I wanted to leave you 5yrs ago when you morphed your checkout process into a misleading gauntlet of extra screens and pre-filled menus that tried to trick the customer into purchasing unnecessary stuff.

I wanted to leave you 3yrs ago when Bob Parsons turned the entire web site into a soapbox for his chauvinistic machismo patriotism-for-profit blather and insulted the women of the tech community with sexist super bowl commercials.

I wanted to leave you 2yrs ago when I learned how you fail to protect your customers and cave to bullies who threaten DMCA suits in pursuit of stealing customers’ legitimate domains.

I wanted to leave you a year ago when you turned your technical support people in to annoying sales people that tried to sell me crap when I called because your service was broken.

I committed to leaving you when I learned that you use shady methods to swoop up customer domains and hold them hostage.

I began leaving you and moving my domains to another registrar one by one when Parsons pulled that stunt glamorizing his slaughter of a wild elephant in Zimbabwe as if it were some kind of heroic act.

I am now officially peaced out with this SOPA nonsense.

Your stance on SOPA is inexcusable political back scratching to curry favor and undoubtedly advances Parson’s financial interest in some sketchy under-the-table way. I don’t even know where to begin responding to the points made in your response. I am a native Phoenician and an active member of our startup community. The fact that you are regularly cited as a success on the basis of your revenues is an abomination as it neglects to account for the nasty underbelly of how your company operates. You guys are an utter embarrassment to our tech scene. I actively encourage all my colleagues to boycott your service and spread the word of how evil you truly are as a company. I have escalated the exodus of my few remaining domains on your system. good riddance.

-Sean

For anyone else who is currently on Go Daddy, there are a ton of hosting providers offering coupons to switch off their service given their recent shenanigans. Check this Reddit thread. If you haven’t been following the SOPA developments, search Twitter & Google to get informed and involved to help fight this insanity they’re proposing.

I attended Jason Baer’s Facebook Marketing seminar at NACET last week. Usually these social media marketing seminars are fluff or so remedial they don’t yield any new insight. But Jason was extremely knowledgeable and I learned a couple interesting things from his talk and discovered a few sites and services that appear very useful. In all it made me realize we’re under-utilizing Facebook for our startups and need to implement a FB strategy going forward. Below are my notes and links to the relevant sources:

Five Different strategies to take with FB

Awareness
	- new Facebook page that actually collects emails
	- "win the news feed" x-factors - high target interaction weight
	- edgerank formula seems similar to HN "gravity" algorithm
	- Pagelever for better FB metrics (Edgerank checker = low end)
Increase Sales
	- ShopTab.net from Phx do this well (like CartFly?)
	- Direct response = higher end
Market research & insight generation
	- Liking page = expression of support (equiv digital bumper sticking).
	- intersperse q's to keep interactive and prevent feed fatigue
	** play with polls more to activate people
	- Bulbstorm / idea challenges- good eg. ^ <- nother Phx co!
	** investigate ExactTarget
Customer Service
	- listen proactively, worst case = have a page and not attend
	- deleting neg comments is hugely detrimental, only if hate speech etc
	**** Kurrently realtime Twitter & Facebook monitoring
	- use discussions tab as a place to take discussions off the Wall.
	- key to establish hours of operation just like phone CSR's. ground rules for posting
Fifth??
	^missed it - maybe someone else who was there can comment?

July 7th I cancelled the account I’ve had with AT&T for the past twelve years and embarked on an experiment to see if it was possible to go carrierless and retain a somewhat normal existence. I’m happy to report after 30 days that this situation has worked surprisingly well. This post will summarize the key things I learned over the last month and offer some helpful nuggets of advice for anyone contemplating doing the same.

Context

The goal in cutting my mobile phone service was very simply to eliminate a non-critical expenditure in the effort of getting extremely lean financially while working on our startup. I had used skype on my iPhone prior to the switch and knew that it handled calls well. My concerns were primarily whether running daily phone calls over Skype via iPhone would be annoyingly cumbersome.

My setup

I have an oldschool iPhone 3GS, a Verizon 3G Mifi mobile hotspot (grandfathered in under the unlimited bandwidth plan they used to offer) and the Google Voice and Skype apps on my iPhone.

