design certainly helps. Apple wasn’t the first company to place digital music on portable players but Jonathan Ive’s clean design, with its plain white face and silver back, made the company’s music player as much a fashion accessory as an electronic gadget. Being seen with an iPod in the device’s early days marked a user as someone who was up with the latest fashions. Even if you couldn’t hear the tunes they were listening to — beyond the irritating thump of a bass delivered second-hand — you knew that an iPod user’s white earphones marked them out as someone who was serious about their music.

It wasn’t just color that made the iPod cool though. Its user interface was different too. The clickwheel, a mixture of mechanical buttons and a touch sensitive ring, made users wonder why no one had thought of that before. It made the device simple to use; a flick of the thumb was enough to change volume or move to the next song without looking at the screen or searching for the right button. The iPod was cool to use as well as look at.

It’s that simplicity that helped to mark the iPod’s coolness. Early MP3 players, such as Saehan’s MPMan and Diamond Multimedia’s Rio, seemed to owe their main design influence to Sony’s Walkman. Or perhaps a brick. The Rio, in particular, was packed with more buttons and switches than you can find on a typical flight deck. By doing away with all of that complexity, Apple showed that it was forward-looking, current and different. It marked a break with the past – and revolutionaries are always young, cool and trendy. Just ask the estate of Che Guevara.

Google Was Cool… Once

Disruptive technologies then can be cool too. For a long time, Google was the coolest company in Silicon Valley, the place where every geek wanted to work (and a place that could make most workers wish they were geeks.) It acquired that image by producing a product that looked as simple and frill-free as Apple’s iPod but which did an equally good job at flattening the competition. At a time when AOL and Netscape were ruling the Web, watching those then-giants take a sock to the jaw from a company that was then the little guy on the block was cool. And it did it the right way too: it produced a product that was unique, effective and which did a much better job than anything available at the time. Better still, Google became almost as well known for the degree to which it pampered its staff as for the reliability of its service. Google epitomized the coolness of the underdog. When a small company suddenly starts wiping the floor with big, heavy opposition, individuals cheer — especially when the company is seen to support the individuals who made it happen.

The downside though is that that sort of coolness does come with a time limit. Google isn’t as cool as it used to be. It’s now a big company too, and while the Googleplex might still be a nice place to work, the firm’s “Do no evil” slogan has taken a battering from its involvement in China, its forays into markets as far-flung as mobile phones and office software, and its attempts to build a digital library, regardless of what authors (another kind of underdog) think. Coolness is powerful but it’s also fragile. Pick it up for being small but extraordinarily good, and you might find that it starts to disappear when you’re big and merely as good as everyone expects you to be.

Unless you’re also a master of hype. This is a very different kind of coolness – a manufactured kind, created in advertising offices and nurtured through public relations, image-building and careful branding. Again, it’s no surprise that Apple, today’s ultra-cool manufacturer, is the master of this technique too. Very few of Apple’s products are actually as innovative as they look. Capacitive sensing, the technology behind the clickwheel, has been known since 1919, and the clickwheel itself was first designed by touchpad manufacturer Synaptics. Quantum Research, a UK technology company, also sued Apple for copyright infringement. The iPad, despite months of anticipation, has delivered nothing that didn’t exist already. While it might not have been possible to buy an outsized iPod Touch before, it has been possible to buy tablet computers, even with touch screens.

Apple’s genius isn’t just to create attractive products but to make cool new versions of the kinds of products already on the market.

Measuring Coolness

Coolness isn’t something tangible. It’s not something you can measure in the same way that you can count screen size or memory capacity. It’s more powerful than that. It can come from a design that speaks to the market and turns buyers into members of an elite club (in the iPod’s case, a club of devoted music fans). That can happen even if the club is enormous, non-selective and open to anyone willing to open their wallets wide enough.

It can come from being sharp enough to change your industry even when you’re so small the industry has barely noticed you. That’s a coolness connected to your competence – the fairest kind – but it’s also a coolness that can disappear once you become established.

And it can also come from careful marketing. That’s the hardest kind of coolness to create and maintain. In fact, one of the things that makes Apple so cool is its ability to still be cool despite being a big company that produces proprietary software, distributes copy-protected content and runs a capricious monopoly over the applications created by independent developers.

It is possible then to create coolness, but you have to be cool enough to know how to do it.

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Roger Federer’s Guide to Perfectionism par sabrina Mercredi 3 Février 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: franz88

He’s got the kind of career success the rest of us can only dream of. A record sixteen Grand Slam titles. Twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semi-final appearances. A world ranking of 1. And generally acclaimed as the greatest tennis player who ever picked up a racket, perhaps even the greatest sportsman ever. Roger Federer’s success is down to his ability to whack a ball across a court faster and more accurately than anyone has ever done before, but success at anything is never down to just the technical skills required for that particular field. Lots of competitors will have those abilities too. Being the best also means having the right mentality, the right preparation and the right attitude to make the most of the talents you were born with. So what can Roger Federer teach us about achieving perfection?

Recognize Your Potential for Perfection

The first lesson is to know what you’re good at.

That’s easier than it sounds and it’s something that even Federer struggled with, as well as the people around him. Asked after winning his latest title, the 2010 Australian Open, what the secret of his success was, Federer’s answer was very blunt:

“There’s no secret behind it,” he said. “I mean, [I’m] definitely a very talented player.”

That wasn’t particularly modest, or revealing, but he then went on to say:

“I always knew I had something special, but I didn’t know it was like, you know, that crazy.”

He wasn’t the only one not to spot immediately that his talent was that “crazy.” Adolf Kacovsky — a tennis coach at The Old Boys Tennis Club where Federer was the star pupil — would laugh when the 10-year-old would say that he would be the best in the world.

“I thought that he would perhaps become the best player in Switzerland or Europe but not the best in the world. He had it in his head and he worked at it,” he told Rene Stauffer, author of The Roger Federer Story: Quest for Perfection.

It’s easy to spot when you’re better than average at something. But it takes confidence to believe that you can be the best at it, and work hard enough to make full use of that talent in order to get there.

Patience Makes Perfect

It also takes time. When Federer enters a competition now, the expectation is that he’ll reach at least the semi-finals, even if he doesn’t win it completely. It wasn’t always that way. Federer played in seventeen Grand Slams before he won his first. He might not have looked back since, but his experience does show that there are no short cuts to perfection. Even the most talented performers still have to pay their dues, learn the business and build experience.

Federer’s playing history shows that perfection isn’t born, it’s made. That lesson of patience and practice is one that entrepreneurs need to learn too.

Know When to Be Perfect

Ask many people at the top of their profession about the secret to success and they’ll wheel out the cliché, “I work hard and play hard.” But lots of people put in long hours in the office and equally long hours in the night club with nothing to show for it but an average salary and a large hangover.

Today Federer trains as hard as he competes, and there’s no evidence that he’s a hellraiser in the evenings. Married with two small children, his home life doesn’t appear to have any of the tabloid excitement enjoyed by… say, Tiger Woods. But a telling story from his youth does give us one clue into the best way to use perfection. According to Marco Chiudinelli, a Swiss tennis player who played at the same club as Federer when they were children, the two would treat training fairly lightly. They’d goof around a lot and were frequently thrown off the court. Roger would lose to just about everyone. His attitude changed completely when it came time to compete however:

“When it came down to business, he could flip a switch and become a completely different person,” he said in Stauffer’s book. “I could give him a thrashing in training but when we played at a tournament together, he gave me a thrashing. Even back then he was a real competitor.”

Perfection takes focus, effort and energy. It’s not something that can be maintained constantly without the risk of exhaustion and burn-out. It’s notable that while Rafael Nadal has had knee problems and Andy Murray has taken time out after injuring his wrist, Federer has had relatively few injuries. His style of play allows him to achieve perfection at just the times he needs it most.

Achieve Perfection One Goal at a Time

With Pete Sampras’ Grand Slam record already broken, there’s little else for Federer to obviously aim at. Commentators though are busy discussing the possibility of Federer picking up a calendar Grand Slam, winning all of the four biggest tournaments in the same year.

Federer though is having none of it.

“I won’t just put the entire calendar just around trying to win the calendar Grand Slam,” he said recently. “It’s something if it happens, it does and it’s great, but it’s not something that’s like my number one goal, not at all. It’s the same as I haven’t put a number on how many Grand Slams I want to try to win. Whatever happens happens.”

For Federer perfection isn’t a goal. The goal is to win the next tournament, the next match, the next point. As all of those things happen, perfection is reached. Aim for perfection though, and you’re more likely to experience frustration and disappointment — exactly the kind of thing that’s likely to blow you off course long before you reach your ultimate goal.

Reaching perfection isn’t simple, and it’s not something that’s available to everyone. You can do all of things that that Roger Federer does and still come in at just “very good.” But you can also make a perfect effort, and that’s what Federer teaches us all to do. It comes by believing in your abilities (even when others don’t), having the patience to learn and practice, knowing when to put in your greatest focus, and looking to achieve success one step at a time.

Combine those lessons with talent and you can Grand Slam your market too.

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Hype Your Product Like Apple par alex Mardi 26 Janvier 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

The launch is the most important moment in the life of any product. It’s the moment when the entrepreneur gets his or her first notion of whether the idea is going to fly. After all the months and years of development, after all the dreams of striking it rich and drowning in cash, the product is available and customers are starting to buy. The money is coming in at last. But while a launch marks day one in the life of the product, it’s actually just one more day in the life of the product’s development – and in its marketing too. The success of the launch might depend on the quality of the item itself, but it depends no less on the anticipation built up before the big day.

That anticipation is a key element in any sales strategy. The route to a purchase usually passes through awareness and recognition before it reaches a desire strong enough to lead someone to part with their cash. The market has to know the product is going to exist before it can decide that it wants it.

