iPhone Awesome, Too Expensive

By now you probably have heard all about the new iPhone that Steve Jobs announced today at Macworld. (If not, go here to see the keynote speech or learn more about the phone.)  I’m not a huge cell phone user, but this one makes me want to become one.  It’s small and slick, awesome features and appears to be easy to use.  They’re not out for sale until June, so I don’t know that for sure, but Apple is good at making things look good and work easy. And Jobs’ presentation sold us on the idea that everything could be done with a finger on a touchscreen—sounds pretty easy.

But I can’t see paying $499 (for a 4GB phone) or $599 (for a 8GB phone) to have one.  A couple reasons why.

First, cell phones get lost.  That’s a pretty damn expensive piece of equipment to carry around everywhere with the possibility of it getting lost. It’s small size is almost too small, making it even easier to misplace or have it fall out of a bag or pocket without noticing it.

Second, as easy as it looks to use, I still don’t particularly care if I have a combination iPod/phone/camera.  I use my iPod mainly when I exercise, although I have a speaker thingy to dock it into that I use occasionally.  But I don’t necessarily want my iPod to make phone calls or my phone to play music.  Maybe that’s just me.  Maybe the phone is built for a younger crowd that does want these features.  But can that young crowd afford a $499 or $599 cell phone?  Well, probably a lot of them can, actually.  But still, it will be interesting to see if that price point scares people away or not.

One more thought.  Human nature being what it is, how long will it be before people get mugged for their iPhone?  Or how long until kids start bringing them to school and getting beat up and robbed of them?  It’s happened with high-end sneakers, and I think it even happened when the iPods first appeared.  I’m sure we’ll hear stories about it happening with the iPhone.  (I should note, however, that the media likes to find a story like that and blow it out of proportion, as if people are knocking each other over the head left and right to steal each other’s stuff.)

So I won’t be an early adopter, but if Apple wants to drop one in my lap to reach the influential blogger/startup CEO crowd, I can be bought.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Future, Inc.

One of the biggest business lessons of the late 1990s and early 2000s came from teenagers using the Internet to trade music digitally, costing record companies millions of dollars. Caught off guard, the record companies ended up having 15-year-old kids arrested—not exactly the ideal way to interact with your target demographic.

In his new book Future, Inc., futurist Eric Garland says the record companies should have seen it coming, but they were too interested in working their traditional business model to notice a threat coming from a seemingly unrelated industry (computers). Similar (although less publicized) situations happen all the time in business, and the companies that avoid getting caught flat-footed are the ones who know enough to make educated guesses about the future. By doing so, they stay ahead of the curve, revamping their business models in advance to meet the changes head-on, or using the knowledge to launch new products or services that fill a coming need.

With Future, Inc., Garland gives you a double-dip toward predicting the future and getting out in front of it. First, he offers a wealth of ideas on how you can predict the future of your particular industry. Second, he offers his own take on today’s biggest trends and where those trends might be leading us.

How can you predict the future of your business? Garland offers a number of factors for you to analyze, and then suggests ways to put them together and make educated guesses. The issues that affect your business are not just about your current competitors. New technologies, government regulations, economic trends, environmental factors, politics, your company’s local community—any or all of these could affect what happens to your company.

As an example, Garland picks the chocolate industry. What if, thanks to the trends of increasing litigiousness and the epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, the chocolate industry found itself increasingly under attack, thus damaging sales while costing companies millions in legal fees? How would those companies react? What could they do to get ahead of that trend?

(Another example that comes to my mind would be the fact that some companies that had long enjoyed their treatment by the Republican majority in Congress should have been preparing for expected changes if the Democrats were to take control. )

While Garland suggests ways to predict the future, he also cautions companies not to get caught up in media hype. Carefully analyzing what is happening through the use of multiple, reliable sources can help you better assess the market of today and tomorrow.

To help you on your predictive path, Garland uses the second half of the book to point out current trends, where they may be headed, and what risks/opportunities each presents. Among the issues he raises:

• the effects of an aging population
• rising costs of health care
• ever-increasing computing power with ever-smaller chips
• biotechnology breakthroughs and the ethical questions they raise
• energy
• media
• the environment

You can probably easily cite some issues around these topics. The need for alternative energy sources, cloning controversies, people living longer and longer but the costs to keep them alive growing larger and larger—Garland discusses these and more, but offers thoughts on consequences you may not have considered.

