Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

SXSW - Monday

Yesterday was spent seeing people more than attending events. There are some publishing folks who live in Austin who I had breakfast and lunch with.

The one session I did get to was Making Your Blog Your Business. My friend and designer-extraordinaire Phoebe Espiritu was one of the panelists. The subject of the panel how people had turned their blogs into businesses. The sentiments reflected here were the same as many other panels.

• Blogs allow you to aggregate demand for products and services
• These businesses are very small and are things you do in your spare time.
• You need to try things to see what will work

At the end of the day, I also caught How to Blog For Money by Learning From Comics. I thought it would be something interesting and different. A couple of interesting points from their talk were:

• Merchandise works well, but can be a pain to manage
• People often want to support sites. A site (missed the name) offered T-shirts and added micropayments. They found success with micropayments, but their merchandise sales disappeared. Apparel is much more profitable and the micropayment experiment was terminated.
• There are tribes on the net for everything. Sometimes, these comic creators would have a storyline or reference and draw huge crowds (one mentioned Firefly). The trouble is they don't stay. The story there is play to your audience.
• The last one is create great content. There were all these questions on "How do I get advertisers?" and "How do you handle printing of T-shirts?" People so quickly forget that you have to make good stuff.

Tags: sxsw2006

SXSW - Sink or Swim - Five Most Important Startup Decisions

Good morning.

I am starting my day at panel on startups. It was the star power that got me. Evan (Odeo), Joshua (del.icio.us), Cabel (Panic), and Joel (Fog Creek) are all speaking.

This is another one of those panels that gets interesting in the Q&A.

None of them had a business background nor do they really have business plans.

Joel - Paul Graham won't give me to a company that doesn't have at least two co-founders.

Cabel - MacWorld Test - If you can't explain it in a single sentence, you are screwed.

Joel - Forget about coupons and affiliate programs, write the next version of software. They generally double sales when they release a new version of software.

Joshua - The best decisions were the choices not to add features to del.icio.us.

Cabel - They always made software that they wanted to use, either because what was out there was bad or because it didn't exist.

Tags: sxsw2006

SXSW - Kathy Sierra

Here are streaming thoughts from Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users:

It is not about the product--it is about helping them do.

What can we help people kick ass doing?

If you help users be passionate you get the some of the spillover passion.

You need to get past the brain's crap filter.

Chemistry---people need to feel something, think about how you are communicating...weird, novel, different...keep the brain thinking that it is something important...the brain likes the unresolved. Funny..faces...beautiful...sexy...scary

Conversation beats formal lecture.

Talk to the brain not the mind...

Get people past the Suck Threshold and the Passion Threshold. There is an image of experitse, a meaningful benefit, and a series of steps to get there.

To get people to remember, you need to use emotion.

Need to balance challenge versus knowledge and skill.

How do we keep users in flow?

Get There Attention
Challenging Activity
Payoff

You need levels to keep people going.

Levels don't need to be obvious.

Hero's Journey

• Life is normal
• Something happens to change that
• Things really suck
• Hero overcomes bad things
• Return to the new normal

Create Playful Work

T-Shirt First Development - people want to identify themselves with you

Give them something to talk about? Make it ambiguous. Coldplay, Fair Trade, and the two black rectangles...

It doesn't matter what they think about you...it is about how people feel about themselves.

If spend more time in flow, they have happier lives

Tags: sxsw2006

Rocketboom: $40K for first week's ads

Rocketboom's Ebay auction ended tonight and the rights to the first week of ads went for $40,000.

I have wondered with many how Amanda and Andrew were going to make some money doing this.

It seems they have figured it out...

Order A Backup Drive Right Now

We purchased a backup drive for our household about a month ago. My wife has a Mac Mini and we bought the matching LaCie 250GB drive.

A couple days ago, Amy started noticing some problems with the Mini. It degraded quickly into not being able to login. I tried everything from running diagnostics to reinstalling OS X. No luck.