Apple Leaks

The real master of this kind of anticipation-building is Apple. In an article in MacObserver recently, John Martellaro, Apple’s former senior marketing manager, described how he was sometimes asked to make controlled leaks, despite the company’s official policy of not discussing unreleased products:

The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”

Those leaks though are used to do more than whet the audience’s appetite. According to Martellaro, Apple also uses leaks to solve problems. They could be used to give a slow-moving partner a push; to test market reaction to a price point; to confuse a competitor; and also to create expectations about a forthcoming event so the right sort of people are in the audience.

For large companies – especially those that generate as much interest as Apple – leaks can always be effective at building pre-launch interest. But small firms bringing out their first product will struggle to get press attention even with widely distributed press releases. The Web’s self-publishing tools though make it possible to skip past the mainstream news outlets and bring snippets of information about what they’re doing directly to their market.

Twitter’s Anticipation Platform

The easiest way to do that is through Twitter. The microblogging site allows a company to shoot out quick bulletins about the project it’s working on, creating curiosity with each post. In the days before blogger Darren Rowse released a new photography ebook, for example, he posted the following tweets:

Releasing a new E-book on DPS in 36 hours, entering into the ‘frenzy zone’

And

getting ready to launch a new DPS photography e-book – am in a prelaunch frenzy – amazing how many windows I’ve got open right now

Those tweets are clearly about Darren and his life, rather than the product, which is the way that Twitter works best, but there’s no question that the followers that Darren has already gathered would have had their interest piqued by the posts. They’d want to know what the book is about and whether they should be buying it. The tweets themselves might have been small but the effect they can have on the anticipation before the launch can be massive.

But that depends on having an audience ready to receive those messages in the first place. Again, this is something that Twitter makes simple. Creating a large follower list can take a little time but it mostly involves lots of active tweeting and chatting. It also helps though to have a popular website whose readers will also migrate to Twitter in order to pick up more information from a source they trust. If Twitter is one way of providing small pieces of information about your product to your market then, a blog is another.

The problem with a blog though is that there’s no reason not to spill the beans completely. When space is unlimited, it’s possible to use a blog post to describe exactly what your product will contain and what it’s likely to do. Claiming the need to protect confidentiality is unlikely to help; audiences will care little about your need to protect yourself, and far more about its own desire to know what you’re doing. Tweets though have to be small and because space is strictly limited, you always have the perfect excuse for providing only the smallest of glances into what you’re doing. You get the anticipation but because you don’t provide the audience with satisfaction, you also get the curiosity that means they care when the launch happens.

So how you deliver the information matters. What sort of information you deliver matters too.

Darren Rowse’s tweets revealed nothing about the product but did describe the work that went into making it. That’s always one useful approach: bring people behind the scenes of your business and you connect them to your business. On Twitter, that happens personally: Darren Rowse’s followers saw not how a company was creating a product but how he was working on it. That’s a much closer connection.

Apple though has been building anticipation about its tablet not by taking people behind the scenes – officially, nothing was said at all – but by leaking sneak peeks of the product. Letting them try a little, then taking it away, can be an even more effective way of getting an audience excited about a product before it launches.

The launch day might mark the first opportunity for a market to meet a product but it shouldn’t be the first time buyers hear about it. There’s plenty of groundwork that can be done in the days and weeks before the product is released, and it all helps to determine whether the launch and the product will be a success.

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Search Engines That Go Beyond Google par alex Mardi 19 Janvier 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Search engine optimization is now an essential part of marketing. It might not be as fun as producing creative ad ideas. It might not be as exciting as running competitions or coming up with new promotions. But when the result can be a steady flow of free leads and a website with a high ranking, all of that content creation and link-building pays in spades. So search engine experts spend hours flirting for just a touch of Google love, even as they’re having their head turned by Bing while still wondering whether Yahoo! has anything to offer.

Focusing on those big search engines makes sense. According to HitWise, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask together took 98.84 percent of all Web searches in 2009. While the proportion of searches shared between them might change a little, especially as Bing continues to eat up Yahoo’s users, the big engines’ hold over the search market has changed little. In 2006, Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask accounted for 98.34 percent of searches, still leaving little more than one percent for other players. But those figures might be a touch misleading. They don’t, for example, take into account the number of searches made through Google’s Custom Search Engines, user-made directories that focus on a small subset of sites and reached not through Google’s home page but through search boxes on specialist Web pages. While these are likely to make up only a tiny proportion of Google’s total searches, they can provide some highly targeted marketing.

Fewer Listings Mean Higher Rankings

Anyone searching for a notary service, for example, is likely to turn to Google to find a local office, but it’s also possible that they’ll surf first to a site about notaries to find out what they do and what they can offer. Once there, they could find themselves looking for a notary on a search engine created by NotaryBids.com. Any notary business can ask to be listed and any site can place NotaryBids’ search box on its pages.

The advantage for NotaryBids is clear: they get a cut of revenue from the ads on the search results page. But the benefits for notary firms are also clear: they get to put their name in front of a small but highly targeted audience. Even more importantly, while NotaryBids’ search engine is powered by Google and uses Google’s algorithm to rank results, the smaller number of businesses listed makes it easier for sites to rise up the rankings. There’s a better chance of appearing in the top ten search results when there are only eleven sites with your main keyword in the search engine.

There’s no shortage of similar types of Google-based search engines serving a range of other niches. PogoFrog, for example, is aimed specifically at the medical profession, while Insurance-search-engine.com gives insurance businesses a chance to reach their markets.

Entry to search engines like these though is restricted. The search engine’s creator gets to choose which sites will appear in the results. Because many are created not as search engines alone but as search facilities on niched sites, that can mean that competitors will find themselves excluded, and entry will be restricted to partners. There are plenty of other search engines though that are equally niched and which are completely open to any relevant site.

BusinessFinance.com, for example, uses a Google search box to search within the site and across the Web, but it has its own matching software to allow company owners to browse the site for capital and financing. Octopart was created by two physics graduate students who were fed up looking for electronics parts in different catalogs. Their search engine allows engineers to find bits for circuit boards and invites distributors and manufacturers to sign up. And WeddingSearches.com is just one search engine among many trying to help couples navigate their nuptials.

$150 For a Directory Listing

Most sites like these don’t charge for submissions. The more comprehensive their listings, the more likely they are to attract searchers — and the more money they’ll be able to make out of advertising – so they’re happy to accept any relevant site that wants to join. When a niched search engine or directory gets very big though, demand for space and the necessity for a company to be listed can be high enough for the site to charge a fee. That’s what happened to EngineersEdge, a portal for design, engineering and manufacturing professionals with more than 500,000 slightly nerdy visitors each month. To stand a chance of reaching that audience, businesses have to pay $150 for inclusion.

But is it really worthwhile? If almost all search traffic is going through the Big Four – and most of that through Google – is it worth spending time trying to get a site listed on a niched search engine?

Much depends on the size of your niche and, more importantly, the number of searches your niche’s search engine receives. As long as submissions are free and acceptance no more than a matter of completing a form then there’s nothing to lose and free traffic to gain. Even if a niched search engine only attracts a fraction of one percent of total search engine traffic, those visitors will be targeted, self-selected and keen on your services. If they know about the search engine, they’re going to be knowledgeable and dedicated — and ready to be converted into buyers. A niched search engine then might not deliver giant streams of traffic, but the users it will deliver will be valuable.

Whether it’s worth paying for a listing will depend on the strength of the portal. Even EngineerEdge’s 500,000 visitors will have to compete with $150-worth of clicks from AdWords — and they sit on the side of search results.

There is one more opportunity that a niched search engine can offer a growing business: the possibility of creating one yourself. Google’s Custom Search Engine makes creating a search engine for your field a breeze. You’ll make money from the advertising — and direct traffic to your own site too.

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5 Ways To Increase Your Freelance Earnings par alex Mardi 12 Janvier 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

As an employee, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can have the effect of reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.

Increase Productivity

Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.

Productivity systems like Getting Things Done might help – although their complexity could actually cost you time too – but really the most effective way to increase your productivity is to create short bursts of focused attention. Work in a café, for example, and you’ll know you’ve got a seat for about two hours, long enough to complete one task. That mini-deadline could be enough to keep you staring at the screen, instead of looking through the window. And if that doesn’t work, you could always choose a café without an Internet connection.

Aim to Upsell

Clients usually choose a freelancer who can complete a particular task. But it’s likely that there’s a whole bunch of other jobs you could be doing for the client as well, and some of them might just pay more. Each time you complete a job for a new client, look at other jobs you could be doing for her, and create a package deal.

Don’t pitch it right away though. If the client thought that project was good for her, she would have asked you to do it in the first place. Persuading her will take time, but most importantly, it will take trust. Wait until you’ve completed two or three jobs for the same client, proven that your knowledge as well as your skills have value, and then pitch your idea. You should find that you’re able to turn one job into two.

Increase Your Skills

Upselling will let you do more with the same set of skills. Increasing your skills though, will let you do more valuable kinds of work. For tech types, that’s relatively easy. Programmers can always add a new programming language to their resumes. Designers can learn new software or experiment with new techniques. But even freelance writers can sharpen their editing skills or take classes in technical or medical writing, niches with particularly high pay.

It might not be simple, fun or quick but it’s worth doing anyway, if only because it keeps your skills up to date, and lets you compete with new and better-skilled freelancers entering the marketplace.

Replace Your Old Clients

The first clients a talented freelancer picks up get a bargain. Demand is low so their negotiating power is strong. When the alternative is an empty book, a new freelancer will often be willing to accept a rate much lower rate than his work is worth. As his book fills though, time becomes rare and the freelancer starts to charge more. But that still leaves those old clients who were lucky enough to pick up an early deal.

Those are the people you can ask more money from. You know their work well enough that you’ll be hard to replace. Time will mean that you can at least ask for an inflation-linked rise. And if they prefer not to pay, then you’ll be able to replace them with a new client who’s willing to pay the full amount.

On the other hand though, familiarity with an old client can mean that you’re able to complete their work faster than you used to. Increasing productivity can mean shutting down the Web and turning off the radio but it can also mean working faster, something that happens naturally the more you do a particular job. Before you demand more cash from your old clients, it’s worth looking at whether you’re not already earning the same money in less time.

