Thypos

Craving Access, Dissing Time

We bust our asses in this world to get ACCESS. Access to nice cars, houses, fine dining, vacations, healthcare, concerts, cable TV, and cell phones. Combined, these expenses explain most discretionary household cash burn assuming you about 2X the povery line. Of course, you can leverage people to gain access to things that money almost can't buy. For example, I went to The Master's golf tournament last week. If you know anything about golf or sports, you probably know that these tickets are extremely hard to get. If I had not had the good fortune to leverage a friend's generosity, I would have had to come off about $1000 to attend the final round of golf at Augusta. As I entered the gates to watch the leader's final round of golf, I noticed all the people leaving the tournament. Given that there were 6 players that were in a position to win the tournament, I thought it odd that thousands of people were leaving given the drama that can unfold in Augusta on Sunday. Regardless, they were filing out by the thousands to get back in their cars or planes so that they could make it back to wherever they needed to be Monday morning. Of course, many of these people had children that needed their parents. For others, it was a matter of avoiding crowds, traffic, and wanting to catch the last strokes on the TV. Still, this was the World Series for golf, and I couldn't imagine leaving like that with the score tied in the 9th inning. Regardless of the multitude of reasons that people were leaving, I want to be sure that my job, work, or income needs won't keep me from watching the finale of the great things. It was reminder that accessing TIME is so much more important that accessing anything else in life. Time is NOT money. Time used to be money in an age when productivity was assembly. Now we seem to be rewarded based on the quality of our thinking coupled with purposeful action. This is why GTD is good for many people, because it gives you a system for leveraging quality thoughts instead of just being busy. Of course, there are days when being busy is the thing to do. Who am I today? Doer or Thinker. Does it really matter so long as the Doer and the Thinker get together and create more TIME than MONEY. Back to Amen Corner!

Nano Experience

Design matters. Hard to measure good design but somehow you know it when you see it. Perhaps it elevates your heart rate 7.5 bpm or makes you forget what you were thinking about. Nonetheless, it is there, and the companies that understand design know this way down in their gut. I was unpackaging my new iPod Nano the other day, and felt what I know the package design team intended with a slight rush of excitement and "gee whiz" the little Nano was revealed to its new user. The packaging itself is so cool that if you threw it away you'd have to be gutless. Every move of the new users anticipation was guaged and anticipated as the Nano reveled itself. Anyway, Moore's law is alive and well with this little device and there is not doubt that BIG change is afoot! It was a $80 upgrade to dump my 4GB Mini at eBay on one poor eBayer who had not had the chance to touch (experience) the Nano yet and realize what a relic he was buying from last year.

Driver's License says "Steal Me!"

Here is the envelope that my renewed driver's license arrived in. As the de facto ID here in the U.S., it would seem odd that this coveted piece of identification should be packaged so conspicously. Even better, I, or anyone impersonating me, could apply and receive a renewal all through the mail. It would seem that the TSA and Homeland Security should be concerned that identification used to board a commercial jet should be so insecure.

Missing Mouse and Fatique

Many visually challenged and stressed out people have hunted for their glasses only to find them on the top of their head. Today, I found myself somewhat panicked when I could not locate my fancy cordless mouse while sitting at my desk in front of my computer.  Alas, after about 15 seconds of flipping over papers and looking on the floor, I noticed the mouse was covered up by my right hand.

Wild Web

Seth Godin's recent comments about the current state of the Internet are worth a few comments:

1. Penetration. There are 50 times as many people using the Net as there were then. 50x is a multiple you don't see every day.

Not only that, the Net is no longer a behavior for fring or the bleeding edge of society. The quality of the people has improved dramatically to the point that retirees are going to be spending their retirements as function of web-enabled services and products.

2. Bandwidth. It's easy to forget how horrible modem surfing was. The prevalence of high bandwidth connectivity means that surfing is far more natural, more frequent and that the experience is better as well.

The more I see, the more I want to buy. So back then, it took 15 minutes to do an e-commerce transaction, now I can learn all about a product in 2 minutes with the benefit of rich content and spend another 1 minute making the purchase. In the next 12 minutes, I'm off to 3 other websites to find something else to buy!

3. Tools. You can launch most any online service with almost no custom programming. Changethis.com demonstrated to me how straightforward this has become. It also means that finding the world's greatest programmer is no longer a critical component for most services.

Brilliant Seth. It's all about the idea and the brand and the execution, not the nuts and bolts.

4. Servers. When google can offer a gig of storage for free, it's proof that server space is essentially free. You may recall that just three ten years ago, a one three gig hard drive cost $3000.

Just about FREE. The state of data is increasingly important if I can time-shift every media experience. For 99% of what I do, 24 hours old is fine with me. Just update that 100 terabyte hard drive in my home and business at 2AM. Thank you!

5. Wifi. The next generation of wifi will be faster, but more important, have a vastly improved range. Which means, for example, that all of downtown Philadelphia will offer free wifi. With ubiquity will come cheap machines that dramatically increase the number of surfers, and put those surfers most everywhere.