I made a trip to my local Apple store to give them a chance to take a look. They quickly declared the hard drive dead and replaced it.

Enter the backup drive. My wife is using Backup (need active .Mac account). All we had to do was hook-up the firewire cable between them and restore the files. It took some time (about an hour), but it was as easy as pie.

Backups use to be for servers and geeks. As more of our life ends up on our machines, we need to take precautions.

Go get yourself a external hard drive and a buy a recommended backup program. You will not regret the decision.

Rollyo Yo!

I remember hearing about Rollyo when it first launched and I couldn't think of a way it could be useful. Walt Mossenberg reviewed it this week in WSJ and it got me thinking again.

At 800ceoread, we are always looking for good material on business books. If you do a general search, you get a couple of good hits, but I know we are missing alot of good things. So, I decided to create a Rollyo search to see if I could do better.

In my searchroll, I have all the major business publications, some good business blogs and the 800ceoread family of sites.

http://rollyo.com/800ceoread/business_books/

The short answer is that I think there is something to limiting the number of sites that are searched. I looked up "alpha dogs", a new book from Donna Fenn. Check out the google results and the rollyo results. The Rollyo results are so much more relevant, such as finding the Inc. video interview with Fenn.

Others of you out there might similar needs, so I thought I would point you to this cool tool.

Memory Upgrade the Mac Mini

My wife and I took on the project of upgrading the memory in her Mac Mini this week. She had been complaining that she was getting the pinwheel quite a bit and that she could only have one or two programs open at a time.

I think the main memory hog for her is iPhoto. She lives in that program and has over 2200 photo and almost 3GB of data. The rate of photo taking has only increased since September, so we needed to do something.

Her original machine came with 512MB and we decided to go to 1GB. We didn't have a lot of choice in the matter, since there is only one memory slot and the maximum you can put in is 1GB. A trip to our local CompUSA got us the 1GB upgrade for $89.99 after rebate. Not bad.

The only difficult part of the upgrade is getting the case apart. MacWorld has a great tutorial for doing the upgrade. You want to take their advice on finding the thinnest putty knives you can. I got thinnest I could at Home Depot and still had to use a razor blade scraper to get the putty knives started on each side. Once we got the case it took about 3 minutes to complete the upgrade.

She is already reporting a much better experience since the upgrade.

Our next task is getting a backup drive. I think we are going to go with the LaCie mini 250GB. It will sit nicely underneath her Mini and connect via Firewire. We can both backup our computers there, as well as archive some data we don't use much. I'll let you know how that goes.

Real Power

The head of operations at Google says "Over four years, the power costs of running a PC can add up to half of the hardware cost."

[via TriplePundit]

We'll look back...

We'll look back at the last two weeks as pivotal times in digital media.

We know have price points for all digital media. I am not saying this is what media will forever cost or that it is the right price point , but this is what you can soon buy for 99 cents:

• 20 pages of a book


• 3 to 7 minutes of music


• 22 minutes of video

There is a disconnect when you look at them from a production cost standpoint (i.e. books are cheap, TV is expensive). You also see something similar from a file size/bandwidth standpoint (i.e. books in KB, video in GB).

Music and video have priced their product for digital distribution.

Publishers have not. They are trying to protect their turf. I don't see any consideration for the elimination of physical distribution and returns. This attitude is going to continue cost them share of mind and share of wallet.

New Project Over at 8cr...

This morning, 800-CEO-READ launched a new site.

I think of it as an ad-based version of woot.

It is closed beta right now. Sign yourself up if you would like in. We will be adding more people this week.

Your Choice in Power

I got a letter from my electric company, We Energies, with an interesting offering.

They are offering me the choice to use alternate resources to power my home. These are resources that are local to state and renewable. They say it is a combination of wind (17%), small hydroeletric (8%), and landfill gas (75%). They offer three participation levels with the highest being able to match 100% of your electricity with the purchases of renewable energy. That highest level adds an additional $15 a month to your bill.