Outsource Your Work

And finally, the best way to increase your earnings is to hire freelancers yourself. It’s this approach that’s allowed Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, to lead a life of apparent idleness broken only by professional speaking, writing and promotional work. Some tasks you’ll always need to do. Your signature work, for example, particularly complex coding or writing that carries your name you’ll probably want to micromanage to the extent that you may as well do it yourself. (Although if Damien Hirst can hire people to do his paintings for him, then what can’t be outsourced?) But much of the day-to-day work that most freelancers do can often be passed on to other freelancers who charge less than you do for an hour of time. Simple coding, basic design and low-level editing can be trusted to hired help, freeing you up to earn a premium in that time.

It’s something that tends to happen only when the freelancer has enough work to pass around, is confident enough in his abilities to oversee the work of others and is ambitious enough to want to turn a one-freelancer enterprise into a growing business. It’s also the kind of thing that can remove all the limits to your freelance earnings.

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Improve Your Café-Working Productivity par sabrina Mardi 5 Janvier 2010 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Scott Feldstein

Cubicle walls might not have been pretty but they’ve always been good for productivity. Not seeing your neighbor might have freed you up to take a snooze, fire up the solitaire or surf to the sports pages, but it also meant less gossip, fewer temptations to chat, and the fear that your boss might peer over the wall and catch you in the act. So what happens when you give the office a miss and swap the cubicle for a coffee shop? What can you do to ensure that working in a social environment won’t mean all sociability and no work?

It’s a question that’s become increasingly important as cafes recognize the power of wifi to pull in regular customers. A survey in 2006 found that about a fifth of the US workforce spent at least some time working outside a traditional office, and estimated that the rate was growing by about 10 percent a year. With hi-tech firms feeling the squeeze in the recession and even skilled geeks picking up pink slips and “consultancy” business cards, it’s no surprise that so many café tables are now packed with Macs.

Etiquette between café workers has now become clear but while those rules will keep the atmosphere pleasant, they won’t necessary keep your productivity high. That happens first when you choose the right café. Even chains serving identical drinks in identical décor can vary in atmosphere. A Starbucks on a main street will often be filled with shoppers resting their feet and swapping sales stories. A branch next to a law firm will contain suits discussing briefs and sharing strategies. Each of those cafes will feel very different to freelancers opening their laptops and hoping to hunker down to some focused effort. It’s always harder to work when others around you are having fun. Look up from your keyboard to see others typing away though, and you’ll feel guilty you’re not doing the same.

Work Where Others Are Working

Rule one for productive café workers then, is to work in a café where others are working, meet in a café where others hold meetings — and have fun in a café where others are chatting.

Rule two is to keep your distance. There might not be walls between tables in a café but there should be enough space for workers to get on with work without being tempted to sit and talk. Etiquette demands a nodded greeting between regulars but productivity requires nothing more to be said before it’s time to close up and head back to the home office.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Asking a fellow coffeeholic to watch your Mac while you make space for another brew can easily spark an opening for a conversation. Sharing a power outlet gives enough in common for two workers to feel like old friends. And talking can make for useful networking. One of the benefits promoted by co-working spaces is that they allow freelancing geeks to talk, chat, problem-solve, and perhaps even build businesses together. The conversation and the company are as much a part of the package as the table space and the Internet connection. When you see the person at the next café table not as a potential disruption but as a possible partner, it’s tempting to spend time deepening those connections instead of building your product.

In practice though, those sorts of benefits rarely materialize. Fellow café workers might make for reasonable neighbors but there’s little reason to believe that they’ll also make good partners. Once you’ve assessed another freelancer’s ability to help your company — and found it wanting — it’s best to stick to nodding terms so that you don’t spend your time talking instead of working.

Add Stress to Your Coffee

Where you sit matters too. Café regulars tend to choose the same seats each day but it’s important to choose the right seat. Obviously access to a power outlet will be crucial — otherwise you’ll be spending half your time glancing at the battery icon — but choosing a seat that lets you sit with your back to the wall can help with productivity as well. You’ll be able to see everyone else (and see them working) but you won’t be stuck with the feeling that someone is reading over your shoulder. There are few things more disruptive than that. Cafes are public which means that to protect your productivity you’ll also have to do whatever you can to protect your privacy.

But perhaps the biggest threat to productivity when working in a café isn’t the atmosphere, the conversations or the peeping toms trying to spy on your screen. It’s the comfort. Cafes are designed to make people relax but studies show that a little stress can improve productivity, even if a lot of stress has the opposite effect. To be at your most productive then, you’ll want to introduce just a little bit of pressure even in a place as calming as a café. You can do that by setting yourself strict limits on the length of time you’ll sit and drink. Knowing that you’ll only be there for two hours — and that you have that long to complete a specific task — will get you working against the clock. You can also try breaking the routine by visiting the café at a different time of day or trying a different watering hole. The unfamiliar might not be as stressful as a tight deadline but it might just be enough to make you retreat into your laptop and get on with your work.

Cafes have turned out to be great places for digital nomads to use as replacement offices. They’re everywhere, they’re affordable, and they come complete with good refreshments. But using them in a way that lets you work rather than relax, get things done rather than watch waiters get things done, and produce results rather than just a large bill, does take a little care. Get it right though and you should find that your local coffee bar beats the cubicle any day.

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Twitter Hashtags for Efficient Tweeting par alex Mardi 29 Décembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Twitter’s hashtags have become an essential tool. Conference organizers use them to expand their reach. Communities use them to track natural disasters. And of course, protesters use them to tell the world what they’re doing and what their governments are doing back. It’s no surprise then that spammers also use them to hit eyeballs and push their dodgy goods, and that the most popular trending topics always seem to be light and breezy: three things to say after sex tends to pop up a lot and everyone always seems keen to announce what they’re listening to right now. But essentially, hashtags are a way for Twitter’s users to organize the information they’re producing on the site. They’re a means of categorization, allowing anyone to find the data they’re looking for without wasting hours sorting through irrelevant posts. In other words, hashtags are efficiency tools. So how else can you use them to improve your productivity and cut back on wasted time?

The easiest way to use hashtags for productivity is to identify the tags that are most relevant to you and create a series of saved searches from your Twitter page. You won’t need to do more than click the tag to bring up a list of the latest results so you’ll even save the time it takes to type the hashtag into the search field. First though, you’d need to know which tags you need to be looking for. Directories like Twubs and wikis like What The Trend can tell you what the different tags mean, and Brizzly, a social media platform, provides a little explanation together with each trending topic. But in practice you’re unlikely to need them. As you follow people you find interesting on Twitter, you’ll naturally come across hashtags that your community is using. Save the most common terms, create a relevant list, and you might just be able to cut down on the time spent checking Twitter for interesting tweets. Those hashtag links will bring up the best tweets on your topic right away.

Categorize Your Tweets

Saving hashtag searches will help you to quickly find tweets that have already been categorized by others. But hashtags can also be a good way to categorize your own tweets. It doesn’t matter whether other people use those hashtags or not –- in fact, you don’t want people to use them. You want to create a system that allows you to pull up a list of the tweets you’ve posted that fit a particular category.

The #quote tag, for example, is used by people who like to toss inspiring quotes into their timelines, an easy way for people who have nothing interesting to say themselves to add new content and win retweets. Create a unique tag for your own quotes and place it in your tweets in addition to the #quote tag, something like #[username]qts, and not only will you turn up when someone searches for quotes, but you’ll also be able to quickly pull up a list of your own tweeted quotes. While it might not make the most exciting reading, it will at least ensure that you don’t tweet the same quote twice and it will help you to figure out what kind of quote you might want to include next.

For other kinds of tweets, categorization by hashtag will let you keep track of your posts in the same way that categories let you group posts on blogs. Replies could have one kind of tag, tweets about your business another, tweets about your blog a third kind, and tweets about your product a fourth tag. Include the occasional tweet listing the tags you’re using and you’ll help your new readers to find old posts they might have missed. And by calling up posts that use those tags you’ll be able to see which kind of tweets you should be tweeting next.

Categorize Other People’s Tweets

That’s particularly important when it comes to Twitter-based conversations. You can’t categorize other people’s tweets, and while you can favorite them, that only gives one overall category for the tweets you’ve found important enough to answer. Fave all the tweets you’ve replied to and, if you’re chatty – as you should be on Twitter — you’ll struggle to find old posts that caught your eye. You’ll have the same fight flicking through your own replies to see the posts you were replying to.

Include a hashtag in your replies though and you’ll create a layer of categorization beneath “favorites” and “replies.” You’ll be categorizing your own replies but more importantly, because you can click through to see the tweet you replied to, you’ll also be able to categorize other people’s tweets that have caught your eye. Using the hashtag #replyblog, for example, will let you find the conversations that you’ve had about blogging.

And there is one more way that hashtags can improve your productivity. They can stop you using Twitter so much. One of the reasons that Twitter is such a time-waster is that you never what kind of post is going to be coming up next. You don’t know if those “2 new tweets” are going to be something important, relevant and unmissable, something fun and entertaining, or something pointless and dull that makes you wonder whether it isn’t time to unfollow. Restrict your tweet-reading to hashtags on a service like TweetGrid or TweetDeck and you’ll only be getting information that you know you want. You’ll also be getting a lot less information overall.

Most productivity systems are centered on categorizations, whether that’s in the form of multiple to-do lists or the 43 folders of Getting Things Done. Twitter’s hashtags make it possible to add multiple category levels to your own tweets, allowing you to keep track of the information you’ve posted in the past, as well as find relevant data that other people have tweeted too. Lists might not have taken off on Twitter but with a little creativity, you should find that smart hashtagging can save you time, keep your reading relevant and improve the way you keep track of track of Twitter’s communications.

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Rev Up Your Start-Up During the Recession par sabrina Mardi 22 Décembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Photography: Rich Anderson

There’s never a good time to start a new business. Whenever you decide to set up your company, seek funding, and launch your product, you’re going to be battling with competitors, struggling to bring in your first customers, and dealing with all of the setbacks and surprises that come with starting something new. Make the moves during a boom-time, and you’ll find that there are plenty of other firm flush with cash and racing to get their products out ahead of you. Do it when times are hard and you’ll struggle to persuade buyers and investors to put their hands in their pockets. But that’s not a reason not to do it. In fact, a shrinking economy can throw up all sorts of advantages for entrepreneurs looking to turn their business ideas into successful companies.