The Switch Process

I ported my AT&T number to Google Voice for $20. Doing so automatically triggers the cancellation process w/ AT&T. You’ll want to check what your early termination fee is if you’re still under contract – mine was $70 so I more than covered it in the past month. It took a day for the number port to complete during which time all SMS messages sent to my phone blackholed. SMS apparently doesn’t work like email where it will keep retrying to send until it goes through. It took about 3 days before I began receiving SMS after the port. Once completed I spent another $20 to keep my previous GV # as an alternate phone (it was printed on all the business cards I had recently ordered and I like the idea of keeping separate business & personal #’s).

Unfortunately the GV app alone on your iPhone won’t enable you to send and receive calls. You’ll need to setup a Skype account if you don’t already have one and get an online number to be able to forward your GV # to. Skype offers a $3/mo option that gets you unlimited calls in the US. With the Skype number configured as the primary forwarding number in GV I was now able to receive and send calls from my iPhone.

The Good

• The obvious benefit is that this eliminated a $130/mo phone bill.
• There is an undeniable psychological win in saying FU to AT&T.
• I’m navigationally-challenged and rely heavily on the iPhone for directions. The good news is the GPS is a true GPS and works via satellites (the cell tower triangulation is apparently the fallback method when it can’t acquire a GPS signal). This means the location-based features continue to work in spite of not having a cell carrier.
• An indirect result of going carrierless was that I picked up all the benefits of using Google Voice. Transcribed voicemails is an awesome feature that eliminates listening to long messages.

The Bad

Now, the not-so-good:

• You lose the ability to send picture messages over SMS. This isn’t a huge deal and I’m sure there are apps out there that give this capability. I haven’t really missed this – it’s easy to just email photos but if you rely upon sending picture texts for some reason, this is something to consider.
• I have no 911 emergency dial. This is an acceptable risk for me but if you have dependents or frequently commute through dark allies, losing this might be unacceptable.UPDATE: apparently 911 does still work – thanks Dave for the clarification. Now I can continue to live dangerously!
• Call quality is flaky over slow connections. Skype degrades the call quality when you have poor connectivity. It hasn’t been a problem yet but there have been a few instances when I’m working over a shady connection that I have to relocate to continue a call. The Verizon Mifi has been surprisingly good for calls with the exception of about 10% of the time it just seems to be unreliable. If you have a 4G mifi card I’m sure this isn’t even an issue. The answer when making important calls is to plan ahead to be working over a solid ground-based wifi connection for the call.
• Unfortunately there’s no way to disable voicemail on Skype – this is a known shortcoming and a lot of people have complained about it. So to ensure that GV handles your voicemail the workaround is to enable call screening on GV (formerly known as “call presentation”). It’s only mildly annoying but means you’ll have to answer calls and click the “1″ button to patch the person through.

Headsups

So here are some random tidbits of advice based on what I learned:

• Use Google Talk when in front of computer and save on outbound calls. I went through $9 in calls over the past 30 days on the pay-as-you-go plan. If you have the unlimited plan then this is irrelevant but Google Talk is free for US calls and you can offload some of your paid outbound calls to GT while you’re in front of the computer.
• You need to setup Google Contacts for caller ID to work. This is simple/obvious but you need to have all your contacts loaded in GV for it to be able to associate names w/ calls and text messages. Skype will automatically pick it up from your Contacts in the iPhone so inbound calls should still register with a name.
• If you’re calling someone who happens to have Skype the call quality is way better if you can just use Skype instead of Skype->phone.
• Get the Chrome extension for google voice. It’s pretty slick – it gives you a toolbar button that lets you quickly make calls and check messages.
• You need to remember to launch Skype when you restart your iPhone to keep it running in the background. Otherwise your phone won’t ring when you receive a call- you’ll just get the missed call alert via GV. I have it running on both my phone and computer and will typically just answer via the computer when I’m on it. What’s neat is the iPhone earbuds w/ the mic will work for talking on the computer and actually perform pretty well even in a noisy coffee shop.
• The battery life on the Verizon Mifi is about 5hrs which is not enough to last all day. You should turn it on when in transit and switch over to a local wifi hotspot when you get where you’re going. If you forget and leave the Mifi on all day you’ll kill the battery. It has a USB input so you can get a standard cigarette lighter USB charger if you do a lot of driving.

