I’m super excited to be part of the crew (along with Bootup Entrepreneurial Society) bringing the Startup Lessons Learned conference to town via simulcast this Friday April 23rd. For those of you who don’t know, the Lean Startup movement (a derivative of lean manufacturing) was kicked off by Eric Ries, formerly of Imvu. It has blossomed in a very short time into a global movement of entrepreneurs interested in how to build fast-cycle, highly iterative startups that learn fast and minimize wasted effort.

More information on the event is below.

• REGISTRATION: http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• PRICE: $25 (regular on-site SF price = $695USD so that’s a 96.5% discount not counting the savings in travel costs.)
• SIMULCAST LOCATION: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, 3rd floor, 163 W. Hastings St., Suite 200.

Startup Lessons Learned, San Francisco (via simulcast to Vancouver)

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Confirmed Speakers and Participating Mentors:

• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)
• Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute (@kentbeck)
• Steve Blank (@sgblank)
• Randy Komisar, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play (@andrew_chen)
• David Weekly, PB Works (@dweekly)
• Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics (@hnshah)
• Cindy Alvarez, KISSmetrics (@cindyalvarez)
• Ethan Bloch, Flowtown (@ebloch)
• Timothy Fitz, IMVU (@TimohtyFitz)
• Drew Houston, Dropbox (@drewhouston)
• Ash Maurya, WiredReach (@ashmaurya)
• Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
• Sean Ellis (@seanellis)
• Laura Klein (@lauraklein)
• Damon Horowitz, Aardvark / Google (@iamnottweeting)
• Max Ventilla, Aardvark / Google (@ventilla)
• Brant Cooper (@brantcooper)
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs (@clarashih)
• Manuel Rosso (@manuelrosso)
• Rashmi Sinha (@rashmi)
• Dan Martell, Flowtown (@danmartell)
• Brett Durrett, IMVU
• James Birchler, IMVU
• Andres Glusman, Meetup (@glusman)

Agenda

• 8 AM – 9:00 Registration
• 9:00 – 9:30 AM Welcome
  *Eric Ries, Host, Startup Lessons Learned
• 9:30 AM – 10:20 AM Build Keynote: “To Agility, and Beyond”
  * Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute
• 10:20 AM – 10:40 AM Continuous Deployment Case Study: WiredReach
  *Ash Maurya, WiredReach
• 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM Agile Development Case Study: Grockit
  *Farb Nivi, Grockit
• 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM Case Study: “But Does it Scale?”
  * Tim Fitz, James Birchler, and Brett Durrett, IMVU
• 11:30 PM – 12:15 PM But What about Design? Minimum Desirable Product
  *Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Laura Klein, Dave McClure, Rashmi Sinha
• 12:15 AM – 1:15 PM Lunch
• 1:15 – 2:00 PM Conversation: Getting to Plan B
  * Randy Komisar, KPCB
• 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM Minimum Viable Product Case Study: Aardvark
  *Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, Google (Aardvark)
• 2:20 PM – 2:40 PM Pivot Case Study: Flowtown
  *Dan Martell and Ethan Bloch, Flowtown
• 2:40 PM – 3:00 PM Pivot Case Study: KISSmetrics
  *Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics
• 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM Afternoon Break
• 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM Customer Development 2.0
  *Steve Blank
• 4:15 PM – 4:35 PM Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study
  *Manuel Rosso, Food on the Table
• 4:35 PM – 4:55 PM Customer Development Case Study: Dropbox
  *Drew Houston, Dropbox
• 4:55 PM – 5:15 PM Customer Development Case Study: PB Works
  *David Weekly, PBworks
• 5:15 PM – 6:00 PM Customer Development Panel
  *Cindy Alvarez, Brant Cooper, Sean Ellis, Matt Johnson

This event is intended for people on the front line of delivering products. If you are a start-up founder, an employee engaged in customer or product development role at a company of any stage, or someone at a large company looking to bring the lean startup methodology to your company, we encourage you to attend the event.

Local Simulcasts

For those outside of the Bay Area, we will be offering simulcasts of the event. Official simulcast hosts can be found below – make sure to sign up using one of the links below:

Africa

• Cape Town, South Africa http://sllconf-capetown.eventbrite.com

Asia

• Tokyo, Japan http://startuplessonslearnedtokyosimulcast.eventbrite.com

Europe

• Barcelona, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/638921030
• Birmingham, UK http://sll-birmingham-uk.eventbrite.com/
• Bucharest, Romania http://sllconf-bucharest.eventbrite.com/
• Budapest, Hungary http://sllbudapest.eventbrite.com
• Cambridge, UK http://startuplessonslearnedcam.eventbrite.com/
• Copenhagen, Denmark http://sllconf2010copenhagen.eventbrite.com/
• Delft, Netherlands http://sllconf-delft.eventbrite.com/
• Edinburgh, Scotland http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=652392323
• Gothenburg, Sweden http://gotsllconf.eventbrite.com/
• London, UK http://www.meetup.com/agile-entrepreneurship/calendar/12944310/
• Madrid, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/640820712
• Munich, Germany http://www.eventbrite.com/event/650629049
• Timisoara, Romania http://www.meetup.com/The-Timisoara-Agile-Software-Meetup-Group/
• Vienna, Austria http://at.amiando.com/sllconfstream.html

