The Idea Dude

Desire Determines Destiny

2012-01-12T09:15:00.002-05:00

2011 turned out to a frenetic year of hope, opportunity and energy. We had 18 students work with us to create Carddit. For many it was their first jobs as co-op students. Beyond teaching them design and coding, I hoped they learned about passion, desire and perseverance.

John Maxwell has an article of passion being the fuel of persistence. He said, 'desire determines destiny' and the winning side is usually the team that 'wanted it more'. Passionate people use their passion to inspire them to clear roadblocks, to do the seemingly impossible. Dispassionate people find reasons to doubt, looking for reasons to stop instead of ones to push on.

2012 is for me the year of persistence. Enthusiasm doesn't pay the bills, neither does vision unfortunately. But what keeps us coming back day after day is the desire to achieve something special together. I'd like to look back and know I've made a mark no matter how small, I've made a difference to the life of at least one person, hopefully many.

In the darkest hours, the fuel of persistence is our passion, our desire, our beliefs. Without that, we, as a group and as a company would be without a soul. The internet does not scare us, but it inspires us and motivates us to participate. I truly hope that our desire is enough to determine our destiny.

I'd like to think last year, we made a difference to many lives of students that passed through Play Dynamics. This year, I'd like to think we'll make a difference to the people who are with me in creating this great company.

What do politicians and programmers have in common?

2011-12-12T18:33:00.002-05:00

Not all politicians are evil, I do believe some really mean well. They look at the current government and all its limitations and shortcomings and are inspired to do better. They stand on their soap box and tell people they will reduce taxes, create jobs, offer free healthcare. All good stuff. Some even have a plan of how to do it, finding excess and surplus and build efficiencies.

The reality is once they are in office, all the aspirations are met with a wall of complexity built by many governments that have gone before. They are faced with rules, lack of infrastructure, fear, regulations and practicalities. Often they leave office several years later having met very little of their campaign promises. As tax payers we'd like to think they were incompetent, but how can that be when many of our leaders were respected and successful lawyers, businessmen, accountants before they were politicians. They were killed by the unpredictability that comes with complexity.

Programming is pretty much the same. Having been on both sides of the fence, programming and managing, there is very little I haven't seen. Yes, there is posturing, pet projects, politics even in software. The hardest thing to accept that in software, everything takes about 6x longer than anyone anticipates (that's 2 x pi for the geek-minded). Anyone, whether a manager or a programmer looking at a problem from the outside will say the infamous 5 word phrase, "How hard can it be?". We don't understand why putting a button on a screen may take a day. Alas it's the iceberg effect.

In software, 90% of the complexity is never seen by anyone except those toil into the night. That one little button could in fact pack a whole of functionality, making the implementer change the order of the workflow, create new database tables, dependencies and even unanticipated side-effects (we sometimes call bugs). Like a new car, software degrades from the day it is shipped. New specifications, customer demands, changes in scope, changes in the market make us do unspeakable things to an otherwise perfect and beautiful system until weeks, months and years later we look back and say, "What on earth was he thinking?"

The answer is of course, the programmer was only thinking as far as he could see and chances are if he saw any further, he would have built a behemoth that would never have shipped on time. Even as a seasoned software developer, I have on occasion looked over the shoulder of my peers and muttered underneath my breath, "How hard can this be?" only to realize a week later that while the feature is simple, the system complexity made the implementation speed totally unpredictable.

Priceless

2011-10-20T14:06:00.008-04:00

Need I say more?

Little girl kisses kitten

Wil Power

2011-10-18T22:30:00.002-04:00

Yes, that's not typo. Wil Wheaton gave us some love today and brought our Carddit site down. That's what we call Wil Power.

Just before noon, my co-founder Sharleen sent Wil a Carddit deck that she made. It's an awesome deck. (She has many, you should check out her other decks. Sharleen's Decks).

Within minutes, our site went down, horribly. Attempts to bring it back was futile, the servers were dragged down like bloodied boxers in the final round of a losing match. Realizing we were running out of database connections, we took the servers completely offline except for a page just showing Wil's jazz hands. It was just the type of humor we needed in the office and for all the disappointed visitors to our site.

The problem wasn't that we weren't designed to be scalable. We had load balancers, multiple servers and redundant database service all hosted in a cloud. We already off-loaded all our assets to Amazon S3 a long time ago.

It was a question of finances. As a small company we could ill-afford to have a massively redundant architecture on standby. Frankly the popularity of Wil and the love his followers showed took us by surprise. But we were back up within the hour, with a much more powerful database server and 4 front-end web servers. Zero coding and a bit of reconfiguration. I'm particular proud of our team, Sharleen, Tony and John.

We pride ourselves as being an agile team. Today we showed it. Hopefully, more people will see our labour of love, Carddit. It really is the best way to collect the best of the web, and take it with you (today on your iPhone, iPod Touch), soon on your Android.

So tonight, for the first time many moneys, I've downed my dev. tools to reflect on this moment. It's a small but important validation of our work.

There is so much more to come.

The gods smile upon us

2011-08-02T00:41:00.002-04:00

About an hour ago, I was doing payroll, a very depressing activity given that we're bootstrapped (aka survival) mode. I'm very proud of our team, the sacrifices they've made in time and money. But worrying about our financial future is a perpetual state of mind. I deeply feel my responsibility as CEO to provide for our team and our families. Even the bravest and strongest have doubts in moments of battle.

15 minutes ago, I took a casual look at the iTunes Appstore. Our app Carddit made it to the New and Noteworthy section in social networking. We're featured in #2 spot. For many this may seem unimportant but for every app developer out (the many tens of thousands) to be listed in New and Noteworthy or Featured App area of iTunes is a holy grail.

I often wondered whether we took too long to develop Carddit. There's the quick and dirty approach of throwing a dozen apps and see what sticks. As a consultant, that's what I would have probably recommended. Instead, Carddit took the team 6 months to build. We fussed over every interaction, every screen. Debated every feature. We often joked, that this wasn't version 1.0 it was more like 4.0. And maybe, just maybe, someone saw the love and attention that went into the app and gave us back some of that love. We are truly, truly humbled and grateful to be recognized.

I think I know why. On Saturday I spent the day with the family at the botanical gardens. My daughter had her digital SLR and I had an iPhone. As we walked around, I decided to drink my own kool-aid and started to take a couple of pictures and make 1 or 2 cards. I ended up making over 20, totally voluntary. I shared my cards on Facebook, more activity in my account in one afternoon than in the last 6 months! I got lost in the moment. Today we heard that same comment from someone else. "I lost track of time playing with your app". I think we definitely did one or two things right.

Carddit isn't perfect, yet. Version 1.1 is already in testing with some added features and minor bug fixes. We've already have plans for 2.0. I hope the world sees why Carddit embodies everything we believe in about play.

Carddit is simply about favorites, our photos, our memes, our memories kept in a familiar paradigm, decks of cards. Allowing us to curate, collect and share. Tony, my wise friend once said, the true success of an app not whether we get a million downloads (that is for the world to decide), but whether we want to use it ourselves everyday. I do.

Our fate is in the Cards

2011-07-28T11:11:00.003-04:00

Finally I can announce the first (hopefully many) Play Project from Play Dynamics. It's called Carddit. You can find it here in the Apple AppStore

Why Carddit? Play Dynamics has always been about Play. We wanted to pick something that would embody our vision, culture and ideas. We chose cards because everyone understands how cards, decks, deals, and trades work. We weren't teaching a new concept. We also thought that photos today should be more than just a post with a filter. It should be about wrapping the photo in a frame (in our case it's a card). Add the stuff the matters, the date, a title, a description. And then to treasure that card in your deck. Finally to share that treasure with others and of course, collect it from others too.

Too often our applications are developed to make us more efficient, make stuff faster but we lose the moment, we lose the play. Imagine that last loving kiss on your date was just a peck on your cheek. Imagine eating lobster and steak at your fast food joint. Imagine ice-cream came in a pill. It's all efficient but what happened to the experience?

With Carddit, we took so long (maybe too long) obsessing about the experience. It had to make you feel good before you even shared the photo. It had to make you feel good receiving one. I hope we succeeded. The best test is whether we would want to use it. My co-founder Sharleen made 1,500 cards during our testing. They weren't just the same picture of a coffee cup but while it was for testing, each had some personal relevance. Some were there because it made her laugh (like the memes), some made her cry (because they brought back poignant moments in her life) and some made her sigh (like albums, um decks, of her children as they grew up.

So if Carddit doesn't make you smile, sigh or cry (not because of the bugs), please drop us a line and let us know because then we failed in our intent. They laughed at me at the beginning when I said my measure of success would be that every user touched Carddit at least once a day. If you could see our feature list for the next 3 versions, you'll realize despite how audacious it may sound, it is plausible.

My parents are in the 80's. This is the very first software product, I feel I can explain and load on their iPad and get them to use. I can't wait to show them. Perhaps that sentiment is all I validation I need, "did I do the right thing?"

It's a long post, but I need to make a quick shoutout to all the people who participated in the dream. Many have taken huge drops in salary to make it happen. Along the journey, I've picked up some of the smartest people I know. We've given 15 students an incredible insight of what it means to be in a startup and learn to write for web and iphones.

So many thanks to all my friends/colleagues/advisers at Play Dynamics. Sharleen (my co-founder), Tony, John, Bert, Emily, Ke, Emily, Robert, Tim, Javier, Roy, Aaron, Lily, Abbas, Sinthu, Zac, Mubushir, Sanghoon, Rajan. And yes to my family (Karen, Nick, Courtney and Mozart-the Carddit Cat), I will finally be home for dinner.

Now that the cards have been dealt, it finally feels Play Dynamics is on its way.

This is my favorite card of the day

Pi after midnight

2011-07-20T18:36:00.002-04:00

It isn't quite four score and twenty years but it has been a long time since I updated this blog. Elvis hadn't left the building. On the contrary, his lack of appearance was because he was building a skyscraper.

Frankly, I could have done with a 48 hour day but we make do with what we have. Since we launched our Play Dynamics website in March, we've been frantically building our first product. With a lot of help from my friends...

We grew from 2 to 13 during that time, put 13 co-op students through our company, did much consulting to pay the bills and still managed to finish our product. Finish may be the wrong word because it is just the end of the beginning.

Last night we did the obligatory all-nighter, finding last minute bugs and issues the defied our intelligence. There is some software law that says all software is shipped after 1am. We did it. Well after midnight, we submitted our first app under the Play Dynamics banner to Apple. I'm eager to share what we did but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.

From the get-go, we built this company in the most unorthodox manner. We run it the same way that we write our code. Serious play. We play hard. For many it will feel like work. Funnily enough, despite the 16 days, 7 days a week, we rarely call it that.

It has something to do with the way we interact and support each other. The way we brainstorm ideas. Involve and mentor students. We're in constant play, challenging each other, living in the flow. It can be done, we did it.

If you go out to build your skyscraper or follow your dream, surround yourself with the right people. The wise men who have done it many times before. The partners who aren't afraid to challenge or be challenged. People who love ideas, who dream, who are curious. People with energy and tenacity. People who don't know what "can't" or "won't" means. People filled with possibility. I'm blessed to be surrounded by such people.

This is a milestone not only for Play Dynamics but for my life. I've shipped many products for many companies. This one is both special and personal. I did it my way. We did it our way.

More to come but for now, it's time to do all the stuff that piled up, ignored because shipping was the most important thing.

And why Pi after midnight?

It seems appropriate at least for the geek in me, that we shipped at 3.14am, ergo, pi after midnight.

Win-win is always the best way

2011-04-30T11:06:00.004-04:00

Friday saw the last day of our current group of co-op students. On Monday, we have a new group starting their first co-op term with us. I'm particular proud about what we were able to do for these fine young men. Sure, they were raw, inexperienced but they were enthusiastic, smart and willing. In keeping with our culture at Play Dynamics, I think we succeeded in creating an environment that allowed them to learn, grow and play and in return we have over half-a-dozen prototypes waiting for integration into our new product.

So often, it's easy to look at the bottom-line and to wonder whether it was worth the thousands of dollars we invested in these individuals only to release them back to their studies several months later. But in life you have to look beyond the bottom-line. It's about giving back and investing in the system. To recognize that the past months may have been the most important in their careers, because beyond giving them great technical skills, we taught them by example the passion within startups, the hunger to write the best code possible and the agility we need to survive in the Internet world. Unlike school where often the problem is simply a restatement of a known and previously taught solution, startups are adventures in the unknown both in market and technology. Giving back has been our biggest payback. The fact we have significant more code ready to deploy is the icing on the top.

Most importantly we taught you can have fun at work. Play without work is pointless and work without play is meaningless. They played at work and worked at play.

Best of luck to Sinthu, Abbas, Rajan, Zac, Sanghoon and Mubushir. May you continue riding the momentum you found at Play Dynamics to be far more than even you could imagine.

Wear your PD t-shirts with pride because we are very proud of you.

Moving around a mess only makes a tidier mess

2011-04-16T11:29:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about social curation these days. Remember how blogs flooded the Internet and we then had blog aggregators to try and solve the problem. It succeeded to a certain extent but didn't do two things, remove the noise (albeit was less noisy) or the volume. For someone to read 100 blog posts each day instead of 1000 posts doesn't solve the problem and I'm not sure it even makes it better. In fact the illusion that it solved the problem actually causes you to waste time filtering the 80 out of the 100 you didn't want to read. So what did we end up doing, most of us pick the 10 bloggers we love the most and just stayed with them. Because fundamentally that's all we can handle. It's not wonder the long tail for blogs is a characteristic that has not gone away. We tried to solve the problem at TheGoodBlogs by random showing you blogs that never made it to your radar and we did manage to connect readers to interesting blogs that you would have never found.

Back to social curation. There are simply too many startups that claim to solve the social noise issue by following a similar strategy. Social noise is even worse than blogs because the dynamic here is very small soundbites but a lot more of them. Tweets will probably one day exceed the number of blog posts created on a daily basis, if it hasn't already. So if we attack social curation by simply grouping stuff and republishing it, we are not really solving the problem. At best it is a large bandaid just like it was for the blogs. So instead of having to follow a 10,000 tweets a day, you follow 500 and yes there are all the other pieces of social noise like Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates etc, etc. Essentially, after social curation (as it is done by many today), you have smaller piles of organized social noise.

So when you're faced with an ever increasing social entropy, you either end up spinning your wheels trying to keep up, stop being active in your least favorite accounts and probably resort to finding out what's happening from trusted sources at lunch or pub.

There's an interesting TV series on extreme hoarding, how people uncontrollably collect and hoard physical stuff. I would propose that digital hoarding is even worse because it is less obvious and far easier to fall into. Is it because we are fundamentally voyeurs who thirst to know what everyone else is doing. Not knowing simply drives us up the wall. Add to that, telling someone something they didn't know enhances our status and influence in our peer group. We didn't invent gossip, it is as old as time when Eve told Adam what the serpent told her, eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Like they say, money is not the root of all evil, it is the love of money. Well, knowledge is not the root of all digital evil either, perhaps it is the love of knowledge. Didn't someone says knowledge is power.

Creating your A-team

2011-03-27T14:56:00.003-04:00

There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about startups and hiring the smartest people you know and creating the A-team. Unfortunately 'A' seems to be always associated with smart and knowledge. I beg to differ. The A-player is package deal. Here's what I look for.

A = ability. That's a given, there must be some level of skills that you bring to the table. However, it is important to remember that in all likelihood, the skills that you have today are insufficient for tomorrow.

A = aptitude. My definition, the readiness and quickness to learn. Speed is everything, long gestation of talent eats up resources and opportunities.

A = attitude. In a start-up there is no job description, it's about getting the job done. I look for people who sees gaps and fills them on a regular basis.

A = agility. Being able to change course on a dime. What you are asked to do tomorrow may not be the same as what you are doing today. Markets, trends, products change on the Internet so rapidly, we require people who can react, retool and reinvent continuously.

Startups are in generally in a continuous state of reinvention

Balance is luxury not the norm. As I'm writing this, I realize what I'm asking for. People who are fearless, passionate and proud about what they do. People who love what they do. And the 'DO' part is not software development, or marketing or any of the extrinsic job descriptions. 'DO' means people who are continually motivated to create, challenge, refactor, discover, explore and in the course of their journey, they may just create milestones that are simply awesome.

Changing trajectories

2011-03-24T22:57:00.002-04:00

Just got back from Waterloo to recruit the next team of students for the summer. The current team is working out beyond my expectations. I only wish we started earlier. To say we are helping change the lives of some really smart young engineers may be a stretch but we're certainly have a hand in changing their trajectories.

Hopefully but the end of each work period, they learn about what it takes to be hungry, savvy entrepreneurs. Learning about problems that change even while you work on them. Looking at the world with incomplete lenses, finding solutions in the most unexpected places. Most of all, learning about working in teams and the synergy that arises from it.

Hang around young people and you can drink from the fountain of energy.

Building corporate culture from scratch

2011-03-15T09:40:00.002-04:00

I came across some interesting answers to how do you create corporate culture from scratch

The answer IMHO is that you never really build it from scratch. The company yes, the culture no. Why? Because the culture is something that is brought in by the co-founders. They set the tone of how the company is run, how the products are built and how the people who help build the company are treated.

The culture of the co-founder is read in books or taught in schools. It is deeper than that, it is how he or she thinks about things, how they build stuff and how they treat people. For the one reason, bringing in an enterprise seasoned CEO or VC may not be the best option, neither is keeping a serial entrepreneur at the helm when the company has over a hundred people. It is hard to find a man for all seasons. Only a few come to mind.

Start-ups require people to be agile because stuff happens. Which means check your egos at the door please. Listen to everyone around you but the buck stops here. Everyone is a resource and everyone must be multi-skilled. I happen to be the first one at the office every morning which means it makes sense that I vacuum the floors. You may wonder if that isn't a waste of my time. Actually no, I figured out how to make that a play situation. Instead of whistling while I vacuum, I think, prioritize my day or ponder about that elusive bug. Cray used to dig tunnels while he designed his supercomputers. I vacuum. Two hours later, I teach. In between that I code. Between coffee and and the next compile I pay bills.

I'm not the only one. Sharleen has taken over producing the graphical elements. When she isn't doing that she's worrying about the user experience of our prototype. Between coffee and the next photoshop graphic, you'll find her surveying the web. She is our eyes and ears, watching and listening to the pulse of the web. And she manages to squeeze in organizing our next batch of recruits. She is also HR. Creativity starts with her.

Tony will be fixing servers, working on customer projects that have fallen off my table, and mentoring our co-ops. He is our resident tech guru but is known to throw in some sharp insight that turns our product around. And if I don't watch him, he'll sneak by and wash my coffee cup.