Conclusion

The bottomline is this setup has proven totally adequate for my situation. There is some admitted flakiness over slow connections and annoyances like lack of ability to send SMS picture messages, but it’s 90% of the service for literally 6% of the price. Ultimately the factors you’ll need to consider in determining whether it’ll work for you are 1) criticality of 911 emergency calling 2) tolerance for occasional call flakiness 3) guilt level for not supporting your phone carrier. In tight economic times, saving $130/mo is significant – I would be re-examining my core business if I were a cell phone service provider. If anyone else has cut the cord and successfully run a similar setup I’d love to hear what your experience has been and if you have any hacks you made that improved it.

I recently made a series of dumb dumb dumb mistakes that culminated in the loss of about a week’s worth of work. In order to extract some positiveness from this incident I figured it would be good to do a post-mortem on exactly where I f’d up and what I learned so that I might perhaps save others from making the same mistakes. BTW this is only going to be mildly amusing/useful if you’re a geek – if you’re a layperson stop reading now b/c your eyes will glaze over. One thing I will say is having restored things at this point I have profound empathy for the couch surfer guy’s catastrophe and what he went through (I only lost a week of work – he lost 3 yrs with his “perfect storm”). Here’s what happened:

The context

So I’m admittedly terrible when it comes to attention to detail. The fact I somehow at one point programmed Cold Fusion web applications and commerce systems from scratch that handled hundreds of thousands of dollars of people’s money still boggles my mind. The fact is I know just enough tech to be dangerous and I try to leave the hardcore IT functions to others. In this particular situation though I was essentially working rogue to get a microsite up to test a new commercialization opp for Scratch Audio around the idea of facilitating online remix competitions. Using the free microinstance tier of hosting on Amazon EC2 and the WordPress JumpBox I figured I could implement a site in a weekend, throw some quick traffic at it and determine fairly quickly if there was resonance around this idea.

I started on a Friday and did a marathon session of pulling together all the marketing working on a local VM of the WordPress JumpBox. Given that I was working out of a cabin in the woods over a crumby connection, the aspect of being able to develop against a local server was really handy. By Sunday evening I had a microsite done in WordPress about 85% of what it needed to be. I used the JumpBox backup procedure to extract the state to a local file on my desktop, shut down the VM, made a timemachine backup of my laptop and did the 2hr drive back down to Phoenix feeling pretty good about things.

The next morning I woke up in Phoenix planning to use the JumpBox migration procedure to move my dev instance of the site to a live hosted scenario using the Amazon Free offering. I lit up a new instance on EC2 in minutes using the JumpBox launch widget (spiffy!), imported the backup file and checked the site. The page content was there but all theming was lost. Here’s where I made my first error…

The failure sequence

Now I should have known this having used JumpBoxes for the past five years but the backup procedure explicitly excludes certain directories by default (and this is a sensible way for it to work). About half the work I had done in that marathon session was in making changes to the default theme. Had I installed a new theme and worked there, no problem… but alas I made all changes on the default theme which was excluded from backup. “No biggie, I’ll just grab the theme directory out of the local VM and use that.” Here comes mistake #2…

That morning I realized I had mislabeled the directory that the VM lived in with the name “June 2010 site changes” (yea i’m frequently about a year behind). I fixed the date name on the directory thinking nothing of it earlier that morning. When I went to fire up the VM to grab the theme directory it was VMware armageddon. The first message was a helpful “a needed file cannot be found” warning. “Oh, must be that I renamed the directory. I’ll just rename it back.” Enter a barrage of new errors informing me that various i’s were not dotted and t’s were not crossed. I spent the next 2hrs learning the intricacies of the .vmx file, changing various settings, sacrificing a chicken, throwing some salt over my shoulder and finally was able to recover the VM (note: the sage advice from @godber – make a backup of the entire VM dir before you do anything).