I thought this was pretty remarkable. You typically do not have alot of choice over the energy you consume in your home. The old answer was consume less. Their new answer is renewable energy costs more, but here is option to pay for it if you value it.

Notational Velocity

If you are a Mac user, I want to strongly recommend Notational Velocity.

It is just an outstanding program for taking notes.

Cool parts of NV:

1. Everything you type is automatically saved.
2. All of your notes are immediately acessible in one place. I have teleconference instructions, to-do lists, and conference session notes.
3. If you type words in the top box, it will search your notes and show you matches. That can help eliminate you starting another note for something you already have.

It is another example of a simple elegant app designed to do a simple set of things.

Listen to Your Customers Instead - Part II

This quote is from John Battelle:

I once asked a Google exec why it didn't have a music play, like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. The answer: "Sergey doesn't listen to much music."

This reminds me of my Blockbuster post from a month ago. If what Google develops is based Sergey and Larry, that could spell trouble as the company moves away from search.

Yahoo! Offers Free Site to all U.S. Small Business

Yahoo! is offering every small business in America a free website through their Yahoo! Local service. They say half of American businesses don't have a web presence.

I would say this is a win-win. Late adopters get a easy way to get online and Yahoo! can offer better search results to its users.

PSP ESP

I guess this was right.

The Next iPod?

"The [Playstation Portable] will be the most in-demand consumer electronics device of the year, even more than the iPod."

-Richard Doherty, Envisioneering quoted in March 2005 Business 2.0

Podbrix II

Have you been following the Podbrix phenomenon? These little artistically modified Lego men are all the rage.

The $16.99 first edition was an ode to the dancing figures in the iPod commercials. There were 300 produced and they sold out in 10 hours.

The second edition is a carbon copy of Mr. Jobs holding an iPod and an Shuffle. The release coincided with Jobs' birthday on Thursday. Again, there were 300 numbered units and it only took 36 minutes to sell out.

I put a ebay tracker on these little guys as soon as I heard about the first sellout. There were three first edition Podbrix that showed up this morning. Each of the auctions has more than 5 days to go, but the top price is $157.25.

Skype Issues Resolved

It took four days, but the money I deposited is now showing up in the application. That means I can use SkypeOut now. I have placed a couple of calls and it has worked perfectly.

Skype Billing Disappointing Me

I have been working on a good way to record phone interviews for 800-CEO-READ Podcasts. I liked the solution that Glen Fleishman posted at MacDevCenter.com. It involves lots of software, but I think it is going to work great.

One of the pieces of that puzzle is using Skype for the phone connection. I don't expect that all the authors I talk to are going to have Skype (requires download), so I signed up for SkypeOut (this let's me make call to phone grid). I made my payment on Thursday. The transaction shows completed, but they credits are not showing up in my Skype application. I have been on the live chat three times and the best answer I can get is wait awhile and log back in.

A Feedster search finds many with the billing problems. Unbound Spiral has been talking about Skype alot. This post talks about the billing problems with Skype.

So, I am in a holding pattern on my project. Grrr....

Pure Genius

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a post about the Genius Bars located in Apple Stores.

The stat that caught my interest was "50% of the people visiting the Genius Bars are experiencing trouble with their iPods". With 10 million in circulation, I think that stat can be a little misleading.

What also made the post catch my attention was that I was recently one of those visiting to get my new iPod replaced. The new 20GB was DOA and Brian at the Mayfair Genius Bar got me straighten out in a snap.

I can't find the post, but I also saw recently that Genius Bar visits also generate more sales for the stores. During the exchange, I also bought a Griffin iTalk.

Thoughts from Boeing on A380

Randy Baseler is the Vice President of Marketing for Boeing's Commercial Planes division.

Baseler has started what he calls a web journal. Later in the entries, he refers to having done research into web logs. I think his "web journal" needs permalinks and an RSS feed, but it is a start. I sent him an email about it. We'll see if her responds.

