Silicon Valley is a sexy place. Not in the same way that the cities of Miami, NYC, or San Diego are sexy. The ideology of silicon valley promotes entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation, self-starting, team building, meritocracies, and insomnia. OK, well not literally insomnia, but not sleeping is a badge of honor. That ideology is sexy and it’s like gravity in that It draws people into its field of influence but it also leaves a lot of bodies in it’s wake.

ReadWriteStart’s last article titled “Are You Really an Entrepreneur?” is a a great post that emphasizes some of the less sexy, but realistic elements of being an entrepreneur. Anyone interested in starting a company should check out the article. I don’t think it should discourage individuals from going after their dreams, but hopefully it will better prepare them for what is to come. This will likely improve the outcome of a new venture since proper planning can overcome many challenges faced by an entrepreneur.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the article:

• Put down “The 4-Hour Workweek”; it is a myth that the author spun to sell books (so that he could work 4 hours a week).
• There will be long periods of time when everyone around you questions your sanity, and on all normal metrics (hours worked and stress endured vs. material rewards gained), they would be right.
• The entrepreneur is an odd mix: part dreamer, part brutal realist and pragmatist.
• Entrepreneurs have to be generalists. They may know one thing very, very well. But they also have to know enough about almost everything else to occasionally do those things themselves, and have the judgment to eventually hire the right people to do those things.

And people wonder why only a few startups are successful…

Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship, readwritestart, silicon valley, startups

A few days back I stood up for Facebook for a few reasons. First, I don’t think the design is as bad as people say it is. Second, people often don’t offer many recommendations for improvement beyond “dude, the UI sucks.” The beauty of the internet is everyone gets a voice. The downfall of the internet is everyone gets a voice. It makes it extremely hard for PMs to sift through the mess(as evident from the comments on MG’s TechCrunch post) and understand what is noise and what is actionable feedback that should be addressed. OK, that is now out of the way and I can get back to the task at hand, Virb.

If Facebook had Virb’s UI, Productivity in the US would plummet
Seriously, Virb’s UI is hot. Its clean and easy to use. It really isn’t fair to compare it to Facebook, since it’s purpose isn’t to keep in touch with friends. Instead Virb lets you explore photos, text, quotes, bookmarks, videos, and more. One of my favorite features on Virb is the explore button. I spend so much time searching for the things I want, it’s nice to just browse through images, videos, and quotes from interesting people that I don’t know. It’s like channel surfing on TV, but better. There are definitely some talented artists and photographers on Virb.

Content is king, so Virb’s got some work to do
Despite the wonderful UI, content is king, and on Social Networks the content that keeps users coming back is more users. Maybe Virb’s goal is really to be a place for really creative people to… well, be creative. I’ve got no problem with that, since I’m a big fan of concrete mission statements or mantras. I think it tends to lead to products that answer a need and successfully monetize.

This post really just scratched the surface. My next post on Virb will go over a few of the UI/UX features that I think make it a killer web application. Stay tuned.

Product Management, Social Media, User experience facebook, Product Management, social networking, UI, UX

As a product guy, I do feel the need to stand up for Facebook. They take a lot of bashing from the media for their UI. I myself am guilty for bashing Facebook’s UI/UX, but they have a long laundry list of requirements. Not to mention their user profiles are quite diverse. They have user feedback pulling them in a million different directions, and then there is the other 98% of users that don’t explicitly say anything. Their actions must be measured, translated, and digested for their product team to act. So next time you think about saying “Man Facebook’s UI sucks,” think again. A 200 million user base didn’t show up due to lack of options.

Despite Facebook’s dominance there is room for innovation in the social network space. Facebook is winning the game, but it has not won it. They aren’t happily sitting back with their lead in the space. Their product serves a need, but it is far from perfect and they are well aware of it. Social networking is still in its infancy stages despite its adoption rate.

In regards to competition, I do like Virb’s look and feel, but it does leave me wanting feature wise. I’ll save my thoughts on Virb for another post.

Media, Product Management, Social Media, Technology facebook, Product Management, social networking, virb

I’m a car nut, and as such, one of the last people I’d ever feel sympathy for is the owner of an exotic car. At least, that was the case until this last week. This last week I was presented with a different perspective on the matter of owning an exotic car. I spoke with a gent that owns a Ferrari 430 and for the first few minutes we did what car nuts do, obsess about the intricacies of the car. However, a few minutes into the discussion he said that he doesn’t drive the car that much anymore. This guy is not one of those Ferrari owners that buys a car because its pretty or prestigious. This guy buys a car to be driven, hard. This kind of behavior begs the question, “why?”

So what causes a Ferrari 430 owner to not drive it?

Simple, fear. The fear that in a world where the loss of jobs and homes are commonplace, envy or resentment could bring people to commit acts of violence against those that are not feeling the crunch. Just think about those AIG execs that received death threats after the news about their bonuses leaked. I really hope our society has not degraded to such a state where we should be ashamed of our successes or fearful of expressing them. That is indeed NOT the American dream.