Anyways, with VM restored I was able to manually grab the excluded theme directory via SFTP and push that into the Amazon EC2 instance. Worked like a charm and the new site was live!

Aaaaand… here’s where I made mistake #3.

I configured S3 backups and breathed an unknowingly false sigh of relief thinking “everything is on Amazon now and backups are in place. Nothing can go wrong.” Of course, my backups were still inflicted with the exact same problem that had forced me to retrieve the theme dir from the VM in the first place. (yeah this is why I have no business in IT folks ;-)

I trashed the VM on my laptop in order to save 6GB of disk space (I figured worst case I still had the timemachine backup at the cabin). With site working and eager to get some immediate feedback I implemented an Adwords campaign. Over the course of that week I iterated the marketing, implemented various tracking scripts like Chartbeat, Crazy Egg, Analytics, Optimizely and Adwords conversion tracking. On Friday evening I implemented a Stumble Upon campaign thinking “okay let’s get a broad swathe of musicians looking at it and see if anything shakes out.” Closed the laptop lid, went to happy hour… bad idea. Turns out microinstances fall down under load of 9 concurrent users on WordPress (and that’s even with Hypercache running). I get a Chartbeat page about an hour later that the site had gone unavailable. No biggie, I pause the SU campaign from my phone, pause the adwords campaign and figure “I’ll just restart it in the morning and run it under a larger instance size.”

I wake up the next morning, open my AWS console and am greeted with the cheery message “you have no instances running.” “Umm yea but what about the instance I was running last night that’s now unreachable?” Nothing. Worst case at this point I thought I had the S3 automated backup from the night before so I had only lost a day’s worth of modifications. Wrong.

Upon inspection of the S3 backup I realize my automated daily backups suffered the same (obvious) problem as the one I used to restore from and validate the nickname I earned in 1st grade: “absent minded professor.” < begin head slapping > Okay okay, worst case now I’ve lost changes back to Monday but now I need to drive up to the cabin and pray that the backup file I had in the cloud on S3 would restore successfully into the VM that would hopefully restore successfully from Timemachine backup I had on the firewire drive at the cabin (it was starting to feel like my data existed at the 4th level of Inception).

What was really puzzling though was how getting a slug of traffic to a microinstance could completely wipe it off the map? I would think it would hang it but not obliterate it and outright eradicate the EBS volume with the data. Completely baffled by this and with all hope lost on retrieving the EC2 microinstance at this point I happened to check the JumpBox GUI to see if I could access it from there. Miraculously it still showed it active although clicking the “Access” button just left the browser hanging. This didn’t jibe with what my AWS console was telling me but at this point I shrugged and used the JumpBox GUI to terminate the instance. Mistake #4…

Turns out the instance was still there- it was just in the west region and the AWS console defaults you to the East region. So the data on the EBS volume was still there and retrievable right up until the nanosecond I clicked that terminate button… < commence Seppuku >

Given that the majority of the work that week had been in refining page content (which was protected by the S3 backups since it was stored in the database on the WP JumpBox) it wasn’t actually all that bad. I ended up driving back to the cabin, restoring the VM from Timemachine (which worked flawlessly), importing the latest S3 JumpBox backup into the local VM and using the WP Import/Export function plus some manual finagling to move the site. Having remembered most of the changes I had made that week it was a matter of reimplementing those and re-adding the various tracking scripts that were missing. In all, about 5hrs worth of duplication of effort to recreate everything under its new home.

I’m happy to report that remix.scratchaudio.com is now live on a server that can survive substantial traffic and we just had our first band signup yesterday.

What went right

For all that went wrong in this series of idiotic blunders on my part here are some things that went right:

• Timemachine appears to be effing bulletproof
• The JumpBox backups work flawlessly but with the caveat that you understand exactly what they’re backing up.