Garland’s writing style is accessible and easily understood, not overly scholarly as books of this nature sometmes are. And, by combining his research on macro trends with a detailed plan for do-it-yourself futurism, Garland goes beyond telling you what’s coming—he makes the book a resource that you can return to repeatedly. Even when the trends he speaks of become dated, the methods used to make smart choices about the future will remain relevant.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success

It’s no news that companies that “go the extra mile” are more successful than those who do the minimum, but I love to hear different ideas or stories on how that concept can be put into action.

Here’s one from Jeff Burrows at The Trump Blog. In it Burrows talks about not just fulfilling your promise to a customer, but doing the extra one percent that your competitors do not:

Let me return to the example of a company that installs swimming pools. If that is your business, you know that deciding to have a swimming pool installed is a very big moment in your customers’ lives. But it is also a dangerous moment for you, because your customers are so focused on the idea of having a pool, they will forget that you are going to have to dig a big ditch first. They will forget that your trucks are going to back up and make a mess of the yard. They never stop to think that they are going to be scared silly because their kids are going to want to run around in the work area.

If you can identify and manage that extra one percent of issues, you are going to stand out as a company and make profits.

You can add that extra one percent of value by explaining the whole construction process to your customers, so they will know what to expect. You can introduce all your workers to your customers, so they will not be alarmed to see strangers on their property. You can take extra measures to ensure their kids’ safety. And you can complete your work in a way so that when your pools are installed, your customers will say, “Wow, my yard and landscaping look even nicer now than when the pool company came!”

Yes, obviously we’re not all installing pools. No example works for everyone. But this example stuck with me because I can remember hiring people to do things at my home who have technically done what I paid for, but made me never want to use them again.

In each of the last two homes I’ve owned, we’ve had fairly large earth-moving equipment have to come in, once to remove a retaining wall, once to take a large rotting tree down. In both cases, the weight of the equipment smashed the sidewalk, so that afterward when it rained, large pools of water would collect where the sidewalk squares had gone from level to a serious slant. No one from either company ever mentioned the problem, no one offered to do anything about it. And each time it took us a little while to realize the problem, so we couldn’t really pin it on the companies, even though it was obvious they’d done it.

A better company would have said to us, “We’re bringing in heavy equipment and sometimes it can cause some damage to your walks. We’ll do our best to avoid it, but I have to tell you in advance that we’re not responsible for that type of damage.” Or of course they could offer to pay for/fix any damage. But even if they wouldn’t fix it, being told in advance would’ve kept me from crossing them off my list if further work had been needed.

I don’t know if there’s something we can all take from the swimming pool example or not, but it’s a reminder to always be thinking from the customer’s perspective instead from your own profit-and-loss perspective.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Do Daredevils Deserve Our Rescue Dollars?

Keith Hammonds at the Fast Company blog brought up a subject that I’ve thought about before but was too wimpy to say publicly. The basic question is: When people do daredevil stunts and then are in need of rescue, should tax dollars that you and me pay be used to rescue them.

Hammonds uses the examples of Ken Barnes, whose boat was destroyed while attempting to sail around the world, and the climbers who died climbing Mt. Hood last month. It was actually the Mt. Hood incident that got me thinking, after I saw a picture in the paper of a small group of would-be rescuers who were getting ready to start scaling the mountain in search of the climbers. Was it fair to spend the money and potentially put rescuers in dangers to save people who were engaged in a highly risky behavior for sport?

I remember long ago in grade school we had a question put to us as to whether the people who lived near Mt. St. Helen’s should be forced to evacuate when it was erupting. I can’t really remember the point of the question, but my answer was no—if they want to stay they can. The point being that it’s their choice to suffer the consequences of that risky decision. The teacher didn’t like my answer. But I guess I still feel that way. If people want to engage in risky behaviors, that’s up to them. But if they want help when things go wrong, they should set up a lifeline before they do their stuff instead of calling on public servants to bail them out when things go bad.

Of course it’s hard to draw the line between what is a risky behavior and what is not, and of course no one wants to be heartless when someone is in danger, regardless of the fact that the person may have purposely put himself/herself in that position. But since several states have charge-for-rescue laws on the books, it’s obvious that some governments are willing to try to draw the distinctions.

It’s a disturbing question.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

The Risk of Being a 1 Percenter

One of the concepts in the book Citizen Marketers is that the people who take the time to care about your business are the 1 Percenters, as in the other 99% have better things to do.  The 1% thing is traced back to Hell’s Angels in the 70s, people that dropped out of society to ride.

As with everything, the concept got co-opted and now everyone wants to be a 1 Percenter.  Well, not everyone.  But probably more than 1 percent.