Perhaps the most important is motivation. Creating a start-up is hard work and initially at least, you’ll be doing most of that work yourself. There will be little, if any, income so you’ll probably have to squeeze the development, marketing and research around your day job. You’ll be putting in long hours, giving up your weekends and free time, and you’ll have no idea whether your plan really is going to play out or whether, like most new companies, it will crash, burn and become just another line on your resume.

When the effort is so real and the benefits so unclear, it’s easy to keep dreaming and stick with what you know does work: the day job that you might not find very satisfying but which you can count on to pay the bills.

The Recession Raises the Risk in Paid Work

During a downtime though, that day job doesn’t look quite so stable. While a start-up always carries risks, a recession brings those risks into salaried positions too, closing the gap between sticking to a job and starting a new business. Being able to control your own future can start to look a lot more attractive when the alternative is waiting for the boss to knock on the office door and call you in for that talk. At the very least, you want to have somewhere to land if the company does gives you the push.

And if you do find that you’re out, you’ll also discover that you have time. While job-searching is often described as a full-time job, in practice, it’s usually possible to send out resumes in the morning and have the afternoon free for building your own job. Even interviews won’t happen every day. Best of all, you won’t be the only one with hours to fill. A recession might mean a shortage of money but it also means that there’s no shortage of talent looking for ways to put their skills to use. When times are good, you’ll struggle to find a programmer, a designer or a copywriter willing to work for a song or a share of the profits. During the downturn, cafes and co-working spaces are filled with “consultants” and “contactors” hoping to stumble into a project that means they’ll be reading resumes instead of writing them. There’s no better time to build a team. Check out the people sitting next to you at Starbucks or work your social networks. At times like these everyone knows someone who’s either lost their job or could be about to. Even if they’re sitting pretty themselves, they’ll be happy to put out the word that there’s an opportunity available if it means they’re helping a friend.

A Downtime Means Being Cash-Poor but Time-Rich

There’s also no better time to find an office. As companies close, office space becomes available and rental prices fall. In 2008, even New York saw falls as high as 5.5 percent while the amount of sub-let space increased by 34 percent. Funding for a new business might be difficult to find in a recession but bargains are available everywhere. And that applies to other assets too. Businesses are much more open to negotiation when the alternative is an empty book. You might be able to push harder for better advertising rates on selected websites, or pick up deals on barely used office furniture and computer equipment.

Of course, that does still leave that problem of funding. But that’s going to be a problem in boom times too. A rising economy will deliver more money and a greater supply of angels and investors, but there are also more start-ups chasing that cash and booking appointments with those investors. The dot-com years, when it was possible to add “dotcom” to the end of a word and pick up a check for million bucks, are unlikely to return. But not all the money in the world has been wiped out and investors are still looking to put their funds behind a good idea. You might need a business plan that’s more persuasive and shows a faster road to profit than usual. And you might need names on the board that investors recognize — or which at least turn up well on Google. But if the idea is sound, and you push hard enough, you should still be able to find at least some of the funding you need.

Or best of all, the squeeze will make you discover that you didn’t actually need as much as you thought you did. Entrepreneur Rich Christiansen started CastleWave, an SEO firm, with a budget of just $5,000. It’s now worth over a million bucks. If he’d taken that to an investment firm, a large chunk of that value would have belonged to the investors.

Recessions are difficult for entrepreneurs because everyone is cash-poor. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are also time-rich. Make the most of that time, invest it wisely, and you should find that when the economic tide rolls back in again, you’ve already built the kind of foundations that will keep your company afloat in good times and bad.

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Entrepreneurial Trendwatching par alex Jeudi 17 Décembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

entre-trends

Image: sophistix

It’s the latest thing… apparently. Traditional tattoos are noughties, embroidered tattoos are nice. YouTube wedding dances are out, sword fight wedding dances are in. Imelda Marcos shoe closets are embarrassing, stiletto rolodexes are perfect for showing off. According to Trendhunter.com, a 30,000-strong community that tries to spot rising coolness before it cools off, those are just some of the trends that are currently on the way up. It’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be worth a fortune to companies keen to cash in on the next big thing. But can trendwatching really deliver returns for businesses?

Twitter certainly hopes so. The site includes a list of trending topics on its Web interface, letting users see the most popular discussion subjects at any time. Usually, those tend to be fairly banal. Standard subjects are often the music that people are listening to as they’re tweeting what they’re eating for lunch. Three words to say after sex frequently bubbles back into the list as do “omgfacts” and things that #WillGetYouSlapped. Where they come from, nobody knows but it’s hard to see how knowing that “”Queue” is the only word in the English language that is pronounced the same after removing the last 4 letters” is going to make someone some money.

And yet when Brizzly came out, a service that unites Twitter and Facebook into one social media platform and which also offers a short paragraph explaining what each trend is about, both Biz Stone and Evan Williams were quick to tweet about it and give it their thumbs up. The business option that Biz Stone has frequently hinted will soon be launched is said to include easy trend following among more obviously useful features that include multiple account users and mention alerts – information that can be accessed now through Trendistic. So far though, it seems that the only people who have managed to make money out of Twitter’s trends are the evil spammers who insert popular hashtags into their sales messages.

Trendwatching Unlocks Cool

But that doesn’t mean that trend following itself has no value at all. Trendhunter.com defines trendwatching as “the science of identifying emerging shifts in our social behaviour and aspirations,” and claims that the information it gathers is used by industry professionals to develop products, generate ideas and keep marketing, media, design and strategic planners informed.

“Breakthrough ideas and strategic advantage hinge on the ability to anticipate trends and identify the next big thing,” the service claims. “By tracking the evolution of cool, Trend Hunters generate ideas, stimulate creativity, and ultimately unlock cool.”

Or to put it another way, its list of thousands of rising memes function as a kind of giant morgue file for creative types looking for inspiration. Art directors might not see it as a fleet of bandwagons ready for jumping on, so much as a place to copy and build on the smart ideas of others.

But trendwatching can do more than reveal original thoughts. It can also display which of those concepts is more likely to come out a winner. Helene Blowers, a self-confessed trend watcher who blogs about libraries and new technologies, has been tracking the rise of digital readers to discover whether the Kindle, the Nook, Sony’s Reader or the much-awaited Apple Tablet will be the format of choice for the future of e-books, and presumably replacing her bookshelves. The jury still seems to be out on which device will take the prize but it is clear that tracking the discussions might just reveal which of the platforms is currently the most popular. Compare the terms “Kindle,” “Nook” and “Sony Reader” on Trendistic, for example, and it becomes clear that Amazon’s device has consistently been a bigger talking point than its rivals:

<script src="http://www.trendistic.com/_embed-745/kindle/nook/sony-reader/_since-2009-11-15-10h-utc/_until-2009-12-15-10h-utc"></script>

Search for the tweets themselves that mention those terms and a publisher wondering which format to publish a book on first will be able to see whether Kindle is more discussed because it’s better or because Amazon has just removed a bunch of purchases from its customers’ devices again. Of course, the sales figures of each of those devices might be just as revealing, but they’re only available if the manufacturer agrees to reveal them. Discussion numbers are available to anyone.

There’s Money in Trends

Where trendwatching can be most valuable though is in finance. Ron Insana, author of Trendwatching: Don’t be Fooled by the Next Investment Fad, Mania or Bubble argues that when it comes to investment, those who have paid attention to the patterns of previous trends are able to spot bubbles as they rise, placing their money in when the bubble begins to grow, taking it out before it pops – and cleaning up after the pieces have finished flying around. The best investment professionals, he writes, are able to recognize the patterns in rising trends and spot the moment when behavior becomes irrational.

“At that point, these ‘trend watchers’ depart the scene, content to let others catch the last leg up.”

So trendwatching can function as a source of inspiration. It can reveal solid figures about the relative popularity of competing products and ideas. And it can even enable savvy professionals to spot investment opportunities, letting them place their money on rising assets — and remove them as the patterns in those trends start to change.

But the trends themselves are only the raw materials. While following them might make for some easy and interesting reading, Ron Insana notes as early as his introduction that understanding them and being able to act on them is a lot harder than just watching them. Inspiration is one thing but mimicry will only land a creative designer second place to the first and original. Seeing that one device is more discussed than another might be a measure of the effectiveness of current marketing rather than the long-term staying power of a new product. And lots of people saw that house prices were trending upwards in the last few years. Only a handful were smart enough to see that there was nothing behind those prices other than hot air and fat mortgages.

Trendwatching can make a business money then, but the data has to be matched with some smart thinking too.

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When Competitors Become Partners par alex Mercredi 9 Décembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

The business world is supposed to be dog-eat-dog. It’s a zero-sum game in which any advance by a rival is a setback for you – and any achievement by your company is one in the eye for your competitors. Sometimes though it pays to put the hostility aside and look for areas where two (or more) competing companies can co-operate. While that might sound like a bad result for consumers (and an issue for an antitrust commission) the result can often be benefits all round.

Much though depends on the context and the motivation for the deal. When Google teamed up with Yahoo last year, providing the online directory with access to its search and advertising technology, the goal wasn’t to provide better services to consumers or even to ensure that both sides earned more money. It was to prevent Microsoft from getting a ready-made foothold in the search market by buying Yahoo. This was a case of two competitors coming together to defend against a common rival rather than create advantages that benefit themselves and the market as a whole. It’s rare though for an industry to be dominated by three firms in this way and the deal itself was temporary and one-sided. Google was the senior partner and by accepting its rival’s technology Yahoo effectively waved a white flag above its own position in the search market.

