buzznovation

Once read books…and solving a real problem or the next step after Shelfari….

As I have been watching all the things happening on the web, I think about the real problems in my life, and how they might help me solve them.

So first, let me tell you a little story. My sainted mother was a voracious reader. She would have loved the net, would have loved all the writers, the blogs, all the user generated content, but in her life, the net was great books, magazines, newspapers.  These various ways of delivering content may disappear in my lifetime. I hope not.

When she died, my sister and I were left her house, and I think most of the stuff she had ever owned in her lifetime, including all of her books. All of which she had kept. We each took a few, but the rest we gave to the community college in our home town. To my absolute delight, the college created a book plate that said something like… “In loving memory of Lucille Keenan Bruggeman”.  When I was in the library one day, I saw a title that I recognized from her library, opened it, and found the book plate in the book.  I brushed a tear from my eye, and was just flat thrilled.

So, fast forward 20 years.  Routinely over the years I have boxed up books and sent them back to the college. Each time I have gotten a note, thanking me, and telling me that they will add the special book plate, and put the books on the shelves.

I felt great, as if I had done right thing, e.g. reading the books, knowing that Mother would be proud of me, knowing that I had read them, and knowing that the books I had purchased would be read again and again. And I would know there would be a book plate in them, so that whoever opened it, would read her name and wonder who this much loved woman was.

And so here’s the idea.

What if there were a business or a charity, that would  a means by which libraries could in effect subscribe to Shelfari, and when you indicated that you had read a book, that they would match the book you read with a library request somewhere, and would provide you with a mailing envelope and postage so that the book would end up in the hands of someone who needed it.

A friend of mine once told me that having a book shelf full books you had read was like having a six pack of empty wine bottles.

I am sure companies like Amazon would be irked, authors would probably be disappointed, but libraries everywhere would have access to the books they wanted, and the world might be a better place.

Like all my ideas, they make a huge amount of sense to me.

I am not quite sure how to make this work, but I know how valuable books in the right hands would be.

What do you think?

 

Why do some people get ActiveWords and others don't?

About a month ago I noticed that a guy named Marty Korn had down-loaded ActiveWords. We are always trying to figure out what we are doing right and what we are missing as we try to build and expand our user base.

I googled Marty and found that he was a well known and sophisticated psychiatrist. So… I reached out to him, found him to be a terrific guy and I asked him a couple of questions, e.g. :

“How do you get people to modify their behavior so as to try an application like ActiveWords?”

“What are we missing in terms of our product, pitch, ideas, vision, etc.?”

I figured that given Marty’s background and skill set, he would be a natural to answer my question. Marty has turned out to be a great guy, and has posted an essay about ActiveWords here.

What ActiveWords and for that matter every little software company needs is about 100k guys like Marty.

Reflections on a face plant....in the pavement... :(

Yesterday afternoon I went to a family wedding. The day was beautiful, the bride absolutely stunning, the groom handsome, and the service, the ceremony and the reception a huge amount of fun. The father of the groom is one of my cousins, and he reminded me that I was an usher at his wedding way too many years ago.

There were a number of wonderful images that I have firmly imprinted in my mind from the day, including the use of names. One of my cousins grandchildren has been named after his mother, at times a difficult woman, but one who always treated me wonderfully, and of whom I have only the fondest of memories.

I figured out a good time to leave, and headed home thinking about how much fun the day was. But as I headed north, I sensed that my trusty Saab was not running quite right, but thought it was my imagination. My imagination turned into a dark reality, and whammo my car stopped running. I was able to get off the Interstate at an exit and glide into a Shell convenience store/gas station.

I tried to re-start the car, but no luck, then called a friend and a tow truck which took forever to get there. But when it did, the driver was skilled and in short period of time, he had my car on the flat bed part of the truck ready to haul to the Saab garage.

But rather than let the pros do the work, I decided I would help the driver retrieve all his gear. As I walked to pick up his gear, I stepped innocently on something, slipped, and suddenly fell crashing to the pavement, effectively planting my face into the concrete. It was like being in a fight, and never seeing the punch that knocked me right out of the ring.

I managed to pick myself up, lips bleeding, teeth almost loose, hand bruised, knee incredibly sore, and my clothes a total mess. It all happened so fast that a day later I am not sure what happened.

Some of the soreness is now gone, but my knee is still aching, and hand pretty bruised.

So lessons learned:

a. Cold water takes the blood out of your tie.

b. Lots of Advil minimizes the pain.

c. Leave the real work to the pros.

I am just grateful not to have a broken hand/leg. And hopefully the analysis from the Saab garage will not be brutal.

But the Wedding was wonderful, and I am glad that I went.

ActiveWords and Scripting in Outlook 2007...

I seem to live in Outlook and the browser.

Living in Outlook is not where I had planned to spend my life, but having resolved to build the best relationships for ActiveWords that I can, I have resolved to master Outlook, and to script those things that I need to do, or do all the time. For those that take the time, you can pretty quickly figure out that there are keyboard equivalents for all kinds of things in Outlook, but whoever designed them must have had a different logical view of the world than I do, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing.

To here’s today’s problem and solution for three things I do in Outlook all the time.

Problem 1, I go to lots of events, meet lots of people and see to follow up with them. The problem starts when I get a business card. I have tried card scanners with mixed results. So I am left with getting the card into outlook the old fashioned way, e.g. type in the name. Normally not a problem, but when you go to an event and get the cards say from 6 people from the same company. And all of the cards have lots of the same detail, nightmare in terms of re-typing all the stupid stuff over and over. But do not fear, inside Outlook is a command called “New contact from the same company”.

