Sep29
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Sep29
Ensconsed on the couch in my new media room, wired by a talented friend. Apple TV arrives Monday & I am ready
Sep29
Ensconsed on the couch in my new media room, wired by a talented friend. Apple TV arrives Monday & I am ready
Sep29
Ensconsed on the couch in my new media room, wired by a talented friend. Apple TV arrives Monday & I am ready
Sep29
Marketing: Find a Real Need and Fill It
TechCrunch’s latest conference, Disrupt, was live streaming from San Francisco this week. A battery of new, hopeful companies launched there, hoping to solve problems. But the companies I saw were not solving the many real problems we see around us: the scarcity of resources, the decline of public education, the high unemployment rate, the potential collapse of democracies, the inability of supposedly educated human beings to participate in civil discourse.
Instead, they were trying — with great ingenuity and advanced technology — to solve manufactured problems: how to provide more rewards for consumers usingFoursquare, (Gifi) how to track my behavior on web sites I visit (One True Fan), These companies want brands to be able to reach me when I am in the super market and tell me about specials on shelves I might not want to visit, to buy things I may not want or need.
What’s the technology they’re using? Game mechanics. Game mechanics are the biggest thing since sliced bread in web application development. Every brand is looking for a game to sponsor or advertise with, where the consumer can win some sort of points, badges, or awards for trying or buying their products.
As an early adopter of technology, and even more as an empowered social customer, I was offended by those launches.
As a social customer, I am being manipulated. Do entrepreneurs really think all I want to do is play a game? Do brands think all I want to do is be gamed?
Or is this a sign of our weakened economy, in which consumers have to be coerced and motivated to consume?
Engineers and developers, if you are going to start a company based on complex motivational theories and advanced technologies, why not use your talents for a higher purpose? It doesn’t change the world to help me find more things to buy, or to get a few cents off my purchases, or to leave a Starbucks card for a friend in a bathroom (Gifi).
Whatever happened to the classic definition of marketing:“ the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting appropriate value in return.”
That definition seems to have morphed into this one, from Wikipedia:Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in goods or services.” Wikipedia has flipped the definition on its head, with unfortunate consequences.[ Someone needs to get into Wikipedia who knows what marketing is. I wish I had the time to do it:-)]
And consumers have lived with the flipped definition for long enough to go broke, and are now hoarding cash as a result of having been interested in more goods and services than they needed and can afford.
When you are stating a technology company, or any type of company for that matter, it’s a good idea to ask yourself the question “am I after the consumer, or the customer?” The customer already has a need. He’s out there, looking for something that can solve his problem.
The consumer doesn’t have a need unless you tell him he does. And then his need may be real (my public school is not educating my children anymore) or manufactured (if I check in on Foursquare I might get six cents off my favorite breakfast cereal brand).
Manufactured needs are not dependable. They go away in downturns. They vanish when the fad is over. Real needs are steady, always there, and can provide the basis for sustainable businesses. Watch what happens to Zynga in five years to see what I mean.
If you’re going to study game mechanics, and launch companies based on what you’ve found, at least apply those mechanics to health care cost control, education, or saving the planet, not to small niches of heightened consumerism. Get something done. Solve a big, real problem. End of rant.
Sep27
Went to the new Chandler life sciences incubator this morning. Sweet!
Sep27
Fixing Education: Passion Before Math and Science
I am listening to Matt Lauer and the president talk about money in public education. But I don’t think it’s about money; I think it’s about passion. I was educated not by the rich, but by the passionate. They communicated their passions to me. My teachers weren’t unionized, they were inspired. And my parents were only marginally involved, although they supported the education system 100 per cent.
During World War II, when I was a kid, the immigrants came from middle Europe. Their parents didn’t speak English. There were no English Language Learning classes. It was sink or swim, and the kids all swam while the parents often sank. The teachers did it often without the parents. I remember every teacher and what we learned every year. And some of it will surprise you. Math and reading were only the givens, like lunch and recess. School imprinted me because of everything else. What I remember most about elementary school to this day were the enrichment activities, the music, art, and science, the trips to the museums and historical sites. Every year, school seemed to get more exciting.
In kindergarten, I was disappointed that I didn’t have Miss O’Meara, who had white hair and taught the morning kindergarten, but I was in the afternoon. In Mrs. Fuhrman’s class we drew and wrote and marched around the room to the piano. Miss O’Meara played the piano for both classes, although she only taught in the morning. I loved her BECAUSE she played the piano, and we actually had an upright piano in our classroom.