This is a typical day at the Play Dynamics playground. There are no rules just people who love coming in and doing stuff that needs to be done. There are no egos, and no 'not my job' here. Gaps need to be filled and people step up to fill them. That's the culture. We're bootstrapped so everything is lean and mean but it buys us the valuable time to play without agendas, without borders. We have super advisors but none who demand that we make a dollar by some arbitrary date. They understand the need for us to find our path and get the train on the right set of rails.

The longevity is not in our products but our band of heroes. I'm pragmatic enough to know the internet is fickle and often success comes by way of a heavy dose of luck. What we do agree on around here that the game may and will change but the players remain the same. That's what our investors should be investing in.

Today my thought is:

Our possibilities are only limited by our own imagination

How Co-op Programs Can be a Win-Win

2011-03-14T23:29:00.004-04:00

In January we took a huge leap of faith and employed 6 co-op students. Half the motivation was we had too much to do and very little budget to do it. But the overwhelming reason for doing it was I had heard so many horror stories about what co-op students (especially first year students) actually did for their employers.

Co-op work terms are meant for students to get real-world exposure of what they could expect when they graduate. Often their experience ends up being menial jobs like testing, making coffee, filling in forms and other mindless, boring tasks. The reason is twofold, either the employer sees this as an opportunity for really cheap labor but often it is because they are so busy, they have very little time to plan or train what these students should be doing when they arrive.

What it really boils down to is a waste of a pool of highly intelligent individuals in too many circumstances. At Play Dynamics, we have a philosophy that the more we give to the system, the more we will get back. We believed that we could take a group of really smart individuals and despite their lack of experience, they could contribute meaningfully to our cause. In return, they would receive the best work experience possible, something that they would be proud to put on their resumes and help them in their studies and in finding other jobs in the future.

The recipe is so simple.
1) Respect. They are inexpensive because they are co-ops but they are also smart. Treat them like peers, not second class citizens.
2) Train. The fact that they are inexpensive means you can afford to spend time training and mentoring them. You'll be amazed how fast they can be once you take the time to show them how.
3) Culture. Use the opportunity to teach them not just the technical aspects of the business but give back to the system by teaching them about business, marketing, sales and decision making. Most can be done as informal 5 min chats. They are like sponges waiting to absorb everything you have.
4) Motivate. Show them how much you love what you do and they will eagerly follow. Energy is infectious.
5) Challenge. Breed the culture of never giving up, inspiring and helping others, being curious and thinking of what is possible instead of lamenting the impossible.

The results can be amazing.
1) They will give back everything you give them and more.
2) They will tell their colleagues and friends about you making it easier to get the next batch of students.
3) They are an inexpensive way of buying you time, to do the things you don't or never had the time to do.
4) The best of all, you leave every day knowing that you can give back to the system that will one day benefit everyone. And maybe, just maybe one of them may turn out to be the next software billionaire or the Nobel prize winner.

At Play Dynamics, our students love coming to work, because they come to play. Play is work and work is play. Play is learning and while they learn, they do the tasks that we need to run the business. In 6 weeks, they have learnt to configure Apache servers, write PHP code, create SQL database, program iPhones, research tough technical issues. Most probably they have already done more in that time than many other co-ops in two terms or more. And during that time, they have helped us achieve stuff we simply have no time to do.

Win-win is possible, if we only took time to invest because that investment buys us time.

The Way of the Bamboo

2011-03-04T08:32:00.003-05:00

Bamboo is the fast growing plant on earth. There is a species called Moso which can grow up to 119cm (47 inches) in 24 hours and 24m (79 feet) high in 40 days. It is actually a grass although most people do not think of bamboo as such.

Ironically, during the first few years (3-5 years), there is no visible growth and then magically, it starts its astronomical growth spurt as described earlier. Unseen by most of us during the time of 'dormancy', it is actually building a vast root system in preparation of the growth phase. A great description of the bamboo lifecycle can be found here.

It describes the path of Play Dynamics. For over 4 years, Tony and I founded and ran TheGoodBlogs. TheGoodBlogs was not a financial success, but we carried on regardless because I believed in 2 things. Firstly, unless you participate you will not find opportunity. Secondly, every part of the journey has some learning and that learning prepares you for greater things to come.

Learning about Moso bamboo has given me hope that the last 4-5 years has been just that, the preparation phase. We learnt first hand about building scalable websites, dabbled in mobile applications, built an incredible network of people who continue to serve as advisors and sounding boards.

I believe most startups never make it past year one simply because they are unprepared. Bamboo would not be able to grow rapidly and to great heights if it not for the giant root network they established. The same is true for startups. It is rare that someone hits it out the park in their first try. We only see the superstars not the other 99.9% that never make it for whatever reason.

Play Dynamics was conceived in November last year with my good friends Sharleen and Tony. Being old and scarred (in Internet years), we were hesitant to pull the trigger, plus the fact we were bogged down with an intensive consulting contract. As the New Year unfolded, we decided this was the time. In hindsight, it was not so much the product ideas that intrigued me, it was the fact that collectively this group had three incredible ingredients: experience, creativity and energy.

Moments like this come often only once a lifetime.

In the space of 3 weeks, we moved offices, built a team of 10 and was up and running without missing a heartbeat. After month 2, we are still rocking, with product ideas and prototypes to boot, at the same time managing our consulting revenue to pay the bills. Four years ago, we would not have been able to move as decisively and quickly as we have this year. Most decisions and knowing what to do came naturally and when we didn't know, I knew who to call.

Bamboo groves are often called colonies because like grass, they never grow alone. As in the previous blog post, I really believe all that preparation paid off and now we have the right to play. So far, we're growing as group in leaps and bounds, hopefully our root network of people and knowledge will be able to sustain us.

At the end of the day, I am realistic, some of our ideas will tank and others will succeed wildly. That is business reality. But I'm convinced that longevity is not in the products but the people who create them and who can't wait each day to come to work to play.

This is the Way of the Bamboo.

The Right to Play

2011-03-03T08:39:00.004-05:00

The Idea Dude didn't leave the building, he was in the basement... yet again. Play Dynamics is officially underway. New offices, new team and a new vision.

What do I say after a 3 month blog hiatus? Where do I start? There's a firehose of thoughts and emotions and some of it is too early to say or tell. So here's an attempt why I'm so excited about NOW.

The Right to Play
The first part of my career was about developing software development skills. It's akin to knowing the basic principles of cooking. What ingredients to use, when and how to use them.

The second part was building teams and business development. I was learning how to create environments that made people exceed their own expectations and, in doing so, help you exceed your goals. I was learning about product design and working with people who didn't code but sold products. In a restaurant, it's called hiring your sous chefs, the front of the house staff, the managers, the waiters and dealing with customers.

The third part was running your company no matter how small it was. Doing the accounts, taxes, paying rent, insurance and all the stuff, like oxygen, isn't the meaning of life but necessary for survival. This was like owning your restaurant.

All of the above wasn't the holy grail. It never was. I didn't even know what it was myself. In hindsight, it was preparation for this moment. The moment I can truly say, I have the right to play.

The State of Play
This is what we do at Play Dynamics, from the running of the company, building the team, creating the products, it's done with a pervasive culture of play. It's an on-going experiment where we run fast and fail fast. Re-invention and pivoting isn't an event, it is an on-going process from day one.

We're proving work and play are not opposite sides of the coin. The energy every day is just overwhelming. The only regret is there are only 24 hours in a day. Even in sleep, we dream of play.

It feels good, it feels right. I love our team, our mission, our culture, our energy. It feels like the planets are aligned. And shortly, the rest of you will be able to see the first fruits of our play.

Everybody deserves the right to play sometime in their lives. We've just arrived at ours.

We're currently in our labs in a constant State of Play.

Stay tuned

Looking at the world with new eyes

2010-12-14T10:46:00.003-05:00

34 weeks ago, I published the following quote on my miniblog.

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. (Marcel Proust)

I look at the microwave oven, the yellow sticky note, someone looked at the problem with new eyes and found new applications. I could be argued that Google, eBay, Groupon could be defined the same way, they didn't invent search, auctions or coupons but they looked at them in a new way, with new eyes.

I wondered about how often we drive down the same road day after day, talk to the same people, eat the same food, to a point it becomes routine, done subconsciously. Our favorite neighborhood becomes a blur, a part of our peripheral vision.

Familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, but it dulls the edge. If a sunset was 24 hours long we would stop looking in wonder. If we lived on a beach all year around, we would start complaining about the sand in our shoes.

So where is this going? Just a personal realization, we stop looking at ourselves and the people around us with new eyes. They stop amazing us. At some point our relationships become commodities... it is an insidious process that catches us unaware.

That's what play does for us, it allows us to be delighted, to be amazed, to be surprised. We explore and often we discover. Things and people taken for granted through the passage of time offer new gems. We start to marvel at the hidden grain of weathered wood, the crease of a smile that shows not age but love, the kindness behind a gentle voice.

This is the Christmas to look around us with new eyes and be grateful.

Why developers play?

2010-11-30T09:00:00.002-05:00

Dan Pink in his book Drive! talks about motivation and what drives people to be self-motivated. His three pillars of motivation is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Given all three, participants tend to be in the state of flow, a concept pioneered by Csikszentmihaly. Basically when you're in the flow, your engagement is so high, time is no longer linear or relevant for that matter.

It occurred to me that this is what drives software developers and why we labor for long hours, often forgoing food and sleep in our quest to fix that bug or implement that feature. All the elements Pink talks about are there.

Autonomy. Software developers are pretty autonomous. Generally, there are guiding principles, good software practices and patterns that we abide by. But mostly, software developers are left to their own devices to write the code as they see fit. You define the goals, a feature or bug fix and that's it. Beyond the programming language of choice, we generally do not dictate how the actual code should be written. There lies the creativity. Developers are generally given a destination but seldom told how to get there.

Mastery. Writing software can be considered infinite play. We never stop getting better. The permutations of what can be done is infinite. Of course, as we better, we rely on past libraries, patterns etc to help us get there faster. But the destinations change and we learn along the way by our own mistakes, insights and looking at other people's code. There is always a better way, an opportunity to refactor and perhaps even a different way next time. Mastery gets better but never complete.

Purpose. This is always clear. No developer sets out writing code with no goal in mind. Better still even if the product is extremely large, we learn to break the problem down to small manageable chunks. We narrow it down to a single feature, a bug that needs to be fixed and then we focus our entire energies to achieve that small goal. In short, we learn to create reachable milestones that reinforce our motivation along the way. Each milestone becomes an achievement. The feedback is direct and immediate. It either works or it doesn't.

For many of us, software development is a game even though the deliverables are real. And here is the rub. We often view playing is all fun and no work. No goal and no pain. But truth be told, there is pain. Ask the gamer who battles a boss for 2 days while dying a thousand times. Ask a developer who is frustrated by bad documentation, buggy API or bugs that defy logic. There is defintely pain in play. But here is the point. If you have autonomy, mastery and purpose, you WANT to play even though there is a cost (be in time or mental anguish). You are engaged and self-motivated.

Perhaps software development is the ultimate and infinite playground.

It is Serious Play.

The future is irrational

2010-11-09T09:13:00.002-05:00

I'm reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. His premise is that the world will solve a lot of the issues of the future which to many seem unsolvable. He claims to be a rational optimist because he looks back on human history and sees how we have become better and better overcoming economic disasters, plagues, wars and other points in our history when seemingly our future looks bleak. He says he is a rational optimist because he has arrived at his optimism in a rational manner based on evidence and not temperament.

Here's the paradox. He can be rational only because the future is irrational. As humans we like to look at the past as indicators of what the future could be. Hence the need for warnings when buying stocks, trying new medication and so forth. Yes we will run out of oil in the future which may change the world as we know it. But who's to say we will be still driving cars and building factories the same way as today?

We look to the past as predictors of the future. Couple hundred years ago, this may have been acceptable where technological innovation and industrialization were slow. You could probably predict 10 to 20 years ahead with reasonable reliability. Today, it may be years or even months. A year ago, Apple seem to be on a path to world dominance in mobile. A year later, Google Android is outselling the iPhone IOS. Jesse Schell says that in the next few years, our ability to predict the future may be days and weeks and not even months or years.

In short, with the rapid pace of technology advancement, the future is becoming increasingly irrational. Remember when having a 100MHz computer was considered a physical improbability as well as having a terrabyte of storage. Remember when Yahoo Search was king and Google was the sum of two young scientists? I remember reading how the search wars was won and yet Google dominates in every way unimaginable. Remember Facebook had less than 10 million users in 2006 and MySpace had over 100 million. The future is not linear nor is it rational. Today, we glibly say the social network war is over and Facebook has won.

Human evolution and advancement has leapfrogged not because of linear improvement but through unpredictable singularities. Ridley's observation that many of these advancements and innovation are because of human cooperation and collaboration. People who challenge each other and build better mousetraps. There is the saying that 90% of all inventions happened in the last 100 years. With the connectedness that the Internet has created, perhaps we will say in the next decade or two, that 90% of all inventions will happen in some 10 year span. That is not entirely unbelievable.

Even 20 years ago, you never knew about scientific discovery except through the publication of papers and conferences. These generally happened several times a year. Today, there is unprecendented transparency. What you say today may be heard a million times within a week. 1% of that million will have thought of 10 different ways to take your idea and make it different or better. Ingenuity grew in a week when it may have taken 1 year in the past few decades or years in the past few centuries.

So for all would-be entrepreneurs, the future is irrational. The biggest jumps in technology advancements are black swans, i.e. they are not predictable. That is the opportunity. That should give rise to rational optimism that you could be the next person to change the world.

Footnote: Google and Facebook are not going away any time soon but to make the bet that they will forever dominate the Internet, you have to believe that some 10, 20 or 50 years down the road, the Internet will exist as we know it today.

Who decided we should not mix play with work?

2010-10-27T15:24:00.008-04:00

I'm not sure of the answer.

I sent my kids to Montessori school when they were too young for school. I didn't want daycare. I wanted them to flourish and grow at their own pace and into things that made special in their own way. Then school came, and they assimilated into the 'classroom system'.

Every day 20 children all dressed the same, facing the same way in each class. Education became industrialized. Of course, this was efficient. We graded them each year and promoted them to the same level. There is a curriculum. No-one, least of all parents, questions whether we are teaching them the right things and should all children learn the same stuff at the same pace.

Somehow modern education is about training, 12 levels, you get a diploma. Another 4 years in college, you're hopefully equipped for the real world. But it all seems so contrived, so regulated. Occasionally, a small percentage, break out of the system and become leaders, inventors, artists. But the rest, well, they sort of relegated to the monotony of boring jobs. Our goals become making the rent payment, paying of debt and looking forward to 2 weeks vacation after we have toiled for the other 50.

I called this the industrialization of mankind. I wonder what would have happened if we gave children the latitude to explore, discover, invent at their own pace. Without giving them rules that if you learn this 10 things, you proceed to the next level. Where would they be?

I'm pretty sure the inventors and innovators broke all the rules to discover what was seemingly illogical and impossible. We revere Galileo today and yet in his time, he was forced to recant his beliefs which ultimately proved to be correct. But at the time, it didn't jive with the what everyone was taught and expected to believe.

Somehow for most, we lost our sense of play by the time we reached our teens. Or rather we taught our children play and work were parallel paths and you couldn't do both at the same time.

Work is often characterized by doing the right things at the right time for a specific purpose. Over and over again. Play is about engagement, contribution, curiosity, exploration, discovery. Yet play is seen by most as time wasted, irrelevant, self-indulgent, unproductive... perhaps only because we made it so.

I wonder why?

Ray Ozzie's last post had an amazing quote..."And so, the first step for each of us is to imagine fearlessly; to dream."

Update: I found this wonderful presentation by Sir Kenneth Robinson an hour later after doing this blog post.

if you recalibrate your perspective in life, it's amazing what you can see.

2010-10-24T15:54:00.003-04:00

I mentioned the buzz about gamification to someone at lunch the other day. He replied that his father was a teacher many years ago and he took the unorthodox approach of making every lesson into a game. Not just give points for good behavior but literally created a game in such a way kids never thought of it as learning.

This conversation was interesting because the current hype of gamification has it's own set of critics, from "this is not a new thing" to "another case of the Emperor's new clothes". However, this man's father did things the same way I ran many of my development groups in the past. I figured that if people bought into a cause and felt an affinity to each other in the group, 90% of my battle was won. People would work beyond the call of duty and people would volunteer to help each other for the great cause. In the end, we all climbed the same mountain.

So I would agree that the folks from the gaming world wasn't privy to some hidden secret in the virtual world that was lost to the rest of us in real world. What they did do was figure out what were the important things to keep people buying games and playing them. In the gaming world (unless it is gambling), there is rarely a financial reward so game designers had to figure other ways to attract and keep players and get them to spread the word. Out of necessity, they figured many of the keys to successful user engagement.

It's an art that has been lost in the real world. It's either have fun or work hard. Indeed we were brought up that way. Remember the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" saying. We were taught hard work was the oxygen of survival and we should not have fun doing it. So life (usually at the onset of adulthood) became work, chores and maybe a bit of fun. Sure there were others, like my friend's father who believed otherwise. So did the creators behind Lego's Serious Play. But they were among the few, like lost prophets in the desert.

So my point is that play like work is a fundamental part of our lives since the beginning of time. Society at some point decided they were two different things. The rise of social networks like Facebook and online casual gaming has help blur the line once more. So there is much we can learn from the gaming world, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, why we play, what engages us. There is also much that the gamification folks need to learn about the real world, i.e. they need to undo decades of prejudice, perception and cultural bias. Take a poll of any top 500 business CEO's and I'm sure that they will tell you jobs are to achieve a purpose not to have fun.

So I spend my days now looking at my life and work in a totally different way. So much so, I am about to start another venture with a few like minded friends. If something looks like a chore or is unpleasant, I step back and think about what this context should like as a game. All of a sudden, I'm in control. I'll plan a couple of strategies and predict the outcomes. I'm constantly reevaluating, like the monk constantly regaining his balance in a fight (that's another post). Each failure, is only a setback not an indictment on me or my team. I focus on the prize, the epic event. Yet at the same time, I don't lose sight of the fact, the journey should be as pleasurable as the moment of reaching the end.

If you recalibrate your perspective in life, it's amazing what you can see and accomplish.

Hell has no fury like a user scorned

2010-10-08T09:16:00.002-04:00

I was watching a YouTube video given by Randy Farmer. He explained why the rating system on YouTube was broken. When you looked at many video ratings, they either had 5 stars or none. It seems logical now that he explains it. If you watched an entire YouTube video, chances are you liked it and would rate it highly. You would never waste time watching the entire thing and give it a single star. At least not many people do. Ergo, the proxy for the 1 star was implicit, i.e. anyone who didn't finish watching was essentially giving it a single star or a thumbs down.