Not all Ferrari owners are evil exploitive bastards

Success is not a bad thing. We all strive for success in different ways. Once attained, we express that success in different ways. Most exotic car owners are not driving these amazing machines around to make anyone feel bad about their life. It’s got nothing to do with that. They’re just enjoying the ride, wouldn’t you?

cars cars, economy, ferrari

Why not just stick with TweetDeck?

Why A few weeks I go posted a tweet about hoping that the iPhone app Tweetie would be ported to an OS X desktop application. It’s not a secret that I have a love-hate relationship with TweetDeck. I like its functionality, but the UI and UX is suboptimal. Not to mention the memory leaks can end up with 1GB of lost RAM. I must say, every Adobe AIR app I’ve ever used suffers from this issue. Come to think of it, every application from Adobe on my comps (including the entire Creative Suite) is a resource hog. At any rate, this is what ultimately led to a mission to replace TweetDeck. Tweetie is not my first attempt to dethrone TweetDeck from ruler of my tweets. Last week I was giving Nambu a shot. Unfortunately, the stability of that application was questionable. However, it’s a beta release so I will give it another shot in a few weeks.

Too early to tell, but its looking good

At the request of the developers, I won’t disclose much information, but I will say that it does have promise. I’ve had the application open all day and its using up a total of about 30MB of RAM. I’ve got 4GB so that is an insignificant amount. Its responsive and easy to manage. Animations are cool and the UX is where it needs to be for a Twitter application. A big sell point for me is being able to track conversations/threads. Not sure why every Twitter app doesn’t have this, but its a great feature. There are many other cool features that I won’t hit on just yet. I will be sure to publish a more comprehensive review once I get the OK from the developers. For now it will serve as my new Twitter client for the Mac.

Technology Apple, Software, twitter

My biggest standing question:
What mix of content and profile-based targeting will be used to target me ads?

My doubts
I’m not a fan of preference based content or ad targeting. I think it will only be effective in a “beats a blank” scenario. This is when the ad or content targeting engine has no idea what to target me, which basically means it has no context of my visit. This should be a rare phenomena since I usually enter a site through a link from Twitter, Google Search, or a news feed from my Pageflakes page. My destination is almost always not the front door, aka www.site_name_goes_here.com. This means that with the right technology, my context can almost always be identified.

Profile-based targeting done right
I must admit though that I do like the way Google is going about this profile based ad targeting. It’s transparent and easy to opt out.

Google should stick to it’s Ace in the Hole: Context
Google has one thing that everyone wishes they had, context. Google knows exactly what context their users are in after a search is submitted. So will Google target me primarily on context and fallback on my profile preferences when context is not available? That is what I hope to answer with this experiment. Stay tuned, but if you have an experience with this new initiative from Google, please post in the comments below.

Personalization, Search, Targeting, Technology

I remember when $100 could barely by a low capacity slow hard drive. This was not even a decade ago. I was reading an article on Seagate’s latest innovation in data storage technology and I came across this ad:

Thanks to increased network speeds and these huge hard drives, I haven’t purchased a blank CD or DVD in years.

Technology Hardware, Technology

Ensuring that customers get the highest value out of your products keeps them happy and coming back for more. This of course is assuming that you aren’t asking for another large sum of cash for this value maximizing. Well Best Buy is doing just that. They are charging their customers a whopping $300 to perform “calibration techniques” on purchased HDTVs to ensure that customers who purchased HDTVs get the best picture quality. There is some validity in this service as it is important to calibrate your TV’s picture quality, but $300 dollars is a pretty steep price.

Get it for FREE!

If you want to get the most out of your TV, but you DON’t want want to fork over your savings to Best Buy, check out the AVSForums. This site has been around a long time, and has a ton of audiophiles and videophiles. If you have a question about your specific model, just post a question and usually you’ll get an answer quickly. Chalk another one up for Wisdom of the Crowd.

Technology

Will this battle ever get old? I think not. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of beef between the two camps, and people keep creating flammable content to feed the fires of war. Best of all is the creative stuff. The Mac Vs. PC music video was great, but this is taking it to another level. I’m not sure how long it takes to put something like this together, but its surely not a project to take lightly. These guys did a great job. I look forward to the sequel.

Keep up the creativity.

Technology

Needless to say, Excel, GoogleDocs, Wikis, Word, are not the right tools for managing product requirements within an organization. Its like using a screwdriver as a hammer. That said, I’ve seen a few products that have steep learning curves which are unacceptable to my organization. Not everyone will spend all night figuring out a new system(nor would I want them to, they should be building the products). Accompa seems to be the best thing to fill the void, but I’m curious if any Product Managers out there have any recs. Oh, and money is not just an object.

Here are my needs:

• Inexpensive
• Reasonable learning curve
• Hosted(SaaS)
• Bug management preferred
• API Access preferred

Apps