More common are partnerships in which rivals come together to set an industry standard, and this is something that seems to be happening fairly frequently now as technology advances faster than business models can keep up. Infineon Technologies, for example, recently announced a partnership with rivals Micron Technology to create CellularRAM memory, a kind of chip suitable for 2.5G and higher mobile devices. The two companies will agree on the specifications for products that will use the chips but compete on the products themselves. It’s almost as though the movie industry had decided whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would be the standard, created the video systems that would play them then focused on making the films. It’s a much more attractive option for companies than investing millions in a winner-takes-all race.

Publishing Rivals Team Up to Create New Magazine Formats

That kind of mutual platform-building is also now happening in print media. John Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to create a new company that will bring together his old firm, Condé Nast and Hearst. Together, the publishing rivals offer more than 50 of the best-selling magazines, including Vanity Fair, Vogue and Sports Illustrated. The aim of the new company will be to build a platform that will allow them to sell their magazines across different digital devices from the iPhone to the Blackberry. Reports describe the planned product as being something like iTunes for magazines but with a choice of formats.

The incentive for a move like this is clear. The publishing industry is struggling to roll back its decision to offer content for free online even as consumers become more used to reading on digital screens. No firm wants to be the first to put up a paywall for fear that it will send its readers to rivals. In order for everyone to benefit, everyone has to move together. Jointly creating a place for everyone to move to is a canny first step.

On the one hand, this model of co-operation appears very similar to that being followed by Infineon and Micron Technologies. The rival companies will create a common platform and offer their own products on top of it. But it’s not just the technology that the publishing companies are building – the various formats of their magazines that will work on different operating systems running on mobile devices; they’re also putting together a store from which readers can buy their products. They’re creating a marketplace too.

Co-operation Is Rare and Not Always Helpful

So what can small businesses learn from these models, and what can they do to enjoy similar benefits?

The most obvious point to notice is that this kind of co-operation is relatively rare. Major rivals teaming up to solve a mutual problem is unusual enough to generate headlines when it happens. It’s also clear that collaboration works best when everyone faces a common problem, usually one caused by a fundamental change in everyone’s business model. When magazines were sold mostly in stores and read on the buses or in the front of the fireplace, every publisher could have their own printing press and their own distribution system. When technology has changed the business model so drastically that profitability is threatened, it makes sense for everyone affected to come together to find a way to save the industry. Those kinds of revolutionary moments though don’t come along very often, and when they do the industry usually finds the co-operation a struggle. It often takes an outsider – even the force causing the disruption in the first place – to provide a solution. Apple’s iPods, for example, created an even greater demand for music in digital formats but its iTunes store also provided a way for companies to deliver that music and get paid for it.

But perhaps the best model for co-operation between competitors isn’t the temporary truces sealed by rivals while they rebuild the battlefield. It’s the genuine respect and sharing found between online publishers giving away their content for free. Websites depend on links from other sites to build up their Google love, and references to publications offering similar content don’t detract from the site’s value but rather enhance it. Readers see the referring site as both a source of new information and a place that can send them off to learn even more about a similar topic. Even Internet marketers promote each other’s goods in affiliate relationships and swap testimonials to help each other sell – even if they don’t do it for those offering items that are exactly the same as their own.

For the most part, companies operating in a similar field should be seen as competitors. It’s the kind of thing that keeps firms on their toes and ensures better and cheaper products. But co-operation can help to solve a temporary crisis – or bring more traffic to your website.

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The Most Powerful Creative Marketing Channels par alex Mardi 1 Décembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

creative-marketing

Image: David Erickson

Marketing a business always comes down to a simple calculation: how much attention and how many sales will your marketing dollars buy? While it’s always easy to toss out cash on search engine optimization, on AdWords campaigns, and even on traditional print, billboard and television advertising, when you’re really strapped for cash, you want creative ideas that can deliver results for minimal costs. You’re prepared to experiment with new strategies in return for the benefits of a low-cost investment. Fortunately, those experiments can now also be low-risk. The rise of smart, fast communication channels – and even smarter marketers — has created all sorts of effective and creative marketing channels for entrepreneurs.

The most obvious of these is viral marketing. When the audience is passing your marketing message to their friends, you’re not paying for advertising space. You’re also getting your name associated with something cool and fun, and you’re winning an implicit recommendation. If someone thinks that the virus you’ve supplied is interesting enough to pass to a friend, they’re telling their friend that you’re worth looking at.

The problem is that viral marketing campaigns can be complex – and they’re not always cheap. Although viral marketing is usually associated with tiny companies, creative marketers and shoestring budgets, the best examples often come from big corporations, the types that can afford to pay top dollar for the biggest advertising talent. When Warner Brothers wanted to create a buzz for The Dark Knight, for example, it created a traditional teaser page containing the Batman logo. Users who clicked the logo were sent to a fake District Attorney election page for one of the movie’s characters. That page led in turn to a defaced version with which users could interact. In return for their email address, users received a code that revealed a few pixels of a hidden image. In order to reveal the entire picture, lots of visitors had to sign up. It didn’t take long for fans to spread the word, telling their friends to visit the site and uncover the picture.

As a way of bringing thousands of people to a website in a very short time – without spending a fortune on marketing – it couldn’t have been more effective.

Tell a Friend, Win a Date

SinglesMonthly, an online relationships magazine, did something similar in the early days of the Internet. While other sites were experimenting with radio button-based quizzes, the site allowed its users to send an email to a friend, invite them to take the quiz and compare the results to test compatibility. The ploy was so successful at encouraging users to bring in more users that it was quickly copied by Women.com.

But viral marketing doesn’t have to be that complex or require such forward thinking. Hotmail’s decision to place its own Web address at the bottom of every email sent was simple, effective, cheap and has been copied by just about every online entrepreneur since.

One of the most effective creative channels is also one of the most derided. Facebook today might feel a bit like someone’s middle-aged cousin in comparison to cool, new Twitter, and if its valuation $15 billion valuation looked optimistic in 2007, it appears positively dreamy now. But advertising on the site works. According to research firm Borrell Associates, Facebook is expected to generate around $310 million from advertising in 2009. A whopping 74 percent of that revenue though is said to come from local firms trolling for local business.

Facebook Has Built-In Viral Marketing

That makes sense. Facebook allows companies to target leads geographically far more effectively and accurately than Google does. The Web might allow companies to reach people around the world but if you don’t deliver further than 50 miles then a service that allows you to focus on specific towns and zip codes – and throw in personal data, such as marital status, age and even alumnus organization – is always going to be valuable.

And Facebook even has its own in-built viral marketing system too. Wedding photographers are using the site to upload images from their shoots. When they tag the photos with the clients’ names, those shots are then pushed to everyone on the client’s contact list, allowing them to spread their images widely for free and with little effort.

Finally, competitions might be old and traditional but they’re still very effective — and online, they can involve mass participation too. Web company MoonFruit might have attracted a lot of attention earlier this year with its Twitter-based giveaway but its creative contests, in which people got happy with Flickr, YouTube and lots of other places besides, were judged by the company itself. That was a missed opportunity to engage audiences and put the public to work on behalf of the company. When Similac, makers of baby formula, ran a contest earlier this year to find a “Superdaddy”, it allowed anyone to enter and it let contestants encourage friends and family to cast a vote. That might have turned the competition into a popularity contest rather than a test of fathering skills but it also meant that contestants worked their social media networks to bring everyone they knew to the company’s website. Soon Facebook was filled with requests to contacts to head over the site and click a button, generating plenty of extra exposure for the firm. A strategy like this requires a prize big enough to motivate people to enter and cheerlead, but the returns clearly have great potential.

One of the biggest changes to hit marketing in the Internet age is the ability to target your efforts on the demographics most likely to respond. The old lists sold by junk mail marketing companies now look as outdated and useful as the static ads in the Yellow Pages. But social media has also opened a bunch of creative new channels that cost next to nothing to use and which can generate a huge number of leads, conversions and new clients.

And best of all, they also make marketing – even on a tiny budget – fun.

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Creative Models for Inspiration par sabrina Mardi 24 Novembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

creative-models

Photography: .nele

Creative ideas tend to be unpredictable. They come in a flash, while you’re in the shower, as you’re waiting for the lights to change, in the middle of a dull conversation at the office party. If those moments have anything in common, it’s that they’re usually times when you’re far away from your iPhone’s note-taking app, or even a pen and paper. In theory, that shouldn’t matter. Good ideas should stick around while bad concepts fade away, but the idea itself is only one part of a creative process that leads from inspiration to IPO. You also have to figure out whether your bolt from the blue really is as revolutionary as it looks, whether there’s demand for it, and whether there’s a real way to make it work. Psychologists and gurus have produced creative models to guide entrepreneurs through that process, entrepreneurs themselves have invented their own… and some of them might just be helpful.

Creative models have actually been around for a while. One of the oldest was created by Graham Wallas, a Fabian and social psychologist who wrote The Art of Thought in the 1920s. Wallas, who isn’t known to have actually brought any products to market himself, described creativity as a four-step process made up of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. Creative thinkers begin by defining the issue, he says, then they lay it aside for a while, a new idea pops out, then finally, they check to make sure it’s all going to work.

It’s a model that includes a mixture of rational analysis and spontaneous inspiration, an approach that’s turned up frequently ever since. The Creative Problem Solving Model, for example, which was developed in the 1950s and taught at the Creative Education Foundation, has a six-step model that’s been conveniently shortened into the acronym “OFPISA.” That stands for Objective Finding, Fact Finding, Problem Finding, Idea Finding, Solution Finding, and Acceptance Finding. It all sounds very rational but the problem and idea-finding stages actually involve the kind of blue-shy thinking more usually associated with creative types.

Successful Creativity Requires Imagination and Evaluation

In general, says Paul Plesk, author of Creativity, Innovation, and Quality and founder of DirectedCreativity.com, earlier creative models tend to suggest that creative ideas are gifts from the heavens, while newer models imply that it’s possible to squeeze out the inspiration in an act of directed free will. Just about all the models though agree that the creative process should combine analysis with imagination and evaluation — and that thinkers have to take action too.