There's as much to learn about what was not said or not done when analyzing user interactions. We get excited about the pages where we get million clicks, but we never ask ourselves (rarely) what happened to the pages that got 1 click. Surely there is as much to learn from that, because that actually makes us better. But we don't because it points to our failures and we hate those.

Women have already figured this out. If two men are unhappy, they go outside, have a yelling match, maybe throw a couple of punches and then make up and go have a beer. A woman scorned will slowly kill you with her stare and her silence. It's a slow dagger that gets twisted with every second, driving you nuts because you don't know what she's thinking and how long the pain is going to last. Of course, this is said tongue-in-cheek, but you get the idea.

Ronan Keating has a song with lyrics I'm going to repurpose. It goes like this.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all

When do chores cease to be chores?

2010-10-05T11:03:00.002-04:00

Watching kids play Farmville and Restaurant City, I asked myself why these kids are happy to plant vegetables, wait patiently for them to grow and harvest them. Why are they happy to cook, clean toilets and mop floors in the virtual world. Yet we cannot get them to pick up their socks or make their beds.

So when is a chore, a chore? and when is it fun?

I have two observations. Firstly, it's to do with self-motivation. When we are told to do something, there's a part of our brain that rebels. If there were no speed limits, most of us would self-regulate realizing speed kills. Nobody drives down an old country lane with no signage at 100 miles an hour. Yet, when there is a limit posted, there is desire to exceed it by 10 or 20 or just enough not to get caught. Being externally motivated (you must do this) vs self-motivated (I want to do this) is a key to that understanding.

The second observation is when you do something with someone, it's never seems to be as bad as doing it yourself. Try this with your children. Get them to go around the house and pick up stuff by themselves. Trust me, inventing perpetual motion is much easier. But make it a game, like treasure hunt and play it with them, everyone has fun and the job gets done.

Self-motivation and playing with others are keys to engagement. Same reason why people have personal trainers, it's hard to be self-motivated to exercise at home. Much easier to do it at the gym when you see others with equal purpose. The mere fact that you are in the same room doing a common task is sufficient.

My son refuses to buy games that are single player games anymore. His argument, he can finish the game in a couple of days and it sits on his shelf. Network games however allow him to play the game forever because each game is different with new participants. Note, often he doesn't know these people beyond their code names and most times, he'll never meet them again.

However, when we undertake journeys that are important, we prefer to do it with people we know, because they become part of the story, they become part of your history.

Why not?

2010-10-05T00:23:00.003-04:00

This weekend, my daughter wanted to make Green Tea Ice Cream for a friend as a birthday gift. I argued that we didn't have the time, recipe or ingredients to make it. Besides, the local Asian supermarket had a delicious brand on sale. We could buy it cheaper than we could make it.

She looked me in eye and asked why not? At the moment, all my excuses why we shouldn't seemed pretty silly. We made the ice cream and it was delicious.

Adults ask why in the hope we find enough excuses not to do something. Children in their quest to explore ask why not? For them the journey is as important if not more so than the destination.

Our sense of possibility dims with age. We should learn from our children.

Lost in Translation

2010-10-02T10:09:00.002-04:00

The more I think about gamification, the more excited I get. If the average teenager spends as much time playing games as he does in high school, there is a parallel universe that is untapped. Currently it is a universe that is tolerated rather than leveraged.

The fear I have is that when people get excited, it's like you have a hammer and everything looks like nail. Age brings the benefits of experience having lived the history instead of reading it. I saw the fads of AI, B2B, CRM, ERP, millions of dollars spent inappropriately because everyone wants that silver bullet, the holy water, the miracle cure. Many of these technologies thrive today because they are useful and strategic where they should be. Hundreds of casualties and dollars are littered on the way because they weren't.

Bringing new ideas into any company or life is by definition traumatic because they threaten the norm, they make you uncomfortable, they change your beliefs and they potentially make you look stupid when you see what you have done in the past.

The problem why ideas don't stick or don't apply is that something got lost in translation. Usually it is the intent, the core of the idea. We sometimes get caught up in the mechanics, the rules. We argue about the how instead of the why. Logic is at arms with the illogical. We forget that logic is often not a product of mathematics in our lives, it is a product of our culture, teachings and learnings. We forget these were created in the context of time. But time passes, so should cultures evolve, new discoveries lead to new learnings.

Be definition, at least mine, an expert is someone who knows when to apply something and what to do in that context. It is a generic principle. We should take heed as we go down the path of making business fun. Before of technology and ideas that get lost in translation.

My mission, making sure "making business fun" should no longer be an oxymoron.

My epiphany of the day... Progress is learning from the future not from the past. Is that not the definition of imagination?

Shall we play a game?

2010-10-01T17:55:00.003-04:00

10 years ago, I had this weird and wacky idea of making games on the Gameboy so that kids would play in class as part of the act of learning, or is it learn as part of the act of playing. Several years later, I thought Serious Play, a Lego initiative was just as important, introducing play into the workplace as a serious tool to problem-solving. So much so, I made it a practice to buy small Lego kits for all my team members. The whole premise was that if they learnt to 'play' at work, they would come up with some pretty unique solutions and have fun doing it.

Fast forward to 2010 and gamification as a concept is the latest buzzword on the Internet. The wikipedia describes gamification as the integration of game mechanics or game dynamics into a website, service, community, campaign, or application in order to drive participation and engagement. There's a whole bunch of folks in the gaming world who have realized that there is a lot of learning we can glean from the gaming world. We have created games that make people spend inordinate amount of time without coercion or incentives to play games. Games that involve problem-solving, coordination and collaboration. The argument goes as follows... If we have successfully created environments that are so immersive and engaging, why can't we do the same in the real-world.

With every new technology, there is undoubtedly a tremendous amount of hype, think artificial intelligence, push technology, yes even blogging. But that doesn't necessary mean it's the Emperor's new clothes scenario. I kept thinking how often we create gaming type scenarios because it took the drudgery of daily chores. Recently, my daughter and I were left for a number of weeks to fend for ourselves. Cooking would be the number one dread and concern. I decided that fast food was not the answer and my daughter and I set off on a quest. My daughter was my recruit. There is no epic event other than survival but each day was a mission, define a goal (what we are going to cook), forage for food (finding the best price and freshest produce), locate a recipe (look up the rules), cook (complete the mission). In short, 6 days out of 7, we complete our mission. It was fun not to mention healthy. Looking back it was a game. And that is probably the difference, we didn't set out to cook and find the fun in cooking, we set out to have fun together, cooking happened to be activity and delicious food the by-product.

I call it fun with a purpose. Think of those who do spinning (cyclists who ride in a group in a health club). The leader most often has a narrative, e.g. we're climbing up the mountain - tightening the tension, or we're coasting on the shoreline - relax. If cycling was a list of mechanical rules, i.e. ride hard for 2 minutes then relax for 1 minute etc, I would propose it would have never garnered the same kind of following it has today. Basically, there is a moderator, there is a theme or a narrative, a group of people with a common purpose, this is actually a game.

BTW: The government has already found a way to gamify taxes, it's called the state lottery.

So why do I think gamification is not just the next fad? Because we already do it subconsciously or in an unstructured manner. e.g. there are 21 traffic lights from home to work, to cut the tedium of the daily commute, I often try to make it home without stopping at any light. If I succeed, it gives me an incentive to repeat that success. It is a game. Whenever, there is a task I don't particularly enjoy, I create a story around it, add a goal at the end, break up the task into mini tasks. I'm creating a game to play in my mind to move my psyche from a context of resistance to one of participation.

Like any tech geek, I would love to write the next Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. I never do. I always feel whatever I do should be useful, productive and make a difference. Ergo, I always wanted to change the world, not just entertain it. Perhaps gamification may be journey that will allow me to do both.

Is this the next big thing? My friend Sharleen has convinced me it is. She covers this in tremendous detail and insight on her blog. It is becoming the de facto source on gamification on the web.

My passion has always been to inspire people, encourage them to imagine and explore the possibilities, to initiate and be the cause rather than be the result, to exceed their own expectations. If I can get them to do all that and have fun doing it and become better and more productive employees, it would count as my part of changing the world.

One man can only change so much. How much more can he change if he is able to inspire others to the change the world too?

Changing the world

2010-09-23T09:55:00.003-04:00

Johnny Reid's song Today I'm gonna try to change the world seems to play every time I'm in the car this week. It is appropriate at this point in my life. 4 years ago, we thought we could change the blogosphere by promoting the long tail. A noble cause but the reality is there is more trash than treasure out there. Certainly, a vast number of blog networks don't make enough money to call it a long-term success. It is time to move on. My only consolation is I didn't blow a couple mil. of VC money to learn that lesson.

John Maxwell has a great quote that before you figure at what you want to do, you have to figure out what you want to be. I'm in the process of figuring that out. It's never to late to ask yourself that question.

Some of us are missionaries and some of us are mercenaries. Some of us want to build Internet skyscrapers, others want to build Internet fortunes. Sometimes both are achieved, often not. I've always wanted to leave behind legacy not a fortune. That is my DNA, and as corny as it sounds, I've always wanted to change the world.

But if you listen to the song, it isn't about doing spectacular things but it's doing the simple things that touch people, one person at a time, a kind word, a listening ear, a warm hug, an inspiring thought.

It actually doesn't take a lot to change the world.

Taking a few risks every year

2010-09-22T08:49:00.002-04:00

I was watching a Stanford lecture where the speaker commented about a CEO needs to take several risks every year. I recalled the saying that if you keep doing the same thing you will always get what you always gotten.

On a personal level I think we forget to do that. Taking risks doesn't mean we put our life savings on #7 at Vegas. It means we should do something that takes us out of the comfort zone at least once a year. Better still, once a month.

It could be as simple as trying a food you've never had, visit a place you've never been, doing something you've always wanted but never had the guts or time to do.

Close your eyes and think about the way you shop, the food you eat, the friends you make, the places you visit. Most of the time, it's the same old, same old. It's comfortable, we don't have to think.

No risk, no reward as they say. Ever get lost only to find a shortcut to a destination you never knew?

Do something different today. I think you'll find it both exhilerating and liberating.

Finding the extraordinary

2010-09-20T09:12:00.002-04:00

It occurred to me, the older we get the more we become desensitized to life. If you look that young kids, they stop to examine a leaf on the ground or pick up a colorful piece of paper or simply anything they haven't seen before (much to the parent's dismay). Everything to them is extraordinary. Better still they always seem to have time to stop and take it all in.

As adults, we have no time for frivolities. We have jobs to keep, bills to pay, errands to run. We're constantly stumbling from task to task. Life becomes a grind. Our friends become acquaintances and finally memories. Where did the time go? We've lost our sense of the extraordinary.

Without appreciating the extraordinary, stimulating our curiosity, losing our imagination, we lose our ability to invent, change and innovate.

Unless we keep still and listen, we cannot hear what the future is trying to tell us.

Are we there yet?

2010-09-10T09:21:00.003-04:00

Imagine eating an ice-cream looking forward to the end. Imagine telling someone that the best part of Disneyland was coming home. Imagine telling a friend that the best of an awesome date was taking her home. Imagine that...

Sounds absurd? that's what we do when we start jobs, companies, projects. We look at the pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow instead of the rainbow. The irony is that too often there is no pot of gold but the rainbow was real.

Looking back at all the startups I was involved in, the parts I remember and cherished the most... it wasn't the money that was made or lost, it was the people I met, lives I changed and people who changed mine. It was the journey, not the destination that defined me.

Too often I wake up thinking about what I should achieve that day, instead of thinking what I should do that would make the day an important part of my journey.

If life is journey and not a destination is a cliche then why don't we live it that way.

I think along the way we forget what is really important. Society makes us believe that our status is more important than our experiences because it is easier to judge and measure riches and success. It is harder to measure the greatness of being fulfilled and happy.

Advertising is to blame in part, we too often show young, beautiful people smiling with perfect teeth, standing on luxury boats and driving insanely fast cars. We instill the idea that money is the root of our happiness.

I pledge to wake up every morning and take time to cherish the rainbow.

Recipe for success

2010-09-03T13:41:00.002-04:00

I took the family out for a Korean dinner last night. It's a small place, perhaps 16 tables at most. It looked like a family business, a couple and their son. I went there earlier in the week for lunch, it was the same three people.

The meal was cheap, less than $10 per person. The menu was simple. But the food was great. Great presentation, great taste. They pride themselves as not using any MSG. The way the food was prepared and presented made me realize that cooking was passion for the owner, not a means to an end. I glimpsed into the kitchen and saw how he patiently fussed over each dish. I can imagine this was a man who had worked as great chef in many other places before opening up on his own. To define himself in his own way in his own time.

Quite simply, they delighted their customers one at a time. If people can see that you do what you do with love and passion, they somehow are drawn to supporting you as I was to this little Korean place. 11am to 11pm 7 days a week. Whether it was true or not, it didn't matter, but from a customer's perspective, this is where food is celebrated and cooked with care. It was an art even at $7.99.

I will be back as will many others. Finding and showing your passion in your work is surely the recipe for success.

Digital books are eco-friendly

2010-08-29T13:37:00.002-04:00

I bought my first digital book last night. They didn't have it on iBooks so I ended up buying it from Amazon using Kindle for iPad.

The 512 page book was compressed to less than 5MB. Before I knew it, it was downloaded onto my Kindle. It's a blast to use, bright screen, adjustable font sizes. I think I just shrugged off my fear of not have a hardcopy on my table.

There are so many pluses to this. The publisher makes more money because each copy is effectively zero cost. Hopefully it gets past onto the author. I received my book within seconds and without leaving my kitchen where I made the purchase. I can carry any number of books with me without the physical weight and I can download it on my Mac if I choose to read it that way.

Imagine if they had an exchange program where you can hand in a physical book and get a digital copy, there's probably at 20 books that I would immediately hand in.

Just lovin' it.

To blog or not to blog

2010-08-15T09:00:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure where the last 6 weeks went. It went.

So I hang my head in shame looking at the void in my blog since my last post. The spirit was willing but the work piled up. There was no shortage of ideas and inspirations just lack of time to think them through.

And there lies the rub, thinking them through. Is it better to publish a post that is half complete or not to publish at all? Maybe that's why people twitter. There is no expectation of quality or premeditation. The worst that can happen is you waste 10 seconds reading a maximum of 160 characters.

So here's a post perhaps is much ado about nothing. Hmm, maybe that should be the byline for Twitter.

Otherwise enjoying a vacation in Washington and New York. Experiencing the magnitude of history in DC and the magnitude of diversity in NY. I feel so small.

Hearing is believing

2010-07-21T20:14:00.004-04:00

Logic never comes into the equation when it comes to buying the things we desire the most. Those decadent objects are never bought because you need them but rather because you want them. Think Porsche sports cars, Coach handbags, Apple iPhones, Centrance headphone amplifiers. Wait... did someone say headphone amplifier? Yup, I sure did.

Most people in the world listen to music as if we're driving a car with a muddy windshield. We buy an expensive music player and proceed to use $20 headphones listening to music ripped as MP3s. Like drinking cheap wine, if that's all you drink, you'd be happy for a long time. Until of course one day someone offers you a great Chardonnay or a 10 year old Cabernet. After the first sip, you savor what would seem like liquid heaven... and then you damn the person who offered it to you because life will never be the same again.

The only thing I never loved about my MacBook was the sound. It wasn't bad but it wasn't great either. My Thinkpad of old had Intel High Definition audio. It spoilt me to a point, I never really listened to music on my Mac for long periods of time. The sound was flat, boring and unimaginative. Finally, I relented and purchased a headphone amplifier, the DacPort from Centrance. Computers are not meant to be hi-fi devices so they put components that are generally decent and good enough but not stellar. The DacPort was designed to be a high end audio device that takes raw digital output and converts it to analog signals to drive headphones and preamps.

If you're expecting sound that's immediately a 100x better, you would be disappointed. It's not that immediately obvious. But like a good bottle of wine, take a little time and all the goodness is revealed in its own time. Here's why it shines:

You have to pick the right music and performances. The garbage in / garbage out principle applies. Pick a live performance with great voices and acoustic instruments, you'll hear the rasp of a sultry voice, the squeal of fingers on the nylon strings. Details you only thought you could hear if you sat next to a live performance.
Audiophiles like to talk about the soundstage. That's another way to say, the music sounds three dimensional, not flat but has depth. Instruments and artists are every distinct from each other giving you the impression that are in different places around you. The DacPort gives you that soundstage.
Here's the shocking thing. I have a pair of Shure, Grado and Sony Studio Monitors. In the past, they sounded pretty close to each other, presumably because the audio quality was vague enough to mask their differences. With DacPort giving very clean and distinct sounds, each headphone had an entirely different character. I was aware of the differences before but never to that extent.
Unlike many headphone amplifiers, the DacPort works great with in-ear headphones like the Shure. No hiss, no noise, just clean, clean sound.
The mark of a good amplifier is how much detail you hear in low volumes. I was able to turn it pretty low (while programming) and still enjoy a lot of detail in the music.

Warning: some of your favorite music you listen to will invariably sound bad, either because they were ripped with too much loss or the recording wasn't great. The DacPort isn't discriminate when it comes to revealing your music to as close to its original form as you can get. It's like watching the beach form a distance. They all look beautiful until you get really close, not everyone is made equal (unfortunately).

I don't normally do product reviews and I paid full price for this baby, so it's not some shameless endorsement here. At close to 400 big ones, you could get a netbook. But as far as audiophile equipment goes, it's a steal. It isn't rational. At the end of the day, as you step into your Porsche and turn the key, or sling that Burberry handbag over your shoulder, the price is irrelevant, it's how it makes you feel. Right now that's the way I feel when I crank up the volume.

BTW: When the CEO takes the time to answer your many emails very patiently, you realize there is a passionate team of people who really care about what they do and the quality of their products. Thank you Michael.

My MacBook is now even cooler!

2010-07-16T09:58:00.005-04:00

I finally decided to buy a laptop cooling fan. After upgrading my MacBook to 4GB, adding a higher capacity hard drive and driving a 24 inch external display, things starting to heat up. When I first bought my MacBook, the temperatures were in the 50's and now consistently it is in the 70's and sometimes 80's. (all figures in centigrade)

So I sprung some well-earned dollars and got a Zalman cooling fan. It's not ideal, the two fans are smaller than others and the airflow is towards the bottom 2/3's of the cooling platform. The MacBook gets the hottest at the top where the exhaust vents are and on the top left where the graphics card is.