North America

• Atlanta, GA http://atlantasll.eventbrite.com/
• Austin, TX http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13090413/
• Boise, Idaho http://sllconf-boise.eventbrite.com/
• Boston, MA http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle-Boston/calendar/13093640/
• Boston/Cambridge, MA http://dplc-lessons.eventbrite.com
• Boulder, CO http://sllconf-boulder.eventbrite.com/
• Chicago, IL http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13056515/
• Cleveland, OH http://startuplessonslearneduniversitycircle.eventbrite.com/
• Cleveland, OH http://sllsimulcastcleveland.eventbrite.com
• Grand Rapids, MI http://startupgr.eventbrite.com
• Los Angeles, CA http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13082783/
• Monterrey, NL México http://www.eventbrite.com/event/654293008
• Montreal, QC Canada Chttp://leanstartupmontreal.eventbrite.com
• New York, NY http://dplny-lessons.eventbrite.com/
• New York, NY http://www.meetup.com/lean-startup/calendar/13102326/
• New York, NY http://sllnyc.eventbrite.com
• Omaha, NE http://sllconf-omaha.eventbrite.com/
• Providence, RI http://sllconfprovidence.eventbrite.com
• Provo, UT http://wsg-lsc.eventbrite.com/
• Raleigh, NC http://www.meetup.com/lsc-rtp/calendar/13161035/
• Redmond, WA http://www.eventbrite.com/event/648075411
• San Juan, Puerto Rico http://startups.eventbrite.com/
• Toronto, CA http://startuplessons-toronto.eventbrite.com
• Twin Cities, MN http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/12849312/
• Vancouver, BC Canada http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• Washington DC http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13068744/

Oceania

• Syndey, Australia https://s.eventarc.com/event/view/597/entry/startup-lessons-learned-simulcast-conference
• Wellington, New Zealand http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Wellington/calendar/12624714/

South America

• Belo Horizonte, Brazil http://sllconf-bhz.eventbrite.com/
• Buenos Aires, Argentina http://buenosairessll.eventbrite.com/
• Florianópolis, SC, Brazil http://www.meetup.com/Floripa-Startups/calendar/13090194/
• Santiago, Chile http://sllsantiago.eventbrite.com

Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS metrics team, Randy Komisar (VC/angel with Kleiner Perkins and author of my favourite book on venture capital – The Monk and the Riddle), Steve Blank (who recently wrote a fantastic blog post called “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers” and many others. This is a top-tier collection of speakers.

This is going to be a kick-in-the-ass day that is going to make any startup entrepreneur rethink their entire business approach.So if you’re sick of limping along building your business 10 users at a time or “working to get the app just right before we launch”, get yourself and your team down to this event.

Sign up HERE. This event is $700USD in person. We’re providing the simulcast here for $50 FREE. Do it. You won’t regret it. And you’ll get to hang out and meet a bunch of other startup entrepreneurs who are all building their ventures. Great place to connect with like-minded folks.

This is truly awesome and inspiring as a creative work.

I haven’t outsourced my inbox yet like Tim Ferriss has. I still do it myself. So every time I hit Inbox Zero, I thank my friend Alex Samuel from Social Signal for her tweeting about her own inbox zero success. I used to have 3000+ emails in my inbox and another 20,000 somewhere in the archive. I finally found a way to clear it. It requires Gmail, a to-do list of some kind and Gmail’s awesome keyboard shortcuts, and some Apple keyboard shortcuts.

Ensure you already have a good to-do list manager of some kind, that you can use to sort and prioritize tasks. I use a basic google sheet in a dedicated Site-specific browser too called Fluid (so it looks like a desktop app and it has an icon in my dock), but you can use anything. The keys to success are in these principles:

• Email is not a to-do list. Period. Get tasks out of there.
• Archiving = peace of mind. I never really understood the value of archiving until I realized that it is a way to file…without the psychological overhead of filing. It is a way of saying “get this out of my inbox and put it away in case I need it again.)
• The important thing is to either archive, action/archive, or put on list/archive everything.
• Eliminate (in this case archive) everything you don’t need to action as fast as you can
• Delegate (with short emails) nything you can as fast and succinctly as possible)
• Put tasks into the task list, then come back and keep sifting.

So once you have your crazy full inbox and your to-do list:

1. Go to the oldest email in your inbox and open it.
2. Scan the contents and using standard GTD thinking, do one of the following:
   1. Task?
      1. Command-Tab to your task list
      2. add the task as an ABC or to-delegate item
      3. Command-tab back
      4. hit the magic “]” key.  (<- This archives the message and takes you to the next most current email.)
   2. <2 minute action?
      1. Command-tab to app to take action. If you need to send an email and don’t want to lose your spot in the email inbox in Gmail, hold SHIFT and then hit COMPOSE NEW MESSAGE. It will pop open a window on top. When you’re done and have sent it, the window will close, leaving you right where you were before.
      2. Take action. If that means writing an email, do it in five sentences or less.
      3. Command-Tab back to Gmail if necessary.
      4. Hit the magic “]” key to archive the message.
   3. Archivable? No action required?
      1. Archive and next with “]” key.
3. Repeat as fast as possible until Inbox Zero.
4. Celebrate.

