Posts Tagged ‘Explanation’

Today’s a quick post sharing some of my first impressions after having picked up a new Kodak Zi8 camcorder.  A number of you are in marketing, use Flip cameras already, or are just considering one of these new devices.

Chris Brogan, over at www.chrisbrogan.com, was one of the first folks to create any sort of ‘spark’ for me with this new class of device.  Sure, by now we’ve probably all been to events with Flip cams.

They’re neat, cool, but the ‘value’ wasn’t quite there.  Part of that I attribute to having a ‘good’ digital tape camcorder and being put off by the overall process hassles (record an hour, take an hour to download, then process, then encode, then…).  Odds are, if you’re not a video aficionado you’ve had the same dying desire to repeat the experience. Not.

It wasn’t until I started paying attention to Chris’ vlogs and some of his various experiences (Flip, Zx1, Zx6…) that I really appreciated their value.

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Ann Arbor SPARK hosts a monthly series, Starting Your Own New Business. The day-long seminar includes presenters on finance, accounting, marketing, product development, and other topics related to launching one’s own business. Below, is the high-level presentation delivered Friday, February 19, 2010.

This high-level presentation discusses what are perhaps the most key topics important for successfully moving the Idea for a product, through development, and ensuring it survives to reach fruition.  The target audience is new entrepreneurs considering business for themselves.

In Seth’s latest book, Linchpin,  he spends a lot of time talking about maps and artists.  That being an artist means you create your own map, your own path.  And, that society is changing.  Rather than spending your life following a map someone else created, to be successful you’ll need to create your own map moving forward.

While I’ve not been an assembly line worker in a literal sense, it took me awhile (couple dozen reiterations) for what Seth was talking about to truly sink in…appreciating how much of it related to my own life.

Life was relatively easy, for a long time.  With a clear goal in front of me, I could move mountains to achieve it.  I would feel a sense of accomplishment, and life was grand.  So, for the first 3/4 of my life, this is how it worked.  Goal, after goal, after goal.  Going into the service, I bought a map out of the carousel, having chosen to go into aviation.  Once there, the Navy gave me a nice [flight] bag of additional maps to follow (exams, flight certifications, instructor certs, regular performance reviews, etc.).

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One can argue whether economists are cheapskates, or not. The debate can certainly be entertaining, such as in this Wall Street Journal article.  There’s even an old economics joke tied to their, umm, stereotypical tendencies.

It goes something like this, “…an economist is walking down the street with a friend when they happen upon a $100 bill laying on the ground.  As the companion reaches down to pick it up, the economist says, ‘Don’t bother—if it were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up.’” (Andrew McAfee and Andrew Lo.)

Andrew wrote an article comparing companies’ use of IT with that $100 bill.  The notion is that ‘everyone’ has the same technology.  We all have, or have access to, tools like email, internet, smart phones, computers, and the like.  So, technology itself should be a non-competitive tool. Right?

While Andrew continues to discuss inconsistent use of these tools—fewer than 5% of all firms do the job well—I’d like to briefly look beyond just ‘IT’ per se.

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Ann Arbor SPARK hosts a monthly series,  Starting Your Own New Business.  The day-long seminar includes presenters on finance, accounting, marketing, product development, and other topics related to launching one’s own business.

Below, is the high-level presentation I’m giving today.  The focus is on moving the Idea for a product, through development, and ensuring it survives to reach fruition.

Back in the late 90s, as we were enjoying the glow of the dot.com boom, Andy Grove, CEO of Intel,  predicted, “…all businesses will be internet businesses, or they won’t survive.”  Instead, companies adapted to having an internet component to their business.

Now, in the late 00’s and heading into the ‘10s, Software as a Service (SaaS) has become credible, taking its rightful place as a mature business concern.  Increasingly, traditional software vendors (and others) are realizing their product offerings can continue in conventional form (here’s CD/DVD, you install, and maintain) or as a service completely delivered via the web (SaaS).

I think the path of SaaS will be parallel to what we found after Andy Grove made his original prediction for the internet.  I do not feel, ‘all software companies will be SaaS companies, or they won’t survive.’  Instead, many will develop a SaaS component of their business.

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Now that Windows 7 is available to the general public I decided it was time to introduce it to my environment. In years past, I was typically eager to live on the bleeding edge. Now, I’m a little more relaxed, willing to learn from other’s teething pains, and avoid adopting features that might significantly change or be dropped by the time the final version popped out. Even so, adopting Windows 7 the week it came out might still cause others to feel I’m on the bleeding edge. Let’s just say I’ve allowed the edge to dull…a tad.

If you want an in-depth review of every Windows component, along with myriad opinions, I’d encourage you to check out someplace like TechRepublic. My following observations are directed toward those of you with a more casual affair with your PC. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a question that shows up in discussion periodically. For moto-enthusiasts, it’s about the same as starting a discussion on tire pressures, what oil to use, how often to change it, and so on. There are countless answers, an endless number of experts to given them, yet they all fall short. The reason is that there is no absolute answer. It is akin to asking, “…what should be in my resume?” Once you’ve decided what it is you want to do, then what you put in the resume starts to speak for itself. Read the rest of this entry »

A common starting point

The internet’s ubiquitous nature has made possible so much. If it were not for the internet (like the utilitarian ‘phone,’ it’s time to stop capitalizing ‘internet’) the notion of Software as a Service (SaaS) wouldn’t even exist. Yet while incredibly empowering, the internet can be incredibly devastating when it fails.

Saying, ‘…the internet is down…’ is often akin to using the ever popular Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time, like today, the topic of software backward compatibility comes up. A common issue is involves how many versions ‘back’ a software product should support. Restated: If I release Pedersen 10.0 (coming Monday, actually), should it have to support files from Pedersen 8.0, 2.5, 2.0.3? This is an age-old question for software companies: How many prior versions should we support? There are at least two balancing acts to consider. Read the rest of this entry »