Your notebook will heat up if:

You add more hardware like more memory, bigger / faster harddrive or connect external devices like an external monitor. More hardware means more current. More current means more heat.
Running screensavers will keep your CPU's and GPU's hot because there is very little or no disk access. Your CPU's will end up running 30% or more capacity and more importantly (all the time, not just sporadic bursts). This translates to more heat and less battery life.
If you leave your browsers open, be aware what is running in the windows. Rotating ads, flash advertisements, animations will drive your CPU and GPU nuts just like screensavers. Your CPU could reach 50-80% depending the page. And all this is happen while you step out to lunch or throughout the night.
Keep an eye what what is running in the background and what their CPU consumption is. If it is occasional like a printer manager waking up for a brief period, you're ok. But it all adds up. I've noticed that Google Docs have some bug that occasionally, it gets into a loop and my CPU max's out until I close the browser window. And I wasn't even editing the doc!

There are so many threads about notebooks mysteriously draining power overnight or overheating when not in use. Because you're not using it doesn't mean the notebook is being used!

So on to cooling pads, here are some tips:

If noise is important to you. Get the cooler with the larger fans. They range from 70mm to 230mm. Large fans don't have to run as fast to generate the same airflow. Fan speed is the biggest source of noise. Small fans have to run faster and generate more noise. I would have love to get the ones with 230mm fans, unfortunately, their design means the whole notebook is raised by an inch which is not acceptable to me. I type pretty much 8-12 hours a day.
Most of the cheap products don't tell you what the airflow is (usually this is measure in cubic feet per minute (CFM). You can usually guess by looking at fan size and fan speed when comparing different products.
Before buying a fan, look at where the hotspots really are on you notebook. Sometimes it is on the side furthest from you (MacBooks) or on the side (ThinkPads). Remember, the fan is there to move hot air away from the hotspot.
Running a cooling pad will not necessarily reduce your normal operating temperature of the CPU as much as you think. Here's why. The CPU gets hot, the heatsink draws the heat away from the CPU, the fan blows the air away through the vents or towards the body of the notebook. Under normal conditions if you can remove the hot air from the notebook body and the vents, the internal fan detects the internal temperatures are down and slows down or stops. The CPU stays relatively hot. So extra cooling on the outside at some point doesn't translate to lower CPU temperatures. You're reached steady state and the temperature gradient from inside to outside doesn't change. To reduce the CPU temperature, you have to make the internal fan run even if it thinks it doesn't have to so the air from the CPU can be moved away.
External cooling fans do their best work in the extreme cases. That's when the CPU's hot, the internal fan is blowing and you need to move hot air fast. Since getting the notebook cooling pad, the temperature seems to be fairly constant between 66-75 deg C while running the internal fan at around 3000rpm. This is true even when watching a YouTube video or the SlingBox TV channel. Before the cooling pad I would see temperatures rise over 80 deg C and the fan blowing over 4000-5000rpm.
Don't forget that your ambient temperature impacts your steady state. My office is good 5-6 degrees cooler than my loft at home. My MacBook sensors show the notebook body is correspondingly 3-4 deg lower at work than at home. Ambient affects what your steady state temperature flow.

So my conclusion, notepad coolers are great. Don't expect them to do much at normal loads (but then you would be buying one anyway). But they help keep heavy load conditions close to normal operating temperatures. High temperatures shorten the life of your components and increase the risk of failure.

Right now, my MacBook is even cooler in every sense of the word.

iPad goodness

2010-07-14T13:42:00.002-04:00

I managed to read a 197 page pdf document on the iPad. There's a neat feature that allows you to save the pdf to your iBook library. Best part it remembers your last page. But it's an exercise I have rarely attempted on a notebook or desktop.

The iPad format feels like a book that you can sit back, hold in your hand and pause to reflect on the content when you want to. Maybe I'm just old school.

I've been reading Marvel comics on the iPad too. The graphics are stunning but somehow it just doesn't feel the same as having a comic in your hand. I'm thinking it is because when we read comics, we don't just focus on a frame but our peripheral vision allows us to see the other frames that adds to the viewing experience.

BTW: The worst thing you can do on the iPad is browse car sites. Just about every major manufacturer requires a flash plugin and many just don't work at since the menu is flash-based. Must be a niche for some savvy developer.

Bridges of Madison County

2010-07-12T11:31:00.002-04:00

I finally got around to watching Bridges of Madison County. Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar, she should have won.

There was one moment that stuck with me. Clint Eastwood's character Robert Kincaid reflected on their relationship,

"This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime."

A great powerful comment. I thought about pivotal moments in my life, the crossroads where I made some important decision. How many of them were that certain. I'm not sure.

But often, in the face of risk, our gut will say something, maybe something like what Robert said. At that point in the time, we know what we should do, anything less we would live with a lifetime of regret.

The train has left the station

2010-07-06T16:51:00.002-04:00

I was watching Polar Express with my daughter over the weekend. Yes it was kinda weird watching a snowy Christmas movie when we're in a heat wave. But we're Tom Hanks fans.

There's a very poignant moment at the end of the movie where the conductor says to the boy, "It doesn't matter as much where the train is going, it is more important whether you choose to get on the train."

The older we get the harder it is to commit to new adventures. Perhaps we are all too aware of the cost and risk. Children never count the cost or see the risk. They definitely seize the moment whereas as adults we simply seize up like old machine parts.

There is a happy medium in between but often we forget to see the world through the eyes of children. If we forget, we may never know what we could have achieved.

What's in your knapsack

2010-07-05T07:47:00.002-04:00

Two elderly people were out walking this morning. Wrapped around their waists where sweaters... just in case. With the kind of weather we were getting, hand towels are probably better ideas, but instead they had sweaters. Just in case.

I wondered how much of our lives are cluttered with unnecessary articles, habits, thoughts, feelings, regrets, hate. Things we choose to carry around us because we are afraid by letting go, we would lose them. But what if we do? Would it be the end?

We do it all the time. I'm notorious for keeping boxes after taking out the items. Just in case I need to return them, I tell myself. 10 years, after the items have been thrown out, the boxes are still there. Just in case. My parents do the same, in their case, I'm sure it is because they know what it is like not to have things. For them, it is a habit of being frugal. And mostly it is a habit.

We are all hoarders in some way. Whether it is physical or emotional, we keep things around. Many of them are unnecessary. Maybe it is our primeval gathering instinct but I suspect it is just our insecurities.

George Clooney gives his knapsack lecture in his movie Up in the Air. One can read so much in that metaphor, e.g. empty knapsack means empty soul. It does make me wonder how often do we check what we have in our lives. How much is redundant? How much of it has no value or use anymore?

To have an empty knapsack would be a tragedy. There must be things, memories, feeling, people who help define us and build our world around us. I guess the problem is we seldom look inside to figure out what we should leave behind, to make space for the new. If we don't, our knapsacks will eventually drag us down and we remain the same.

They say if we continue to the do same things, we will get what we always gotten. It is always time to change. Not necessarily monumental change. Just tweaks here and there and before we know it, we become new "me's"/

Having room to breathe

2010-07-03T11:05:00.002-04:00

Once again, I slipped into the blogging abyss. I don't believe in frivolities, I'd rather not blog than fill this space for the sake of putting some content up. I make a poor candidate for Twitter and Facebook. I honestly don't know why people would care that I had a great day at the beach yesterday. I don't deny the value of the social network. I just don't believe in digital pollution.

To be honest, I have been criticized in the past for not initiating or speaking up because I was told that my voice does matter and the content always has merit. Unfortunately, I am an introvert and it's a gene or DNA thing. Like a sword, my voice is never used in jest but used when needed to. In truth, I am a thinker. I get lost in my thoughts, really.

The past month has been a hectic whirlpool of activities as we help a client with some much need features that would make their big marketing push. 14-16 days don't give one room to think of other things. Nor does it help with the morning quiet time I religiously set out for myself.

It did prove one thing. If you have no room to breathe, or have no time to reflect, you will stop growing as an individual. When you're in a jungle slashing away furiously around you, beating a path, you're not above the treetops looking at where you should be going.

We love our client to bits. They have given us the financial freedom to make them successful and so far I think we have done just that. At the back of mind, there's a nagging sense that it is like a pair of golden handcuffs, because we're not building our own futures beyond being terrific consultants. I am truly grateful for once again having our heads above water but I embarked on this journey exactly 4 years ago to beat to our own drum, not someone else's.

Tealeaf is away for 3 weeks and I'm holding the fort. A lot of things have changed in the last 4 years. I've learnt a lot on all fronts. Most of all you learn a lot about yourself. You faced with your own frailties, shortcomings and learn to build on your strengths. Most importantly, you learn to survive. They can't teach that, you must learn it on your own. After 4 years, I feel like I've just started, it was my apprenticeship, to build a set of tools for the next 4 years.

Where will the next 4 years take me? I'd be a fool to predict. Some things don't change. I love to empower people, build great products, offer superb user experiences. Basically make my stay in the digital space a memorable one to those we touch.

I always ended each of my journeys with the Toy Story phrase, "To Infinity and Beyond". Unfortunately, reality is around the corner and is much more tangible than infinity. Nevertheless, I'm always a digital dreamer. Microsoft used to have the tagline, "Where would you want to go today?" I need to start asking myself that question again...

Winston Churchill said it best, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning".

We've drunk the Apple Kool-aid the past 18 months. So it is only fitting I tell myself, Steve's 4 famous words...

"Stay hungry, stay foolish"...

Bling is in our DNA

2010-06-06T19:09:00.002-04:00

So I'm standing in the Apple store looking at the 15 inch MacBook with the anti-glare screen. Next to it is a standard MacBook with the glossy screen. It's been a rant of mine about how Apple and other notebook manufacturers have gone down the evil path of offering glossy screens that give off horrible reflections making it difficult to work over long periods of time.

Firstly, I pull up a long web article that consisted of lots of text. My theory is confirmed, that is much easier to read the one with the anti-glare. So I'm thinking that it would be great to trade up since I do spend 10-12 hours a day writing software.

But a strange thing happened. I noticed the photos on the anti-glare Macbook appeared washed out. The glossy screen seemed to show deeper and more vibrant colors. Indeed, the anti-glare screen seemed to put a snowy haze over everything, blacks looked like dark grays and the colors looked dull.

I reached an interesting cross-road in my analysis. Even though, I knew that as a programmer and someone who reads a lot of text throughout the day, buying the anti-glare Macbook was the right logical choice, the emotion side of me kept reminding me that I will miss the vibrant colors and deep blacks. I wondered if I would fall in love with the anti-glare version the same way as I have with my current glossy MacBook.

What happened to the logical, sensible me? My only explanation is that bling is our DNA. We love shiny things. As consumers we feast with our eyes. We buy shiny cars. We put sequins on our dresses. Our skyscrapers are monuments of glass. Every TV and notebook manufacturer has realized that. I played with my iPad the same night and wondered if I would have felt the same way, if the screen was also anti-glare. I half-suspect, I would still enjoy it but it would cease to be that new shiny thing that shimmered in my hands.

Most of our purchases are based on emotions and often on impulse. Yes, we'll compare features and do our research but our final decision is seldom based on logic. We will find ways to justify why we will buy the inferior one simply because it looked better.

Glossy is king and shiny is in. There are often stories of crows that lined their nests with jewelery, beads, marbles and other shiny things. Perhaps we are all birds of the same feather.

Apple needs to lighten up

2010-06-02T09:09:00.003-04:00

First up, I'm an Apple fan and have been since the Apple IIe in 1983. We have iPods, iPad, iMacs, iPhone, MacBooks. I loved the Mac commercials poking fun at the Microsoft products. I used to be a Microsoft fan too, still am. So for me, it's just great entertainment, nothing more or nothing less.

So I'm a little surprised at how they handled Ellen DeGeneres skit on the iPhone. First of all, it's coming from a comedian and talk show host. It probably borders on satire in some ways. But frankly, every mistake she made, I've made too. Typed the wrong characters, sent an SMS by mistake. It's not misrepresentation but reality. Apple saw fit to scold her and she had to offer a public apology. It's nowhere close to the constant stream of Apples ads ridiculing Microsoft.

Apparently what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. So it's a little disappointing to see that reaction. Apple, you should be fashionably sensitive but way to cool to care.

The 3 i's revisited

2010-06-01T09:31:00.002-04:00

I used to have the 3 i's on my business card. Funnily enough, if you have three words with exactly the same starting character, it's harder to remember.

The i's where Imagine, Innovate and Initiate. I believed in it and taught my teams to believe it it too.

Imagine - most of us don't practice the art of possibility (beyond the usual 'I want to be a billionaire'). We accept the status quot. We travel the same path every day, use the same gadgets, get the same pay check. Imagining means thinking of the what-if's and not worrying how absurd it sounds. Think about the microwave, the cellphone, wireless internet. A hundred years ago, it would be absurd. Today it is a commodity we take for granted.

Innovate - means bringing your imaginations into reality. Figuring out the path, finding the way. Innovating forces you to look at things differently, doing it differently because doing it the same way every day will get you the same result every time.

Initiate - get off our butts and doing it. The first step is always the hardest. Ask any toddler. But it doesn't stop him for trying and eventually he will learn to run and maybe, just maybe, become the fastest in the world.

The thing with the 3 i's is that they are things we do ourselves, they aren't things others do for us. There is no external barrier, just us. Sometimes we are our own biggest impediments.

Often I would imagine but too lazy to innovate and even if I find the energy, initiating is such a hill climb. But if we think of all the great inventions of our time, are these not the first 3 steps that they took?

The 3's are a constant reminder of what I need to do make a difference.

Far from the madding crowd

2010-05-29T08:42:00.002-04:00

6:30am and a stroll along the Niagara Falls. No crowds. Just some runners and a few tourists. The air is fresh punctuated by the twitter of birds and the roar of the water. Amazing!

Now I'm sitting by the pool on the 14th floor blogging while my daughter swims. I love my iPad. I could get used to this. Only regret? I didn't get the 3G version, there are definitely times when there isn't a hotspot available. I'm thinking of getting one of those mobile pocket wimax routers so I can use that with my iPhone, iPad and MacBook at the same time. Usually when we travel, there are also another laptop, netbook and another smartphone. These new 3G pocket routers are the size of a pack of cards and will connect up to 5 devices.

The protective layer over the iPad screen works well. I probably will forgo the customary screen protector. If I look back at all my devices, the Palm V, the Dell pocket pc, they all became obsolete before they broke down or became severely scratched. I know of families that wrap their couches in plastic. Yet we all drive $20,000+ cars in the worst conditions with hot sun, hail and snow. Isn't that ironic. I'm going to stop wrapping my life in plastic and live for the now.

Finding the beauty around us

2010-05-25T10:20:00.002-04:00

We visited the Royal Botanical Gardens over the weekend. Just an amazing explosion of color from the tulips to the irises and lilacs. Apparently there are only 20 natural occurring varieties of lilacs but over 1600 man-made / engineering strains. Boggles the mind.

I thought the possibility to moving closer to the gardens when I retire. The idea of being able to visit the many gardens and hiking possibilities were intriguing. Then I wondered would it be as special if I saw the wonderful display of flowers every week. Part of our amazement and wonder is because we visit the gardens once or twice a year.

Would we become jaded if we saw it every day? Would we stop looking and visiting after a while? Seth Godin talks about the purple cow. How a trip to the countryside gets everyone excited with the first siting of cows. 2 hours later, the cows are no longer a novelty and we hardly notice they are there.

We should take time to stop and examine the beauty around our daily lives that we too easily take for granted because they are always there.

Blogging via the iPad

2010-05-23T09:42:00.002-04:00

I had some good friends bring me an iPad several weeks ago from the US. Unfortunately we were so swamped with work we hardly had time to play with it. So here's my first attempt at doing something really useful on it. My first blog post on the iPad.

I can see how I would blog more often. It's a device that will readily on hand most of the time. No more jotting down thoughts so I can create the blog later on my Macbook.

I used to think Apple should have put the MacOS instead of the iPhone OS. I've changed my mind. It would create some issues like trying to be as functional as it's bigger brothers the Macbooks. The iPad should not be seen as a computing device, it is a digital assistant. The digital media companion and when you think about, that's all we really need 99% of the time. A little surfing, a little blogging, watch a video, read email and even play a game. Oh yes, as my daughter reminds me as she watches me type this. And read books.

Do we really need that big notebook / desktop? When we are away from our desks. Probably not.

Typing on the keyboard is not as bad as I anticipated.

Now to go and sit under a tree and read....

Finding the right lens

2010-05-20T08:45:00.002-04:00

This week, a local camera shop inserted a terrific flyer in our newspaper. Rather than the usual talk about great prices, advanced technology and all the gee whiz features of the latest cameras, it took different approach.

It simply told us, if you want to take a picture of that bird on a tree far away, there's a lens for that. Or if you want to focus on a beautiful person and blur the background so she stands out, there's a lens for that. Or if you want to squeeze a whole group of people into one picture, there's a lens for that too. And don't forget that funny lens that makes it look like you were in a fish bowl.

...And by the way, we have cameras that work with all the lenses.

Brilliant.

The message was simple, unexpected, engaging and told us about all the kinds of pictures we could take. ...And by the way, we have cameras that work with these lenses. They weren't selling product, they were selling possibility and opportunity. They were selling a result that you and I could easily understand. They were selling inspiration.

As I walked along the park this morning, (btw: at 6am, it always feels like there's only 10 people in the entire universe. And they all smile and say good morning, isn't that awesome?) I though about that ad, and about framing. How photographers have a great eye for framing a picture, using the right lens to take a picture that conveys the right message.

Made me think about how we forget to frame our lives, our moments, our activities with the right lens. Because we are gifted with great eyes that can see far and near pretty much at the same time. We always see the big picture, the periphery. Sometimes it's just too much information.

Often we forget to use the right lens to frame our lives. To focus on far and beyond when planning our goals and lives. To widen our arms to encompass our family and friends. To focus on special moments and blur our surroundings to make it special. And sometimes to take a really wacky perspective on the world because it's fun and makes us laugh.

The frame isn't the picture, but it sure helps us figure what the picture should be and what we should be looking at.

Using the right lens in life is about defining the moments, understanding why they are important and their context relative to our entire lives.

What's wrong with this equation

2010-05-19T10:19:00.002-04:00

I travel to our office every day for the past 4 years. It's about 12km. Within that period of time, I pass through 24 sets of traffic lights. 24! If they are in my favour, I can do the commute in less than 15 minutes. In the morning it's more like 40 minutes.

So during my commute, some external force aka traffic lights have the power to tell me what to do 48 times.

Got me thinking. We think we have free will from the time we wake up till we go to bed. Subconsciously, we are governed every day by rules beyond our control. How fast we should drive. When to start and stop. Where to park. What to eat. What we watch on TV and when.