Mrs. Nachman had salt and pepper hair, and was gentle. In her class we read, and we had units on food, clothing and shelter, which we were told were the essentials in life. I still think so. In those days, right after World War II, we also started to have shelter drills, in which we had to go under our desks and put our hands over our heads. Later, it got worse; we went into the windowless halls. But that didn’t come until the 50s, when I was in junior high. In first grade, it was almost a game, and we thought a lot about the starving children in Europe.
Mrs. Helfand was my first brush with the system and my own inabilities to cope with it. She was strict, and I had to figure out how to work her, because I had a big mouth and she didn’t tolerate that well. She gave conduct marks. But by Mrs.Helfand’s class, we were reading aloud to each other every day in class, and that forced everyone to concentrate: you had to know all the words in advance, so when it came to you, you didn’t stumble over a word. And the math: same thing. You never knew when you would be called on. It was embarrassing not to know, because so many others seemed as if they did. We were gently made to compete.
In third grade, we had Miss Sternberg. who during that year became Mrs. Rothenberg. She had black hair, up in a bun, and I thought she was beautiful. Somehow the highlight of third grade was rummaging in Mrs. Rothenberg’s purse while she was out of the room and finding a receipt for a bra. She wore a bra! A Maidenform! We felt like we had committed a sex crime. I learned because I loved and admired her.
Third grade was another big academic year, in which we not only read to each other and competed to demonstrate our math skills, but had to learn how to raise our hands in class and keep our mouths shut when we weren’t called on. By third grade, they had already separated us out, and I was a proud member of the IG class: the intellectually gifted. Oh trust me, I knew what that meant. It meant I was smart. I took that as a huge reponsibility. What if I ever fell short of being as smart as the IQ test said I should be?
We made puppets in third grade, and learned how to work with clay. We went as a class to the Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium, and to the Cloisters. We didn’t have a bus; we took the subway and we walked. Our school district was not rich, but every child found the milk money and the lunch money and the subway money somewhere; I can’t remember anyone being unable to go.
In fourth grade, Mrs. Robbins stressed math. I think we were already proficient readers. She had tightly coiffed black hair, and although she was nice, I wasn’t in love with her, and don’t remember as much about her. She didn’t ignite my enthusiasm the way many of the other teachers did, and to this day I remember her “failure.” I expected more from my teachers.
In fifth, we learned music. Mrs. Lang loved it, and we sang James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent poem “The Creation” with a black school from Harlem at a city-wide chorale. This, by the way, was in the late forties, when the south was still segregated. New York was (technically) not, although everyone in our class was white except Leigh Edwards and Camillo Marquez, who even as little kids took the subway to our school because we had classes for the intellectually gifted. By fifth grade, we were practicing for the citywide spelling bee, and I was becoming a spelling champion for my school. I would go on later to lose big in Washington.
Mrs. Karasik, my sixth grade teacher, was the highlight of elementary school. She loved art, and she not only taught us to paint, how to use actual oil paints and mix them, but how to model for each other, and how to compose still lives. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and hung out with the mummies. We went to the Museum of Natural History again, and then…in the second half of the year…we learned about the stars. For many of the kids, astronomy was the highlight of elementary school, although for me it was the art.
I’ve conducted you through my elemenary school years to make a point: these teachers were competent. They were more than competent. They were inspiring. They taught their passions. “Good conduct” was a given, and when I fell short on “Works and plays well with others,” which I often did, we had big discussions about it at home.
Yes, we need fundamentals. But without enrichment activities, school can’t be life-changing. And for kids living in poverty, it MUST be.
Sep24
Brian Solis’ New Series (R)Evolution Interviews Sarah Lacy
This interview rocks because Sarah Lacy has gone around the world and has seen the same things I have seen: entrepreneurship is a lot more than "geek chic." I love the part where she tells about having gone to Rwanda, which I have also visited, and was inspired by entrepreneurs who don't know about Silicon Valley, but whose minds work in the same way. This is the same thing I saw at Singularity University when I went to its participant presentations. I can't wait to read her new book: Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos.
(Thanks Brian, for doing this)
Sep21
Locked out of my Twitter account
Yesterday someone hacked into my Twitter account (@hardaway) or someone from Twitter made a decision to cut me off cold turkey. I actually feel better thinking I was hacked than that Twitter did something in retribution for one of my 31,000 tweets.
This evil genius made it so Twitter can't send an email to my address to re-set my password. When I enter my credentials, I get the usual "wrong email address/user name password combination. When I go to the page for people who got hacked, it asks me to put in the email address of my account, and then tells me they can't send a password re-set to that email address. So I can't get into the account because my old authentication doesn't work, and I can't get new authentication:-(
I've done everything I can think of to contact Twitter (Josh, are you out there?) including following @support with my @azentrepreneurs account, which still works, sending messages to Ev, Biz, Dom, and anyone else I ever knew who worked for Twitter, and posting this on my FB page.
