You need a sweet after taste.
Thats it, i am done.
But wait this is not twitter here man. give us some more you say.
Let me tell you a story about a store named Five Senses Coffee, they got some loud noises from a displeased customer over the twitter space lately, but they have opted the game.
My Guatemalan coffee beans stock dwindled and I needed a fresh batch. so i ordered the beans somewhere pre noon on a thursday and went along with my day.
The next morning to my surprise a courier with the bag buzzed the door, it was 8:15 am.
This surprise was so welcomed and left a great after taste over the purchase.
This is a great lesson to every business and especially a startup, if you can leap over the competition and give your customers some nice after taste when they expect the normal business routine do it! you will get much more customers at this point.
The competition of the coffee bean market is huge but making me rave about it without paying me is what you want.
To a web startup you need a product that will make your clients think “How nice and easy was that?” make them go the extra mile and rave about you.
They need to think what a great service.
I have just seen how its not done. when i was in the market for an online backup i was testing Carbonite to see how good are they and also used iDrive.
When i had issues with the speed with Carbonite i turned to the Customer support with a question as of why it is happening. to my surprise the tech response was so out of focus and blaming, it gave me a feeling of “why the hell did i bother?” and “better pack your bags and go!”,
But Carbonite CEO has his email in contact us page so i decided to give it a go and sent him an email with the trail of the email, surprise surprise, i got a better rep.
But all they did was to give me extra time to try.
Man that bitter taste is still lingering. will i recommend Carbonite?
No.
So what can we do when the product sucks and we have users who are complaining? how do we make them feel good and leave with sweet after taste?
This is your golden question, just don’t ignore these users and don’t over compensate them, let them feel the sweet after taste of a good deal.

Working on the Omm Writer, is it that productive? it seems to disable all of the interface and allow you to look only at the written word.
At first i did not believe how this could influence my work.
But this trial got me to believe that my work can improve!
Seen the words hand from the emptiness on a screen lets you concentrate on the words.
The twitch sound while you type makes you want to type faster. and the ability to remove words with no punishments using the backspace really makes the process, well, joyfull.
I am experiancing sensation of happiness and joy. some thing not related to writing usually.
The interface is easy to use and simple.
Saving the file as text gives it vast availability.
May be i should try writing code here.

string yuval=”happy”;

This is a thought. why not make our development environment like this… why not actually?
why?

So our bosses wont be chasing us with questions over our actions on the screen? no they will learn to understand and will be avid users after they try it.
Happy did i mention? in a calm way…

Try OmmWriter, its free.
p.s. Dont change the typing sound to No. 2. just because yuva.equals(“happy”) = false.

First and fore most i want to thank the organizers and the participants for an inspiring and motivating day.
I have arrived late to the event and only was through the second half of the day but got very good presenters and some interesting people who have put their heart and information out for the others to comment and help out.
The day was great and i dont want to restate the info already typed here, and if you were in the Startup BarCamp you are welcomed to put your notes up the wki page.
What i want to reffer to was my suggestion to the next Startup BarCamp.
The question asked was what do you want to have in the next Startup BarCamp, a predefined agenda or in the tradition of BarCamps a fluid on the spot agenda.
My suggestion was to make it a semi fluid agenda holding spots for subjects and letting presenters present in a fluid manner inside the time slots i.e.

• 10:00am-11:00pm Investor Relations
• 10:00am-11:00pm Idea growing
• 12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch
• 1:00pm-3:00pm How we did it
• etc.

This will give the people a more coherent way of knowing what to attend and when to wake up.
But i am now thinking that bar camp with all the intensity and fluidity needs to stay fully fluid.
The best example was the Pitch Your Idea session that took more time then most of the presos and was helpful to every one in the room.
So what is your take on this?
[poll id="2"]

Reading Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy post, only because the post title was interesting for me personally as a parent.
During the reading i got to the thought that this post is not true just for writing, its true for conversion and SEM as a guide.
The mental image i got while reading the line

“Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They‚Äôre overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you‚Äôll lose them to option paralysis.”

Was so strong that I had to autosuggest it to the latest shopping experience i had for a compact flash unit.

most of the shops don’t offer all the information in a simple way, when you go to the electronics shop front you have 10-25 categories on the right hand side asking you to start drilling down, their titles are not always that easy to encrypt even if you are a tech guy. Memory in one shop is RAM at another and Media at a third.
The massive amount of links makes it impossible to choose the items that are right for you, nor is it easy to find items at all.
This resonated for a while in the need to create some easy to follow conversion rules.