We think we have choice but in reality our choices are never in a vacuum, they are always within some defining box. The designated parking spaces within the car park. What we can order at the local coffee shop.

Then there are the choices we think we are making but really are influenced by who we know, what we see on billboards and ads and what our friends may think.

I like to think I have the freedom of choice. But in reality for the most part of our lives, our choices have already been made or we are fooled into thinking we are choosing when someone has already defined the options.

Day 2, I joined the 50+ club

2010-05-18T09:05:00.002-04:00

It wasn't the mile-high club, more like the 50 mile-club. This morning, it was a walk in the park at 6:30am. As per my last post, I'm committed to giving myself the first hour of every day.

It is the best hour.

Just me, the birds and few other 50+ seniors.

There's a few ladies doing a few brisk laps around the pond.

An old man practicing Tai Chi on the bridge as the sun rises.

And me. Just me.

My kids are reaching the age where they are end their school era and entering adulthood. I'm fast approaching the 50+ club. Different perspectives, different goals. I wish I could tell them what really matters in life and what doesn't. I'm not sure they'll understand. I'm not sure I know either.

But I did learn in the last two days about perspective. About stepping back, way back and thinking about what really matters. And asking ourselves, the thing we think is so important right now, how would we feel about it in 5, 10, 15 years.

Oh, yes, I got my blogging mojo back it seems.

All I needed was a change in my routine and making time for me.

More often, I'm the March hare (aka white rabbit) in Alice in Wonderland. "I'm late, I'm late, no time to lose, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late". It's time I stopped to enjoy the Mad Hatter's Tea Party or talk to the Walrus about cabbages and kings.

Finding the inspiration

2010-05-17T10:08:00.002-04:00

Bloggers come in all shapes and guises. Some blog every thought, whim or desire. These people are probably avid twitterers, with active Facebook accounts, LinkedIn networks and a couple other social networks to boot.

My modus operandi is different. I prefer to blog about things that move me. Moments that I can go back several years later and still derive the same inspiration or emotion I had at the time of the blog post. That's just me.

Lately it's been tough, I get inspired many times in the day. Problem is it's usually squeezed between heavy workloads that really take it's toll. By the time, I get the 5 minutes, the inspiration is gone. The thought is still there but the ability to crank out a post that's just right has disappeared.

Today was different. There were probably 10 cars on the road. The birds were singing. The air was fresh. I was ready for the gym. Yes, it is Monday morning. The difference. It's 6am.

Developers tend to be night owls, raging into the night, laboring over the feature that just doesn't quite work. So getting up early is hard. Especially when the order of the day is wake up kids, get breakfast, make lunch and cart the kids to school.

This morning was different. At 6am. The world is pretty much still at peace. The drivers are courteous. Did I mention the air is fresh? There is a ton of parking at the gym and everyone seems to be absorbed into their workouts, deep in their own thoughts or maybe just not fully awake.

The epiphany came on the way home. As parents, spouses, workers, we grind out every day, waiting for that hour at the end of day to unwind. We drink from the bottom of the well. We eat the last crumb. We've been there and most of us are still there.

Surely we should give the best part of the day to ourselves, even if it is just a moment, an hour. And it shouldn't be 9pm at night. It should be the first thing we do for ourselves.

This morning showed me what Monday could be. And Tuesday. And Wednesday... So at least until the first snow, I resolve to slip out 6am every morning for me and only me. Whether it is the gym or a walk by the lake, I'm not saving the best for last. I'm savoring it first.

Who cares if the rest of the day is crappy? The main thing is it started right and if the rest turns out bad, there is still another sunrise to look forward to. Another new beginning. A new me.

Jumpstart your vision

2010-04-20T10:50:00.002-04:00

I was reading a John Maxwell article today. John said, "...Many people don't jumpstart their lives because they don't have anything to jump to! They plod along through life with little more than survival in mind. Visionaries dare to dream. They peer into the future and generate possibilities in their mind's eye..."

I believe most of the human race wake up in the morning waiting to be told what to do instead of thinking about what they want and should do. Jumpstarting your vision takes energy, guts and imagination.

Energy because we are entropic creatures by nature. All things being equal we prefer to settle to a low energy state, our comfort level. Jumpstarting a vision takes energy because it calls us to step beyond our boundaries and often into the unknown.

Guts because more often than not, we will be wrong. We will stand out from the crowd because our vision makes us different. It leaves us open to disappointment and ridicule. True visionaries will travel the path because they fear more that they will regret not travelling down the path.

Imagination because a vision requires bold thinking, exploring possibilities, questioning norms and asking what-if? Proust said "The real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes". Opportunities surround us each day, each waking minute. Too often we see our surroundings with old eyes. Discovery does not mean we have to travel far from where we are. Maybe all we have to do is look around us with a new lens.

Of course, all of the above is moot if we do not initiate. To make it to the top of the stairs means taking one step at a time.

I used to keep the three I's on my business card, Imagine, Inspire, Initiate. Imagining possibilities (don't box me in), inspire others around us (there is more power in the collective and me alone), and initiating to make a difference (just do it).

New Moon or Eclipse

2010-03-29T08:37:00.002-04:00

If you watched the opening scene of New Moon, you'll notice the moon getting smaller and smaller. As my astute daughter pointed out, that's an eclipse, not a new moon.

Frankly, I didn't get the movie. My daughter's a fan like countless thousands of young females like her. She didn't think the movie did the book justice but it didn't stop her enjoying every minute of it.

In retrospect, if I were a news reporter, the headline would go something like, "Suicidal teenager obsesses over 109 year old man who can't commit". In the end she gives up the buff-body of a teenage werewolf for bushy-browed vampire.

Based on the number of fans out there, the sequel is sure to be a hit. I wonder if Shakespeare would have got the same reception for Hamlet if he lived in these modern times.

Delighting your customers

2010-03-25T21:57:00.003-04:00

If you look at the reviews for our Email Signature Pro product for the iPhone, a common theme beyond being impressed with the product is that users love our customer service. I'm really proud of that. Sometimes we can't solve the issues due to technical limitations of the iPhone but we really do try to respond in a positive manner. Most times, we answer within a few hours and often we do solve the issues.

People seem genuinely surprised that a) they get an answer, b) they get a response the same day and c) sometimes it's an email dialog because the issue is harder to track down. I guess not all app developers are equal. I mean, if you give something away for free or 99c, how much time can you afford to give support. Something's gotta give. It's tough maintaining that level of support but I always think of me being on the end. It's the least I would expect so it's the least we should do, i.e. respond timeously, professionally and never get into a fight.

So I'm incredibly impressed when I get the same level of service from the Firefox team. I'm testing their new alpha build 3.7 and found a few bugs. Within the same day of logging one of the bugs, I get an email showing activity, it gets re-assigned, cc'ed and finally an email asking for an example because they can't reproduce it. I get around to mocking up a webpage with the problem at 6pm tonight. They respond just before 10pm that it was related to another issue that was fixed today and I should try tomorrow's build.

The fact that they fixed the bug is almost secondary. To know that they were looking at the problem within the same day and then tracked it down to another bug that solves this issue was what was amazing.

I'm left with the feeling, these developers really love their product and proud of it. I doubt I would get the same response for IE or Safari. Firefox has community written all over it.

Next time I find another bug, I'll be sure to post it. Just doing my part for the Firefox community and I have this perception, they really will appreciate the help.

Today, I was the delighted customer!

Change, change, change

2010-03-23T08:57:00.003-04:00

No one would disagree that drinking and drinking is hazardous. Nor would they argue that smoking is harmful to your health. And we all know that getting up just 10 minutes earlier will ensure we get to work on time. Nevertheless, despite our highly evolved human intellect and rationality, we continue to do the things we shouldn't do and resist doing the things we should.

I'm reading Dan and Chip Heath's latest book called 'Switch, How to change things when change is hard'. Their metaphor is the rational rider struggling to tame the emotional elephant. Being rational and logical is in fact paralyzing and saps us of our inner strength. Apparently will power is an exhaustible supply. So we need to use the elephant to effect change.

We actually know this when dealing with kids. We get our way by making it fun for them. Lego had the concept of Serious Play. We learn more when we are not aware that we are learning. Somehow, we forget this when practicing the piano, filling our taxes, brushing our teeth, sticking to our diets, taking out the garbage.

I'll have more when I finish the book. Right now, I'm going to tame that elephant.

What are you doing with the rest of your life?

2010-03-22T08:43:00.003-04:00

I watched The Bucketlist last night. Two terminally ill people played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman set out to do the things they always dreamed of but never did. Made me wonder why we would wait until we knew we were dying before doing the things we always wanted to do. I guess it our fear of death or eternal optimism that we will live forever helps us push out our goals and dreams. The reality is, we could be hit by a bus tomorrow or live to be hundred.

Not all of us would have the luxury of a rich benefactor. If given 6 months to live, I doubt I would be doing anything different, perhaps frantically reducing my debt. No luxury yaughts or climbing pyramids... just working to reduce my debt.

On a side note, if I could choose one physical character trait when I was born, it would not be to have the voice of Morgan Freeman or George Clooney. They probably would have been even be bigger stars on radio if television was not invented.

Back to my bucketlist...

BTW: George Clooney's Up in the Air was also amazing. What's in your backpack? Watch the movie to find out.

The bumps in the road

2010-03-16T09:48:00.002-04:00

Simon and Garfunkel (who???) had a classic song, Bridge over Troubled Water. Starts with the line, "When you're weary, feeling small...".

We've all been there, maybe several times a month or even within a week.

So, I'm driving to work this morning, thinking about a dozen things I need to do that can be best described as tedious and unexciting. Happen to drive across a rough stretch of road in need of repair. Riddled with potholes and cracks.

Then came my daily epiphany.

If I drove an exotic Italian sports car and the road was smooth and straight. It would be boring. The best enjoyment would be to take it through hills and valleys, hugging the curves, deftly avoiding the rocks and cracks in the road. That would be interesting.

So would life be, if we thought about all that is thrown at us - as challenges that make our lives interesting and memorable. Without them, life would be boring, we would be boring.

So today, I will embrace the things I care the least about. Treat them as events no matter how small that make my life interesting and not annoying.

I used to write on my whiteboard in my younger days. "Stop and smell the roses". A reminder I was running too fast, heading for a goal and forgetting to savor the moment.

Seems like I had a memory loss.

The bumps in the road may not be your friend but they sure make your drive a lot more interesting.

So the thought of the day is,

When life throws you a curve ball, you can crash and burn or you can hug that curve

The slums of the Internet

2010-03-12T09:01:00.002-05:00

I use Google a lot. I mean a whole. It saves me from keeping a notebook with stuff and reference books on my shelf. For that I am truly thankful. But of all the search results I get a day, at least 60% or more are junk. Simply spam pages with little or not information. The sites that do have information are cluttered with links, ads and images. In short, I'm bombarded by a million offers I don't need and another million things I have no interest in.

CNN is perhaps the biggest culprit. I counted 339 links on their homepage. Is it so paranoid that I won't go past page 1 that it feels it needs to offer me 339 opportunities?

Of course, the Internet is simply a mirror of society. The physical world is not much different. Switch on the TV and you're blown away by 4-5 ads every 5 minutes. Ride on the freeway and count the number of billboards and signage on buildings. Look at Niagara falls 100 years ago, look at it today. The problem is in the physical world it costs money to put up the signs and it takes people many hours and days to do that. On the Internet, it costs cents and takes seconds to do the same.

What happened to user experience? Which one is more memorable, that $20 Chinese buffer or the $100 dinner at a cozy French restaurant.

Unfettered digital democracy is the best way to describe it. We are drowning in the very pool of digital opportunities.

It is as the saying goes, "The Best of Times and the Worst of Times". We have to take the good with the bad but the bad is rapidly exceeding all that is good. We've seen democracy go bad in the real world, I'm seeing democracy going bad in the digital world.

Perhaps there is a new term we should coin, "Digital Obesity". Getting fat on the Internet diet of worms.

Can it be different? A few years ago, I took the family to Hilton Head in South Carolina. What struck me the most was the rule that all signage had to conform to the size, height and colors of the local authority. So as we drove past the sign for Walmart, it was wasn't 30 feet high or 20 feet wide. It was a tasteful and light brown, fitting it with the lush greenery alongside the road. So was the every hotel sign along the way. The buildings were hidden between trees. I didn't mind at all, I don't think anyone would.

Could the Internet be the same? With no boundaries, timezones or a governing body, I doubt it. The digital revolution is rapidly and exponentially sliding to the lowest level of free so the only way is to advertise. The irony the number of ads people must endure for the site to make money is grossly disproportionate.

Of course, that is the culture everyone has grown up in, me included. Would I pay $9.99 per month for spam free email? Would I pay Google $9.99 per month for quality search? Of course not, because I, like everyone else, has gotten use to free.

Perhaps, "FREE" is the new dirty word on the Internet.

Anyone for a "greener" Internet, a digital world without pollution?

The beauty of human logic

2010-02-25T08:55:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, my Macbook hard drive crash (the second in two years). The previous 20+ years and numerous computers never had an issue. Like they said in the investment ads, past performance is no indicator or guarantee of future performance.

Another colleague in the office had a hard disk crash this week. Searching in the forums for the best RAID strategy. For the small business owner, it's not the RAID with striping or fancy over the network. All he really needed was a disk controller with RAID and mirror a drive. Cost would have been $200. He is still down after 3 days trying to get his backup from his off-site backup.

The forums are full of comments like, "I don't think you need to mirror or backup your hard disk because I've been running Windows Vista for 8 months and nothing has happened". Yes, disk drives have very large MTBFs (mean time between failures), but like flying an airplane, disasters don't happen often but when it happens, it is catastrophic.

I'm not sure why we have this logic built in, but it pervades out thinking, whether it is buying insurance, investing in stock markets or backing up our data. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

We simply don't know how to assess risk. Which one is worse? the fact that your book falls off the table once a day and you have to pick it up or the fact that you have Ming Vase put high up on a cupboard and you live in San Francisco. You can live with the knowledge your book may look worse for wear over a year but you are less likely to survive your expensive Ming Vase falling down due to earth tremor in 5 years time. We are also more likely to fix the table or put the book somewhere else because it annoys us than insure that Ming Vase because it has never fallen over in the last 10 years.

The beauty of human logic.

Is this the beginning of the end?

2010-02-24T11:28:00.002-05:00

On Monday, I put in a 16 hour day to get some final touches to a client project as well as deal with a last minute request to add an extra feature to the application. Going to bed at 2:30am in the morning is generally no big deal except that I usually get up by 7am to get the kids ready for school. No big deal I thought until yesterday morning.

I arrived at work, ran up the stairs, unlocked the door and stepped in. I stared at the alarm pad with a total blank mind. As the beeping continued, I realized I had no clue what the password was, something I entered twice a day for the last four years. Not even the starting digit came to mind.

First dumb thing to do. Start punching a couple of combinations. Then realized it was stupid because I'm not about to guess the password in the next 10 seconds.

Panic mode sets in as I fumble looking for my phone to call my colleague. Of course, it was the morning I changed coats so after hunting in 4 different pockets, I found the phone.

By now, the alarm had gone off, I felt like a burglar. Called my colleague, then realized that he wouldn't be able to hear me with the siren blaring next to me.

Opened the door and ran down the stairs. The first thought was, 'I hope no-one was going to shoot me because, to anyone else, it looked like I was fleeing the scene of the crime. Got the password, ran back upstairs and after a few miscues, type the code in. Silence is golden.

Next 15 minutes was spent sitting in my chair anticipating a rush of police in response to the alarm. My colleague luckily called security to let them know it was a false alarm.

I learned two things from this experience.
a) I'm not cut out to be a criminal
b) I'm not as young as I thought I was. I'm sure I'll have a few more senior moments in the months to come.

Burning the midnight oil should be left for the young. The only thing I'm wondering is how many brain cells I killed in the process.

Is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Our time has come

2010-02-11T19:13:00.003-05:00

A good friend passed on an article about The Gentle Leader. The article talks about the contrary leader, the one who cares about people more than profits, who builds communities rather than empires, who inspires others to exceed and succeed him. The author believes that the corporate wolves have shown to be greedy, selfish, responsible for state of the economy today. The time has come for the gentle leader.

I would like to believe that. Except my corporate scars remind me who holds the purse strings and signs the checks. It is one of the reasons why I decided 4 years ago to walk my own path with my good friend Tony. The road less travelled has not been without its share of hardship but I can wake up and believe I'm making decisions for all the right reasons.

I am pragmatic. In larger companies, it is about the bottom line, shareholder value, profits, beating out the competition. Without any those, there is no business, and without business, there are no employees, the people I would care about and serve.

But there should be a better way, a compromise at worst where the gentle leaders are allowed to nurture, inspire and build communities because success is built by people and not defined by the products which do not exist without the people.

We should lead our teams the same way we nurture our children. By giving them opportunities to grow, make mistakes, guide and mentor. So that one day, they may become even greater than we are. For what better legacy to leave behind than the knowledge that we have enabled others to accomplish a thousand-fold more than we could ever do by ourselves.

iPad, a tablet for all seasons

2010-01-28T09:23:00.002-05:00

Being iPhone app developers, we looked forward to Apple's iPad announcement with great anticipation. Secretly, I hoped it would be a scaled down Mac instead of the oversized iPhone/iPod. Running the standard iPhone OS, it is not multi-tasking and the walled garden surrounding apps is still there. However, I would think with subsequent releases, this will change. With a 1GHz custom chip with loads more computing capability, why would you want an iPod or iPhone on steroids?

But it makes a lot of sense as a first release, Macs have never been the PC killer and the number of iPods / iPhones sold is staggering so why not make sure the iPad can access the 140,000+ apps out there.

The opinion around me is pretty interesting. My good friend Tony raved about it. Why? he has a Sony Reader and given that the launch price is just a little more than a Kindle, Amazon should be afraid, be very afraid. For less than $100 more, you get a sexy device that is color, has browsing capabilities, access to iTunes, AppStore and iBook. Of course, if you're a hard-core reader, you'll realize that the Kindle is better for reading outdoors and has a much longer battery life due to it's eInk technology. But humans are swayed by shimmering, colorful things and I'm sure many potential eBook reader buyers will be swayed towards Apple.

It is also a great entry level for the non-technical folk. People who have never been comfortable near computers. Now they have a personal device they can hug and hold like a book. The keyboard dock or better still, the ability to use a bluetooth keyboard is a stroke of genius. I would buy the iPad before a PC for my parents.

My son who is in the market for a netbook was disappointed. I would be too in his position. While the iPad will have iWorks, it isn't clear whether this device will be a good substitute for a netbook which is only limited by its processing power and format but in every way a full-fledged PC. No multitasking and the omission of a camera for internet chatting are serious omissions. But it is first generation so some things must wait and hopefully available later.

Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll get a couple of them in the office if only to see how we can leverage the larger format. I'm intrigued by the format. I've often felt the iPhone was great if only it was bigger.

Perhaps now is the time to ditch the iPhone, buy a very small Nokia phone or Blackberry and get the iPad. But as my son pointed out, I'd be carry 3 devices, a phone, a tablet and a Mac around with me.

For many who are die hard Blackberry users, it is an interesting device that means they don't have to give up their phone or their PC. Now even Bill can buy one without feeling guilty about ditching his Windows 7.

99c apps are not 99c songs

2010-01-25T16:38:00.002-05:00

Somehow, somewhere down the line, we were hoodwinked into thinking 99c was the ultimate price for everything. Apple got us so used to buying songs for 99c they figured it was just a natural progression to buy apps for 99c. Given the amount of apps that have been sold, they were correct. Today over 53% of all 138,000 apps in the iTunes Appstore cost 99c. In fact only 77 of them cost more than $100.

It was a great marketing move but perhaps not so great for the small developers. The problem with 99c is that to make money you need volume. If you knew how steep the long tail curve is in the AppStore, you'll realize that the percentage of people actually making a decent living from iPhone apps is in the single digits. Given there are probably 30,000 or more developers out there, starving is the word of the day.

What continues to baffle me is to see high quality apps next to some pretty crappy ones for exactly the same price... 99c. Having developed around 29 of our apps, we know what it takes to write a good one, the effort is in the weeks if not months.

Here's why 99c apps are not 99c songs. Songs, (especially the popular artists) have the backing of some pretty large music companies who have invested thousands into each artist. The studio time, producers, promoters etc. They generally have well-oiled and well-funded marketing machines that put the faces of their artists in supermarkets, TV. There are established distribution channels, i.e. radio stations that play the songs over and over again until you end up buying. The appstore has none of these advantages unless you're an EA or already have a large brand and online/offline presence. i.e. if you're a standalone developer, the future looks bleak, better buy a lottery ticket.

At the end of the day, there are some pretty good apps languishing at the bottom of the pile. You spend months working on your masterpiece only to get swamped by 60+ apps on the same day you launched. Talk about drowning in noise. To say the good will float to the top is not correct, that is only true if there is steady state and the cream is given a chance to rise. Keep stirring the pot vigorously, nothing rises but just a whole lot of churning.

Even in the music world, only a handful of artists get valuable airtime and make a whole bunch of money. The rest are hopefuls and has-beens.

The key is not to try and create apps that sell a million, that's a nice to have. But to create apps that address a niche, a demographic who are passionate about a topic like you are and are prepared to pay 4.99 or 9.99. That is the business.

At the end of the day 99c apps are not 99c songs. Right now the appstore is akin to every American Idol hopeful, recording a song on their iPhone and posting it to iTunes for 99c. (The recent auditions in Chicago yielded 13 finalists from 12,000). If they don't let that happen on iTunes, why should it happen in the Appstore?

Great apps are not great on day one (or why there are more and more bad apps in the AppStore)

2010-01-22T09:07:00.005-05:00

It's pretty common knowledge that unless you have deep pockets and high risk tolerance, it's really hard to market iPhone apps. If you follow the forums, advertising in traditional web channels are not that successful unless you doing it with a brand which generally means big bucks.

So the best way is to be mentioned by well known websites like New York Times, MacWorld or a raving blog celebrity. Given there are over 126,000 apps, that is like winning the lottery at best.

The reason why advertising on the web is tough is the context. Most people get their apps when they are actually on the iPhone, e.g. waiting for the bus, or having some time to kill. The first thing they do is look at the Top 25, What's Hot and New. Which means unless you're in the first 50, forget about mindshare.

In the past, updating your app meant you were actually put into the new list along with other brand new apps ensuring that at least for a day or two depending on your category, your app would potentially be seen by millions.

Now this may seem like people would be gaming the system by adding features just to get to the New list and we all did. But it wasn't a bad thing because given the 2-3 week cycle to approve apps in the past, no-one could really abuse the system. The most you could update your app was generally once a month.

There were no losers because developers were motivated to add more to the apps and users would get the benefit since all upgrades to apps are free. So for the community, it meant over time, the good apps really got better. Of course, if your app did really badly, you didn't care to update it anyway and it would sink to the bottom through natural attrition.

Late last year, that all changed. Only brand new apps made it to the new list and the updated apps were no where to be seen. I'm assuming that as the number of apps increased in the store, the number of updating apps exceeded the new apps, a problem that only gets worse as the total number of apps increases. So Apple stopped 'promoting' updated apps.

So what did that mean for developers with existing apps. Having lost one of the most important marketing channels, I believe a large number of them will stop updating their apps on a regular basis preferring to submit new ones. Worst still, since there is no rule about submitting similar apps, I believe many will and did basically reskin the same app and submit under a different name.

As a small developer, my choice when waking up in the morning is a) work on an existing app, b) work on a new app which will at least be seen by millions for a few days, c) change my existing app with a few new features and submit as a new app to get on the new list, d) make existing users pay for upgrades which is non-trivial requiring the developer to keep track of users and add a registration process.

So what's the upshot? The good apps don't get better or deeper in functionality. There will be a lot of similar apps that all do the same thing with very little depth. The number of apps increases dramatically increasing Apple's cost of maintaining the Appstore.

What's the quick fix? I agree that having updating apps swamp the New list is not desirable. But there should be another list, a Recently Updated list which does showcase updated apps. I'm sure it is a great way to resurrect tired apps, get developers a motivation to create really deep and useful apps and benefits the users because apps aren't generally great on day 1.

Here's the kicker. Great apps are generally not great on day one. Unless you're well-funded, the strategy most developers take is the spaghetti one. Throw something against the wall and see what sticks. If it sticks, make it better.

I would argue the best apps in the appstore are those that have been around at least 6 months and been updated 4-5 times. You can be sure many of the early bugs are fixed and a host of good features gleaned from user feedback are in there.

Email Signature Pro is a good case in point, it has grown with every update and 90% of the features added subsequent to the first release are from customer feedback. It meets the needs of our users because we listened. The only suggestions we didn't do were those that were not currently possible on the iPhone platform.

We have 28 other iPhones, many of them are free. Why would we spend a week updating a free app when there is very little marketing return. Unless it is a highly popular, there is no incentive.

We love the iPhone and the AppStore. But love doesn't pay the rent.

Unscrambling the egg

2010-01-15T08:45:00.002-05:00

I can't believe I haven't blogged this year. It has been crazy. There's definitely a new sense of optimism in the city and with our clients. Feels like everyone woke up on 1 Jan and realized they are a year behind. In just two weeks, we've hit some great milestones in our consulting work, found some long lost friends and made a couple of new ones. Not to mention some new opportunities on the horizon.

But that has nothing to with unscrambling the egg. The title probably should have been something like "Software development is a non-linear activity". But that would be boring.

I read a book about magicians a long time ago. Every year, they would gather for a contest to see who had the neatest trick. One particular one did the most simple thing, he scrambled an egg and proceed to unscramble it, drawing gasps of amazement from his peers.

The story has always stuck with me. Unscrambling the egg is the holy grail. Whoever can figure it out will unlock the secrets of the universe.

I digress once again. Looking back at the last few months, it is interesting to see even with years of software development experience we still get it wrong when it comes to estimation. Most of the time, we get it right to within days. Usually the pragmatic estimate is the average guess of Tony and myself. He tends to be more conservative and me, well let's just say I've often said "how hard can it be?".

But there is always that one feature that looks like an iceberg. Looks pretty simple but in reality as you get close you realize 90% of the work lies hidden. Which leads to the maxim, if you going in at a fix price, charge as much as the client will bear otherwise, your effective earnings will be one sixth of what you thought it will be. A better way is build a relationship with your client and bill on a hourly basis with an estimate of the final outcome. That way, you don't end up cutting corners to save time and the client pays a fair price. End of the day it is a win-win, you get to earn a fair wage and the client gets a quality product. The thing I learnt over the years, is to be open with the client and share the issues. You'll be amazed that they are actually quite understanding if they feel like they are part of the problem. What they don't like is surprises, especially nasty ones.

But software development is sometimes like scrambling and unscrambling an egg. The 80/20 rule is often more like 90/10. You get 90% of the feature in 10% of the time and then hit the wall. This is when you're unscrambling the egg, i.e. it takes a lot lochrome://intouchlink/content/buttons/itl-second-home.pngnger, and sometimes not possible. That last 10% could be a simple change to the way the user interface works or restoring a saved state in a multi-input wizard.

I remember the time a team of 40 developers stood around for a couple days while one developer had to fix a particulachrome://intouchlink/content/buttons/itl-second-home.pngr nasty Windows related bug. The problem is it is not linear and proportional to the time you took to do the first 90%. The last mile is often the killer. Ask any marathon runner...

So next time you hit a wall in whatever you do, remember how easy it was to unscramble an egg but it is difficult if not impossible to unscramble one.

A belated Happy New Year!

One minute to midnight

2009-12-31T20:57:00.003-05:00

New Year for many means a new start, closing an old chapter, a time for resolutions, a festive point of the year. For me, it has always been anti-climatic. Perhaps, it is because no matter how hard we wish or hope, hardship in December tends to follow its course in January. Resolutions are quickly broken. Winter is a little harsher and the reality of January sets in. Whatever was tough on 31 December, didn't magically disappear on January 1 or 2 or 3 for that matter. Humbug.

Until last year.

An opportunity save a tiny life changed all that. A gift to both the boy and me. Looking back exactly one year later, it is one of those moments where 30 seconds either way would have surely meant he would not see a day in 2009 and for me, it meant each New Year would continue to be a humbug event. I still shiver every time think of that defining moment.

New Year's eve will never be the same again. It has become a reminder to me to be grateful and humble. Yes, we are indeed the masters of our destiny and yet our ship is dependent on the favorable winds of fortune.

I still strive for success, financial security, worldly goals and other aspirations. But I am now reminded more so on this day, that the most worthy thing I can ever do is how I can save or change a life.

Each day dawns and presses upon me the stresses of the day. I forget the best questions I should ask before I rise from my bed.

Whose life can I make a little easier today?
What kind words can I convey that will sooth a soul?
Which words of encouragement can inspire actions that exceed expectations?
What gesture will strengthen a relationship?
Which burden can I lessen by lending a patient ear?

In the hustle and bustle, I forget that,

Smiling is irresistible
The best gift is a hug
A kiss is never given in vain
Find good in others is the prelude to praise
To be grateful for small mercies
True giving has no reservations

Today, I am reminded of these things. Every minute of our lives should be lived as if it is one minute to midnight. We cannot choose our destiny, but we can choose the legacy we leave behind.

Tomorrow we can say Happy New Year! Should we not wake up each morning and declare Happy New Day!

If you had one breath left, what would you say?
If you could gaze on one last thing, what would it be?
If you could receive one last kiss, who would it be?

If you had only one minute to midnight, how would you live?

Making people take the stairs

2009-12-21T13:13:00.002-05:00

How do you get people to take the stairs instead of the elevator? How do you encourage people to throw their trash in the bin instead of the floor? It turns out if you can't pay people to do it, at least make it fun.

The Fun Theory initiative by Volkswagen did just that. It's a competition to encourage people to come up with ideas of how to make things mundane, well, just more fun. Some of the ideas are indeed wonderful, like making stairs look and sound like piano keys making it fun to use them instead of the elevator next door.

Parents understand this concept very well. It's easier to make a chore into a game than simply make their kids do it. Of course the caveat is once the novelty has worn off you have to find new ways to keep them engaged.

But it did make me think why most managers are not trained to think this way. When I ran software teams, there was only one objective to be a successful leader (note, I used the word lead and not manage on purpose). The objective to create situations where the team could and would initiate the tasks themselves because of the following reasons:

Passion - the overwhelming desire to want to do something because of a force within
Creativity - the result of a challenge that is often extremely difficult or seemingly impossible
Fun - the sense of achievement and the execution of the task that makes you smile no matter how tough it may be

Of course to do so, you have to empower and part of it means making sure they understood and were aligned with your intent. The primary reason we hate letting go? they may do something contrary to our intent. If they are aligned, you can be sure they often come up with even better solutions than you could think of on your own.

My job then? was to Inspire, Initiate and Imagine...

Their job then? was the same to Inspire, Initiate and Imagine...

It's takes a lot of guts for a master to become the apprentice but if you reach that point, you have either lost your job to your protege or made your company infinitely more powerful.

Looking out the window

2009-12-21T12:20:00.002-05:00

This is my first official break from work this year. I'm staring out the window onto the slopes of Mont-Saint-Anne, one of the most beautiful mountains in Quebec. Not having touched the keyboard for 3 days is definitely a foreign experience, confirms my condition as a workaholic.

I have noticed how times have changed. Just a few years ago, arriving at a hotel, the first thing the kids would check was if they had a television in the room. This time, the first question was do they have Internet access. I resisted for 2 days amidst protests, you would have thought we were putting them on bread and water.

Today they are out tubing at Valcatier while I catch up on email, checking out iTunes accounts etc. It also means I get to catch up on my blogging that has fallen the wayside. Not that I didn't want to. I had a ton of thoughts but there never seem a good time to quietly put them down concretely. You may say I'm too much of a perfectionist to be a good Twitterer. Saying something flippant and off the cuff is not my style unless it is a bad joke to annoy my kids.

Skiing, even as badly as I do, is an amazing pastime when you get to do it on a large mountain. For an hour (because I'm particularly slow), you get to see the world seemingly frozen in time. The snow damps all noise and if you happen to stop at a spot all by yourself, the silence is pretty amazing. For that moment you can imagine what it would be like to be the last living thing on earth.

The slopes are relatively empty this year as are most restaurants. I hope for the sake of the locals it is because we are a little earlier this time, getting here before the peak season. Perhaps it is a sign of the economy being tougher than we all care to admit.

Happy Holidays!

Making your blog memorable - step 3

2009-12-01T14:26:00.002-05:00

People love stories because stories stick. They are tangible and the details are concrete.

A 5 year old can tell you how many pieces of candy he has left because he gave 2 to his friend and dropped 3 during his Halloween trick or treating. But he couldn't probably remember the mathematical equations that support his logic.

Urban legends are novel and unexpected but invariably they happen to people just like you or me and the events no matter how far-fetched are real.

We remember fables and parables because they are a) stories and b) contain real objects and people.

Even though someone may love your blog post, it may not be memorable enough to repeat it. Notice how viral stories are always simple. The Mentos experiment for example. Everyone knows what a Mentos mint is and what Coke is too. If it were about mad scientists sprouting chemical formulae, regardless of how wonderful the effect was, the story would not carried because the message bearers would simply forget the details.

Step 3 is a natural progression of the earlier two steps I talked about, keep our messages simple, unexpected and now in Step 3 concrete.

Experts have a hard time convincing the masses unless they are talking to peers because they have transcended the concrete. For them, the interesting part is how to take a thousand concrete events and predict them with one abstract theory. Unfortunately, the rest of us on the other side of the fence can't make the mental leap to their level of abstraction because we neither have the experience, knowledge or perhaps we really don't get excited about the same things as they do.

Next time we blog, we should ask ourselves are we explaining our experiences or conveying our message with Mentos and Coke or using complex scientific formulae that may make us look smart but at the end of the day far less memorable.

How many people would prefer a simpler web?

2009-11-18T10:35:00.002-05:00

I do.

It's a question that continues grow more prominent in my mind over the last few months. Developing for the iPhone taught me to keep things simple. There are only so many things you can do one screen and since you have to tap with your finger, there are only so many hotspots available. While you can scroll on the iPhone, the objective for me is not to require the user to do so.

It's harder than you think. Simple is hard. The rule of web entropy is that like the bedrooms of our teenage sons, if left alone, simplicity usually ends up in chaos.

Nothing is more evident in today's websites and blogs. Given that the resolution of screens are increasing, people are adding more and more, links to flash based ads, double row tabs, links to other websites. Probably only 5% or less on any given webpage is relevant to the topic at hand. The rest is fluff and represents the paranoia of web designers and blog owners that you'll go away without consuming more content.

As web publishers we should think web cuisine, not web buffet. A little content done well goes a long way in getting that user back. A bad buffet really makes no one happy. The consumer learns to filter rapidly. If you asked me what I saw on any given page, I would struggle to tell you beyond the content I was looking for.

So why do we do it? Because the technology allows us to.

That is not to say it is a good thing.

Perhaps it's age but I grow tired of content overload. What I do seek is relevancy and experience. We have yet to learn how to take a white piece of paper and put just enough content to satisfy our hunger.

With that being said, I should heed my own advice and stop right here!

Hopefully Web X.0 will be a simpler, kinder web.

So you think you can dance

2009-11-06T08:45:00.002-05:00

That's name of a very popular TV show that finds the country's most popular dancer. One of the best parts are the auditions. Like American Idol, there are clearly people who not talented but nevertheless stand in line for hours for a chance at stardom.

We are all alike. I remember as a child, watching an action movie and for the next week, every kid who went to the movie wanted to be that hero, donning capes, swords and pretend guns.

Nothing's changed really. We still watch TV ads and buy stuff that promises we'll cook like an Iron Chef or make renovations like Mike Holmes. Last week, I accompanied my wife to an art store. It was like Christmas was early. Every shelf had crayons, pastels, paints of every shade and color. Hundreds of books showing you how to draw perfect pictures and paint beautiful landscapes. Air brush kits, projectors that could project any image on any wall, the list goes on an on. I wanted to draw again, paint again.

Then realized that anything I bought would sit on my shelf at home like many other things I bought in the past in the spur of the moment.

It was all aspirational.

That was when the penny dropped. Most of what I feel in life is aspirational. Something lit a fire and emotionally I wanted to do something. In reality, when that moment passes, nothing would be done.

So now before buying something, I make the mental calculation, is this aspirational or inspirational. Aspirational means it got me excited but I either wouldn't have the time or the talent to follow through. Inspirational meant I was capable of finishing what I will start. It is a call to action and there is a happy conclusion.

Of course advertisers appeal to our aspirational side. The people who show off makeup are the most beautiful people in the world. Toyotas are driven by racing drivers. The food is cooked by chefs. "Buy this and you could be like me, rich and famous."

Aspirational means, don't buy that snowboard for myself because I saw my son do some pretty neat stuff on the slopes the other day. Inspirational means try that new recipe for breakfast because there are only 3 ingredients and I can actually cook it.

So next time you pull out your credit card, ask yourself.

Is it aspirational or inspirational?

Making your blog viral - Step 2

2009-10-28T08:50:00.002-04:00

Boo!