The beauty of the ] key and the command-tab and the shift-compose is that with a few keystrokes, you can can clear hundreds or even thousands of messages in a few hours. My first pass? I cleared 3000 messages in a few hours. It can be done. And when I was done, I had a complete list of all of my tasks again. I wasn’t living with some tasks in email and others in a to-do list which is always a recipe for lack of prioritization anyway.

Have you hit inbox zero? How do you handle it? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear it.

And if you’re interested in cloud computing, please remember to sign up to attend the full day Cloud Camp Vancouver being held on March 13 at Discovery Park on Great Northern Way. I’m co-hosting it with local cloudies Trevor Orzstynowicz and Jenny Yang, both of whom are building cloud companies here in Vancouver.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote an excellent post over here at the NY Times pleading with the climate folks to go on offense with a simple 50 page grade six english report on the state of the world. It’s awesome. Read it. I agree with all of it and particularly getting rid of the phrase “global warming” because idiots then say “well it was warm today here in Arizona so Al Gore is OBVIOUSLY a lying idiot.”(sigh)

Key quotes are below:

What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

Here are the points I like to stress:

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.

2) Historically, we know that the climate has warmed and cooled slowly, going from Ice Ages to warming periods, driven, in part, by changes in the earth’s orbit and hence the amount of sunlight different parts of the earth get. What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature’s natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: “Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.” We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Global Weirding Is Here – NYTimes.com.

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/how-to-optimize-your-saas-revenue-streams-rackspace-saas-cloud-2010/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/how-to-optimize-your-saas-revenue-streams-rackspace-saas-cloud-2010/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:18:40 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=970 I found an awesome PPT deck today called How to Optimize Your SaaS Revenue Streams – Rackspace SaaS & Cloud 2010.

Its authors Lincoln Murphy and Justin Pirie do a great job of articulating the high level difficulty of building a Saas play and explain it in simple terms. Great 100,000 foot view.

It really is THIS hard.

Earlier Schmidt used his first ever keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile phone trade show to give the industry a call to action, suggesting that telecommunications companies should embrace the new world of smartphones and cloud computing, not fear it.

He said high levels of connectivity and cloud computing – the idea that devices can be made smarter by relying on the computers on the internet to carry out complex tasks such as voice recognition – have brought the industry to a turning point.

“The confluence of these three factors mans something very fundamental is happening. A phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter-ego,” he said. “It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are. It can take pictures better than we can remember things.”

He said Google is switching to a ‘mobile first’ model, with more and more developers thinking first about how the applications and services they have created will work on a mobile device.

“Culturally it is time to figure out a way to say yes to the emergent new services and ideas that will not come from Google but from those literally millions of companies and programming shops that will be built on this new platform.”

“Now is the time for all of us to get behind it. What I would suggest to you here, right now, at Mobile World Congress is to understand that the new rule is ‘mobile first’; mobile first in everything.. it’s time for us to make mobile first the right answer.”

I like that phrase: “Mobile First”. I think I’ll use it.

I wrote back in March 2009 about my hopes and dreams for a tablet from Apple, all of which came true on January 27, 2010 with the release of the new iPad. But in late fall 2009, I decided to get into ebook readers since I was reading a lot more books for some research. I ended up purchasing the Kindle DX, the largest of Amazon’s ebook reading devices. I also downloaded Kindle for PC to run in Parallels on my Mac, and also ran the Kindle for iPhone application. Here is a table that shows some of the key differences. And I’ve added in the iPad to begin comparing it to the three I have already been using now for many months. I thought that my own learning might be valuable to others looking at making the same decision.

I was asked, “what are you comparing though – the value of the device / software as a reader or as a multi-purpose tablet?” Another person asked me “is this a platform competition? What if I leave the “reading” app and go outside? Doesn’t that still count as using the device?”

I admit I struggled with that until I realized what I was actually trying to figure out was the following: which combination of stores and devices will let me do as much as possible in as few devices as possible while maximizing my access to great low-cost ebook content? So to that end, as I started to compare options, I shifted from “is it a good reader” to “is it a good device to let me see all the content I want to see, regardless of application or viewer?”

Let’s look at use cases:

Multi-day: On a multi-day business trip, I already take my laptop, Kindle, and iPhone. So the question I am really trying to answer is: can I use the iPad as a replacement for the DX I always carry on trips like that for reading on long flights, and since it can do more generally, will it become a full-on replacement?

Day trip: Currently I mostly head out on day trips with just my DX and my iPhone. It’s okay but honestly I don’t want to read a book on the iPhone, it’s too small. It’s okay for taking teensy-weensy notes but not much more. Typing notes on the DX is like poking sharp needles into your eyes. It’s really lame. And besides, those notes are only allowed in the books themselves. It also has no wifi and my US version doesn’t have cellular coverage in Canada. So all in all, it really just ends up being like carrying a novel around that I can read in between meetings. Could the iPad be the “tween” device that lets me take slightly longer notes if I want? Why not get a netbook so I don’t have to lug around my 7 pound MacBook Pro? Because, like Steve Jobs, I hate netbooks. I hate their tiny poor-quality screens and cramped little keyboards. And sure, you can hack them to make a Mac but I hate hacking things. I just want to unveil them out of the box and have them magically work.