What I learned

1. Test your backup procedures with an actual fire drill where you have to use them to restore your data. You are almost invariably guaranteed to learn something valuable from this exercise (even if it’s just the peace of mind of having done it – like changing a tire before you actually have a flat).
2. I have no business running servers ;-)
3. This is why services like Page.ly exist
4. Don’t delete stuff until you absolutely have to. I had 150GB of free space on my laptop and yet I felt like I needed to get rid of this 6GB VM once I was finished with it. Dumb. Keep until you need to throw it away. There’s utilities like Disk Inventory X that make it easy to clean out the cruft eventually.
5. Microinstances are handy, light-weight, disposable tools for dev/test but should never be used in production. They cannot handle any kind of load. Kimbro had actually told me this but it took experiencing it first-hand for it to sink in.
6. EC2 instances never just disappear, they’re still there even when they become unreachable via the web. When something seems fishy, stop and seek alternate explanations and get a second set of eyes on it rather than trouncing forward and making the situation worse.
7. VMware VM’s are surprisingly brittle – simply renaming the parent directory in which they reside unleashes a chain of events that makes it unusable. I’m shocked given that product’s level of maturity that they’re not more bulletproof. The good news is your data is still probably retrievable when things get moved around but you will spend the next two hrs wading through config files to manually futz with parameters in order to get it working again.

Anyways, hopefully this writeup is useful and saves even one person from making some of the errors I did in this debacle.

There’s a little startup I have a special affinity for having been in the room for its inception at the LA Startup Weekend event, standing feet away when now investor Ashton Kutcher was first pitched. I had a chance run-in with the guys weeks later in a cigar smoking circle outside their RV at SXSW right after they landed $1M in seed funding. And I then got private beta access to their app at SXSW to try and solve a last-minute challenge we had in running our launch party for Scratch Audio.

The best way to understand what Zaarly does is to go to Zombocom and substitute “Zaarlycom!” They’re basically a hyper-local, real-time want ads site with no limitation on what you can ask for. Here’s why this is so cool:

There is no market cap for this company. Like eBay and Craig’s List, Zaarly stands to create an enormous ecosystem that will enable countless people to earn a living (and a few smart ones to become extraordinarily wealthy) by finding ways to expand the market and make it more efficient.

eBay and Paypal are so entrenched because they became core pillars in enabling others to make money. Zaarly will do the same only it will sit at meta level above each of these specialized devices essentially being this master clearinghouse of desire. In the process of making a ton of people rich, they are also going to provide a powerful secret weapon for those who understand how to wield it. Basically it’s like having your own personal “genie in a bottle” that you can pay to solve any issue for a price you name. Provided you know the value of solving the issue, you can at all times troll for a solution at a pricepoint which is profitable to you.

• Need to get 300 mimes in El Paso by Friday? There’s a price for that.
• Need to create and distribute 100,000 wristbands with your company logo to every fraternity member in the US? There’s a price for that.
• Need midget geologists to sneak into a cave in mexico and perform ground-penetrating radar analysis, have it interpreted and translated into Swahili and display the results in skywriting over Chicago? There’s a… you get the point.

Sharp college kids are going to find ways to make money on the spread between asks on Zaarly and the infinite fountain of ways they can fulfill the requests. CS students will invent scrapers that check eBay, Oodle, Craigslist, etc in realtime for items sought by Zaarly’rs and they’ll broker the transactions and capitalize on the arbitrage. Entire businesses that were heretofore not feasible will be enabled by the existence of this tool. Zaarly is one of those simple business ideas like Groupon that people a few years from now in hindsight are going to kick themselves for not having thought of.

One of their other investors Naval Ravikant is a guy whose writing and speaking I’ve followed for awhile now. Knowing how he thinks and his affinity for econ, game theory and market efficiencies, he has to be giddy over the possibilities on this one. I was admittedly lukewarm on this at Startup Weekend but now that I’ve had the chance to ruminate on the implications for all the side businesses this is going to spawn, it’s genius. Every pawn shop, scrappy college kid and CL/eBay lifer is going to be all over this app. I can’t wait to see how things unfold.

The icing that actually tipped me to write this post was hustle they’ve shown in organically generating buzz the way Noah Kagan would advocate. A guy on their team (having no idea that I knew them already) reached out to me having found me via a tech-focused meetup I run in Phoenix. This is how you create a “root system” of buzz: focus on the pressure points and have one conversation at a time.