Now for the thoughts. Baseler starts with this:

Along with the A380 being an engineering marvel it also represents a very large misjudgment about how most passengers want to travel and how most airlines operate.

It's quotes like these which can come back to haunt, but I think he backs it up to a certain extent:

Airbus is calling for a significant shift in recent trends. It believes we will all fly from hub to hub, with one or more connecting flights to complete our journey. Boeing believes airlines will continue to give passengers what they want -- more frequency choices and more non-stop, point-to-point flights.

Consider that Airbus says London's Heathrow will use the most A380s during the next two decades. Yet, the 747's share of departures at Heathrow hasn't changed during the past twenty years. Airbus lists Tokyo's two airports and Hong Kong's as major A380 hubs. But at those three airports, the 747 as a percentage of departures is about half of what it was in the 1990s. If large airplanes solve congestion, the 747 departures would have been going up.

I am fascinated to see how the rivalry progresses and it is great to hear comments direct from Boeing.

[via commoncraft]

Open For Business Project

The Open For Business Project is an open source project that encompasses an entire suite of enterprise software including ERP, CRM, E-commerce, and CMMS.

Cool.

Is OFBiz for you?

Airbus unveils A380

Here are a pretty good photo from Yahoo!

And here is the BBC News article with some more photos.

I think it is amazing.

The conversion is almost complete

I found myself watching the MacWorld Keynote as soon as it was posted.

I was laughing at all of Steve's clever quips.

I was ooing and aahing at the clever effects that they have built into the new products.

I told my wife that the Mac mini was our next home computer.

The conversion is almost complete.

TiVo No No

I started writing a post about TiVo's decision to add advertising when you are trying to fast forward through advertising.

Much better one have already been written. Read these posts from Ben at the Church and Matt at the Media Center Weblog.

Mmmm good

I have been trying to get my head around what was so cool about del.icio.us.

Mr. Ruebel helps explain social bookmark sites with this post. Steve tells the story from a PR angle, but you definitely get it after reading his thoughts.

I went over, got registered, and am now participating. I am starting to see the cool.

More soon...

IP in the game industry

First, add Scott Miller'sGame Matters to your RSS aggregator. It is a great blog about the video game industry. It has a great macro business perspective.

Second, read his post today called The IP Game -- Part One. Scott excerpts from an article from an industry magazine that talks about how intellectual property is handled in the video game industry.

Podcasting 101

iloveradio.org is putting together a great resource going called "Podcasting 101: Illustrated Tips for Newbie Podcasters"

Also check out "I Was Nearly Peter Jennings' Love Child".

Why to read Wired

I read every issue of Wired magazine. Some tell me that the design is too much for them. Others tell me it is too much about tech.

I read it because they give you a headstart on how technology is going to impact your business and its strategy. You must go read this month's article called The Long Tail. It is an outstanding analysis of how e-commerce companies are consolidating demand like physical stores never could.

Consider this - The top 400,000 songs on Rhapsody's music service are played by customers at least once a month. That is amazing. If you were to look at my iTunes purchases, you would see some very similar behavior. I have some very popular stuff and a few tracks were I probably made the purchase for that month.

Let me recommend again getting a subscription to Wired.

How to Podcast

Engadget has an outstanding post on how to create a podcast. They tell you what software you need and how to configure it. This specifically talk the Mac platform with screen shots and everything. They promise the same for PC as soon as they figure it out.

Podcasting

There is some really interesting things going on in this realm of podcasting.

What is podcasting? There is a definition on the Wikipedia. Dave Slusher boils down a podcast to three things:

1. Must be a discrete and downloadable media file
2. Published in an RSS 2.0 enclosure feed
3. Handled automatically on the receiver end, downloaded and moved to where it needs to be and put in the playlists for your playback device

Doc Searls probably has the most linked to post on the subject.

iPodderX is the first newsreader for audio files. You subscribe to feeds and it downloads any audio contained in them. It is a very simple application at this point that will undoubtly evolve.

