How to Change the World

Dear Santa: What I Want By Next Christmas

Dear Santa:

2007 was a great year and I thank you, but I want to provide you with my Christmas list for 2008. I’ve worked with so many engineers that I know that a 363-day lead time should be sufficient.

1. MarsEdit is indispensable for my blogging and Truemors. (If any Macintosh bloggers are on your “nice” list, give them MarsEdit next Christmas.) I need two enhancements: first, the “Media Manager” dialog has to launch faster. Second, I’d like to crop and proportionately resize pictures from within MarsEdit.



2. What do you use for email? I use EntourMail. Never heard of it? That’s not surprising. It’s my homemade combination of Entourage and Mail. Entourage is a bummer because it requires a rebuild seemingly every thirty days. After a rebuild, all categories disappear and rules go on vacation. Searching is glacially slow—so slow I’ve tried using Spotlight to search Entourage. How pathetic is that?

   

   By contrast, the searching in Mail is very fast. No complaints there, but I cannot get iCal and Address Book to synchronize with Exchange. Nor can I get the combo of Mail/Kerio/Exchange to synchronize with iCal and Address Book. And I’ve spent days trying to make this work. Santa, do you see the irony of a former Macintosh software evangelist using two clients to handle email? Please tell me that Office 2008 fixes these problems.



3. While we’re on the subject of Office, could you tell Bill Gates to make it so that if one creates a PowerPoint presentation on a Macintosh and then runs it on a Windows machine, the slide transitions don’t get messed up? I’ve had to do this every time I’ve the transfer for several years now. When you use as few slides as I do, transitions are everything.



4. Everytime I buy something online or get a password, I store the confirmation email in Yojimbo. It’s saved me hundreds of dollars and many hours of looking for such tidbits of information. I would like the ability to name a document so that it can say more than “Toyota Configurator.” Then Yojimbo would be just about perfect.



5. Speaking of Toyota, how about getting it to make two changes to the 2008 Highlander Hybrid? First, the steering is too vague—it’s bad enough that I don’t have a sportscar, can I at least get a tight feeling SUV? Second, the third row should be a split seat so that I could carry six people. Right now, it’s five or seven only—I don’t know what I’ll do if it comes down to a choice between a hockey bag and a child.



6. I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but this is perpetually on my list: a Macintosh laptop that runs for more than two hours on a battery—unless you want to give me a Gulfstream instead. I’ve heard truemors about a solution to this, but I’ve been hearing these rumors for a long time. What does Sony know that Apple doesn’t? As we both know, hope springs eternal every January Macworld Expo.



7. Do you think Steve uses a digital camera? If so, please give him one because it takes forty-two seconds for my copy of iPhoto to launch. I have 13,334 pictures, but that doesn’t seem like too many photos to me. Did Apple work with Adobe about speeding up boot times? You might also ask Steve to make Safari sort its bookmarks though Bookdog works fine.



8. Skitch is also a very important piece of software for me. It’s what I use to take screen shots. There’s only one shortcoming in it for me: it can’t “save as” in the JPEG format. I know I can drag and drop the file to the desktop in the JPEG format, but on my MacBook Pro, I usually can’t see the desktop. This problem will get worse if my next MacBook has an even smaller screen.



9. You’re probably not a big user of Facebook, but we mortals are. Maybe I’m too close to my next life to make it the center of my world. Hence, answering Facebook internal email is killing me. Right now I have 226 unread messages. Maybe you could tell Mark (Zuckerberg, not St. Mark) to enable POP or IMAP access to Facebook messages?



10. I know you have a sleigh (did you know that Rudolph is probably gay?), but it would sure be nice if United Airlines and Executive Travel Skyguide and other airlines and travel sites would figure out that lots of people have to copy and paste itineraries into emails and calendars, so how about a clean way to do this? I don’t really need the terms of service and miscellanous junk that gets copied most of the time.



11. One last item that is true of almost every consumer electronics and computer company: Print serial numbers so that people can read them. Whoever designed the nanotech serial numbers for Apple products is either a sadist or he/she owns stock in flashlight and magnifyng-glass companies. Are the numbers small so that people can’t figure out if their products are part of an exchange program? How many Apple serial numbers can fit on the head of a pin? Is this some kind of FSJ Zen thing?

See you in 363 days. Don’t fail me, Santa. All the best to you and Mrs. Claus.