The UI for their app is gorgeous. The business potential is limited by imagination only. The team is legit guys. Their marketing plan is enlightened. And if/when this works its success will be a shining trophy and an amazing advert for the Startup Weekend event itself. I am long on both Zaarly and Startup Weekend.

Sign up for their beta – I understand they’re targeting a launch for early-mid May. This is definitely going to be something to investigate when it comes out.
Full Disclosure: I have zero financial ties w/ these guys. I just think they rule.

Let me explain. I just returned from spending the last ten days at SXSW Interactive and Music. The attendance for Interactive was just shy of 20,000 people and Music this year was apparently about 10x that number. Having attended SXSW three years back the best analogy I can give is that this star of an event has super-nova’d into a Red Giant that’s borderline overwhelming. With such an intense amount of condensed human interaction it’s like trying to drink off of a fire hydrant: you better have a formalized system for taking baby sips or you risk getting your head blown off by the stream. So here’s the three-part “GTD-like” system I used to extract meaning from this event:

The goal is to wind up with meaningful connections and relationships. If you end up with a stack of business cards and a blurred recollection of faceless conversations, you failed.

Capture

At SXSW you’ll meet no less than 20 interesting people each day. These will be folks from all over the world with shared interests and with whom (if you had hours to sit and chat) you would almost certainly find incredible commonalities and opportunities to help each other via sharing contacts/advice/experiences. Sadly you have only limited surface area at an event like this though so you have a tiny window of interaction to make a meaningful connection.

Given the choice of breadth or depth of interaction, you should err on the side of connecting more deeply with fewer people. Stay in the moment, tune out distractions and engage. At this point you’re operating on two different levels though: 1) you’re 90% in it connecting 2) you’re 10% above it indexing. When you part ways, jot a three word trigger phrase on the back of the business card you received to make a mental note of the conversation.

Curate

At the end of the day (or even better, periodically throughout the day) stop and make notes that distill the anchor points and context of conversation with each person. The half-life of a conversation is less than a day so this distillation process is essential and should occur before the sun goes down. If you wait until after you return home, you’ve likely missed the opportunity to capture and process the meaning.

I use Evernote as a general purpose note taking app and I made a single note for SXSW that I just extended each day jotting down tidbits from interesting conversations. The key here to processing is to actively brainstorm about the interaction you just had and think hard about how you can help the other person. Curate the discussion mentally and jot down a concrete follow-up action you will make to advance that cause. I added an empty checkbox by the people I definitely wanted to follow-up with (Evernote makes this easy).

BTW I hate paper- it’s something extra that takes up space and inevitably you end up losing it. And yet in spite of all our ability to put a man on the moon we still rely upon paper as the lowest common denominator for exchanging contact info at conferences. Go figure.

I use a free iPhone app called “CardMunch” that allows me to quickly convert physical business cards into digital format. It lets you retain the associative value of the business card (the visual image you link with the person and recall) while giving you the more useful OCR’d data in a format that can be exported into your contact manager.

Contact

Lastly, all is largely for nought if you don’t ping the people you met after the conference to cement the connection and open the door for continued conversation. You should ideally offer something of value – an intro, a thoughtful insight based on a previous conversation. Even if it’s just a “hey it was great meeting you” compliment, do something that allows you to stake out a tiny piece of mental real estate in that person’s mind.

If you’re a true baller you’ll use a CRM system to develop relationships. Having used a handful (SugarCRM, Highrise, Salesforce, vTiger, Goldmine, Act) over the years I’ve become a huge proponent of Ming.ly just in the past month. In my opinion it strikes the golden balance of light-weight, frictionless and useful enough to where you’ll actually want to use it religiously. If you use Gmail as your email client this extension to Gmail unifies context across all your contact mediums and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even your phone). I recommend tagging new contacts with an identifier of the event like “SXSW2011″ so it’s possible to search against the pool of people you met at a specific event. Ultimately the mental index you make is king and you’re just tagging interactions with keywords and notes that can be used to retrieve context later.

