Merrily on Our Way

Which Springfield?

I just got back from Springfield, Illinois. The battle for Simpsons fame is on. Notice this attempt to convince us that Springfield is home not only to Abe, but to Homer as well.

Marketing Makes Everything Special

I intended to spend the day in Springfield, Illinois, today to get my Lincoln fix, but I stopped first in Lincoln and at New Salem. I didn't leave New Salem until they closed the place up at 5pm, so I had to go to Plan B for Springfield. It was an easy decision to spend the night in Springfield so I could kick of the day here first thing in the morning. The tough part was deciding where to stay. As you can see, it wasn't easy:

Marketing is everything, isn't it?!

Every Shower Should Have One of These!

The shower at my house is a two-handled hot and cold shower. Traveling on sabbatical now, of course, I'm seeing a bunch of other configurations. Wow! You should see the temp and water control they have at the Affinia 50 in New York.

You just set the temperature knob once. That's it on the bottom. You never have to mess with it again. Everytime thereafter that you want to shower, you simply use the upper lever to control the water flow. Every shower should have one of these inventions!

The Affinia 50 is a great hotel. Reasonable as far as NY prices go, and centrally located--a close walk to Grand Central and Rockefeller Center, and a comfortable walk to Times Square.

We had a full kitchen, including stove and full-size refrigerator. Air conditioning worked great and room was quiet...for New York.

You know, one thing I noticed: New York has horns honking like nobody's business. It eventually became humorous to hear them. With all those cabs, there was no ear-pounding, window-rattling BOOM BOOM BOOM coming from bass-heavy stereos in cars like in California. Ah!

iPhone in Times Square

June 29 came to New York, and less than T minus 15 until 6pm, I walked by the AT&T Store in Times Square. A small line had queued up--may 20 people or so. Security stood out front. And a guy who may have been the happiest guy in New York at that moment mugged for a photo with his handmade "number 1" sign. It was a beautiful site.

Mossberg Fans the Flames of My iPhone Fears

I just saw the first iPhone review written by Walt Mossberg and he's confirmed what I haven't wanted to think too long about: the iPhone and AT&T. I'm on my third carrier with my cell phone. Sprint: rotten coverage in the Bay area, and really rotten coverage at my house. AT&T/Cingular: Better than Sprint for overall coverage in my locale, but not great and still not great at my house. Now I'm with Verizon: Love their coverage everywhere, even when I travel, and especially at my house. Still not great at my house, but acceptable. Here in my NY hotel, my husband's AT&T phone has 0 to 1 bar. My Verizon phone has a strong 3 bars and works great. My Verizon data plan is also cheaper than my AT&T plan was.

Now, back to Walt:

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good...

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks...

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

AT&T is offering special monthly calling plans for the iPhone, all of which include unlimited Internet and email usage. They range from $60 to $220, depending on the number of voice minutes included. In an unusual twist, iPhone buyers won’t choose their plans and activate their phones in the store. Instead, they will do so when they first connect the iPhone to the iTunes software.

That stopped me from even finishing reading the review. I'll go back and read it because I still think the iPhone is awesome. And here in NY, maybe I'll get to see it 3 hours before I might have seen it at home! But AT&T? Hopefully this phone will be such a hit that Verizon will make a deal with Apple. I remain optimistic.

Sabbatical, yeah!

I'm goofing off on my sabbatical right now, so blogging will be light for the next month or so.

I saw Niagara Falls for the first time yesterday. Boy, that area is FLAT--what a surprise those explorers must have had when they discovered the Falls. Of course, the Falls didn't exactly look like they do today. The horseshoe on the Canadian side wasn't nearly as pronounced then as it is now. Check out this picture showing the erosion of the Falls for the last couple hundred years. Today, the water flow is controlled so that only a foot per year is lost to erosion.

The other thing that struck me about the Falls is that context is everything. Seen by itself, the American Falls would be jaw-dropping. I mean, put this thing at Lake Shasta and I'm going to work even harder to get a house built up there one day. But in easy view of the (Canadian) Horseshoe Falls, the American Falls seem almost boring.