Pure reading: I use the Kindle a lot for reading at home or at the cafe. I can toss it in my backpack, go for a coffee and sit and read and write notes and think. But the slow speed, clunky highlighting, and annoying clipping limits do grate me a bit. It was the best I had and it was a great luxury so I have certainly enjoyed it. And it has been nice to be able to have all my books with me. There is also a blissful simplicity in having a device that sucks at absolutely everything except reading a page of text. It acts as a constraint to let you focus better. But I really think that’s a bit of human post-hoc rationalization and reframing – the same thing we say about “the good old days when things were simpler” which is nowspeak for “we had no food or water or money and the war was on but life was still good.” B.S. that’s just wearing rose-coloured glasses to reframe your experience. The current Kindle if you look at it truthfully can’t “flip through pages” quickly. It’s a painful 3-5 second lag per page. The 5 way toggle is clunky. Everybody I hand the device to tries to “swipe” the pages and then looks confused. It’s SLOW. The PDF viewer is horrendous and unusable for powerpoint decks. It sucks at everything on earth except basic text pages.  So I love the books, I love reading on a tablet in a cafe or at home, but I hate the actual user experience of this particular Kindle DX. It’s a blessing and I’m not giving it away until I have a replacement but my iPhone Kindle app spoiled me. It’s so fast and smooth and elegant…just too darned small.

For my uses above, I want the iPad. It is a reader but it’s so much more. It has wifi and 3G so no matter where I am or which country I’m in, it will function without me having to worry about 3G coverage. And it’s just so lickable and fast and clean and iPod-like. I’m already sold. But it may not be the answer for you. Here is a table to help you examine it for your own needs. I’ve also added in the Kindle for iPhone application (which I’m hoping will be expanded to become the Kindle for iPad application) and the Kindle for PC application. The Kindle for Mac app is not out yet. Hopefully it will be better than the PC version which is poor.

	Apple iPad	Amazon Kindle DX	Kindle for iPhone	Kindle for PC / Mac (coming soon)
Reader Price	$499-829 USD	$429-$489 USD	Free	Free
Screen size (diag)	9.7″	9.7″	3.5″	variable
Resolution	1024×768 @ thousands of colours	1200×824 @ 16 greys	480×320 @ thousands of colors	variable
Weight	about 1.6 lb (5 iPods)	approx 1.2 lbs (4 iPods)	approx 0.3 lb
Storage	16/32/64GB flash only (no hard drive!)	4GB internal hard drive (3500 books)	depends on model	n/a
Battery life:	Apple says 10 hours. I don’t buy it. Call it “a day”	Days. I often get 2-4 days of reading out of it	Ha. Don’t get me started. Google “iPhone Battery Life”	n/a
Screen type	LED backlit multi-touch IPS with wide viewing angle. Great for everything.	Non-backlit e-ink display that is easy on the eyes, and very energy efficient. e-ink is COOL. But slow and	standard iPhone screen	n/a
Readability	Demo looks good; looking forward to using it; unknown in bright light	Very easy on the eyes; EXCELLENT in bright light/sun.	Easy to read; just too damned small	depends on your screen
Application fit and finish and quality	Demo looks great. If it works as well as it demos, then Apple’s reader is pretty awesome.	Clunky app from Mac Plus circa 1990; home screen is an awful set of pages in a list. Reading once you’re in the book is great though.	Tight, clean application	Dog’s breakfast slapped together in an afternoon. Missing search field; wacky text line resizing; feels half-baked
Read Amazon store books	Yes, via Kindle for iPhone or iPad	Yes	Yes	Yes
Read iBook Store books	Yes, via iBook app	No	?	No
Total Paid Books available	Current: 400,000 Amazon Uknown? Apple iBooks Out of print: 1 Million+ Google = 1.5M?+ books??	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.	Current: 400,000+ Amazon books, magazines, and blogs. Can not be used to read Google’s books.
Read Text files	Yes, in other apps	Yes	Yes, in other apps	Yes, in other apps on the PC
Read PDFs	Yes, in the email app	Yes, but poorly. No pan or zoom. Rotate only works with some docs. Landscape PDFs from PPT are horrible and “2 paged” in landscape mode. Small print PDFs are illegible. Slow.	Yes, in the email app. Small but readable and zoomable.	Yes, in your PC PDF viewer
Read .doc files	Yes, in the email app	Yes, with conversion	Yes, in other apps	Not in the Kindle app
eNews?	Soon. NYT to start, others to follow.	Yes but it’s a horrible “news reading” experience, with limited graphics and horrendous indexing	No	No
Wifi	Included	n/a. I actually think this was clever of Amazon for their first move given the device’s limited complexity and UI.	Included	depends on PC
3G cellular	optional: requires higher end model starting at $629USD and $15-30/mo	included free in purchase price of books	Included in phone; Kindle app uses it	depends on PC
Screen rotation	Auto; no option to turn off	Auto or fixed	Auto	n/a
Hardware speed	freaking fast if the video demos are accurate	Mac Plus era painful (2-5 seconds per action – kill me)	fast; love it	depends on PC
Native book store DRM restrictions	Unknown; hopefully Steve will push for lenient or no DRM like with music before it	limits to # of downloads, # of clippings/highlights, number of devices, ALL of which are undocumented and set by individual publishers	see left	see left
Native bookstore eBook format	ePub format (same as the 1M+ old books Google is in the process of scanning)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)	Proprietary DRM’ed AZW file (.mobi based)
Audio	Full iPod (woohoo!)	clunky beta audio book and mp3 player not worth using	n/a	n/a
Font	multiple to choose from	single font type	single font type	single font type
Font size	variable	variable	variable	variable
Interaction tool	Multi-touch	clunky 5 way toggle	Multi-touch	Mouse/Keyboard
Dictionary	Unknown	Included	n/a	n/a
Search library	Coming	Yes	No	NONE!
Search book	Coming	Yes	No	NONE!
Highlighting	Coming	Yes but limited in VERY stupid ways	multi-touch highlighting; nice!	NONE!
Annotations	Coming	Yes, with built-in keyboard that is horrible to use.	Yes, but there’s not much screen real estate left!	NONE!
Colour?	Yes	16 greys	black, white, sepia	16 greys
Video can be embedded in book	Yes	No	No	No
Web browser	Safari and it looks like it screams	Beta crappy test browser that barely loads pages	n/a	n/a
Best Use Cases	Apple fanatic who wants a multi-purpose tablet, browser, email, video, content watching thingamajig. Me. Fan-boys/girls. Kids. Gamers. Movie-lovers. Book-lovers. *Education. Web-surfers. The market for this thing is stinking huge. Edu	Book lover who just wants to read huge volumes of text on a super light, very easy to read reader that doesn’t have to be recharged all the time and who doesn’t want to fuss with complicated technology.	Good for catching up on your reading in those spare moments in between meetings.	Good for scanning books quickly on very large screens. I use it on a rotated 24″ screen in portrait mode and it’s great for that!
Summary (Device)	This multi-function mobile device is a game-changer and will add huge new revenues (and hopefully great margins) to Apple’s top and bottom lines. Best for people who don’t mind the added complexity (and weight) and shorter battery life to have a lot more functionality.	The world’s best ebook (only) reader with an excellent collection of current books that you can access quickly and easily in 100 countries with no fuss. This is a great device for book-lovers wanting a portable book.	good for 2nd or 3rd reader to supplement a primary reader.	Poor attempt at a PC app; should have been finished before being released.