Think about how people will respond to your blog post. Ask why people will talk about it or, better still, why they will write about it.

Why are urban legends viral? They have a sense of incredulity. People can't believe it, it makes them sit up and they want to share it because of how they responded to them.

People love surprises. Remember how the office loved the fact you brought in doughnuts to the weekly meetings. Remember how they grumbled after 2 months that you're bringing doughnuts again to the weekly meetings?

The unexpected doesn't have to be fictional. It can be a piece of knowledge that people feel compelling to share. That is the power of gossip. The delight of communicating something you know that someone else doesn't.

Did you know there are almost 95,000 applications on the iPhone and you can only load 148 of them at any one time?

I'm willing to bet if you read this post, you'll tell someone in the next 24 hours!

Next time you write a blog post, think Boo!

It's been a while...

2009-10-26T16:14:00.003-04:00

Sometimes we get caught up in our lives, our careers, our families, we forget to live in the moment. I was listening to some music today while I was coding. Got caught up by the voice, the inflections, the breath at the end of each phrase.

It made me stop and wonder.

When was the last time, I sat down in the quiet of the evening. Just a glass of wine, headphones and my favorite CD.

With eyes closed, I would focus on each instrument, anticipating the sigh, the breath of every well-known phase. Basking in the moment, letting the emotions wash over me. It made me feel complete, at one with the world. Nothing else mattered.

It's been a while...

We do ourselves injustice to have to share our moments with each other, when each moment deserves its own soapbox. It's like looking at your date with one eye on someone else in the room. But alas in our frenetic world, that's what we do. It's called multitasking.

In the end, it's like eating soup, entree and dessert all at the same time. It fills you up but you would hardly call it appetizing.

We should never have to say, "it's been a while..."

Making your blog sticky - step 1

2009-10-19T09:34:00.004-04:00

TheGoodBlogs have been running for over 3 years. I've blogged for almost 4. I've seen a lot of good blogs and a lot of bad ones. Here's my first tip for making your blog posts sticky.

Step 1: Keep it simple

What does simple mean? One idea. One clear idea. For something to be sticky, it must be memorable. We all have short memories.

Bad example: How to make the ultimate 3 course meal. French Onion soup, Filet Mignon and New York Cheesecake.

Good example: Wowing them with the Killer New York Cheesecake.

Question. Which one do you think you will remember? Which one makes you want to share your information.

Blogs are great because they let us ramble, like our diaries. They let us put a lot of ideas in one place. Blogs are bad because most of us ramble and most of us put too many ideas in one blog post.

So rather than give you 6 steps to great blogging. This is all you get. Step 1.

Step 1: Simple means one idea. Make people want to remember it. That's it.

Stay tuned.

Halloween Bunnies

2009-10-13T10:23:00.002-04:00

Maybe a little early but the last time we added the Easter Bunny to our iPhone app, it was approved and released the day after Easter. So for Halloween, we didn't want risk being late. And as it so happens we way early. Nevertheless, if you're looking to send a cute bunny to someone for halloween, our iPhone Send a Bunny apps have one just for the occasion.

Shameless pleas for your support... if you like the bunny, download our free iPhone app for the bunny or collect all the bunnies for 99c.

Visit us and get your Halloween Bunny

The subjectivity of value

2009-10-04T10:29:00.002-04:00

I was watching a YouTube video about virtual communities called Another Perfect World. Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life talked about how we have a perceived value of ourselves and others have a different value they place upon us. When the large number of people believe that value to be true then you have great wealth.

It's a sobering thought because that is equally applicable in the real world. It's a paradox really because we are taught not to care about what other people think but to be true to ourselves. Yet it the real world, for us to succeed we have to convince others to agree with our assessment of our value before we have a chance of success.

Think about an interview. On your resume you have state why you would be a valuable player and deserve a particular salary. On the other side, they have to agree with that assessment before they will hire you. Are baseball players more valuable than the president of the United States. Based on their salaries you would believe so. It is truly about market forces. Does it really cost $200,000 to build a sports car and is it really worth 20x that Toyota sitting in your driveway? It is because they made you believe it via marketing and scarcity.

So while it is not wrong to have a high esteem of oneself, it is important to remember that at the end of the day, our job in any interview or meeting is to be able to convey that value and what impact it has on the organization. Most of us do a terrible job at marketing ourselves because we are taught at a young age that is wrong and when we see others do it we think they are vain or precocious.

Sometimes letting our actions speak for ourselves is not enough. It is up to us to be heard and to be proactive in setting the price.

There are always two sides to a mirror, how we see ourselves and how others see us. Unfortunately, the latter in reality is what counts if we want to succeed. That is the absolute reality of charging what the market will bear.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

2009-09-22T22:07:00.002-04:00

An article in ComputerWorld today had the headline "Gold rush! Big money seen for iPhone, Smartphone app developers.". They quoted the Yankee Group Research as extrapolating the numbers to 2013 to be 4.2 billion. It said that 2.9 billion will go to developers and 1.3 billion will go to the people running the app store.

Being one of these developers in the game for almost a year, you would think I'd be jumping for joy hearing such great news. Alas, to me this sounds like the optimism of the dotcom crash. Here's the reality check.

There are only 3-5 major smartphone players running app stores of any significance. Assuming the numbers come true, Apple will probably take 60% of the 1.3 billion and the rest divided up between Blackberry, Google and Nokia.

There are easily over 30,000 mobile application developers, let's say 50,000 by 2013. Dividing 2.9 billion amongst 50,000 people is 58,000 per capita. Pretty dismal if you ask me. The harsh reality is that the long tail applies. Of the 80,000 apps in the Apple App Store, a handful (literally) will make a million dollars or more, a couple hundred will make several hundred thousand dollars and the rest (that's 95% or more) will never recoup their costs.

So it's all good news for the smartphone vendors but not as rosy for developers. (Sounds remarkably like Google Adsense, where Google makes billions and most of the poor blog owners are, well, poor, to the tune of making several cents a day). Sure, we'll continue to see the great story of how one guy spent one week to write a app that sold a million copies. These are the black swans of our age, it is unlikely they will ever repeat their success the same way again except if you're a big player with deep pockets and huge marketing budgets.

If I got a buck for every time some one came up to us and told us they had the next killer app idea, I would make more money than I would selling apps in the app store.

But this is the real world, life is fair and the majority will always be poor and few will be rich regardless of the industry. I just get disappointed because it's stories like these that make people flock blindly to the next paradigm. What's even worse, is the days to come, where small startups get funded with ridiculous amounts of money when the business models are not sustainable and built on hype. If you build it they will come is happening all over again. I lived through the dot com, this is another dot com in the making. We will never learn.

Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware, in this case, let the developer beware. If you believe you can build a set of applications each returning a reasonable amount of money over time, you have the makings of a business. If you believe you can write one app and make a million dollars, all you have is a dream. It can happen but don't bank on it.

The power of the brand

2009-09-18T08:20:00.002-04:00

Martin Lindstrom conducted an interesting experiment to see how brands affected our children. Most of the childen, in their pre-teens recognized brands by their logos and music jingles even though the logos were partially obscured. Even brands like Gucci didn't escape their recognition. Being bombarded by ads on radio, TV and billboards, these images become subliminal affecting our buying decisions without us even knowing about it.

My daughter inherited my Thinkpad a while back when I moved to a Mac for iPhone development. Recently she complained about the notebook being very hot and the battery not being very effective. Her tone led me to reply that although it was over a year old, her Thinkpad was one of the best and powerful notebooks on the market today. I don't think the message landed because all she said was "Maybe next time you shouldn't buy IBM". That, my friends, could be a signal of the beginning of the end for the venerable giant.

Seriously though, it did show that while the Thinkpad was a icon for us business types, it is not for Generation Y. I doubt my daughter would have said the same about my Mac which she grabs from me at every available opportunity. Functionally, either the Thinkpad or the Mac would amply meet her needs but that's not the point, is it? That is the power of the brand.

So the message to all the dads today is, if you want to be a hip dad, buy a Mac. Your kids will love you for it.

How rules make us forget common sense

2009-09-14T15:48:00.002-04:00

There was a road rage incident recently that gave rise to an interesting article in our local paper. It postulated that the reason why our traffic issues are getting worse and not better is because we have too many rules. Rules give people a sense of entitlement and in the heat of the moment, we use the rules as ways of establishing our rights even though our common sense may say otherwise.

It all makes perfect sense. In many countries, lawyers use precedents and laws to get clients off on technicalities even if it may be clear that they were indeed guilty. Driving on our roads, I often see people accelerate to close gaps or push in when they could slide in behind instead. Somehow, understanding how the rule may work to our advantage gives us the right to do the wrong thing. Perhaps there is a Darwinian gene in us that warns us that if we are to survive, the weak must die. Somehow we have mistaken meek for weak.

Of course, without rules the concept of full-blown anarchy may even be a worse alternative.

Nevertheless, what happened to using our common sense and discretion? Can we even trust ourselves to do the right thing when called to do so? Or do we cop out by simply justifying taking the low road with the excuse that we were just following the rules.

Fat grass and a lesson in patience

2009-09-09T08:55:00.002-04:00

Couple of years ago, our lawn died a horrible death while I was away working in the US for over a year. It was the hottest summer and the family joined me in Atlanta for several weeks. On our return, we had our mini version of the Sahara. Adding to the fact our soil is mainly clay meant any form of rescue was futile.

Being a person with no green fingers, I took advice and added top soil with fervour which promptly suffocated the rest of the grass seeing that I had put too much.

Over the years, the grass slowly returned. I resisted all attempts to rip it all up and lay new grass. I guess I was stubborn (but probably more stupid than I care to admit).

Enter Fat Grass.

For really good grass, there needs to be a couple things done every year as I found out the hard way.

Wash the grass in spring to get all the salt off from the snow

Aerate the lawn at the beginning of the season by punching holes at frequent intervals using a special tool.

Add topsoil at least once a season to replinish what is washed away

Watch out for small white worms that attach the roots of the grass. The best way without using chemicals is to use nematodes early or late in the season. These are natural parasitic worms that attack garden pests like cutworms.

Fertilize several times a year if you have very bad quality soil.

Finally, reseed your grass every year. Grass like anything else has a life cycle and needs new grass to keep the lawn nice and thick.

If you do all this, as I found out incrementally over the years, the lawn will be become your friend. The best way to fight weeds is to have really thick grass. Most weeds survive because their roots reach deep down. Grass tend to have shallow roots so the more grass you have, the more they will choke the weeds.

Ok so what about Fat Grass. This refers to seeding the lawn with new grass to make it really thick um fat. The fat grass recipe can be found at the ChumFm blog. Top soil is great for existing grass but not for new grass because it dries out too quickly requiring a lot more watering. How to create fat grass?

To seed new grass, mix peat moss (very fine powdery stuff that can hold 20 times it's weight in water) and vermiculite (white stuff, actually 2/3s clay) and add water until it is all spongy and wet. Then spread over the areas that require new grass. Sprinkle the grass seed on top of the peat moss mixture and water every day for 10 days. Around the 8th day, the grass should start sprouting and in a few weeks, a much richer and thicker (fatter!) lawn is the result.

This bumbling gardener has been able to turn a desert into an oasis (ok maybe not an oasis but definitely a better looking lawn than most on my street). So you can too.

The thing I learnt the most? You have to do all of the above and most of all exercise patience. During the 8 days, I endured jokes and friendly jabs like "Are they growing yet?" as I religiously went out to water the lawn every day.

Who's laughing now!

Fart used to be a 4 letter word

2009-09-03T16:42:00.007-04:00

As of this week, there are no less than 167 iPhone apps dedicated to elevating farting to an art form or should I say fart form.

That is a staggering number considering it used to be an embarrassing activity one tried not to talk about or share the love for that matter.

I can only shudder to think what would happen if they all submitted updates to Apple at the same time. You definitely want to be a fly on the wall watching 40 reviewers testing all the apps simultaneously.

I know Apple has the been on a drive to make all their products a little greener but this is ridiculous.

Their impact on global greenhouse gases will only be known to the generations to come.

Is Bistro Food, the next iPhone Killer App?

2009-09-02T12:58:00.003-04:00

Maybe not, but it got me excited enough to write about it...again. After the last blog post, I started browsing using Bistro Food and found a couple of neat recipes on the Food Network site. First thing I did was bookmarked them. That's when the penny dropped...

I can't remember how many times, we used to run upstairs, browse to a website, print out the recipe. Weeks later, we would have paper recipes littered across the kitchen counter. With Bistro Food, no more!

From now on, all my favorite recipes will be bookmarked with Bistro Food. And if the meal is a success, imagine how smart you would look, if you could whip out your iPhone at the dinner table and email the recipe to a friend right there.

The snapshot below is a Paul Dean recipe for Strawberry Shortcake at the Food Network. Yum!

We love all the apps that we write, but this one is going straight to my top ten list.

Food, glorious food

2009-09-02T12:33:00.002-04:00

Food is by far our popular Bistro app on the iPhone. It highlights all the great sites like the Food Network that are formatted correctly for the iPhone. It is also the app that bookmarks are used the most often. Makes sense, I would too if I found an interesting recipe. Unwittingly, Bistro Food may be the best way to save all your recipes and have them at your finger tips.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2009-08-31T10:17:00.002-04:00

Too early for winter but just the right time for Snow Leopard, Apple's latest OS update. Usually I'm pretty cautious about new operating system versions, waiting a couple of months until the bugs get ironed out. But heck, I'm a Mac fan, so this weekend was dedicated to installing Snow Leopard. It's a great upgrade. While the base OS was 64-bit, all the system apps like Finder was still 32-bit in Leopard. Enter Snow Leopard with true 64 bit system apps.

The advantage? All the apps are now much smaller (I suspect the 32 bit apps in the past had to still honor 64 bit boundaries but utilizing only half the instruction and data space). Smaller means faster load and execution times, less swapping etc. So even if there were no new features, this alone was a great update.

Pros.

Faster execution of all the system apps. Definitely feels more snappy.

Less diskspace. I got back around 6-8GB on my two Mac systems at home.

Cons.

None really except it will ask you for permission for apps you installed because it thinks you're using them for the first time.

Gothas.

Make sure you backup your current system first. I do a full backup to a dmg file and time machine backup. Good job I did.

The upgrade re-installed apache and deleted my conf files. The lesson learnt is if you think you have custom files in directories outside your user directory, make sure you back them up, you'll have to copy them back after the install.

MySql lost its symbolic link and didn't start automatically.

My iTunes crashed trying to access my iPhone but resynced successfully after relaunching. Some anxious moments here!

Xcode didn't think my iPhone was a valid development device until I rebooted my iPhone. Tip: shutdown iPhone and hold down the home button while restarting the iPhone until you see the Apple logo.

Takes about 45 minutes to do the upgrade. For developers, XCode is supplied with the DVD. Nice touch.

So for the very first time in my life, I'm glad it snowed in August!

To Blackberry or not to Blackberry

2009-08-27T10:15:00.008-04:00

We're at the crossroads this week. After 8 months of iPhone development, we're wondering whether we should diversify our market into other mobile platforms. The logical answer is yes, the practical answer is a little tougher. It means supporting a different application channel.

We're dabbled before with writing Blackberry apps. It's not a technology issue. It's whether we want to spend time learning a different environment. By that, I mean finding out the hard way the quirks of multiple Blackberry devices, a different App Store, approval process. Probably the marketing plan would change too.

Opportunity
So the first step is the opportunity. The market share of iPhone vs Blackberry is pretty even with Apple around 13% and RIM at about 18% (source: Business Insider

This would essentially double our reach.

Competition
Apple has approximately 70,000 applications in the App Store and Rim has 2,300. A breakdown of the RIM appstore as of today is shown below. As expected Games and Books take the lion's share, over 40%.

Barrier to purchase
Apple has made it dead easy to buy an app. For the Blackberry you need a PayPal account plus not as seamless as Apple. We have no clue whether Blackberry users are more likely or less to buy than an average iPhone user.

Approval Process
Less onerous and faster on the Blackberry Appstore from our understanding.

It looks tempting but I'm fully aware of spreading ourselves too thin and sacrificing the quality of our products and our service. But then as the saying goes if you continue to do what you've always done then you'll get what you always gotten.

I think I need an extra large latte and more downtime to make this decision.

Is this the next gold rush or are we going to be tumbleweed in the desert?

Bistro - the Best iPhone Sites That Rock

2009-08-25T22:18:00.004-04:00

Today we generally design our webpages to be 1024x768 as the lowest common denominator. It used to be 800x600. !2 years ago, VGA was tremendous breakthrough in color depth and screen size at 640x480. It's hard to buy a wide-screen monitor these days that is less than 22 inches. So it's hard to imagine a life of 320x480 (i.e. half VGA). Welcome to the world of the iPhone.

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you'll be familiar with swiping, squeezing, expanding we have to do with our fingers as we navigate websites that were never conceived for a format so small. The fact that we can view most websites (as long as they don't start with a flash homepage!) is quite amazing. Nevertheless, it isn't satisfying.

There are quite a few websites that offer an alternative view to accommodate the iPhone. Problem is most often people don't know they exist. So we took it upon ourselves to find, collate and share them with the public.

Welcome to Bistro, the Best iPhone Sites That Rock.

Visit our Bistro page today for the first installment of apps offering news, technology, entertainment, food and other great sites that has made browsing the web with an iPhone a great experience.

I'm not sure we're making the world a better place. We're certainly making it easier for you to find it if you have an iPhone.

Three splats

2009-08-25T11:37:00.002-04:00

It's happened to all of us. You're running late in the morning, trying to get the kids out on time, making breakfast and sometimes everything just goes disastrously wrong.

For me, that was this morning.

Coming up from the basement, I was trying to hold on to a couple tubs of yoghurt, bottles of water and some snacks for their lunch bags. Splat! a tub of yoghurt drops on the floor splattering it's contents.

I pick it up and go back to the fridge to get another one for the lunch bag. The offending tub falls again, this time even a bigger mess. Splat #2!

Ok, deep breath, run upstairs to get some paper towels. En route, I quickly try to flip the omelette I've got going. It didn't flip well. Splat #3!

At that point, as the US President would say, it would prove to be a learning moment. Do I totally freak out, shout obscenities and proceed to have a bad day? or do I figure out how not to ruin the next 16 hours of my day.

Takes a lot of discipline to do the latter because it is so easy just to give in. Deep breath, visualize myself watching all of this from somewhere far away or 10 years later. Think about how big the situation really is. And all of the sudden, even three messy splats which look like mountains a moment ago, now look like mole hills.

Three splats, but I didn't strike out. So I'm having a better day after all.