Summary

So to summarize: capture, curate and contact. Do those three activities and you’ll be surprised how many interesting relationships emerge from events. The curation step is the one that typically gets ignored and yet it’s the lynchpin for extracting the meaning from the interactions you have that allows you to develop the relationship. Try practicing the curation step next event you attend and I guarantee you’ll more frequent and quality interactions following the event.

So what systems have you developed for getting the most value out of big conferences?

Anyone who responds to a bunch of customer emails will be repeatedly typing the same blocks of text. You get to a point where you wish phrases and entire paragraphs of text could be treated as a single word. Well I discovered an app for Mac that lets you do just that and it’s wonderful.

Previously I had a page in our Trac instance with a bunch of boilerplate text blocks as responses to common questions. I would cut/paste those into email and adapt them as necessary based on the situation. This was a shortcut over typing the entire message from scratch. But I’ve been using an app called Typinator for the past few weeks and this allows me alias sequences of keystrokes that auto-expand into blocks of text. So for instance, rather than end each email by typing “Let me know if you have any other questions” I can just type “lmk” and it turns into that sentence. This works for any amount of text and can even do rich text and embedded images.

While it may only shave seconds off the old method, the culmination of many reputations adds up. But more than anything this is just one of those small tools that helps you conquer tediousness and feel more efficient. And you can’t underestimate the gratification of that. These guys are a small Austrian company and they make other productivity products. Check ‘em out.

The title is a reference to the final scene of one of the radest 80′s movies ever: “Back to the Future.” I remember walking out of that theater as a kid hopped up on red vines, Huey Lewis, the prospect of time travel, and all the possibility that a flying delorean represented. It seemed like anything was possible.

I have a similar optimism today with this swirling curling storm of a revolution that’s promising to change how products will be test marketed, built and delivered. I predict this fundamental change is going to do for product development and business model generation what test-driven development did for software dev. And it’s pretty freakin’ exciting to be swimming in this stew of startup activity while this storm is developing. To explain the essence of this mentality let me first tell a story that will reveal a double entendre in this post’s title:

I don’t have the original source on this anecdote but supposedly at a California college (Cal Poly?) they were redesigning the campus and trying to figure out where to build the new sidewalks. It was a complex arrangement of buildings and there were a bunch of conflicting opinions about where the sidewalks belonged. Someone had the ingenious idea that rather than speculating, they should instead run an experiment and let the market speak. So they planted grass the first year and waited. At the end of the year they took an aerial photo and the tread-worn ground became the blueprint for the optimal sidewalk routes as chosen perfectly and implicitly by the student body.

So what does this have to do with startups?

I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing some major changes in how products are brought to market. If you follow the Lean Startup, Four Steps to the Epiphany, Customer Development movements then you have the core philosophy already. But what’s interesting is the emergence of tools that allow you to apply these concepts very rapidly on a large and targeted scale via online experiments. We in the tech industry no longer have to build and tear up sidewalks – we can just plant grass first. Rather than explain the techniques for “virtual grass planting,” I figure it will be easier to simply publish the data and methods for experiments I’m conducting now with a local Phoenix startup that I advise. Here’s the gist of it though:

You can think of this mentality like test-driven development for business.

Test-driven development (TDD) is a methodology for creating software where you seemingly put the cart before the horse and write the tests up front. You then go back and do the necessary coding to satisfy the tests. Once the code meets the test, then (and only then) do you go back and fine-tune, refactor and optimize things. Having been a confessed “cowboy coder” back in the day this style of development sounded completely absurd until I saw it in practice at the San Diego Java User Group. Writing the tests first forces you to think differently by getting consensus on the destination and then worrying about the implementation details of how you get there after the fact. In the same way it’s now possible with all these tools to front-load much of the learning about product-market fit, price elasticity & messaging before you ever actually do an ounce of engineering. It’s all about systematically removing uncertainty and converting unknowns to knowns before charging ahead with the concrete.

Anyways, I don’t mean to leave anyone with startup blue balls but we’re not quite ready at this point to open source our experiments. This is an exciting time to be in this space though. To get a good flavor for this type of thinking check out Kent Beck’s talk from the Startup Lessons Learned conference on the logical extension of Agile development to business. And if you’re new here sub the RSS of this feed or this Twitter account to follow along on how we’re validating and iterating at 88mph and 1.21 gigawatts.