Adam Curry is probably the biggest cheerleader for podcasting right now. You can check out the iPodder.org website. You can also start listening to his Daily Source Code.

One last thing - I had a post back on September 3rd where I described what needed to happen with audio blogging:

I think it is going to take some more experimenting in form and function. How can I easily record post and upload them? What if it was easy for readers to download audio posts onto their iPod and listen to them later? RSS readers detecting audio posts, downloading the new ones, and putting them into a playlist on iTunes?

How about that? Some others saw the same thing and made something happen. I love the stuff that is going on with this. You will see an experiment from me soon.

X Prize Awarded

This is a big deal. The entrance of private companies into space travel is a Wright Brothers type achievement.

Congratulations to everyone involved with SpaceShipOne!

What you could learn

I like what Forbes is doing. I think they have great reporting with alot of original stories.

Here is what you could learn by reading the current issue of Forbes:

• Did you know all of the big planes used to fight fires have been grounded since May? There have been three fatal crashes in two years. The wings snapped off two planes in mid-air. One contractor has taken the next step and modified a 747. [Splooosh!, p66]
• 800,000 people will take Alaskan cruises this year (that's 25% more than the state's population). The summer popularity of the region lets the cruise lines will redeploy ships from winter destinations such as the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii, the Panama Canal, and Europe. Carnival sends 16 ships and over 1/3 of their passengers now department from Seattle. [Cruise Control, p98]
• The cover story is about XM radio. What is amazing is about the article is what the National Association of Broadcasters has done over the years to squash innovation. Their latest maneuver is equally amazing. In 1995, Congress enacted a law that requires all digital radio to pay royalities to performers. The exemption for traditional radio was maintained and as well as the NAB's version of digital, HD radio. The law also made it illegal to broadcast local content, such as traffic reports and sports. The NAB argued that local stations would be hurt by competition from satellite ignorant of local tastes. "Never mind that the radio titans were knitting together nationwide networks to let hundreds of their own stations carry identical programming." [Broadcast Bullies, p140]
• Rexam is helping beverage upstarts with more than just packaging. To help build the market for both, they are helping companies with retailers, inventory, and distribution of the finished product. [Thirsting for Growth, p174]
• Finally, read about ADV Films. They are the leading distributor of anime in the U.S. There are starting their own cable channel and have started producing their own anime. [Why Grow Up?, p178]

Woot! RSS Feed

I hope you have heard about woot!. Their concept is offering one product per day, and selling it until they are out (and they sell out everyday). The products are of the electronics bend. I like the concept. My wife described it as "The Home Shopping Network for the Internet". Not a bad description.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed to find out what the item of the day is. Love it.

My trouble is that the feed doesn't seem to be updating for me. I haven't been getting no products since Monday. Anyone else had the same problem?

Giving Bad Advice

I guess I gave some bad advice pointing everyone to the 12 step program for Macs. Braised Lambchop has a detailed rebuttal.

Update: I seemed to have mixed up my meat types. Della's site is Braised Lambchop.

[smiling]

Another convert...

Interesting Posts

Here is a bunch of posts I ran across this weekend that I thought were interesting:

• I like the ESPN's idea of author-specific RSS feeds [via Micro Persuasion]
• PR Opinions has a good list of articles from Global PR Week 1.0
• Be sure to also catch interviews with Robert Scoble and Seth Godin
• 12 Things to Improve Your Mac's Performance
• David Wolfe of Ageless Marketing has had two great posts in the last week. You MUST go read Beware of Factoids about Boomers and Corporate America's Demographic Blind Spot .

Yahoo buys Oddpost

I am a big fan of Oddpost. They have a great product. I think they are a great example of how you can create a personality for your company. I was disappointed when I moved to the Mac world and couldn't bring them with me (I didn't want to use IE).

Well, Yahoo took notice and bought them. I guess I didn't realize their popularity. I didn't hear alot of people talking about them in the blogosphere.