By the way, you can click all these pics to see larger views.

And here is another excellent Niagara discovery!

Had a hard time leaving Niagara. More accurately, we had a hard time flying out of Buffalo. Our flight into LaGuardia was canceled because of weather (don't get me started on how terribly US Airways managed the situation), which we found out after hearing announcement after announcement telling us how the plane would be here in just another 30 minutes. After nearly 5 hours at the airport, we spent the night in a Buffalo motel for a couple of hours--all while our excellent, paid-for hotel room went unused in NYC!! But, we did get a series of miracles this morning, including a special security line that we were hurried through before we went running O.J. Simpson-style down the airport terminal to catch the flight. (Uh, that's a reference to the pre-murder O.J. Simpson and his appearance in Avis commercials.)

Anyway, we're happy to be in New York now, although this one last picture will tell you what happened at the Mets game tonight. Oh well.

iPhone comes out tomorrow--an exuberant thought that even a canceled game can't dampen!!!

Content Search Moves Beyond Text

I've loved me a site called Podzinger for some time. It was THE way to search for audio content within podcasts--which, as you know, often contain great nuggets of information but are rarely transcribed. Until Podzinger, finding specific phrases within a stack of podcasts was as likely as finding that proverbial needle.

And now Podzinger is even better: They've relaunched as EveryZing to better reflect the fact that they now not only search podcasts for audio content, but also search videos for audio content as well. It works just like a standard search engine, but the text that EveryZing is searching in the background is actually a transcript they've generated with their speech to text technology.

[Product request for the EveryZing guys: please make this speech-to-text tool available. I've been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 to create transcripts and it has lots of shortcomings. I'm ready to switch!]

With video content becoming so commonplace, EveryZing has its timing right. This will be increasingly important as ecommerce expands to video with click-to-buy links embedded. Like the product you're seeing in a YouTube video? Click now to send your PayPal payment. (Yeah, I know that Google owns YouTube and that you're likely to see a Google Checkout implementation of this, but I work for eBay so I'm cheering for PayPal!) Call it a micromercial (did I just coin a new phrase?!): infomercial in a shorter Web-based format with micropayment support.

With their relaunch last week, EveryZing also added channels and other ways to browse content. It's all a pretty nice package.

Transparency is a Snap

You may have noticed that the external links in this blog are followed by little bubbles that sort of look like empty speech bubbles, like this.

I'm using a cool little tool made by Snap.com called Snap Shots. It's an easy way to tell where a link is going to go if you click it. Why waste your time if the destination doesn't look compelling? Or worse yet, why get tricked into going somewhere you didn't want to go? (That wouldn't happen in this blog--I'm just saying...) Hover over the link to see the target destination.

Transparency is becoming increasingly important--especially for ecommerce--and Snap.com is making it easy to do. They have several types of shots, including product shots that I use on my EverythingLincoln.com site. For example, this is a screen shot of my bibliography page, which lists the hundreds of Lincoln books I use when writing something for my site. See something you like? Snap makes it easy to see the product information from Amazon.com, which is something a bit slicker than just being able to show you the Web site. This is a special type of Snap Shot called ProductShot. (Notice also that I can customize the little snap popup by adding my own EverythingLincoln.com logo to the bottom.)

 

Unfortunately, ProductShots only support products on Amazon.com (and not all of them at that). Hopefully they'll expand their product support and show a special version of the Item Description page for an eBay item.

People and Passion: the Ps to Success

There's been some great coverage of D: All Things Digital--Wall Street Journal's awesome digital conference. You can see the official coverage here.

The technology is awesome, of course. As Bill Gates and Steve Jobs agreed, it's a great time to be in the industry right now. So much is happening. Technology aside, though, this Q&A session with the two titans struck me. The transcript below is just a snippet of a video session called "Gates and Jobs Take Questions." You can see the whole clip here.

 

Q [Audience]: [I’m] Rob Kelly, here with my business partner. We’ve got a hundred-person Internet media business. I’m wondering: What would be the single most-valuable piece of advice you’d give us to even attempt to create some of the value that you guys have done in both of your very impressive companies?