The offline Adwords editor is a godsend for working with ad campaigns that have large sets of keywords. But one of its shortcomings is that there is no easy way to bulk update bid amounts for keywords that fall off the first page of results (or more accurately “there is no easy way to identify these keywords in the offline editor”). I posted this question in their forum but got no love. I’ve since come up with a simple workaround that saves a ton of time over manually adjusting a bunch of bid amounts via the browser:

1. In the web interface go into your Adwords account, choose the top-level folder on the left and then select the keywords tab.
   
2. Filter on the “Status” field. Your list is now sorted by active keywords and various error messages and warnings. Scroll to the very bottom and use the paginated navigation to jump ahead to where the warning about “below first page minimum bid” message starts appearing.
   
3. Shift-click on the checkboxes that “bookend” your selection, in this case we’ll just do three. Once selected click the “change status” drop-down and pause these keywords (Note: if you have existing paused keywords they’ll get mixed in when you do this).
   
4. Now hop over to your offline editor, get the latest changes and open up the keywords tab. Sort by the “Status” field and now you’ll have your offending keywords all grouped together. Highlight only the ones you want to bulk edit and then click the “Advanced Bid” link at the bottom.
   
5. Click the “Raise max CPC bid to first page bid estimate” and bulk apply this change to the ones you’ve selected. Post your changes live and the final step is to reactivate the paused keywords (which should still be selected if you have your same browser window open).
   

Obviously this technique is overkill if you only need to update 3 keywords. But if you’re dealing with 4000 and need to adjust the bids on 150 (which is the situation I had today) it’s a great time saver. Mad props to the developers that created the offline editor – it’s massively helpful.

Very simple: make it possible to loan a digital book to a friend. Not authorize the same book simultaneously across multiple computers on the same account, but actually de-auth it from one and give it to someone else.

IMHO the first service to do this becomes the dominant eReader format and here’s why: this is the last inadequacy that still drives people like myself to purchase physical books. The reading experience of eReaders has become adequate in every other respect and has other added advantages like search, portability, convenience of sync across multiple devices, instant gratification of being able to download immediately, etc.

I use the Mac client to read Kindle books now and I’ve tinkered with the Apple iBooks. Both are comparable but neither offers this ability to pass a book on after you read it. If there were limitless lending then it could be argued that it would wreck the eBook market and create a secondary blackmarket of people scalping loaned eBooks. But it would also cement that provider’s eBook format as the dominant format and force everyone get an account on their system. Because they still control the auth/de-auth lending process they could mitigate this problem by throttling the frequency or absolute number of times a book could be lent.

This opens a lot of doors. A lot more people would start buying eBooks knowing they could later loan them (for me personally there would never be reason to purchase a physical book again). Once everyone is using their format they make it so easy to purchase new books that whatever sales they lose from people passing on a loaned copy would be more than made up for in new eBook sales. They gain the opportunity to sell into a massive new base of account holders who are lured in initially by the prospect of a free book loan from a friend who already has an account. And they get a HUGE amount of useful data from tracking the reading behaviors and the lineage of lending. Lastly, they enable a crazy new capability if they make it so annotations can be separated from the lent copy and shared across other copies. For instance I would love to be able to subscribe to Derek Sivers’ book markups and flip on his annotations to see the notes he made while I’m reading one of the books on his list. This type of “co-reading” makes it possible to read not just the author’s message but select people’s takeaways inline.

With the release of iTunes 10 and the Ping service, Apple has finally added a social layer to its media player. I would expect eventually the social layer which is being rolled out around music will extend to all forms of their digital content be it a book, movie, TV show, song, podcast, or whatever comes next. Once the loaning capability is baked in, game over. Amazon should preemptively strike and enable this for all current Kindle owners. Turn all the old eBooks currently collecting dust on the proverbial digital shelf into a powerful, free viral campaign for its current subscribers to signup their friends.

Is there a flaw in this strategy or does this seem like an obvious move to anyone else?