Congratulations Iain and Ethan!

Boo!

Michael has one post up at his new blog Spooky Action.

You need to go check it out.

He covers alot of ground in that one post. I hope he has more to say.

Let the winning begin

iTunes songs sold: 95,264,511

Countdown to 100 Million

Apple is holding a contest to celebrate selling 100 Million Songs at iTunes.

When the number of songs downloaded from Apple’s iTunes Music Store crosses 95 million, Apple will begin the countdown to 100 million songs by giving away 50 special 20GB iPods—one to the purchaser of each 100,000th song downloaded between 95 million and 100 million songs. In addition, the person who downloads the 100 millionth song will receive a 17-inch PowerBook, a 40GB iPod, a gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes songs to create the ultimate music library for the iPod and the opportunity to create a Celebrity Playlist to be published on the iTunes Music Store.

Current song count is 94,823,835.

I just want to say I will be doing my part.

Apple

The Wall Street Journal has the bi-yearly "Why Apple Is Going Down the Tubes?' article (the article is actually called Is Apple Losing Its Sheen? [sub.]).

As recent Apple convert and follower of all that is business, the article drives me nuts. The first half of the article is how their share numbers continue to slip. This is nothing new is added to the discussion.

They then talk about how people aren't in a hurry to buy new hardware. I haven't seen any numbers on this, but I think the lifecycle of an Apple is longer than that of a PC. It will be three to four years between purchases for me versus my old two years. So, again I am not surprised.

The other thing I noticed is that they talk to resellers to get a sense of what it going on in the market. I think the Apple Stores are hurting resellers. When I was buying my PowerBook, everyone told me there was no advantage to buying from a reseller. So, I bought from the Apple store here in Milwaukee.

They also try to bring out the point that iPods will not bring Apple new customers. Wrong. That is exactly what happened with me. I got the iPod, loved it, and when I needed a laptop, I was deciding between an iBook and PowerBook, not between a PC and a Mac.

My last comment(s) is this. For those of you who have been thinking about making the switch, take a really long look at Apple. The biggest thing you will save is time and you can't know what I am talking about until you have one. My Apple doesn't crash. Start keeping a log of the number of times you have to restart your PC.

The other thing I love how well everything works together. We downloaded some video from our Sony camcorder the other day. All I had to do was plug the Firewire cable into the computer. iMovie immediately recognized the camera and I could control it remotely through the software. My Nokia 3650 talks directly with PowerBook via Bluetooth. You have no idea how much time you will save.

The Way it Use to Be

"Okay. Sixty-three-thousand, one hundred and forty minus one sixty-three, plus one twenty-nine zero thirteen fifty-six forty-eight ninety-seven, minus zero zero five, ninety-nine, plus zero zero zero zero zero, plus four seven zero one six, one seventy-seven one forty-three zero zero zero November Alpha, plus zero zero one ninety-seven forty-seven zero twenty-five fifty-one four sixty-eight eighteen twelve twelve eighty-three two fifty-seven zero twenty-three."

He took a breath, then continued. "Up two sixty-three, left seventeen, plus eleven ninety-five, minus one sixty-five zero zero one twenty-six eighty-three three fifty-six zero eight zero fifty forty-seven zero five, north stars, zero sixty-eight zero ninety-seven three fifty-six, no ullage"

-The first course correction radioed from Ken Mattingly to Frank Borman during the Apollo 8 mission. Borman was writing the instructions down and then repeated them back to Mattingly to confirm accuracy. Jim Lovell then entered the numbers into the on-board computer to program the rockets that needed to be fired.

[from Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 by Robert Zimmerman (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998)]

Comparsion Shopping

People are looking at Apple and PCs and finding Apples are not that expensive.

I found the same thing.

Soon-To-Be Famous Last Words

"We don't think everyone is going to want hi-fi, but we're going to offer it"

-Fred Dressler, Exec. VP of programming for Time Warner (Forbes 3/1/04)

This will end up with these other famous last words.