As you can see there are really a few decisions that are sort of coupled and that depend on your own needs:

• Which is the better reading device?
• What are the best sources of content for my needs?
• How many devices do I want?
• What do I want to do with them?

The Device: iPad vs. DX

Amazon is not a hardware company. They only launched the Kindle because hell, they HAD to. Their hardware had some very specific design criteria (long battery life, easy on the eyes, and low cost) and the further (unfortunate) constraint that hardware is not in their DNA like it is at Apple. They’re a low margin high velocity retailer, not an Apple clone. Having said all that, I love Amazon. I love their service. I love their efficient systems. I love the fact that whenever I look up a book on their service, it’s almost always available for $9.99. I love that they make it so easy for me to read and because of them, I’m reading a LOT more. I love them despite the Kindle hardware, not because of it.

Apple is a hardware, software, services, content, engineering, design company and that shows up in this beautiful tablet. Unequivocally I would trade my Kindle DX in and use the iPad instead. Because then I could read but I could also do a lot more. Their device is hands down a better device. I do not buy the marketing messaging from Amazon that their e-ink screen is “easier on the eyes”. I doubt that’s been proven. They’re both operating at similar pixel densities (130-150 pixels per inch) and my understanding has always been that it’s pixel density plus good anti-aliasing that makes the difference, not “lack of backlight”. The second reason is that the Kindle feels like operating a painfully slow Mac Plus from twenty years ago in grey scale. It takes forever to flip pages, jump through chapters, highlight large sections of text or generally move at the speed of thought. You can’t think/do. You think, do……wait….wait….wait…..oh rats, I wanted to do something ELSE. It’s painful.

Winner for devices: iPad without question in my mind

eBook Store: Amazon.com vs. iBook Store

Interestingly the eBook Store is not as coupled to the device as you might initially think. The iPhone is the single largest ebook reading platform for Amazon.com’s titles because so many people have them in their pockets and have downloaded Amazon.com’s excellent little “Kindle for iPhone” application (which is much much better than their half-baked “Kindle for PC” application.)

Amazon has north of 400,000 titles in their own custom .azw file format but they’re the most popular and most current titles on earth and they’re adding to that list rapidly. Because I read current work, this is the most important source to me today. Barnes & Noble and Sony don’t come close so I never looked at them once I had figured that out. So as long as Apple let’s Amazon play nicely by letting them release “Kindle for iPad” that operates at full pixel density (and you don’t have to just run the “Kindle for iPhone” app in 2x double-pixel mode (which would make it awful), then my first preference probably for most of 2010 would be to read Amazon titles on my Kindle for iPad application on the iPad. Next, Google is scanning a million out of print books and making them available in ePub or PDF formats. This is great news for iPad users since it will use ePub and presumably will be able to access these books. I’ve looked at a couple (from the early 1700s actually) but they make up 0.1% of my reading so they’re almost not relevant. Great humanitarian project, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not the material I want as somebody on the bleeding edge of technology and business. Thirdly, Apple’s iBook store will take a while to get going, as it did with their iTunes catalog. But they have the money and the people and the will so I think it will happen and be great. So I think that at least for 2010 I’d end up reading books from both the Amazon store and the Apple iBook store on the iPad. Best of both worlds!