You know it’s there somewhere because you have seen it before. And after spending some time digging around you find it. If you take a moment you will realize that if you were to type say:

<ALT>h</ALT>aw<ALT>c</ALT>

You would get a new contact from the same company with all the right stuff filled in.

So, I have named it “sameco” and whammo it works.

Problem 2, you have got the contacts name in a record and you want to send them a follow on E-Mail, either pitching your product, or doing whatever you want to do with that contact. You find yourself staring at the record and you look at the “ribbon” in Outlook and you see a tab that says E-Mail. So, you can take your fingers off the keyboard and reach for the mouse/trackpad and try to hit the E-Mail icon.

Or you can type say:

<ALT>h</ALT>l

And whammo you have a new E-Mail to the person whose contact record is open. I call this “nm”

Problem 3 And finally with the contact record open you may choose to want to calendar it to follow up.

<ALT>h</ALT>w<ALT>c</ALT> will do it just fine, and I call this script “fup” and insert a date.

I never know how important this kind of stuff is, but in the age of the elimination of admin help, getting this kind of stuff done fast is mandatory in my world.

Simply copy and paste these scripts into the “action” field in scripting in ActiveWords, and if there are other things that you want me to try script just leave a comment.

Time for a new picture....n

I got an E-Mail from my pal Sean. He told me it was time for a new picture. Hence the new picture. The picture was taken last summer when Matt Homann was here in Seattle. He, Kevin O’Keefe and I spent a great afternoon drinking Mack & Jack African Amber in Pioneer Square.

When I was in college and law school, I think that one of my goals was to drink all the beer I could, on the theory that they might stop making it. And then for the next lengthly period of my life I kind of stopped drinking beer. But to the eternal credit of a little brewery in Redmond, Washington, I have returned to having an occasional beer.

 

Note to Steve Ballmer...and what would I buy...Craig's List..?

The other day I was interviewed by a bright young woman from Microsoft. Her topic was about influencing start-ups. We had a great time talking and mid-way through the conversation I had a bit of an epiphany.

She was asking me the best as to my thoughts on the best way of reaching start-ups and I said “Craig’s List” and after I thought for a moment longer, I said to her, instead screwing around with Yahoo, Microsoft should buy Craig’s List.

I had just read an article by Noam Cohen in the New York Times, entitled “Craig (of the list) Looks Beyond The WEB”.

In the article there is a remarkable graphic, e.g. here, which shows the penetration of Craig’s list into towns that are smaller than 20,000 people.

I think I read where Craig’s list grossed $80m last year with 25 people on their staff, not bad. I am sure there those who will argue that Craig’s List is not for sale, my guess is that with some of the dollars allocated to the Yahoo deal, Microsoft could find a way to buy something that everyone uses. They could easily clean up the UI, and have an incredible platform on which to advertise.

The whole idea probably makes way too much sense. I probably need to take a nap and pretend this was just a dream.

 

The Kindle or thoughts on the future of books...

I have met Jeff Bezos a number of times. He is cordial, bright and fun. He has a lovely wife, great kids and a pretty interesting company.

I had the privilege of playing with the Kindle about 6 months before it shipped.  

In an interesting article in the N. Y. Times printed yesterday. The article presents a number perspectives on electronic books, but I think there is a perspective an publishing/writing model that is being ignored.

And here’s how I see it playing out. Let’s assume that a publisher and authors will have two options going forward, e.g. print and digital. And let’s assume that a best seller in print might be say $24.95 and digitally on the Kindle say $9.95.

I would suggest there is a 3^rd option, e.g. that the author would have the ability to have a digital version for say $24.95 which would include annotations, later editions, reader’s comments, user generated content, etc. so that the digital book itself could become a social network. Maybe the more expensive version of digital book would include an interview with the author, or who knows what other add-ons, almost like the director’s cuts of DVD’s that we see re-issued, but my guess is that it might be a far richer version of the paper book or the simple digital book that contains the same text as the book.

And I have one more thought. It appears that we are about to be presented with a new generation of devices called “MIDs” or mobile Internet devices. A pretty interesting example is here, e.g. The Wind.

So, what if, they simply took the screen, designed it so that it spun around like the Lenovo X61 tablet, and let you read a book on the screen like a book. The net result would be that you really would have a dynamite device, e.g. a light weight computer that was also a book reader.

Sure there there would be issues of weight and battery life, but it would be exactly what I wanted, including daily updates of all the papers, magazines and books that I want to read, and ready to go whenever I was ready to go.

The Wind MID referenced above, weighs 2.6 pounds, the Kindle about 11 oz. Not sure if that is a deal breaker, but I should would like to try the Wind with Kindle functionality.

 

Obama...

I never spoke to a Black person until the day I started college. There weren’t any Black people in Northern Minnesota. As my first Black friend Geoff Harding said, “Black people were smarter than that”.

I have had the honor since then to have a number of wonderful Black friends.

Tonight at the gym the TV was on, and Barack Obama was speaking. A Black man changing next to me said that he never thought that he would see the day when a Black name was nominated to be president of the United States, nor did I.

Being Away....

My friend Tom’s death had a great impact on me. Hence beiing away from blogging has not been hard, but I have reflected upon our time together, and our friendship, and he would be most disappointed if I did not go forward with resolve and a deisre to live my life to the very best.

He and I had talked about doing all kinds of things together.

I shall seek to do them, and think about the how much fun it would have been to do them with him.