I've also tried using all the other services that ping Twitter for me during the day, and of course I can't post through them, either
This, it turns out, is a bigger issue for me than giving up wine. I did that three months ago to lose weight. and it has hardly impacted my life beyond the five pounds (yes!!!!) I originally lost and have now replaced through assiduous use of chocolate.
In all seriousness, I now see the utility of Twitter in a way I never did before. All my friends hang out there. Not only can't I communicate with @scobleizer, @pistachio, @susanreynolds, or @newmediajim (to name a few long time tweeple), but I also follow a mess of journos and analysts and can't get my news.
So I've gone back to the old school: consider this blog post a note in a bottle, set afloat by a struggling survivor adrift in the river of news and desperately hoping that my note will be found and I will be saved by someone from Twitter customer support.
And please don't tell me I am mixing my metaphors. You are talking to a person in de-tox, and I can't be responsible for what I say.
Sep18
How We Treat Our Immigrants
My friend Rafael is an entrepreneur, although he is not looked upon as one by most people. And as an entrepreneur, he is a sad example of what has happened to immigrant entrepreneurship in the last decade.
I met Rafael through word of mouth in 2004, and he has been maintaining my yard ever since. In fact, when I bought my house in Half Moon Bay, I invited him up there to fix up that yard as well. When I had my hip replaced, he came over every day while I recovered, bringing me things from the Guatemalan grocery store that he knew promoted healing. I have given gifts to his children, and helped him write letters to the immigration authorities to allow his brother to come to the US for surgery.
An emigrant from Guatemala over twenty-five years ago, he is married to an American woman and has three children, one of whom is in college. The youngest is seven. He came to Guatemala for a better life for his family, and he goes back and forth twice a year to visit the family who is still there. He supports his mother, and employs his brother, who supports a family in Guatemala that can’t get permission to come to the US.
His business is called Christian Lawn Service, which says a lot right there. Rafael spends all day Sunday, the only day he doesn’t work, in church.
This morning he didn’t show up to mow my lawn as he said he would. Irritated, I called him. Half hour later, he was outside my front door in his dress pants.
He told me he was sorry and he would come first thing Monday. He said his brother’s only son had been gunned down in Guatemala and died five days earlier after unsuccessful surgery on his wounds in a Guatemalan hospital. “They said he would be all right, and then he died,” Rafael said.
This happened five days ago. Rafael, the only member of the family with a credit card, tried to buy his brother a ticket to Guatemala to go home for the funeral. Rafael’s English is not good, although it’s good enough for his business. When he took his brother to the airport, they found out he couldn’t get on the plane because the name on the ticket and his name didn’t match perfectly. So the brother missed the flight and Rafael lost his money for the ticket.
Rafael tried again, and this time he had one of his sons buy the ticket over the Internet. But when they got to the airport this morning, the ticket didn’t show up in the system. Because the death occurred five days ago and it’s hot in Guatemala, the body must be buried soon or it will decompose. Rafael had to take out cash and re-purchase the ticket. This was the third time he had to buy a ticket for the same trip.
Rafael had been at the airport since 5:30 AM to make sure his brother got on the flight. He was exhausted, and he was grieving. It was now over 100 degrees, he’s a middle-aged man, and it’s simply too hot for him to mow my lawn today. I wouldn’t ask him to do that.
The larger context of this incident has made me furious. Rafael and his brother came here from Guatemala where it isn’t safe and there isn’t much opportunity. Twenty-five years ago, that was possible. He started a business, bought a home, works like a dog, but supports a large and geographically disconnected family.
Today , that’s not possible. Even people who share the social values of the Christian conservatives, as I know Rafael does, who come here to start businesses and pay taxes, are not welcome. They are lumped into the same heap as drug dealers and entitlement scammers. And thus Rafael’s brother sees his only son randomly gunned down in Guatemala because he’s not allowed to come here. The only son in a Hispanic family is a big deal. Rafael has lost a beloved nephew, too. Rafael’s wife, Maria, has been crying for three days. And Rafael will never get the money back for the other two tickets. He’s depressed and dejected. He thinks the world is messed up, and because he is a man of faith, this unsettles him more.
I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged him. I said, ” the world does seem to suck right now. But I don’t suck and you don’t suck.” I gave him a thumbs up, and I made him smile.