A [Gates]: Well, I think, actually, it may be in both cases—correct me if I’m wrong—the excitement wasn’t really seeing the economic value. You know, even when we wrote down at Microsoft in 1975, “A computer on every desk and in every home,” we didn’t realize: “Oh, and we’ll have to be a big company.” [Audience laughter and Jobs nods in agreement] 

Every time I thought, oh God, can we double in size? Jeez, can we manage that many people? Will that feel fun still? You know, and so every doubling was like, OK, this is the last one. And so the economic thing wasn’t at the forefront. The idea of being at the forefront and seeing new things, and things we wanted to do—and being able to bring in different people who were fun to work with, eventually, with a broad set of skills...and figuring out how to get those people with those broad skills to work well together has been one of the greatest challenges. You know, I’ve made more of my mistakes in that area, maybe, than anywhere. But eventually [we were successful at] getting some of those teams to work well together. So, you know, I think it’s a lot about the people and the passion, and it’s amazing that the business worked out the way that it did. 

A [Jobs]: Yeah. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard, that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it—if you’re not having fun doing it and you don’t really love it—you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being, quote, successful, in the eyes of society, and the ones that didn’t, often times it’s [that] the ones that were successful loved what they were doing so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit, ‘cause they’re sane. Right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So it’s a lot of hard work, and it’s a lot of worrying, constantly. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail, so you gotta love it and you gotta have passion. And I think that’s the high-order bit.

The second thing is: You’ve got to be a really good talent scout, because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you’ve got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them. You know, see how you do and refine your intuition, and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just built itself—because you need great people around you.

All Right Already! First the Trees, THEN the Forest

The other day I attended a meeting with a consulting company who is in the business of keeping their clients aware of "consumer movements, trends and market facts." They showed some interesting Web sites that highlighted trends toward visualization of products and social shopping. No ah-ha moments, but they seemed grounded at least. And then I asked them to comment on how they thought multi-touch interfaces such as those on iPhone and Surface would affect visualization and social shopping.

Yeah, they were grounded all right. Buried even. Too deep to see the horizon.

Apple, they said, was taking a big chance by having a virtual keyboard on the iPhone. But this consulting company thought that it was a matter of necessity, since "Apple is working with a mobile device that has very limited screen space."

Are you kidding me? This isn't about what Apple is doing or why. It's about how.

To say that Apple's big gamble is the virtual keyboard, as even the NY Times said today, is to say that a phone with a physical keyboard is a sure bet. That must mean that my current phone, which has TWO keyboards/pads, is the cat's meow. Actually, a hyena's laugh is what comes to my mind.

If we must talk about the keyboard tree and totally miss the multi-touch forest, may I please make this request? Dear Steve, if you haven't thought of it already, would you please make the keyboard configurable? I would like to drag the backspace key and the return key to the spot where they make the most sense to me.

This is the phone I lived with for two years. In all that time, I never did get used to the location of the return key and constantly deleted the last character I'd typed every time I meant to start a new paragraph.

Now, I must admit that my jaw dropped upon hearing the response of this trend-watching consulting company, but I did put it back in place to give them a second chance. "So let's move away from a small screen, then. Can you please give me your opinion about the same question as it relates to Surface?"

Did they recover? Hardly. Microsoft, in their opinion, was essentially doing Surface because they could. There was no reason to grab a window with your fingers to resize it when a mouse could do that with no problem.

Maybe I should give them a break because they didn't see the same video I saw when I worked at Microsoft: time after time, users in a usability lab could not double-click. Dragging was a little more of a drag than you'd think. Mousin' ain't all that easy for some folks. But really, even the Times article that started off so poorly had a clue:

"It may teach a new generation of technology users to use their fingers rather than a mouse — a four-decade-old technology — as a pointing and command device."

My big gamble is to go out on a limb (pun intended, try the veal) and claim that most people have a reasonable command of their fingers. I bet they'll do just fine.