It's a mental exercise I try to remember to do every time something bad happens. I try not to look at the situation now but how I would feel about it looking at it 10 years later. Was it really that big a deal? Most times, it's not.

Have a terrific day!

The importance of great habits

2009-08-21T11:27:00.002-04:00

I have an old Roland A90 midi keyboard that I hooked up with GarageBand. My son started mixing tracks like a pro. Enough to inspire me to spend an hour tickling the ivories (actually plastic keys!).

So I pulled out Fur Elise and proceeded to try and play it. Age took its toll and my long forgotten music reading skills let me down. After struggling for some time. I closed the book and played from memory. Surprisingly I did much better, my fingers seemingly guided by hidden strings as I magically found notes, chords and progressions.

Somewhere in my brain lay a hidden map. Although dusty, it was there, chiseled in by hours of repetitive practice years ago.

It reminded me of the importance of building great habits. A habit is a unconscious behavior that is reinforced by repetition. Great habits mean that we do the right thing without thinking. I call it unconscious greatness. Alas it takes practice and discipline but eventually they become an automated responses, great ones.

More about boxes

2009-08-20T10:33:00.002-04:00

I thought more about my post yesterday. I think people like putting stuff in boxes and labelling them because if they can define it, they believe (perhaps erroneously) they can control it.

It's perhaps because of the way we are educated. As engineers and scientists, we are always taught to breakdown a problem, identify and classify and solve it bit by bit. Our analytical bias is probably due to the system making us think that way.

Kids have no boundaries because no-one told them there should be any. Indeed, if you look at who has the greatest imaginations and see possibilities instead of roadblocks, it is our children and not us.

Perhaps we should learn from them as much as we want to teach them.

Don't box me in

2009-08-19T10:27:00.002-04:00

I was reading a post this morning on Gamesutra about the state of gaming by Wanda Meloni. Her concluding comment was really profound.

...It all depends on who you ask, their individual preferences and their frame of mind. Are we still so myopic that we can’t see where this is going? Entertainment has no defining demographic, it simply is...

And that would be a perfect way to describe the Internet. The web is a like a molten mass of digital assets that really defies description. It is different things to different people. Being in the tech world, we take it for granted everyone has a Facebook account or everyone twitters. When you have a hammer, yep, everything looks like a nail.

The reality is the web is like smorgasbord and to even try to define an individual's preferences and partiality is wrong. That individual changes every day. Yesterday it was MySpace, tomorrow it is Facebook and tomorrow who knows?

They should dub our current generation, Generation-N for Generation Now. My kids live in the moment. They have no qualms in changing emails, social networks, games or tv shows. To try and define them and put them in a category would be futile. It would be obsolete by the time you read this sentence.

It does change the way we look at loyalty and how we build loyalty programs. Making people collect points over 12 - 24 months are not going to make consumers change their buying habits. They would happily jump ship for the 10% instant discount across the street or worse still it is just a url away.

Those who figure out how to give you a 10 second emotional buzz and get that one time purchase every time will eventually be king.

Every day is a crossroad

2009-08-18T12:05:00.002-04:00

Every day we wake up and face the task of making decisions. Some are easy like what you're going to have for breakfast, others are a lot harder like where are you going to take your business today.

I make it a habit of questioning all my assumptions almost on a daily basis. Not the same as second guessing myself but I know too well how easily we hang on to our prejudices and biases. In fact the longer we travel down a particular path the harder it is to switch paths mainly because generally people hate change and also we feel like we are throwing away our previous investment (time, money, emotions).

We all play the same game, i.e. if we a priori decide that we want something, we will always find a way to justify it regardless of cost or practicality. That is the genius of the human race and also its flaw. That is my biggest fear in life, that I may be fooled by my own desires and ambitions that I make the wrong decisions because of the wrong reasons.

If we are not successful, there is a determinism that makes us prevail. If we are successful, we are loath to try something else in case we lose our success. But time brings new paradigms, culture, preferences and thinking and if we don't move with it we become dinosaurs.

For every decision, there is always an example why it was right in one circumstance and wrong in another. One entrepreneur will tell you how prevailing for 10 years in one domain was his demise, another will tell you how he hung on until the last payroll and ended up rich because of his perseverance.

At the end of the day, every piece of advice we get is only a guideline and at the end of the day, our decisions rest solely with us. We live and die by our own swords, there is no-one else to blame.

Perhaps we should not view our changes in our lives and businesses as radical acts that invalidate everything we've done before. Perhaps we can come to terms with them if we view every path at some point has a crossroad. We make our choices that may take us down a path less travelled but we never forget how we got there.

Our legacy got us here and helps us figure out what's next at every crossroad.

What's love got to do with it

2009-08-11T18:10:00.002-04:00

Everything.

We just received a review from iPhone App Review. The reviewer used the words, So I LOVE – truly, madly, deeply – Signature from IdeasUnplugged. We get quite a few of these in emails every week. When users take time to email you with suggestions and tell you what a difference it's making for them, you know it's all worthwhile.

We've put a lot of work into Signature and will put a lot more in. Financially, it's not the home run. But heck, we wanted to make a difference and slowly and surely we have. Every upgrade isn't a "Gee Whiz, look a this feature that makes all my friends laugh!". It's a determined effort to come up with a professional slick application that hopefully people will appreciate. I'm starting to think so.

It is a great lesson on how to build a following of raving fans. Don't just give them something that works, give them something they love. Who would think that you can build a business app, especially a signature app that people love. I think we just did.

If you think I'm wrong? Take a look at Unix. It's been kicking around for decades. Unless you're a geek, you would never consider loading it as your OS. That is until Apple took it, wrapped in aluminium, added a sexy interface and called it a Mac. The rest as they say is history. Listen to a Mac or MacBook owner, the word that comes up as often as the word "Apple" or "Mac" is the word "Love".

Gotta love it. I do.

The Problem with Momentum

2009-08-10T09:42:00.003-04:00

A really good topic for a Monday morning. Momentum is one of those properties of life that is synonymous with been effortless or at least minimal energy while maintaining a good speed. Finding life's momentum is probably the toughest thing to do. Like getting a huge rock moving, once it gets going, it's pretty awesome but the energy required to get the rock rolling is pretty darn hard. It's called inertia, it's the nemesis of momentum.

We just started another web project. It's not unfamiliar territory but still it felt like a chore. Lots of mundane and time consuming tasks to do just to get it to a point of being presentable. Pretty much trying to get that big rock rolling.

Then I remembered how I used to get my own teams from overcoming their inertia. Divide your tasks into much smaller and manageable chunks. Then tag a few that will give you some quick easy wins. Part of overcoming inertia is feeling good about your progress. Do one thing at a time. Make sure it is one small thing that you know you can reach quickly and easily. Before long, momentum kicks in and you look back feeling good about how far you've come.

Incidently, there is a reason why the couplings between train cars have some slack in them. There's no way a train engine can pull 50 trucks from standstill. What it does because of the loose couplings, is pull the first one. Once the engine and the first truck is moving, it is easier to pull the next one. With each moving truck, the momentum gets larger and larger and eventually the whole train gets moving. Pretty smart. We have to remember to do that in our own lives. Building momentum one truck at a time.

Listen to the user

2009-08-05T19:23:00.002-04:00

Too often in the software industry, we create elaborate product plans thinking we know what the user wants. Usually we partially right but often we don't really know what is the pain point (and hence the purchase decision) until the software is really in the hands of the user.

A significant upgrade to our Signature app has just been made available in the AppStore. The biggest feature? Letting users use a photo taken from their iPhone camera or pick one from their photo album. Of all the support emails we received, most people had no clue how to post an image to Flickr or some image host and get the URL from that picture. As technology geeks we thought it was trivial. Obviously we were wrong. Most people were probably put off after struggling to add their profile image from an Internet hosted image.

Our lesson here. We got the first version out as fast as we could without sacrificing quality and then we listened. Version 2.0 is simply stuff people wanted and struggled with when customizing their signature. Every support email got a personal reply. We felt their pain. And in the end, we produced an even better product that we're pretty stoked about.

In addition to better image support, we threw in a couple of fonts, allowed users to chose the style (normal, bold, italic) and even the font size. People want reasonable defaults so they can see and use something quickly. But once hook, they want to make it their.

If you're interested, more about the Signature app can be found at Ideasunplugged on our Signature application page.

One of the funniest reviews we had in the store was someone complaining that we were fabricating the reviews by getting friends and family to comment. It's a common practice amongst the developer community but one we don't do. We'd rather let our raving fans do the shouting. Every comment and review has been submitted by users without our input or request. The fact that someone thought the reviews were too good to be true even though they really were is just way cool.

Great Wall of Apple

2009-07-27T16:12:00.003-04:00

So we chilled out a little last week after finishing a major update to Signature which hopefully will be available in about a week awaiting Apple approval.

We're always promoting the little guys, like at TheGoodBlogs showing the lesser known bloggers. At the Apple appstore, there are over 75,000 applications clamouring for your attention. Unfortunately like Google search pages, people rarely go beyond the first 2 or 3 pages which means if your app is not in the Top 100 of either recently posted or most popular list, you're on a downward spiral to nowhere fast.

We decided to create a wall of app icons (similar to the physical wall they did at MacWorld. This time it's virtual. Here's a small screenshot of a typical wall.

Check out full size image at The Great Wall of Apple.

Each category has several walls each holding 120 icons. There are 21 categories so you could spend quite a bit of time, browsing the walls.

Don't forget to click on the top right hand corner of the wall to see the next part of the wall.

Have fun. We did.

The way you make me feel

2009-07-20T09:17:00.003-04:00

I was thinking a lot about consumer buying recently. If we were all logical we would be buying practical cheap cars of the same color. We would all wear the same clothes and sensible shoes. But we're not logical at heart. We love to emote and what drives our decisions to buy is how something makes us feel.

Which is why products like Apple, Ferraris, Chanel and other great brands can charge a premium for their wares. They have figured out how their products can make you feel good. Why else would we pay 3 times more for less food at a fancy restaurant. Because you feel pampered, special and somehow, because of where you are, even the food tastes better than it would in diner next door.

It's an easy thing for a marketeer to grasp. Much harder for a technologist or software developer (in general). We're taught that technology is king, the more cool features the better. The reality is trying to figure out what the latest impression you can leave with your user as he or she finishes using your application. That will ultimately determine whether you have a raving fan.

For software it means, make your user firstly fall in love with your icon, it's the thing they look for and the first thing they click. Secondly, make they feel empowered, i.e. you helped them do something significant in their task and they enjoyed doing it. In short, make them feel like a king.

The Economics of iPhone App Development

2009-07-13T18:03:00.004-04:00

If you follow the tabloids, you would believe that every iPhone developer is driving around in Ferrari or at least some German pedigree sports car. Judging by the number of people, friends, family and strangers who have approached us with the next million dollar iPhone app, I would put that perception to be categorized as 'widely held' if not in the 'urban myth stratesphere'.

The reality is many apps don't make enough to even cover the cost of the software development licence of $99 and the $1,500 to get a Mac. I surmise most developers are either keeping their day jobs or driving humble Asian vehicles with double mortgages to boot.

The economics of the iPhone apps have drastically changed in the past months. At the beginning of the year, there were probably 5,000 apps kicking around costing you $70,000 to buy all of them. Today, it's more like 70,000 apps and a cool $160,000 if you wanted to own all of them. Of course, it is an impossibility given that the limit for your iPhone is around 148 apps. But that is one way to measure the market cap of iPhone apps, i.e. what would it cost to buy all the apps.

8 to 10 months ago, the shortage of apps and major players meant relying on Apple to promote you in the AppStore was a sure fire way to success. Lots of eager iPhone, iPod users and less apps, you could rely on a ton of people to try and buy your app. Today, you would likely disappear from the front page in a matter of days and even hours depending on your category.

Add to the fact that major content players (both movies and games) with big budgets are using the the iPhone platform to extend their marketing and sales reach make it really tough for smaller development shops from surviving, let alone show a profit.

So the typical developer goes to bed each night praying that someone like MacWorld will give them a review or they would hit the jackpot and be featured in What's hot! on the Apple web front page.

If you've dabbled in Google Adwords or Facebook in the web world, a 10 to 1 return is phenomenal i.e. 1 person buys out of every 10 clicks. Generally it is more like 20 to 1 and often more. I have scars from that adventure too! When you pay 15c a click or the more usual 20-50c a click, you'll quickly realize the traditional marketing techniques are a sure fire way to hell if you're selling a product for 99c.

On that other hand, if you're an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch fan, this is an awesome place to be. With some amazing free apps to choose from, there's very little that you can't do these days with the iPhone. And if by chance you bought an app that didn't turn out the way you hoped, the cost was less than a double Mocha at Starbucks.

I'm both a fan and developer. The Yin and Yang of Apple iPhone development. The bitter and the sweet. To be fair, life isn't any easier anywhere else. We've had several clients making forays into the digital web world with less than stellar success to put it mildly. Making apps for the iPhone is no different. Lots of sweat and tears and hopefully a little bit of luck (maybe lots of luck).

Browse the app reviews and you'll see the people get more angry over a missing feature in a 99c app or even a free one than they would about not being able to format a paragraph in a $299 word processor. It's a pretty weird thing that's for sure.

Despite it all, we still get excited by the number of people who use our apps. Whether it is to put smile on someone's face with a Kiss Stickie or a Bunny, or being part of someone's productivity when they use us to add a cool signature to their email. I just wish I could get them to pay $29.99 instead of $2.99 for each.

As the Eagles song goes, "It is not the center of the Universe, but it is where I want to be."

Free iPhone ebook

2009-07-06T10:03:00.005-04:00

If you like George MacDonald, we have a couple of free eBooks for download in the iTunes appstore. Enjoy!

The Golden Key and Other Stories is a collection of 6 fairy tales by George MacDonald.

Although written more than a centuary ago, these tales are feel fresh and modern.

As George MacDonald once said, "I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five".

The six stories in this volume include:

1. The Golden Key - It's found at the end of the rainbow, but what does it open?
2. Cross Purposes - The fairy queen wants a mortal or two at her court.
3. The Lost Princess - Can a princess change her spots?
4. The Shadows - They know more all about the human heart.
5. The Giant's Heart - A re-telling of a Norwegian fairy tale.
6. The Light Princess - A lack of gravity makes her too light-hearted, till a prince comes along.

We made the top 100

2009-07-06T09:54:00.002-04:00

What a pleasant surprise after 4th July. Just released Signature Lite, a free version of Signature for the iPhone/iPod Touch over the weekend. Both the free and paid versions are in the top 100 for Business. With over 1000 apps in business (over 69,000 this week in the appstore), we feel pretty good about our efforts.

Signature Lite is currently in the top 30 for Business apps after 2 days, telling us there's definitely a need for jazzing up your email instead of the customary "Sent from my iPhone".

IdeasUnplugged goes mobile

2009-06-30T18:06:00.004-04:00

Seems like a silly thing to say, but our mobile site IdeasUnplugged.com was never formatted for easy viewing on iPhones... until now.

Like most websites, you had to scroll around and pinch the page to get the right size and where you wanted to go. Not a great user experience.

We finally found time to fix that. Took us 2.5 days to revamp the site. Fortunately, most of the work was redoing the CSS stylesheet but we did have to redo some of the content. When it normally takes 2-3 weeks per website, I guess we did do some things right this time around.

Now both TheGoodBlogs and IdeasUnplugged are formatted properly for iPhone browsing. But you do need to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to see the fruits of our efforts.

We were contemplating of creating an iPhone simulator like we did for TheGoodBlogs but we used some Safari specific extensions (specifically, the webkit for CSS) which would not work well in a browser other than Safari. So unlike TheGoodBlogs that gives you a choice of looking at the main site or the mobile version, IdeasUnplugged will switch you over automatically when it detects you're browsing on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Some lessons learnt.

When doing a website, make sure you separate raw data (text and numbers) from formatting (like HTML tags) and styles (like CSS). That way you almost get away with just redoing the CSS for a different format. Where it breaks down, is you may elect to display less content or different content, in which case you do have to mess with the content logic.
Doing a mobile website teaches you to prioritize because of the limited space (which is a funny thing to say because the format of the iPhone 320x480 is half VGA for those of us old enough to remember VGA). That's the space us oldies had to contend with. These days with monitor resolutions 1,024 and up, we tend to fill our web pages with too much stuff.
Focus on getting a user to have just one good experience on a page and convey just one message to him/her. Probably the majority of websites today break that rule.
Worry about loading times and image sizes. Even 3G these days are not as fast as broadband despite what the techies tell you. Not as bad as dial up but we have less patience when you're holding a small device in your hand and you're waiting for just one thing.

The passing of a genius

2009-06-28T13:01:00.003-04:00

This week saw the passing of a musical genius, Michael Jackson. I grew up on his music and witnessed how he changed the music industry both in the music, the videos and the business. Alas the last few years, all his achievements were eclipsed by his eccentricity.

His death however, has made it possible for the old to reconnect to music and choreography and introduce the young to legend of old.

I routinely check our website at http://www.IdeasUnplugged.com that monitors the top songs, iPhones apps etc, and was surprised to find that in the US iTunes store, 15 of the 25 top iTunes downloads were songs by Michael Jackson. In France, 18 of the top song downloads belong to him too. Similarly in Germany. In Britain, however, only a several songs made it to the top 25 as did Canada. You can track this at http://www.ideasunplugged.com/top_spot/songs/.

It is ironic but not unusual that it takes the death of a genius for the world to appreciate his accomplishments. There will be other stars, but none quite like him again.

I bought his Off The Wall and Thriller albums on vinyl. Some of my favorites that I remember when I was at university were "Ben" and "She's out of my life". Do you remember?

Goodbye Michael.javascript:void(0)

The price to dream

2009-06-23T18:09:00.004-04:00

John Maxwell has a terrific article on The Cost Question

We've been living the self-employed dream at TheGoodBlogs now for almost 3 years. Maxwell's questions are relevant to our scenario, methinks.

Want to live the dream? Pay the price.
Done that, problem is like the adventurers of old, you don't know where the edge of the world is until you fall off. There's no universal price tag. Our pioneer forefathers didn't know either.
The dream is free, but the journey isn't.
Probably the most shocking truth that never hits home until you've run out of rations.
The price must be paid sooner than you think.
That's why startups raise millions of dollars, so you can spend someone else's money for your mistakes.
The price will be higher than you expect.
And it's a price not just of money but time and personal sacrifice.
The price must be paid more than once.
That's why startups raise several rounds of financing each time promising it will be last one before IPO.
It is possible to pay too much for your dream.
I think I already paid too much for this dream... but like the pig, I'm committed now. Unlike the hen, it's not so easy just to contribute an egg and move on.

These are sobering thoughts. So much so I think I need a beer to drown my sorrows.