All this is a lead in to get you to read this Lewis Green post: Join the 1 Percenters and Risk Success

Being part of the 1% might not be comfortable for everyone, but pushing yourself into it can pay rewards, as Green well points out.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Barcelona!

Took advantage of the holidays to slip into the Barcelona! exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art before it ends this Sunday. The exhibit features the work of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Antoni Gaudi and Salvador Dali, as well as their contemporaries in the Barcelona scene.

Here are a few of the highlight pieces. My wife and I spent part of our honeymoon in Barcelona in 1995 and that’s where I first learned about Antoni Gaudi. He was crazy! The exhibit features some of his wacky furniture and also info on his never-ending project the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi’s been dead 80 years and they’re still building this thing. They were building it when I was there 10+ years ago and they’re going to be building it for 25 more years according to the exhibit info.

Other highlights of the exhibit for me included Dali’s Soft Construction With Boiled Beans, Picasso’s Blind Man’s Meal, and a Miro once owned by a poor Ernest Hemingway (he was obsessed with those Spaniards you know).

We were a bit rushed as there was high demand and we just squeezed in with the last group of the day but it was still a worthwhile visit.

If you’re in New York or will be, the Barcelona! exhibit hits the Metropolitan Museum of Art March 5 through June 3 of this year.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

I Do So Love Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs!

About 10 years ago I wrote a manual of some sort for GE Lighting. I learned two things from that project. First, I first found out that they refer to light bulbs as “lamps”. In addition to this revelation, I was first introduced to the compact fluorescent bulb (lamp, to them). I remember I was fascinated by its curlicue shape and the fact that you could put one in and it would last years and years. It was more expensive than regular light bulbs, but, as they always do in cases such as this, they’d created an elaborate chart showing how it actually saved money in the long run. (I believe I recreated this chart in the manual.)

Despte my fascination, I never ponied up for one, mostly because I was always moving and I knew the compact fluorescent bulb (lamp, dammit!) was not going to reward me for my patience. Whoever took the apartment after me would be the lucky duck.

As noted by Seth Godin in his ode to the compact fluorescent, these days the bulbs (lamps) are a lot cheaper but they still last a long long time. And I’ve slowly adopted them into my life. The light they give off feels brighter to me and I of course change fewer light bulbs.

Where the fewer bulbs thing comes in handy is for those places where I have to stand on a chair to change a bulb. My house has a few of these, and each one has a heavyish, bowl-shaped cover over the bulb. When changing them I have to unscrew the little brass holder while simultaneously holding that big bowl cover up so it doesn’t crash down on my head. All of this makes my arms tired. Plus I’m standing on a chair the whole time, so I’m always feeling a little shaky.

In short, it’s a pain in the ass. So somewhere along the way I wised up and got the compact fluorescent bulbs and now I don’t have to climb up there so often.

The side benefit to them is that they are more environmentally-friendly, in that they consume less energy. Actually that’s a big benefit to me, but if you don’t give a hoot about global warming (it’s another balmy 50+ degree January day in Cleveland today!), the cost benefit and the decreased hassle will make you a happy camper.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

The Youngest Grocer in America

I like this story of a 17-year-old in a small Minnesota town who bought his local grocery store after it had shut down. His voice and his wise-beyond-his-years attitude are what make it special.

Book Review: Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing

We can’t all be YouTube, rocketing from a garage startup to a billion-dollar buyout in less than two years on an unceasing wave of viral buzz. But, if your business is doing good things, it can probably generate a lot more buzz than it’s getting now. You might think that word of mouth buzz occurs only as a natural reaction to a “wow” product or service—you either have it or you don’t, it’s out of your control.

Ron McDaniel thinks otherwise, and his new book Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing shows you how a deliberate buzz strategy can lift your business, especially if your competitors aren’t employing one of their own.

The first thing McDaniel makes clear is that word of mouth can be generated by everyone in a company–in fact, it’s probably more meaningful when it comes from employees who aren’t executives or part of the sales staff. Hearing the buzz from the Queen Bee (or King Bee) is great, but it’s when the whole hive is buzzing that your customers and your industry really take notice. (McDaniel says his obsession with buzz really took hold when an employee told him that word of mouth is “not my job.”)

But what can an employee with other job responsibilities do to support a word of mouth effort? Especially if that employee does not have a marketing bone in his/her body?