I will start the list and want you all to participate in adding to it.
So here are the items i got so far:

• use simple navigation and make the choice easy – don‚Äôt give me 15-30 navigation points to get me to the subcategories of these to get me to a list of items for the subcategory! Give me my product in the realm I would look for. give me the product using classification and not your internal stock order, if I need a Compact Flash card put it in memory->compact flash or camera->memory->compact flash, Don‚Äôt make me think!
• cough up the cost – I want to know how much is delivery before I click “add to cart”, give me related alternatives if there are with costing.
• tag your products and make them match – use tagging to handle products that need to match, i.e. cpu to motherboard, memory to motherboard, display adapter to motherboard, soil for pots to pots and so on.
• push me to buy it – this is the place for the store to shine, make me know how good this product is and how much i need it, be the salesman I miss. Learn from Amazon and give me the full store experience. Taking the article answer to the ‚ÄúWhy?‚Äù question
  

  “Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they‚Äôre making the right decision for them are going to take action ‚Äî and confidently so.”

• Put yours in the comments

NOTE: this rant is brought to you from the latest online shopping experience I had for compact flash, most of the stores I gone through didn’t get my business because they made me think. I didn’t buy from the easiest to use but I spent more then 30 minutes to get the bloody thing even though I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to spend.

I bumped into this YouTube movie by accident.
That is backed up by this website.

It seems very high level but depicts the economic situation we are in in a very fun and easy to comprehend.
If i was the creator i would have taken a few more minutes to explain the Green/Cyclic methods that are available and not just toss the names in the air as they do.
But what really got me in this movie was that all the American way is the outcome of a design made by Victor LeBow and not “Natural Market” conditions as i always thought. it makes me ponder if the American way is not the wrong way to manage an economy.
So i set to find the document and read it to see what are the … hiding.
i found the Article from 1955 lying around the web.
As i thought the article has a lot more then the quote used in the movie:

Victor seems to put a lot of emphases in the article about the power of the new medium called television and the consumer behavior.

This factor of symbol and significance has become partly obscured with the advent of television. Here we have a new and most powerful medium of communication. It creates a new set of conditions, impelling toward a monopoly of the consumer’s attention. For the first time, almost the entire American consuming public has become a captive audience.

What Television Sells?
Television actually sells the generalized idea of consumption. It promotes the goal of higher living standards. But the commercials are an intrusion. This captive audience, spending several hours a day viewing television, is faced at best with the necessity of rejecting all but one of the automobiles that come into its living room, all but one or two of the breakfast cereals, all but one of the coffees, the wrist watches, the cigarettes.

And it seems to me that the way the movie depicts the world is, again, an American way and angel, making it look like a big conspiracy theory to simplify the problem.
No one read Victor’s article, in the government in the 1950′s, and pondered how to implement this as a global scheme.
It sounds more like “our addiction to the television has taken its toll” story, that is part of the American history.
I am not undermining the movie and its message in any way and want to emphasize it, but the cause to this should be the right one and not a fake Americanized truth.

More intriguing is the fact that Brand loyalty is also a big part of the article pointing to the future of brand positioning techniques,

the consumer’s highest loyalty is actually towards his standard of living, toward the goals, aspirations, and wants which comprise the reason for his existence.

making us today associate the brand with our goals and aspirations rather then the functionality.

Reading the article makes you feel that we are not that different from the people in the 1950′s and have not changed much.

The real goals are to look better, live better, dress better, travel better.

In my opinion Victor LeBow only predicted the future in some aspect seen the way people react to the new media of television and the consumers actions of the 1950′s. this led him to a very accurate prediction of the future but not more then that.

Coming across this Review by victor lebow of Robert Heilbroner book, Business Civilization in
Decline it seems that the prediction of the Sky is falling was made more then once and that the end of the capitalist era was just around the corner in 1976 too.
I wonder why are we still using the same obsolete methods as a society and not act to change it?
I hope that this movie although been Americanized and a bit distorted will make its impact and push us as a society to better manage our global resources.