But in the long run, “defaults count”. The store that is shipped on board the device will have the greater network effect and will eventually overtake the Amazon store (which would require a separate download if Apple doesn’t block it entirely at some point.)

Winner: Apple & Amazon.com! (since I’d be buying titles from both) but with Apple pulling ahead in the long run (2-3 years)

What will Amazon do to counter the iPad?

They are trying to build a developer community around the Kindle. I think that with the current crappy hardware, that’s a non-starter. It’s just not an interesting device to build apps for. I think developers would build for anything BUT the Kindle. And that really blows up Amazon’s key message about it being a single-function device.

I think that they have the will and finances to build a next generation colour e-ink display and to keep pushing on the idea of faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and non-backlit. That’s their key set of design priorities. I think it remains to be seen how many people will be attracted to that vision vs. spending the same amount of money to get a device that not only looks better for books but also does everything else. I never think of these things as either/or. There will be room for Kindles and Nooks and all the other dedicated ebook readers. But I think the iPad will eat a major part of what would have been their market share, very quickly marginalizing them to the edges of the market. If they do continue to push the boundaries of the technology, it could be interesting. But good hardware is just not in their DNA (yet) so it could take a very long while.

Amazon seems to be best when they can build massive global systems that efficiently distribute “stuff” (virtual or physical) at low margins and huge volumes. They are the world’s largest e-tailer and they’re insanely great at that. I know they’ll continue doing that. The Kindle will hopefully just continue to be a set of applications that run on all devices.

Black Swans

Here is a perfect world scenario for me but it’s a bit of a black swan – a low probablility, high impact event. Apple and Amazon strike a deal and Apple can ingest all of Amazon’s content and ditch their proprietary DRM (just like Apple did with the music labels over a four year period) until eventually you can read all of Amazon’s, Apple’s, and Google’s ePub books in the iPad reader with minimal or no DRM. Please Steve, make it happen.

My final decision

I’ll order an iPad as soon as one is available, (not sure if it will be the wifi or I’ll wait for the 3G) and then if I can read all of my Kindle content on there it will probably become my tablet of choice and the Kindle may go away. I know that it will be a more effective device for carrying on day trips and for hanging at the cafe. I’ll just have to remember to bring a charger since I don’t believe Apple’s battery claims.

In the meantime, where is my DX so I can sit down and do some reading? Man this is slow, and clunky and OLD feeling today. Sigh. Makes me realize how true this Onion story is.

Holy cow, did I ever call this one right back in March of this year. Scary right. Apple has reinvented the mobile industry…again.

Apple’s new iPad is a radical game-changer, a disruptive competitor to Amazon, a disruptor to the software business and a great leap forward in terms of user interface. It’s freaking awesome. This will be Steve Jobs’ legacy:

• Apple update:
  • they just had their larget quarter ever
  • their gross margins are up over 40% while the rest of the industry is collapsing while fighting it out in the netbook category
  • They have over 140,000 apps in the app store that have been downloaded over 3 billion times.
  • They’re now a > 50B company.
  • Apple is the world’s largest mobile product company: bigger than Nokia, Samsung, or Sony. Holy crap.
  • 125M credit cards that have downloaded over 12 Billion products.

• The iPad
  • “netbooks suck at everything”
  • we decided to create a tablet
  • 9.7″ diagonal
  • custom processor
  • <1/2″ thick; less than 1.5 pounds;
  • auto-rotation, GPS, compass, 3G, WIFI
  • all new iTunes
  • all new iPhoto
  • all new calendar
  • all new address book
  • It’s a full on replacement for the old “day-timer”
  • multi-touch everywhere
  • 10 hours of work time and a month of standby time
  • insanely fast graphics
  • run all 140,000 existing iPhone apps at regular 1x size or at 2x full-size;
  • new apps can be built to run at full screen
  • soft keyboard is almost the same size as a real keyboard
  • plugs into a projector and a portable keyboard and has its own cover

• iBooks
  • 5 major publishers on board, more coming
  • beautiful display
  • iTunes like bookstore built in
  • Editorial notes from me:
    • as a user of the Kindle DX, I can’t wait for this. I hate the low speed and crappy hardware of the DX but love having my books with me eveerywhere I go.
    • They have only said “we have 5 major publishers on board” but haven’t said anything about how many titles they have. Amazon has 400,000 and counting and content is king.
    • I would also be happy to use the “Kindle for iPhone” application from Amazon if they release one. I can see having my e-books split across the two libraries which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world.

• iWork – all new iPad apps for $9.99 each (WHOA).
  • brand new apps
  • multi-touch
  • incredible app for a portable device
  • Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations.
  • [I'm floored by this $9.99 pricing. They've just disrupted the entire personal productivity software pricing model.]