I used to think about computing at my desk, now I can think about computing anywhere!

6. Multimedia. The web is still stuck in ASCII world, but not for long. Add a few million video cameras, fifty million cell phone cameras, every song ever recorded, every TV show and movie ever made and the contents of most any scholarly book and it gets interesting fast. Sure, the lunkheads at the RIAA and MPAA will make up lies to try to stop it, but the cosmic jukebox meets the realtime surveillance camera is going to happen.

That's why I want 100 terabytes!

7. Grandmothers. It is no longer necessary to explain to the average American (of any generation) what this "Internet thing" is. Google has made the world safe for entrepreneurs. Don't underestimate how important this is.

Oh yea, I already said this. The people with REAL money are online.

8. Teenagers. The Yahoo generation is now getting driver's licenses!! These are kids who have grown up without encyclopedias or videocassettes or lps. These are kids who have completely and permanently integrated the Net into their lives and are about to go to work and to college.

Connectivity is not an option. It's what they do.

9. VC. Fred Wilson (Link: A VC.) has more than a hundred million dollars to invest in great Net companies. So do a dozen or more other (less talented) venture capitalists. Given that it takes far less money today (see #10 and #3) than ever, this means the search for money is not the challenge.

I think this has been true for about 2 years.

10. The death of TV. (It wouldn't be a Seth Godin post if I didn't mention the death of TV, would it?) You know what killed the first crop of stupid $100 million Internet consumer service startups? Advertising. They all believed that they need to spend millions to build a brand.  Today, we've got proof--every single (no exceptions!) Internet success is a success because of Unleashing the ideavirus. It's not TV ads. It's word of mouse.

Thanks Seth. Got to put that in. One last little jab for the clunky CRT in the living room. I gave mine to Goodwill in 2001.

Yellow Pages Key Fob

8GB ComactFlash  8!! 8!!

Gizmodo says:

My guess is 'painfully, laughably expensive,' but that's how all these things are until they're given  away as trade show trinkets in 2-3 years.

How true! Now what kind of info would be worth hauling around on a 8GB key fob that was re-engineered to work inside a handheld. How about the Yellow Pages will full-motion video for starters?

Forging A Yellow Web

Seth Godin sees what most people don't and he keeps yelling about it until somebody gets it. Indeed, interactive, rich media directories stand a snow-balls chance of being a bit more useful to the consumer relative to a 2 inch by 3 inch ad on a page with about 8 other ads and a bunch of phone numbers so small that you need a magnifying glass.

Seth identifies correctly that it does come down to both a business model and a sales force. Hmm, pick a vertical market or pick all of the them but I agree with Seth that it's worth getting started on this problem, NOW.

Writing a Book from a Blog

Seth Israel asked Robert Scoble to do a book about blogs. Robert accepted on the condition that the book be written as a blog itself and where the rights would be sold on eBay. So, it's going to happen.

Indeed this will be a very interesting exercise and might signal a new "thing" in the world of publishing. The readers of this blog will certainly contribute to the accuracy and throughness of the work. I hope they finish quickly because the idea-flow in the blogosphere might make the first half of the book irrelevent if they take too much time with it.

Jeremy Enright has started his book too and mentioned a co-release with Scoble & Israel which I think is a great idea.

This blog to book idea could be hugely impact in LOTS of disciplines if it catches on. Many, many technical disciplines (biomedical science, IT, etc.) could all benefit from this format. However, I think that the publishers would be scared to death about not having an embargo on the HTML content of the blog. Moreover, the printed book would only represent a snapshot of the blog while the story of the blog would be written/revised in perpetuity.

The Day I Shut Down My Radio

While driving and enjoying a podcast, I couldn't help but notice this annoying mumbling sound come from somewhere in my car. Alas, the "radio" was found to be in the "ON" position and it was streaming muck from some gigantic media company called ClearChannel.

Permission and Balance Sheets

Seth is keen on identifying the difficulties in protecting a "permission asset" (a.k.a. the "right" that someone grants you to borrow their attention).

The fragility of permission is real. What Travelocity didn't realize is that even though their misquote may have been for Seth's benefit, managing Seth's perception is something entirely different. Understanding the gap between the intent of a web page's design and its actual use might represent one of the largest unknowns in online media. Indeed, many e-commerce tools can measure and optimize the dollar value of cash flow from a web page. How many marketers measure the flow of permission from the same page? Perhaps pages that generate the most cash in the short term also create the greatest loss of permission?

This conundrum has caused me to become almost TOO careful with my audience because I'm unable to measure the erosion of permission. Sure email unsubscribes are a good marker but there must be a lot more to it than that?

Next post- measuring and retaining permission (the greatest asset that doesn't come close to the balance sheet, BUT IT SHOULD!) Cash is king! Permission is king! Which is it? Can permission be traded? Can I trade permission futures on the open market? What would GAAP or Sarbanes-Oxley have to say?