Guy Kawasaki

Reality Check: Spokeo

Spokeo finds information about your friends—long-lost or not—and then tracks their online activities as they make updates. These friends don’t have to “invite” you, approve your friend “request,” or be a member of Spokeo. Spokeo is able to, for example, monitor their Facebook notes and shares, YouTube videos, Amazon wishlists, Flickr and PhotoBucket photos, Pandora favorites, MySpace updates, Twitter tweets, personal websites, and blogs.

The Spokeo process begins with providing your address book; your name and password at social-networking sites; or the URL of your friends’ profile, photo album, website, or blog. Spokeo then creates a “buddy list” of all the friends that it finds and displays them using a “reader-like” interface. The number next to each buddy’s name indicates how many new entries Spokeo has found. When you click on buddies, you can see the details of their photos, videos, music, shopping lists, websites, and blogs. The sites and services that Spokeo supports are:

Amazon
Bebo
Blogger
Buzznet
dailymotion
deviantART
Digg
Facebook Notes & Shares
Flickr
Fotolog
Friendster
Hi5
imeem
Last.fm
LinkedIn
LiveJournal
MySpace
Netlog
Pandora
PhotoBucket
Picasa
PictureTrail
Slide
Stumbleupon
Twitter
Veoh
Vox
WebShots
Windows Live Spaces
Xanga
Yahoo! Videos
Yelp
YouTube

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Spokeo.

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A Tour of PARC

PARC was the center of the universe for the development of many personal computer and Internet technologies. For example: Ethernet, laser printing, personal computer (Alto), graphical user interface, and object-oriented programming. Maybe “center of the universe” is an exageration, but at the very least, it’s one of the main trees as you can see by downloading this diagram or looking at this timeline. I recently got a tour of the company, and these are my photos.

The architect designed the outside of the building to blend into the foothills because Palo Alto residents didn’t want see buildings.

There are many large patios for employees to hang out on.

A solar connector that PARC researchers designed.

This is the “typical” desk of a PARC researcher: six monitors, three for a Macintosh and three for a Windows machine.

The “typical” keyboard of PARC researcher.

This little patch of orange paint is the original color of the walls. The theory was that orange fosters innovative thinking.

Almost every office has a window. There are also several garden areas like this one to provide a Zen-ish atmosphere.

This is the robotics lab.

I had the impression that PARC was all about software and design, but there’s a lot of power tools for fabrication.

This is the PARC gym which includes an on-site nurse.

This is the cafeteria.

Herman Miller furniture, pre Dotcom days.

The friendly staff of the corporate libary.

Looking for any of my books. They told me they were checked out. :-)

The library did have Founders at Work—because it wasn’t checked out. :-)

The first Kindle?

The first labtop?

The first PDA?

The first iPod?

The first LAN?

This is what it looks like to speak at PARC.

cFares Special Offer

One of Garage’s portfolio companies, cFares, is a leader in discount air fares. Magazines such as Money and Travel & Leisure have called it “Best for Airfares” and the “Costco of Airfares.” cFares would like to offer my blog readers a 90-day, risk-free trial of a cFares Platinum membership for only $1.

As a Platinum member, you can book unlimited tickets at below-market prices. Fill out the form here and your credit card will be charged $1. If you decide to buy a Platinum fare or to keep the membership beyond 90 days, your credit card will be charged $49 extending your Platinum Membership to a full year. If for any reason you can’t take advantage of these great airfare deals, cFares will cancel your membership with no hassle or cost to you.

Must-Watch Video: "Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price"

Now that you’re a nanotechnology expert, here’s the next trend to study: Free. This is a video of Chris Anderson discussing his next book. Chris is the editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail. Kudos to whoever at Nokia decided to put this keynote online for the rest of us. And kudos to Core77 for finding it via Nova.

Must-Read Nanotechnology Report

Batelle Memorial Institute recently completed a report called "Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap." It's a complete analysis of this world-changing technology.

Word of Mouth Versus Key Influencers

This summary of an article from the December issue of the Journal of Advertising Research (good luck finding the issue online because I couldn’t) says that common word-of-mouth advertising by regular folks is more powerful than “key influencers.” Which is to say that sucking up to A-list bloggers may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. It seems like it’s bad day for celebrity endorsements.

James Coyle, assistant professor of marketing at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, Elizabeth Lightfoot of CNET Networks, and Ted Smith and Amy Scott of MedTrackAlert conducted the study by surveying website visitors, conducting in-depth reviews, and analyzing website usage patterns. Said Coyle:

“We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral potential. Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.”

I agree. I think that most key influencers are pompous, insecure jerks who take themselves way too seriously. And I say this knowing that you can rightfully accuse me of being one of them. The marketing lesson is this: Create something great, sow fields (not window boxes), “let a hundred flowers blossom,” and pray that “regular folks” will spread the word.