And perhaps that’s where these models first run into trouble. While it’s easy to find lots of great concepts growing and doing well in the business world, it’s much harder to spot the ones that developed according to a set model. The sources of inspiration for the biggest successes are often accidental (such as penicillin mold growing on a tray of bacteria, and ruining it), or imitative (such as Facebook, which was either inspired by Harvard’s own face books that showed students’ photos, or a copy of an idea described by Mark Zuckerberg’s classmates.)

In practice, the concept will often be a result of need while the process of implementation will be inspired by chance. Inventor James Dyson, for example, felt the need for a different kind of vacuum cleaner when he realized what professional cleaners have known for years: that conventional types just don’t work. As they suck up dust, the dirt clogs the bag and they stop sucking. The idea of using cyclonic separation to pull out the dust though, came from the cyclones that Dyson already had installed in his Ballbarrow factory.

Having created one reasonably successful product, Dyson should have had a model to copy in order to create his next one. In his case though, that model didn’t work. Manufacturers refused to take the new machines and Dyson had to produce the vacuum cleaner himself – a model that worked fine for the vacuum cleaner, which is now the highest-selling model by value in the US, but which failed when used to develop a washing machine. While the implementation process was sound, the idea of using two drums instead of one wasn’t, and his concept had to be abandoned.

Twitter Has Millions of Creative Thinkers

That might suggest that there’s a limit to the degree to which you can model a creative process that leads to success. Getting it right once doesn’t mean that you can follow the same steps to achieve success the next time, and that’s particularly true of the latest model pioneered by smart entrepreneurs. Twitter’s growth has been revolutionary not only for its speed and the way it’s changing the way strangers meet and communicate, but because it provides perhaps the only example of a crowdsourced creative model. Addressing a NESTA innovation conference in London recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, described the company as followers rather than leaders, paving the paths already created by the site’s users. Other commentators have suggested that Twitter’s founders invented the bat and ball, left them in a park and returned a week later to find that the world had invented baseball. The new retweet feature, for example, was produced in reaction to the way that users were sharing information rather than as a planned feature of the site handed down to an eager market.

The system was created quickly — in less than two weeks — and was influenced partly by co-founder Jack Dorsey’s experience writing software for a dispatch firm and partly by boredom with the project they were supposed to be working on. Certainly, the site has come a long way from its less-than-visionary beginnings and, with a billion dollar valuation, it’s developed into the kind of success that gets everyone in Silicon Valley dreaming.

But it’s not a model for a creative process that’s going to be easy to copy. Put an idea out there to see what people do with it is usually going to deliver not millions of people to do the creative thinking for you, but stasis, confusion and failure.

Perhaps the best creative model then is the one that lies at the heart of every commercial success from the light bulb to microblogging: have a good idea and implement it.

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When Design Goes Wrong par sabrina Mercredi 18 Novembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

wobbly-bridge

Designers have a tricky job to perform. On the one hand, the products they create have to be efficient and ergonomic. They have to allow the consumer easy access to all of its functions and make use as intuitive as possible. On the other hand, they also have to make the object look as attractive, as cool and as desirable as possible. Get it right and you might just end up with an iPod, a whole new genre of gadgets, a megajob with Apple and all the free iPhones you can eat. Get it wrong, and… well, you could find yourself included on a list of the worst design disasters.

The Wobbly Bridge

It cost £18.2m, was £2.2m over budget and when it opened on June 10, 2000, the Millennium Bridge over the Thames in London was two months behind schedule. That happens. Big construction projects often run late and cost more than expected, and the footbridge, with its low profile and unimpeded view of St. Paul’s Cathedral was pretty enough for people to overlook the cost. Created by architectural firm Arup, Foster and Partners and sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, the bridge was dubbed the “blade of light.”

Within two days of its opening though, the bridge had acquired a new name: The Wobbly Bridge.

On its first day, more than 90,000 people crossed the river, including many taking part in a charity walk. With as many as 2,000 people walking across at any one time, the suspension bridge began to sway. As it swayed, the walkers adjusted their steps, increasing the movement even more until it felt like walking along a rope. Two days later, the bridge was shut down.

Engineers later fixed the problem by retrofitting 89 dampers at an additional cost of £5m. The bridge re-opened in February 2002 — and was destroyed by Death Eaters in the opening sequence of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Microsoft Gets No Help from Clippit

clippit2 Back in 1995, Microsoft had a killer idea. The company would create an interface that, for once, owed nothing to anything that Apple had done. The “social interface” program for Windows 3.1 would allow anyone to use a computer, even people who didn’t know how to use computers. By double-clicking on “Bob,” the interface would be changed to a picture of a living room. To find the program you wanted, you had to click a household item such as a sheet of paper for the word processor and a pile of envelopes to access email. If you got stuck, Rover the dog was on hand with helpful advice. The project was overseen by Melinda French, now better known as half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was killed before the release of Windows 98. Steve Ballmers described it as a time when Microsoft “decided that we have not succeeded and let’s stop.” PC World Magazine gave it seventh place on its list of the 25 worst products of all time.

You’d think that that would have been enough of a warning, but no. Still convinced that its customers were too daft to figure out how to use its products by themselves, Microsoft included the Office Assistant in its Office programs from 1997 to 2003. Whenever you started doing anything, a paperclip called Clippit would pop up and ask if you needed help. So annoying was Clippit and his friends, Merlin the Magician, F1 the robot, Links the cat and Rocky the dog that even Microsoft’s developers were said to have renamed Office Assistant TFC – “The Fucking Clown.” Sometimes it’s possible to overdesign a product.

Stick a Cell Phone to Your Head

head-cell-phone

And sometimes it’s possible to underdesign a product.

The Cell-Mate, which was actually shown at CES in 2009, calls itself a hands-free cell phone holder. It’s a headband. It looks like a headband. It acts like a headband. And it appears about as cool and sexy as a headband. A metal headband with black disks.

Usually, simple is good, and there is something to be said for not looking like the kind of constantly connected android that walks around with a Bluetooth earpiece. But actually for the kind of problems that the Cell-Mate (and really, the person who came up with that name deserves a cellmate) solves, Bluetooth is fine. No one can see you looking silly when you’re doing the dishes or sitting in traffic – at least no one you care about. With so many cool and sexy ways to talk with your hands free, sticking a black disk on a couple of metal rods just isn’t going to cut it.

The Sinclair C5 — A Cold-Weather Convertible for the Suicidal

sinclair-c5

Fresh from his success at creating the first popular home computers, the ZX81 and the Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair looked to make another massive technological leap with the launch in 1985 of the C5. A battery-operated tricycle, the C5 followed at least some design rules. It looked cool, space-agey and sleek.

Unfortunately, that neat look hid a small problem. It was almost completely useless. The low ride led to worries that drivers wouldn’t be able to see it until they were driving over it. The motor was too puny to climb even the gentlest of hills. And January in England probably weren’t the best time and place to launch an open-top vehicle. Altogether fewer than 17,000 C5s were sold, making it about half as popular as the Segway.

Apple Newton Proves that Bad Ideas Can Only Go Down

Jonathan Ive might now be regarded as the master of all things design but even the best designers can make mistakes, especially when they’re just starting out. The Apple Newton was a good idea, a little ahead of its time. Launched in 1993 as an early personal organizer, the Newton showed the road ahead by ditching the buttons and using the screen as the main interface. Its handwriting recognition software was supposed to make keyboards a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, the software wasn’t quite ready for primetime and repeated attempts at writing the same word made using the Newton felt a little like teaching a two-year old to read. Still, Ive did come on a bit… once Apple’s software developers had caught up.

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How to Be a Lucky Entrepreneur par alex Mardi 10 Novembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Asked to promote an officer who had already shown talent, bravery and leadership, Napoleon, it is said, would always ask “Is he lucky?” That might have been a more reasonable question than it sounds. While luck is often seen as fickle and unreliable, the sense that some people are just plain luckier than others (and that some people have the touch of doom) might have solid grounding. It’s certainly possible to find people who appear to fit in one camp or another: how else to explain both Kaka’s $13 million annual salary from soccer club Real Madrid and his boy-band good looks? If luck isn’t evenly spread out then but delivered by the truckload to some people and snatched away from others, what can you do to ensure that as an officer of your business, your efforts are blessed by good fortune?

According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at England’s University of Hertfordshire, and author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles, it is possible to take action that improves your chances. After tracking closely the behavior of 400 people who considered themselves either particularly lucky or cursed in everything they do, he produced four principles that characterize lucky types.

Pulp the Lemons

First, lucky people, he says, expect good luck. They’re optimistic and believe that everything will work out in the end. That confidence can help them to push through tough times, and might also mean that they pay less attention to the bad stuff and place a greater emphasis on the positives. It’s not really that they’re exceptionally lucky, they just regard the pot holes as exceptional and pay them little attention.

That sort of attitude also helps with the second principle. Lucky people turn bad luck into good. Instead of moping around and telling people how life’s got in for them, they actually take steps to turn things around. Being told to make lemonade out of life’s lemons might make you want to pulp the person giving you the advice, but “lucky” people, says Dr. Wiseman, actually do it. They recognize that things could have been worse, take control and move forward.

Those two principles though suggest that luck is as much about who you are as what you do. It’s about thinking you’re lucky rather than just being lucky. But Dr. Wiseman’s other two principles for winning luck offer much more practical strategies for business owners. Lucky people, he says, are willing to follow their hunches. They’re prepared to take risks, accept that losing is part of life and consider the consequences inconvenient rather than devastating. Because they’re willing to play more often, they win more often – and lucky types who listen to their gut and lose, rather than act only after long study, will then pull out their lemon juicers and think they’ve won.

To demonstrate that theory, Dr. Wiseman asked volunteers to count the number of pictures in a newspaper. A few pages in, the volunteers reached a half-page advertisement telling them that they could stop counting; the paper had 43 pictures. A few pages later, another ad placed next to a picture informed them that they could tell the examiner that they’ve seen the ad and claim a cash reward. The “unlucky” types missed it and kept counting.