Defining a hero in your organization is probably correlating to the gap of knowledge availability in the organization and his private knowledge.
But what is a hero? From wikipedia “hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters (fictional or historical) that, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice”
Let us define danger in the IT world. danger will be the loss of ones reputation due to failure to execute.
Using that logic a Hero is a man who delivers an IT solution.
But what does the gap of knowledge availability and personal knowledge have related to delivery?
Everything! not knowing how to solve an issue prevents you from delivery and the more complex and the less information the harder it is to deliver.

Heroes are created when they display their abilities to know some thing that is not clear and takes some experience and thus both put their reputation on the line for a job every body else is trying to avoid and save the companies reputation.

We all know that all Service providers are in need of keeping up with other entities and keeping its reputation and market positioning.

Professional Service agencies are measured on quality and reputation that represent the abilities of the workers and their capability to deliver.

The environment where these heroes grow in is typically a selfish and hiding environment where people are fighting on knowledge sources and tend to hide the knowledge in private means.

Heros, as we all know, were very proliferate in the dark ages and later. they were very proliferate in combats and usually were holding a story of surviving in the place where no other man has survived. but if no other man has survived where is the information to make them a hero? the lack of that information made them the hero’s they could be. i can extend my argument to which’s and magic that today is no more then acts and herbal medicine. the more proliferated the information is the less likely we are to see an extraordinary phenomena and when we meet one we know that it just something we dont know yet.

Now lets get back to the Professional services age and the IT Heros.

If the information is collected in a Content Management system or a collaborative means it is usually becomes more available with time. but that is only true when people share, and sharing is a conjunction of the environment they are in.
So what will be a good environment to get people to share.
There are a few reasons why you wont share:

1. Over competitive environment where your performance is directlly linked to your compensation
2. Protecting your existence in the company
3. Environment that is ruled by a secretive manager who divides and concures

So technology in this case is not going to share the content between people unless they get an incentive to do so.
My guess is that when companies devour the Hero culture they embrace the team environment.
Cultivating the team as a value in a company that usually is scattered across clients is quite hard and requires the effort of the managers and the instantiation of technology.
I assume that team building will be poised at the top of the companies pedestal but the question is what actions will be put into place to support this.
I guess that in my opinion the yearly team meet is not the greatest and a more regular team gathering is in place.
another thing is putting the compensation to extra effort like bonus as a team bonus.
Will this stop the neanderthal hero from coming back?
I am not sure.

Last.fm thank you. you have made my choice as easy as waking up in the morning.
Since last.fm changed their business model to a subscription model i have been prompted by their client to pay or i will be waiting for music streaming.
Well enough is enough! I have just deleted the account and removed your software to stop you from abusing me.
Fist last.fm takes some bandwidth and download my songs while i am listening and now after several years (3 as a matter of fact) you ask me for subscription fee to keep using your service?
Have you lost your mind some where?
Isnt scrobbing prevents you from
I have deleted my account and uninstalled the service so you can’t Scrobb me off my files any more.
I am not paying a company that took my resources and copyrighted content 3$ a month to continue.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish last.fm

Ominous Clouds over the free services?

Now i hope this is not a start of a new trend where companies who relied on advertising now slowly realize that the money is gone and they need some alternate income so they turn to the registered users and ask for subscription fees.
If that is so we are about to see a new change in our usage of once free services.
If yahoo decides to block flickr for subscription or facebook creates a pro services bundle and limits the regular users that will decrease usage and will prevent many from using their services especially in an economic environment like this.
But i think it will take a long time for a percolation through the whole industry of web applications and it might never happen to some of the big ones.
p.s. Will this be the end of the overrated hype Cloud Computing?

Looking at Lukas Biewald post in Dolores Labs startled me a bit.
Do all of those companies that use the S3 API to store data have no DR plan for any downtime due to S3 problems?
no application and hardware is immune to fail over.
What happens if their DB server is down will they stop servicing their clients due to that down time?
I think that looking at any infrastructure we need to assume there is a risk when using it and we need some sort of even temporary backup.
I am sure it will be hard to queue the thousands of pictures that SmugMug is handling in those 7 hrs of down time but a solution should be in place to enable that. especially when solution like ParkSpace allow you to work on S3 API with local resources.
All i can say about those applications fail time is Naive attitude to System Architecture that borders with neglegence. if you want to make a stable system you need a stable platform design and implementation.
I think that the main problem is again the hype of Elastic Cloud Computing that promises to relieve you from the need for DR as this is part of the system they developed. but due to its immaturity a company setting upon been in the early adopters group should consider the instability and eventual trouble it may encounter from this immature solution. this calls for a DR solution to these resources.
Now that we know that this is the case i expect more companies using the Elastic Cloud Computing to be more aware of the instability and treat the resources as another hardware resource.

