Muddy Sight
So, it's early on in my sophomore year at Michigan State University, and I go into my counselor's office one Monday morning to declare my major as economics. I had recently enrolled in the business college, and was about a couple of weeks into my first macroeconomics class. I thought it was fascinating. The next day, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Now, we all have our bouts of superstition. This was one...
They're All Going to Laugh At You
Of course, if you try something, and you fail, then everyone is going to notice, everyone is going to ridicule you, and nobody will forget it as long as you live. But that's not really true. There are some spectacular failures that get a lot of press, like New Coke. But for the overwhelming majority of things, failure is an event that goes unnoticed, and is quickly forgotten. The day Apple announced the iPad, it...
Privacy Policy as a Selling Point
I joined a company a couple of years ago as one of their programmers. Their idea? Enter the online personal finance space. At the time, our biggest competitor was (and still is) Mint.com. Mint.com makes no secret about the fact that while they're giving you a convenient web interface to budget, categorize, and track your bank and credit cards transactions, it makes money by analyzing your spending habits. Then it targets offers for bank accounts...
There Are NO "Little People"
My girlfriend's mom has a trick she uses when sizing up candidates when they come into the office for job interviews: after they leave, ask the receptionist for their thoughts. How did they treat them when they came in? How did they act? Were they polite? Everyone's nice to the hiring manager or the head of the department in an interview, but it's revealing to see how they treat a "little person" who doesn't hold...
Hi and Hiatus
Went to go see a concert last night, but when we got to the show, it was sold out. My friend and I walked around West Hollywood to find a good place to eat, and we stumbled across a steakhouse that contained, among other things, a mechanical bull. The novelty drew us in, but I became a fan for one simple reason: the service. The manager was making the rounds getting to know the patrons,...
The Sand
There is a story that has come to my attention from several different people. (It takes place in Texas, and I don't know a soul in Texas.) Quick question: what do you do when you're running a movie theater, and ticket sales have been falling? The answer is likely "better marketing". And how do you do that? By taking a stand. By drawing a line in the sand. And that might involve publicly firing some...
Privacy Policy (Offline)
It's no secret that technology has rapidly outpaced the privacy laws governing it in the past couple of decades. Privacy policies, on the other hand, are often better spelled out on websites. Sure, they're often way too long for a person to read through, and they often contain unintelligible gobs of legalese, but at least they are available to anyone who cares to read them. I popped a question yesterday online about those "contest jars"...
Empowering Points of Light
My friend Rick shared this page with me today. Play with it a for a little while, it's amazing. I'll be here when you get back (if you can tear yourself away.)
About it, Rick said, "This is inspiring. You create something, so that people can make something beautiful out of it."
Well said. Most people build successes not by creating something awesome, but by creating something that enables other people to be awesome.
Followers != Following
Marketing advice that I got second-hand from the Advanced Search Engine Optimization conference, in a nutshell: If you want to get a thousand fans on Facebook really quickly and cheaply, start running ads in a foreign country that has an extremely low GDP. The ads cost less per click and people's Facebook pages haven't been saturated there yet. This isn't bad advice if you want 1,000 Facebook fans, pronto. But it also illustrates the supreme...
Car Code Readers
My check engine light came on the other day. This is the first time this has happened since I jumped onto the yuppie bandwagon and purchased an iPhone for myself. As I opened the trunk to get out my OBDII code reader, I immediately thought to myself: "Why hasn't someone created this idea for iPhones?" The earphone jack on the iPhone can take raw binary data as an input (this is how the Square app...