The subtitle to Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing is “57 Word of Mouth Challenges For The Entire Workforce”. Don’t let the word “challenges” throw you, though. McDaniel offers 57 action steps to create buzz, and thankfully most are simple enough for anyone in a company to do in just a few minutes a day. (I think they’re called “challenges” in that you’re almost “challenging” people to follow through with them.) E-mail an old friend or business acquaintance and tell him or her in your own words about the good things your company is doing? That’s not hard. Send a congratulatory note to someone who’s had a noteworthy success? Sounds like a win-win. Forward a news clipping that a business contact might be interested in? That’s natural enough.

In fact, many of the word of mouth actions McDaniel describes are things you probably already do, but the idea is to do so more deliberately, with more of a conscious effort to be consistent about it. (I should note that some of the 57 ideas are a bit more ambitious, so those who want to take on bigger challenges can find plenty of ideas as well.)

An obvious question is how to motivate those whose interest in the company’s success is only as strong as their desire to get a regular paycheck. McDaniel suggests that the benefits to them in actively buzzing may need to be spelled out: the potential for greater rewards within the company, the potential to become an expert in a field, and of course the known benefits that come from active networking. In other words, talking up the company is in their interests just as much as it’s in the interests of the company.

By leaving plenty of space for you to document your attempts with each of the 57 action items, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing is a workbook meant to be used on an ongoing basis instead of simply a book to be read once and put on the shelf. I plan to keep my copy within easy reach, picking it up at least once a day to be sure I’m consistently driving my business forward.

(P.S. If it hadn’t occurred to you, this review is one of the ways I’m creating buzz for me and my company.)

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Wikinomics

As founder of Bessed, a human-powered search site that encourages visitors to shape search results, I was excited to get an advance copy of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. With me they’d just be preaching to the choir, but I was ready to hear the sermon.

The premise of Wikinomics is simple: the more your company lets outsiders in, or even turns the company over to the masses, the more new ideas are generated, the more new products are developed, and the more problems are solved. On the flip side, however, if your company wants to make money, you need to think long and hard about how open-sourcing fits with your business model, or figure out a business model that can take the fruits of mass collaboration and fashion saleable products and services around them. The potential is huge, and the risks may be fewer than you think.

The first thing that pops into your head when you hear Wikinomics is probably Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit (although don’t be surprised if your edits don’t last long). Wikipedia is the ultimate example of using the knowledge of thousands of diverse people to create something exceedingly useful—and something that even a large team of researchers couldn’t have created through decades of work.

Wikipedia is not a for-profit company, however. So, while it’s a great example of what can be accomplished, it’s not a great example of what can be accomplished at a profit. Luckily, Tapscott and Williams attack the question of “how can this make us money?” through the discussion of several business frameworks. These include:

• Peering (indirectly building business through participation in open-source projects)
• Ideagoras (marketplaces where businesses can post their R&D needs to the masses and reward the problem-solvers, or offer up their unused inventions that would otherwise lie dormant and in secret)
• Embracing the Prosumer (encouraging/supporting customers who “hack” your products, creating new features or uses that your company would have never thought of on its own)
• New Alexandrians (breaking down the proprietary walls in the sciences, namely in the fight against disease)
• Platforms for Participation (opening up your technology to allow others to create or even profit from its use, which may add to your bottom line and/or strengthen your brand)

Tapscott and Williams use many specific examples, from IBM’s contributions to building the free software Linux to Proctor & Gamble’s goal to outsource half its R&D, to Merck releasing thousands of human gene sequences to the public domain. What’s nice about the many examples the authors chose is that they aren’t all technology companies, proving that this isn’t just an IT phenomenon. (In fact, the book opens with a story about a very old-school industry, gold mining—Canadian company Goldcorp made its maps and research public, and outsiders very successfully pinpointed where more gold would be found.)

I was also glad to see the book acknowledge the huge issue associated with putting intellectual property in the hands of the masses. If your company spent money to create it, why and under what circumstances should some or all of it be freely shared? That’s the question any company who wants to profit from the wisdom of the masses (or that sees its business model threatened by it) needs to answer.

I had a few quibbles with the book. Neither its “Global Plant Floor” nor “Wiki Workplace” sections offered especially new ideas or insights—globalization isn’t new, collaborating and soliciting ideas in the workplace isn’t either, even if new technologies offer some slightly new spins on these phenomena. I also found myself daydreaming while reading the book. Sometimes this was because an idea or example made me start thinking about how to use it in my own business. Other times, unfortunately, I slipped off when the writing got overly jargony, saying little with a lot of words.

That aside, Wikinomics is an important book for any company or business person trying to understand how to thrive in an age where traditional top-down, command-and-control structures are being aggressively challenged. Mass collaboration may be a flash in the pan, but as some have already found out (i.e., the record industry), ignoring it could leave you burned.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.