MerchantOS
December 4th, 2006
Check out the point of sale made easy blog I write for my company MerchantOS (Web based point of sale software).
What can I do for you?
November 16th, 2006
A while back I read the book THE FROG AND PRINCE: Secrets of Positive Networking. It made a couple of good points but the most important was to approach people with the attitude: What can I do for you? With that attitude you’ll get the best response from people and you’ll open up a channel for real dialog with your new acquittance.
I was reminded of this again today while watching a video of a recent talk; Funding Your Dream. This talk was about raising venture capital. I found many of the speakers insightful, but I think Ian Sobieski from the Band of Angels really made some good points that related to positive networking. Ian suggests that you should not be consumed with maximizing the return from your venture, rather you should make sure that everyone involved is getting what they need. You’ll have an easier time getting people on your side if you approach them with an extension of good will. You will also be more likely to get them talking about how you could help them. Which is great way to sell your idea, or sell anything for that matter.
One key ingredient to this attitude is flexibility. If you’ve got a set outcome in your mind every time you approach someone, for funding or anything else, it’s going to be hard to convince them that you want to help them. When you approach someone with the attitude ‘what can I do for you?’ you need to have the flexibility to change your plans so that you can back up your offer.
Prediction
November 9th, 2006
Ebay will buy Prosper.com or Zopa.com (both are P2P auction lending/borrowing).
Power to the employee, A Company Concept
November 8th, 2006
Here’s the company I want to work at:
Every employee gets a base salary. Say $50K/year, doesn’t really matter too much as long as it’s not too high.
Every employee gets a yearly budget. Say another $50K/year.
Employees organize them selves into projects that they create and pool their budgets to fund the projects.
Here’s how it would work: I’ve got an idea, maybe I spend some time making a small prototype or hashing out the idea in some way so that others can get their mind around it. Then I find other people within the organization that want to form a team with me around that idea. I might find a programmer, or engineer, a marketing person, a sales type person, whoever I think I’ll need to be successful. You each bring your budget to the project. So if I get 3 other people on board with my project I’d have a budget of $150K/year to get my idea off the ground. If my idea grows into something that is really cool more people will want to join it and contribute their budgets which will fuel the fire.
Now here’s where it gets interesting; the profits. If my idea is successful it will eventually start to make a profit. A cut of that profit would go back to the organization as a whole, in essence it would be redistributed so that all the people in the organization can keep those salaries and project budgets. But the rest of the profit is for your team and is distributed to them based on the total amount of money they have put into the project using their budget. So if a project starts with just one person in the end when the project is making a profit they will have added the most money to the project through their budget and thus will be getting the largest slice of that profit. And if the idea is spun off as a separate entity ownership of it is determined in the same way as profit sharing.
The company would provide the infrastructure for these projects to grow from, but it wouldn’t be commanding from on high. Evolutionary type pressures would allow the best ideas to rise to the top. It would provide an environment where it was safe to experiment because you’d always be getting your base salary and it would reward those who come up with brilliant ideas.
There would be no rules as to how you could spend your budget except that you could not spend it on paying yourself or anyone else within the company more money.
Of course their would have to be some oversight, some way to get rid of non-performers etc, and many other details in its implementation. Those are all beyond the scope of this thought experiment.
The Olympia Web Design June Meetup - First Meeting
May 17th, 2006
I’ve started an Olympia Web Design meetup group. Please join me!
- When:
- Thursday, June 8, 2006, 7:00 PM
This is United Web Design Meetup Day
20060609T020000Z
- Where:
- Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Roasters
513 Capitol Way S.
Olympia , WA 98501
360-786-6717 - Description:
- This will be the very first Meetup for The Olympia Web Design Meetup Group!We’ll use the time to get to know each other, talk about being Web Designers, and discuss what we want out of our Meetups.
I would really like to establish a technical community in Olympia. I know there are a lot of creative and technically savvy people in this area and I’d like to meet all of you!
I’m open to changing the meetup date/time to anything that works for people.
If you want to chat with me I’m on skype with user name “justinlaing”. I’m currently running a startup software company MerchantOS.com (formerly Bikesoft.us).
Here is a preliminary agenda:
1) Introductions: What you are working on, what you want from the group.
2) In depth view of the architecture and technology behind MerchantOS.com.
3) Some information from “The Ajax Experience” conference in San Francisco.