• Accessories:
  • we have built a dock so you can plug in and type and recharge
  • we have a great case built for it

• Pricing:
  • DATA PLAN
    • USA:
      • $14.99 = 250MB/mo (good for most people) with no contract; cancel anytime you want [this is great because so many people were so pissed off at AT&T)
      • $29.99 unlimited
      • Both include free use of AT&T wifi hotspots
      • Cancel anytime is a great feature
    • Rest of world:
      • July 2010 pricing coming soon
      • but you can use a micro SIM to run it on your own local carrier with our permission before July
  • IPAD (wifi only pricing / wifi + 3G) [kind of like the iPod Touch / iPhone]
    • 16GB: $499/$629
    • 32GB: $599/729
    • 64GB: $699/829

SUMMARY thoughts:

As usual, Apple has knocked it out of the park. They have built on their successes that came before: iPhone, app store, iPhone economy, app store, iTunes, and now iPad. This is the beginning of the next arc for Apple and will add another $50B/yr to their revenue. You can see their follow-on areas to add: video camera for skype/camming.

The price models illustrate the best pricing strategy I have seen. They chose the price to go to market with $499 and also had margin requirements (knowing Steve and team from a distance) and as evidenced by their increased margins from this last quarterly earnings call. They then engineered it to be producible at that margin and at that market price. It’s staggering.

This will cause yet another Cambrian explosion in application development and a (temporary?) bump in the publishing realm as all of the struggling newspapers move their content onto this platform.

Fan-boy glow aside, this is a technology and business game changer across mobile, netbooks, and laptops and will fundamentally restructure things AGAIN like the iPhone did.

I”m shocked at how well Apple has consistently executed on their business from the Macbooks to the iPhone/iPod Touches, the App Store, the iTunes store, and now the iPad. This is the beginning of something huge for Apple.

Nice work Steve and team!

Sign me up!

For more information see:

• iPad Main Page
• Features
• Design
• Gallery

As I look at two trends that I’ve been part of in the past couple of years, I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which was about reaching out beyond the firewall and interacting across boundaries, and I see cloud computing which is about moving systems and applications outside of the firewall into “the space in between.” Now we have both desire/intent (enterprise 2.0) and ability (cloud) to enable much broader and deeper integration of networks of actors, be those vendors, suppliers, partners, or press.

I’m as guilty as the next person of always wanting to move to the next next thing from Apple or pretty much any brand company I’m associated with. I was one of the first adopters of Mac OS 10.0.0 (what a nightmare that was), I had one of the earliest iPhones, I got rid of my CDs about a hundred years ago. I stopped using desktop applications about two years ago. I am the ultimate tech savvy early adopter.

The issue is that there are two important factors to consider:

• your buddhist wanting mind will never ever ever ever ever go away and you will constantly crave the next next thing from Apple (or BMW or Ford or Walmart or Amazon or …)
• Apple and most technology companies have pretty well established patterns of releases and if you know them, you can ride them appropriately so you stay productive.

Buddhists call the part of you that seeks to find new experiences and that drives the shopping urge the “wanting mind”. It is the bottomless pit of desire that says “if I just buy that one thing / upgrade to the new O/S, get that new app for my phone / etc., my life will be complete and I PROMISE I’ll be happy.” Don’t believe the lie. You can choose to be happy with nothing. Satisfying that urge gives you momentary relief until your seeking mechanism picks a new target. We’re wired this way in our DNA. Don’t listen to it. Or at least be aware that’s what is going on when you irrationally crave the leap to the new O/S, even when you don’t really know what it will do for you.

I’d like to suggest that Mac OS X 10.5.8 (the most up to date version of 10.5) is probably the best we’re going to get from Apple in the next nine months. With the leap to Snow Leopard 10.6.0, Apple is putting in a stronger foundation but breaking a lot of stuff above ground. That’s because of this pattern:

• Mac OS 9.0….9.x.y: the development years;
• Mac OS 9.x.y (the very last release of Mac OS before adopting the new NextStep O/S foundation):this was the penultimate Mac OS 9 O/S – fully featured, fast, multi-application. It was a thing of beauty.
• Mac OS 10.0: the nightmare beta. Unix based but they threw out 10 years of UI and started from scratch.
• 10.1.0: It sucked less
• 10.2.0: They sped it up.
• 10.3.0: Getting better! (but more apps broke)
• 10.4.0: Hey this thing is fast, solid, and runs really well (and some apps broke)
• 10.5.0: Wow, I love this stable, fast, lovely, beautiful Mac and all of my apps run so well.
  • 10.5.8: Even all the little patches and glitches are fixed!
• —— big O/S. foundational break point——–
• 10.6.0: WHOA – a whole bunch of applications broke here. The finder was rewritten from scratch (a good thing) but alot of applications are now borked. If your drive was partitioned incorrectly, you need to clone it to an outside drive, format/partition it to GUID partition tables (wtf are they? yes, exactly my point), and restore the drive and THEN upgrade it to 10.6. Quicktime is a frankenmonster and now has a crappy poorly thought out UI and still requires Quicktime 7 to live on the drive anyway. It now only runs on Intel macs so if you have multiple generations of Macs and move your cloned copy around to different machines or want to use them as emergency spares, you can’t do that with OS 10.6 unless they’re all Intel based. They gave us a few new features (like Exchange integration which is great for those who need it) but broke a lot of cool tools like Widemail/Letterbox that give  you 3 pane views in Mail.app or Windows Live Sync or Parallels Desktop and the list goes on and on. This is a big foundational change and not a user release. It is Apple’s attempt to defray engineering costs of their new O/S by getting a bit of revenue in now which is brilliant on their part.