Luck is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity

That shows what is probably the most important characteristic of lucky people: they maximize their opportunities. That’s vital and it suggests that there is a difference between chance and luck. Chance is random, evenly distributed and happens to everyone. Luck determines whether those chances turn out to be helpful or painful. It’s a redefinition of an older idea that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That suggests that being lucky isn’t about buying a rabbit’s foot and keeping your fingers crossed. It’s about a combination of attitude and action. Being a lucky entrepreneur means adopting an upbeat, relaxed manner that allows you to see the bright side of any problem and remain calm enough to turn around a crisis.

It means laying the groundwork for action all the time because you never know when opportunity is going to knock. For an entrepreneur, that might involve building networks on Facebook and Twitter, and attending conferences, even when you have nothing to sell and little to promote. You never know who you might meet and what opportunities those networks could churn up.

It means having your elevator pitch ready and on the tip of your tongue because lucky people talk to the people they meet, win the chances to use those pitches and deliver them, while unlucky types ride the elevator quietly while staring at their shoes. Their attitudes increase the number of chances they come across and allow them to make the most of those chances when they turn up.

And also it means taking action instead of wondering what would happen if you did A instead of B while looking for more information about C.

Dr Wiseman describes one example of a single person who goes to a party hoping to find a date. An unlucky person would come away with no phone numbers and no date. A lucky person would come away equally dateless but with a bunch of new friends, some of whom might later develop into business partners, customers or suppliers.

To become a lucky entrepreneur then, you have to be able to see the bright side of life, be happy and outgoing, be prepared to take risks, network constantly and not sweat the small stuff. You have to believe that your venture will be successful and assume that when you take a step back, the next two steps forward will soon follow. With that sort of attitude, they always do. The result might not be a place at the officer’s table next to a short, French dictator but it might just give you a successful business – and friends who think you were just lucky.

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IPHONES and smartphones haven’t killed the desktop in the office par alex Mercredi 4 Novembre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

no-computer-iphone

Photography: Lee Bennett

Tech types have been predicting the rise of the paperless office for years. When you can pack more information into the average laptop’s hard drive than you can squeeze into a room full of filing cabinets and when you can send documents backwards and forwards without ever licking an envelope, who needs to chop down trees and staple pages? Computer power will soon mark the end of ink and pulp, we’ve been promised… again and again. But could we see the end of the computer first? Just as the ability to squeeze increasing flexibility into laptops and now netbooks has reduced demand for desktops, could the growth of mobile phone technology mean the rise of the computerless company too?

Judging by sheer computing power alone, desktops should be safe. A typical Dell Inspiron desktop comes with a range of processors from Intel Celerons to Core 2 Quads, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage space, which certainly sounds impressive enough.

The iPhone is a Weakling

In comparison, even the latest iPhone 3GS looks like a seven-stone weakling. But for most users, even Dell’s most basic model is probably overkill. If all you’re planning to do is create spreadsheets, write emails and prepare documents, the lowest-end processor would be more than sufficient. And you’re only going to fill a terabyte of storage if you’re busy skipping round the corporate firewall to build your movie collection. Of course, you still have to pay for all of that extra power whether you use it or not.

That might explain why buyers are migrating to smaller, cheaper machines that pack a weaker punch but are still strong enough to do the job. According to iSuppli, a technology firm, sales of desktop PCs fell 18 percent in 2008. Sales of notebooks rose 12 percent in the same period.

But while even the smartest of smart phones might have relatively small brains, the iPhone didn’t revolutionize the mobile market with its muscle power. It was its interface that changed the way we compute. By making surfing the Web comfortable and easy, the iPhone’s true power doesn’t lie under its touchscreen but in the cloud. Who cares how much storage space you have when everything you need is available from one of the many online storage centers available – or even Google’s rumored GDrive? Does it matter if your iPhone only displays the last 50 messages when you can still log into Gmail and read everything you’ve received and sent over the last three years? And do you really need a program folder stuffed with bloatware when you can buy almost all of the programs? you need for just a handful of bucks – or even access the same functionalities free online

That became easier recently with the release for the iPhone first of QuickOffice and then of DataViz’s DocumentsToGo. Both were previously available for the Blackberry, Android and Palm but the iPhone’s bigger screen means that creating documents and spreadsheets is now more comfortable than ever. Although neither program offers the complete range of editing options available in Microsoft’s full-size Office suites – you can’t add comments, for example, or images to Word-type files — they both provide the most popular features used by most office workers. The completed documents can either be synced directly to a computer or – for non-computer types — emailed to a partner or client.

Can You Work without a Keyboard?

Best of all, the devices themselves fit in your pocket, weigh next to nothing and can be used and taken anywhere. You can now do your work while lying on the sofa or even squashed into economy class… with a food tray on your folding table. And it’s always with you. When was the last time you left home without your mobile?

Combine those basic office programs packed into a handheld device with Internet accessibility, email and the giant range of note-taking, organization and even entertainment apps, and it quickly becomes clear that there’s little a smartphone can’t do that your laptop can, except give you shoulder-ache.

But clearly, there are limitations. The iPhone still has no external keyboard, which means lots of tricky thumb-typing, and even the real buttons on a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device can feel pretty fiddly when you’re preparing a long report. Creative types who work with graphics might also find working from a mobile a challenge too far. The Zeptopad app does allow vector drawing – and even P2P sharing – while Color Expert helps artists and graphic designers capture inspiring colors as they see them. Neither though offers anything like the flexibility designers need in Photoshop let alone a convenient, roomy place to store large format images. Attempting to put Adobe’s chief graphic product on the iPhone gives you something like this:

So while the rise of the personal computer was supposed to have done away with paper, in practice, things didn’t quite work out that way. Bored cubicle-dwellers are still able to three-point paper balls down the corridor. The Amazon is still being cleared to fill filing cabinets. And while screens sit on every office desktop, they’re often surrounded by piles of letters, documents and paper reports. The same is likely to remain true for the prospects of a computerless company. Mobile devices might be growing increasingly smart and incredibly flexible. They might now be able to offer many of the same functions and at the same speed that you could have found on a full-size computer just a few years ago. And their access to the cloud means that that potential is now limitless. But you wouldn’t want to use them all the time.

While you could now do all of your (non-graphic) work without ever touching a real keyboard, in practice, you probably won’t want to. Your smartphone won’t replace the desktop but it will probably sit on the desk, next to the laptop… and on top of your printed report.

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Using Milestones and Deadlines for Greater Productivity par alex Mercredi 28 Octobre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

Nothing focuses the mind faster than an impending delivery date. You’ve accepted the task, done the research and played with the procrastination. Now, with the deadline in sight, you actually have to finish the job and hand over the goods. The change is massive and sudden. Knowing that your reputation and possibly your job is on the line has an amazing effect. Suddenly, a task that looked impossible becomes achievable. YouTube and viral emails still appear tempting but you can block them out. Your productivity goes through the roof. Instead of staring at the wall or pacing around the room, you’re hacking at the keyboard as though it’s stuck to your fingers. Even if you miss the deadline a little, the period between recognizing the urgency and completing the job is one of unparalleled attention and diligence. If only you could work that way all the time. Sprinting like this over a full working life is just about impossible but you can take some of the lessons learned from the effect of a tight deadline and use them to raise your work rate every day.

First, it’s important to understand that deadlines aren’t uniform. They pack different characteristics and each characteristic has a different effect on motivation. The outcome for the worker himself, for example, is one important influence. A deadline for a design that could win you a promotion or land a larger and more satisfying project is likely to be met. A threat from the wife that she’ll throw out anything in the garage that hasn’t been put away by the end of Sunday can be fairly safely ignored. Deadlines aren’t just dates, they’re also carriers of personal punishment and reward.

Missed Deadlines Are Your Fault

They’re also vehicles for organizational punishment and reward, and that’s important too. When a failure to meet a deadline is going to have a knock-on effect throughout the business, delaying the next stage in a project or causing large-scale changes to the marketing plan, those results also affect motivation. Even if you can shift the blame onto tardy suppliers or poor information, the knowledge that others will suffer will influence your ability to knuckle down and finish on time.

And personal interest in the project helps too. When a task is interesting, exciting and fun to do, you’re more likely to do it on time and less likely to be pulled away by the lure of a new post on an interesting blog or the chance to chat with a friend.

All of these things make up the task’s importance—to you and to the organization. Other factors affecting a deadline’s ability to drive you to get things done include its level of difficulty, and the specificity of both the task and the deadline goal. You’re much more likely to miss a deadline when the job is difficult, when you’re uncertain about the requirements, and when you’re not clear about when the project actually has to be delivered. Does “the end of next week,” for example, mean 5pm on Friday or, if the project is just going to sit ignored on a computer all weekend, can it include a bit of Monday too?

So deadlines are most effective at increasing productivity when they include real consequences, when you know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, and when you enjoy the job. Few tasks pack all of those things but the more you can include, the better.

But these factors are difficult to control. You don’t want every job to be life or death. A task that looks clear can become fuzzy as you work your way through it. And while you might start a new task buzzing with excitement, that thrill can quickly fade.

There is one characteristic of a deadline though that’s more powerful than all of the others combined, and it’s also under your control: its proximity. One group of researchers at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington has argued that a close deadline brings rewards closer, increases the challenge and raises motivation. It creates two psychological states, they argue: urgency and “felt accountability.”

Clearly, no one is going to ask for a tighter deadline just so that a task feels more urgent but deadlines can be made to feel closer simply by placing smaller versions—milestones—before the final due date.

Celebrating a Milestone with a Million-Dollar Party

This is something that happens anyway, argue the Foster Business School researchers in the book, Work Motivation: Past, Present, and Future. Using secretaries as an example, they describe how employees faced with a deadline continually assess their progress towards the goal, reallocating their time and effort depending their assessment of whether they’re likely to finish on schedule. In effect, workers are creating mental milestones that tell them whether they’re on the right track.

Those milestones can be built up and made concrete. Dan Carrison, writing in Deadline! How Premier Organizations Win the Race Against Time, describes how Boeing organized a massive party to celebrate the first time all of the components of its new widebody 777 jetliner were put together. The company didn’t just invite all of the engineers and employees who had worked on every part of the plane to mark the event—which would have opened the celebration to 10,000 people—it invited their families too. Altogether, more than 100,000 people were able to tour the plane as proud relatives showed off the screws they had attached and the wing parts they had designed.