While reading the post and comments over at Jon’s blog i was reminded of all the assessments i have done for products and all the projects i have met and i started thinking of the purity of the process and structure of it.
My comment to the article was:

*Note* РI work with Vignette, a CMS vendor. My opinions however are my own….but are obviously biased.
I will go on this later on my website but for the time been i think that we need to take the Selection process and asses Adriaan Bloem comment.
The selection process even if it is for a case 1 will need to be maintained by some workforce of the client. so the vendor selection should be at least reviewed by the current team of the client.
Preferably that part of the sales will include some introduction training over the product to enable assessments of the primordial capabilities of the product.
This assessment should not be a Business case assessment but a technical one since the product UX is not available at this stage on the demo product.
After this assessment the client will be much more aware of the products and their matching capabilities to the IT requirements they have. i have seen too many projects been pushed on the IT department as a finalized solution without their approval and making them support something they are unfamiliar with and unable to do so.
The Agency should do its own math as for what product is more suitable for the implementation of the UX and the success of the client and be focused on that.
Later in the process there should be a discussion over the best product matching both the Agency analysis and the Clients departments analysis, the product of this should be a ranking of products.
at this point the price should not be discussed and information should not be available to the teams.
Next there should be a discussion over the price and some fondling with the sales guys.
This will result in a product selection based on 3 criterias:
1. Implementation ease.
2. Matching to clients needs.
3. Price is right.
Now regarding the corruption
Since not everything is money in the world and we are dealing with people, my personal belief is that the Agency and the Client are both pushing for the easier path that will either pay them more or be safer or both.
Coming to see that will in fact reduce the corruption allegations to the ones that are at court at the moment.
It could be that some of the licensing deals have hidden agendas and friendly handshakes but not everything is money.

So what is the way to judge the purity of the CMS vendor choice?
I want to start analizing the choice from the correct timing of the choice.
In SDLC we have these processes when creating a new software:
Initiation/Planning – Generate a high-level view of the intended project and determine the goals of the project.
Requirements Gathering And Analysis – Determine where the problem is in attempt to fix it with a system. Engage business users to define definite requirements.

Design – Design functions and operations and describe them in detail.
Implementation – Based on all the design outputs (documents) build the system while documenting the process.

So where do we put the CMS vendor selection? my thoughts are to do it after you have the Requirements analyzed and before the Design process. but who will make the analysis and who will make the design? do we need to further complicate the business side of the engagements and put more vendors to the mix?
One of the most frustrating thing for me is the finger pointing game we see in many implementations when there are many agencies mixed up in the game.
The price in getting many agencies involved in the process to me outweigh the matching of the CMS Vendor and its matchability.
I wish that many agencies were as proliferate as they should be. their ability to cut the clutter of the process into one agency with one goal and one liability in the process and their vast knowledge of multiple CMS vendors makes them one of the best agencies you can contact.
But there is a risk when contacting a single agency, this is putting all of your eggs in one basket, the risk of them not putting the maximum effort and skils they have towards your implementation and stuffing it up. i have seen some implementations that are quite big and very knowledgeable put their apprentices and not the experts on a project to save the low ball offer they made.

Do we need an external company to process all the parameters collected in the analysis and decide for the customer and the implementer what will be the platform? i guess that is correct if you put the implementer choice right after the CMS vendor choice.

and if we point the spotlight to the implementer choice, what should be the process? do we put an RFP out just for the implementation? are we using an external analysis company to asses the success ratio of implementers and then go by the most successful?
If we do assess the success of the implementer shouldn’t we do it for the CMS Vendor also? and the Agency if we go to the one stop shop alternative.

So what should we do?
I guess there is no simple pathway covered with a red carpet waiting to be found.
I guess that the client should choose the best fitting option.
The only thing i think any company should have is a knowledgeable supervising company/individuals that will be able to asses the progress of the process, especially the implementers progress.

I really like the post of the top 10 (got expanded to 16) programmer annoyances
In some sort of a bizarre way it incorporates the life in the office from the programmer perspective.
No 9 is a favorite of mine and has been one that i can be proud of. i have fixed too many problems in too many computers in tooooo many offices.