How to Not Choke

I used to take an adult hockey class. Each session started with all of us facing the boards and skating backwards on the instructor’s whistle. We were all supposed to stop on a second whistle; then the instructor grouped students by how far they had skated in the limited time.

(This is a picture of Bret Hedican of the Carolina Hurricanes. Arguably, one of the best skaters in the NHL, Macintosh user, and heckuva nice guy.)

The instructor was trying to group people of similar skill levels for a more efficient learning environment. However, I made the case to him that by grouping people in this way, the folks in the slower groups (like me) learned that we sucked, and our heads got filled with negative thoughts. As a result, we performed worse than we (theoretically) could have for the rest of the class. Of course the instructor ignored my brilliant insight—after all, he’s from Minnesota and I’m from Hawaii.

Recently I read “The Choke Factor: How Stereotypes Affect Performance” which analyzes how stereotypes compromise performance—particularly of negatively stereotyped groups. For example if female students are told that women are stereotypically worse in math immediate before a math test, then they score lower in the test.

The theory is that by making a group aware of their stereotype, you can introduce “enhanced cognitive load.” Instrusive and negative thoughts cause a load that interrupts and harms performance. What do you think will happen when (not if) you are told that you don’t know how to run a company? Entrepreneurs—like wannabe hockey players and female math-test takers—should heed the scientific underpinnings of choking and the impact of negative stereotypes.

Here’s what you can do to avoid choking:

1. Avoid negative people. This refers to the folks who are likely to express the negative stereotype that first-time entrepreneurs don’t know what to do. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to avoid venture capitalists because they never tell you what they really think.) Certainly you should avoid “proven” older entrepreneurs who don’t remember how clueless they were when they were “your age” and now consider themselves experts.

2. Ignore the people you cannot avoid. As George Orwell should have said, “Ignoring is bliss.” If you think about what they said, it could lead to what they said, so figuring out what to ignore is as important as what to listen to. The best way to ignore negative people is to bury yourself in your work—to prototype like hell. When I’m writing, nothing enters my brain but the need to eat and pee—and sometimes not even that.

3. Invoke positive stereotypes. Positivity can enhance performance according to the article—it’s “fighting fire with fire” as the saying goes. For example, entrepreneurs could invoke the positive stereotype that a couple of guys/gals who love technology and aren’t “proven” entrepreneurs can start companies like Apple, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Perhaps this is one reason that Silicon Valley rocks as a place for young people to start companies: the wunderkind stereotype is a very positive one here.

4. Frame, or reframe, yourself. Finally, you can control how strongly you identify with any social group. For example, you don’t have to identify with “first-time entrepreneurs.” You could more strongly define yourself in terms of being a mom, dad, wife, husband, scholar, programmer, marketer, or whatever works for you. Or, in my hockey experience, not as a lousy beginning skater, but a 53-year-old guy from Hawaii whose peers are mostly playing golf if they are exercising at all.

Addendum: Several readers have pointed out the work of Carol Dweck regarding how one’s mindset can affect performance. Duh, I wrote about her and linked to a video of her. And here is a Scientific American piece that she authored. (Thanks to Mitch and Luke Burton.)

HomeTips: There's a Lot to Like

Google announced the winner of the Adsense Story Contest today: Hometips. This is a site that features free content concerning home improvement, remodeling, repair, redecorating, and do-it-yourself projects. For example, here are tips for hanging Christmas lights.

According to the owner, Don Vandervort, the revenues generated by Google Adsense went from paying for coffee to paying for lunches to paying for all salaries, overhead, and business development. The site's traffic is moderate--something like one million visitors a month or less if you believe Compete. I love this kind of story:

• The company started in a backyard clubhouse. Don converted the bottom floor of his sons' two-story treehouse. "Two-story" treehouse? How cool is that?

• The site has a clear focus: content for homeowners. There's nothing that I can find that smacks of "Web 2.0 social media" at all. This is just so refreshing: All you can do is find information, you don't need to bond with any strangers.

• Don added Adsense to his site by himself. He said it took twenty minutes. He probably didn't do any market research, focus groups, or 2x2 McKinsey-esque matrix analysis.

• He probably didn't even raise a dime of venture capital. He probably didn't even try to raise venture capital. He probably didn't even boot PowerPoint. He certainly didn't present at Demo or TechCrunch40.

Yes sir, there's a lot to like about Don's story: do what you love, focus on a niche, find a viable business model, and work for yourself.