But the plane wasn’t finished. It would be another two years before it made its first flight. This wasn’t a celebration of the end of a job. It was an attempt to encourage workers to complete the task on time. Engineers were able to see what their work had achieved so far. They were able to understand what completing the project would create. And by allowing employees to bring their families, Boeing was able to recruit a giant team of cheerleaders: wives, husbands and children who would ask their staff about the big plane over the dinner table.

A party after the project is completed is a reward, Carrison writes. A party held while the project is still under way—when it’s met a milestone—is a motivational strategy.

Of course, you don’t have to throw a million-dollar party to mark your milestones but knowing when they are, celebrating their achievement and letting others know when you expect to be done can all keep you focused and motivated, even when the final deadline is far away.

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Using A Support Group For Creativity par sabrina Jeudi 22 Octobre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

support-creativity

Photography: drurydrama (Len Radin)

Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little better. Although many have been known for their ability to down the odd bottle with friends at the end of an unproductive day, a hack’s best collaborator has always been his moleskin or his typewriter, not a loyal group of friends. But the notion that ideas come best when we’re alone, often in the shower, might well be one of creativity’s biggest myths. In fact, group work can bring out some of the best concepts.

We can see this at the highest end of art. The work of an Impressionist painter always reflects his own ability; it’s produced by just one pair of hands. But the ideas that went into the final picture are the results of long discussion among the painters themselves about what art should be and how to produce it, discussions held in bars and cafes and continued afterwards by letter. None of those ideas – and Impressionism itself – could have been produced by just one artist working alone.

The same is true of the kind of creative thinking that led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs. In Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, Michael Michalko describes how Einstein, Eisenberg, Pauli and Bohr were almost unique among scientists of the day for their informal meetings and open conversations. While other scientists kept their thoughts to themselves in case they were described as controversial or revealed their mistakes, the real breakthroughs came from the scientists who weren’t afraid to speak their minds, even when what was on their mind was only half-formed.

The Creative Thinking of the Impressionists

If the café chats between the Impressionist painters like those held at the Café Geurbois where Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro would meet, or the talks between Einstein and Eisenberg were productive it might well be because they followed the principles of “koinonia,” a Greek term that describes the sharing of ideas. Socrates was so fond of these kinds of group dialogue, says Michalko, that he and his colleagues formed principles that guided the discussion. Participants had to listen carefully to each other, identify and remove their assumptions, talk honestly without fear of sparking controversy and, when disagreeing, avoid arguing or interrupting another speaker. Koinonia, says Michalko, allows “a group to access a larger pool of common thoughts that cannot be accessed individually.”

But as anyone who has sat through a brainstorming session knows, koinonia is much easier to say than to do. Forming a group to spark creativity and inspire new ideas means doing more than listening respectfully and biting your tongue when someone says something stupid. It also means finding the right people to form the group with. You could argue that if you put Monet, Sisley, Cezanne and Pissarro in a room together, you would have to put a lot of absinthe on the table to stop the good ideas from flowing. Put a manager in the room with his creative team and you’re going to find that the first thing people will do is clam up. When participants feel that their ideas are being judged – and that their chances of promotion depend on not saying the wrong thing – they will censor themselves. Worse, they’ll try to say the things that match the ideas of the most important person in the room, even when his ideas are wrong.

Creative Group Members Must Be Equal

A creative support group then needs to have members who are equal. They might not be of equal status – it’s likely that when Socrates got together with his pals, everyone knew who the smartest guy in the room was – but they should treat each other as equals. While there should be a facilitator, that facilitator’s role isn’t to judge ideas but to guide the discussion and keep it focused on the goal. He or she can also encourage participants to contribute more by notifying them in advance of the subject of the meeting and asking them to bring three ideas with them, or by setting a number of concepts to be created before the end of the session. While some ideas will be unusable, having to make up the numbers may generate some original thinking.

It would be great if all creative support groups worked that way but it’s clear they don’t. In practice, many sessions tend to be dominated by a small group within the group or people find themselves agreeing with each other so much that few, if any new ideas, are generated. But that isn’t always a terrible thing either because creative support groups actually come in two different forms.

While some support groups inspire creativity, others help creative types to implement those ideas. Writer’s groups, for example, tend to fall into the second category. Aspiring authors rarely come together to talk about the role of literature or to toss around new story ideas. Instead, they focus on reading each other’s works and giving advice on how they could be improved. This isn’t feedback that inspires creativity; it’s criticism that produces better craftsmanship. It’s valuable but it’s not quite the same as inspiring creativity.

Putting together a support group that helps with creativity then isn’t easy. While it’s simple enough to follow the rules of fair and open dialogue, and to set up processes that encourage thinking and contributions, an effective group depends mostly on the people in it. They have to be people you can consider as friends not rivals, people you respect but don’t compete with, and people who will listen without judging. And if they’re as smart as Einstein or as visionary as Monet, that would be a big help too.

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Mindmapping Versus GTD par alex Mercredi 14 Octobre 2009 :: Geekpreneur - make money being a Geek :: RSS

mindmapping-and-gtd

Image by: Austin Kleon

Choosing an organizational system can feel a little like picking your favorite cult. Whatever system you’re weighing up, you’ll always find teams of people ready to tell you how it’s changed their lives, made them more efficient and allowed them to achieve more than they ever thought possible. That’s particularly true when one of the systems you’re considering is Getting Things Done (GTD), David Allen’s “productivity principles for work and life.”

But despite what GTD’s fans will tell you — and they’ll be ready to tell you a lot — David Allen’s methods aren’t the only organizational system in town. Mindmapping can be no less effective in planning what needs to be done, filling in the gaps and creating a workflow that takes you from concept to product. So which is the most effective tool and which method should you be turning to as you’re planning your projects?

Mindmapping Keeps Students Awake

Mindmapping is said to have been created by psychology author Tony Buzan, although others have argued that the method has actually been in use for millennia. The motivation is supposed to have been the difficulty of creating lecture notes. They’re a pain to write at a time when students would rather be listening (ideally, and if they’re not sleeping) and they have to be reviewed before the student can make sense of them. Buzan thought that mindmapping would be a much more efficient way of remembering what the lecturer was saying. His brother, Barry Buzan, then described in his book The Mind Map how entrepreneurs and managers could use the same techniques to develop their ideas.

The principle is very simple. Mindmappers begin by placing an image or a word at the center of a page then extend branches around the page leading to single words describing individual aspects of that idea. Multiple colors can be used to show different areas of the concept, the branches describe how those ideas are related, and the distance from the center can be used to express the priority of those aspects.

The result, say mindmap fans, is easy brainstorming and a representation of an idea that’s free to grow organically, instead of being forced into the kind of linear structure that might restrict natural growth.

As an added bonus, the visual characteristics of a mindmap are supposed to make its contents easy to remember. One study found that mindmapping increased recall in students who used it by as much as 10 percent. The same study though also found that students really didn’t like to use it.

GTD Needs a Road Map

There’s really not a huge amount to mindmapping then. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with and it’s very easy to understand. GTD, on the other hand, needs a road map to understand. Designed by coach and management consultant David Allen, GTD works on a number of different levels. It uses a five-step information workflow made up of: collect; process; organize; review; and do. Plans are divided into six focus levels: current actions; current projects; areas of responsibility; yearly goals; five-year vision; and life goals. And then there’s the five-level “natural planning” process which organizes action by: defining a task’s purpose and principles; envisioning the outcome; brainstorming; organizing; and identifying next actions.

And it’s all centered on lists placed in 43 folders for monthly and daily planning. Plus a “tickler file,” which is a kind of procrastination box used to push nasty jobs to a definite point in the future.

In a straight scrap then, Occam’s Razor would make pretty short work of GTD. If the simplest solution is always the best, then Tony Buzan always beats David Allen into a messy pulp.

But it’s not that simple. GTD is more complex than mindmapping because it’s trying to do a lot more. Mindmaps have two functions: they draw out thoughts, allowing creative thinkers to dream up new concepts and link them together; and they make it easier for those thinkers to remember what they’ve been imagining. Mindmaps generate ideas, structure them, organize them and help people to become familiar with them. And then they stop.

It’s the next stage though that’s much harder. You still have act on those ideas, and that’s always going to require far more organization. A mindmap for a new iPhone app, for example, might place a bodybuilding image in the center then have different branches leading to areas for exercise regimes, diet-tracking features, updates from bodybuilding events and motivational slogans. The branches would contain words that remind the developer of the different features the app would contain and inspire him to add new ones.

Creating the app though, would mean hiring a programmer, designing the navigation system, deciding on the look and the designs, fixing a sales price, writing the copy, submitting it for approval, and finding ways to market it. That’s a lot harder than sitting on a sofa and scribbling single words on a page then connecting them with wavy lines.

But if it’s hard, it’s not always made easier by trying to figure out what David Allen meant by a “mind-sweep” (it appears to be collecting then ditching thoughts you don’t need), deciding whether to write one list or multiple sub-lists, and trying to figure out whether you should “do it, delegate it, defer it, or drop it,” another of Allen’s set of task rules.

In theory then, mindmapping and GTD aren’t really in opposition. Mindmapping is about concepts and ideas. It’s for brainstorming and thinking, not for planning and doing. GTD, on the other hand, is supposed to make action more organized. While it does have elements that are supposed to help creativity, it’s main role is to ensure that the thoughts you’ve already had are turned into plans — and that those plans are turned into action.

In practice though, by the time you’ve finished coloring in the different branches on your mindmap and highlighting the various aspects of your idea, you’re already going to be fairly tired — and possibly fed up with your concept. Toss in the creation of 43 folders and the endless lists that David Allen will have you writing and you’ll be lucky if you have the energy to get anything done at all.

Fortunately, in the end it doesn’t matter which organizational system you use as long as the result is that you stop organizing and start doing.

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