4) Share resources that we find useful.
4) Any other ideas?Contact Justin Laing to discuss this meetup: jlaing [AT] gmail [DOT] com
Apple Sell OS X?
March 24th, 2006
Many people have mentioned that if Apple OS X were available for their intel/x86 box they would give it a whirl. If not using it as their main OS at least as a secondary. Guy Kawasaki writes in the Art of The Start that Apple once thought their computers would be used for standard business purposes only (Word processing and spread sheets). Apple soon realized that people were using their Macs for desktop publishing instead. Apple embraced these users and Mac into the de-facto platform for desktop publishing.
Why is Apple missing the boat on this one?
Over the years Apple has had many opportunities to make an OS that is PC compatible. I’ve heard that OS X has had an internal intel version for years. Is their strategy to stay a computer manufacturer even when computers are becoming a commodity? They have bucked this trend with the iPod (And arguably the iMac and now possibly the Mac mini). However, if their main business is still desktop computers it seems that being a hardware manufacturer is a business of diminishing returns and increasing competition (i.e. Dell).
By selling their OS to the broad PC market they would increase revenue and growth in three ways.
1) They would directly increase revenue with an increase in the number of purchased copies of the OS (even if some people where pirating it, some would buy legally).
2) Having more users on their OS would spur software vendors to write more software for their OS. This would cause more people to buy their computers and OS.
3) The more familiar users are with OS X the more likely they will buy an Apple computer.
An alternative long range strategy
If Apple holds out and does not start selling OS X to the PC market it may still have a path to expanded growth. Apple will benefit from more applications being designed to work over the web in browsers like FireFox (which works well on PCs and Macs). Cross browser web applications will allow more users to switch to Apple’s platform. Only the future will tell if Apple can make the leap from the Mini to the Camry of computers.
Less Is More: Design
February 6th, 2006
As technology options become available, and the time to make a new feature becomes smaller we need to ask our selves, is more better? There is room for feature rich, power user design, but aren’t the most appealing designs/devices/solutions those that are the simplest (sort of like Occam’s Razor)?
Take out features:
Do you think that this is coming from the belief that more is better?
I think it’s because more is measurable, as a valuable outcome. Less is not measurable. What if Adobe said: New Photoshop CS3 with 80% less features?! Well, I mean it’s kind of a paradox. We all want simple things when we start, but when we live longer with it, we want more. So it really is about how to design things that are able to change. People have talked for years about adaptable interfaces and so forth - it hasn’t happened yet. But when that happens…at MIT we have a new model for software, we have a new system called Open Studio we’re developing that has made software simple again. Very simple drawing program, simple photo application. And then, most of the people ask us: “we want more features”! And it’s designed to accommodate more features, you can easily add a new filter and you can buy that or rent that so the software gets as complex as you want to. In Photoshop I use 10% of the features, easily, maybe less.”
Simple is the new safe:
Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”
Flexible:
One of the tenets of the Getting Real process is the idea that the future should drive the future. When you let a product roadmap guide you you let the past drive the future. You’re saying “6 months ago I knew what 18 months from now would look like.†You’re saying “I’m not going to pay attention to now, I’m going to pay attention to then.†You’re saying “I should be working at the Psychic Friends Network.â€
Social News / Web Aggregator
February 5th, 2006
“A source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers; you decide what appears on your front page and which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity.”
Good Design
February 5th, 2006
Web 2.0 is not all hype
January 26th, 2006
In response to Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web 3.0 arcticle, talked about on ajaxian:
It’s not as easy as Jeffrey makes it out to be to design and run an application that is used by masses of people. If it were then Yahoo, Google, eBay etc would not be paying millions to buy these products and user bases and everyone would be doing it. Some of the products may not be super complicated but they did take a leap of thinking (like del.icio.us).
It’s not like in the web 1.0 boom where people that had horrible business plans were getting millions of dollars of v.c. just because it was web or dot com. The products that are being purchased by larger companies have actual value to those large companies due to all the eyes they attract. You think the guys at Yahoo / Google / eBay didn’t learn from the last bubble? They were the ones that survived and thrived. I say if you can make a “thank you” card site that is so awesome that hundreds of thousands or millions of people start using it then you probably have created something of value, and today it is very unlikely that this fictional site would gain that sort of popularity without a very nice user interface.
Maybe I’m taking his article too seriously?