If you want to stay productive, update your system to 10.5.8, run Alsoft Diskwarrior on your machine, free up as much hard drive space as you can so your virtual memory works better and stay happy and productive on 10.5.8 until 10.6 hits at least 10.6.1 or 10.6.2 or maybe even 10.6.3.  Unless you’re an Exchange user, in which case you should just suck it up and live with the pain and upgrade. The upside of having Exchange integration will far outweigh the minor UI niggles and the upgrade path pains. But for everybody else, I recommend staying where you are.

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

I laughed when I read this because it’s so true. I haven’t heard anybody say “DAMN IT, I can’t send email because my inbox is full!!!” since working at a prior company where we used Exchange where 5000 people exclaimed that almost daily. What a colossal waste of their time. Only about 1/10 of 1% of them knew how to set up auto-archiving so it was a huge drain on the organization’s resources.

Good on ya Google. Nice simple ad, straight to the point.

There are more but those have been the ones I have spent the most time immersed in this last couple of years. I have worked quite intensely in teams that have used all three of these modes:

• Phone (audio)
• Google Talk (live chat) and Phone (audio)
• Skype (live and persistent chat and audio and video)

The experiences are all very different and it has become more pronounced for me lately. I wonder if anybody has had similar experiences. First, it helps to set some context. Every tool addresses a slightly different X/Y where X is persistence and Y is dynamism.  Bob Serr has a slightly fuzzy but interesting graphic of this on his site that I’ll link here:

Phone and video and IM are highly transient and very dynamic in nature. Intranets (particularly old-school ones!) were very persistent and static. That’s changing with products like Google Sites, Microsoft Sharepoint, ThoughtFarmer and MindTouch. Documents are moving up the dynamic scale too as they move out of Microsoft Office and into Google and Zoho Docs where they can be more dynamically updated. But you’ll find something called “Persistent chat” up in the corner and it’s something that has been around in many applications for years but it’s not something that people think much about.

My point is this: your collaboration platform dictates your collaboration space – how much area you cover in this graph. More is better.

My experience in working with Group 1 (phone people) is that it’s okay but human English language is not that great at describing things so I often have to share documents or my screen out so that the people on the other end of the call can really understand clearly what I’m discussing. It’s okay but it’s very limited and I often try to move these people towards more collaborative tools.

My experience in working with teams that are using AIM, Gtalk,  or MSN (does anybody use MSN any more?) is that we can have great one-to-one communication (open channel, ping person, chat, optionally move to phone, close conversation, close channel). Moving from that to group chat is simple enough (add a person to the chat) but isn’t frequently done because group chat was only added recently, so users are not accustomed to it. Most of the GTalk users don’t know that there IS a group chat or that you can do audio and video because those features have been slowly rolled into the product but since it was always used as a one to one chat channel, it’s kind of hard to envision as anything but. It’s a chat tool trying to move upstream to become an audio/video tool and it’s not getting there very quickly from a user adoption perspective.

My experience working with teams living in Skype is materially and significantly different. It’s like going from 1940 dial phones to 2020 Star trek video phones. You might think of it as “the way to make free international phone calls” but it really is much, much more. Firstly, the whole company can have an open “watercooler” channel for trash-talking and cross-company live chatter. It’s like the kitchen of the virtual office. It’s always there and you can wander in anytime to see who’s around or even what was said hours ago. That is the power of persistent chat. Second, you can instantly set up and tear down group chat rooms, sort of like pulling four people away from their desks and ducking into a meeting room at a real office. Third, if there’s a reason to do so, you can just hit CALL and all of the attendees are now on speakerphone. Ta-da – instant voice conference without having everybody dial into a freeconference on-demand line. Fourth, you can leave those rooms open sort of like project “war rooms” so that people can have discussion in there about the project and it doesn’t have to pollute other group chats. This is really just another persistent chat, but this time narrowed to a subset of people in just this one project. The great thing about persistent chat rooms is that if you’re logged off when people are chatting, the next time you log in, all of the missed conversation will be replayed for you. This is powerful stuff. Sixth, because video is built in and works very well, people tend to set up their laptops (or purchase new ones) with cameras and actually USE them. In a prior company, we bought all employees new MacBook Pros so that everybody had instantaneous access to skype audio and video without saying “oh hang on a sec – I have to find my camera and headset and plug it in.” Heck, even the new base 13″ MacBooks have them for $1000 each! Seventh, Skype now offers one-way screen sharing which means one less application to fiddle with if you just want to jump on a screen to demo something. It actually works pretty well. That to me is a bonus because there are definitely better screen-sharing applications out there.

Running distributed project teams is hard but it’s becoming the norm. Buying centralized real estate doesn’t make sense for a whole team anymore, not when you’re hiring people all over the globe in order to get the best people for the job. My recommendation is this: if you’re running a distributed project team, figure out how to ensure that they all have machines with built-in mics and cameras and use Skype. Set up a company wide room and a room for every project team. Teach your team how to quickly assemble ad-hoc team rooms and how to make team audio calls. It will give your team a sense of connectedness and the ability to assemble ad-hoc teams that is really really hard to achieve using anything else out there at the moment.  It’s hard to run a distributed team at the best of times. the more barriers you can remove (time-wise, setup-wise, technology-wise, excuse-wise), the better the communication, and the better the business can run.

Please add your thoughts to the comments below. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences here.