Ouch
This is the current top review of Mule Radio app:
Reskinned 5by5 App ★☆☆☆☆
by TokuNJTLike two of the shows you can listen to with this app - “Let’s Make Mistakes” and now “The Talk Show” - it is essentially a re-skinned version of the 5by5 app previously produced by developer Black Pixel for 5by5 before the project was shelved. The app payload even includes a 5by5 Broadcasting logo, for crying out loud.
Yep, still using Clear from @realmacsoftware. Here is my minimalist GTD setup.
[REVIEW] Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams
My rating: ★★★★★
Great little book giving an overview of a wide array of research on social networks and how information passes through them. Though near the end it gets a little too evangelical for permission marketing IMHO, I think it is a great starting point for learning about the social aspects of building web products today. Many of the cases in the book might be familiar to you if you read a lot of new business books, or books on decision-making and/or popular psychology. Adams does a good job highlighting these cases and tying them together for the web entrepreneur.
I listened to the audiobook which was a quick and easy listen. I am going to pick up a text version so I can explore the footnotes.
View all my reviews
Getting customers in the enterprise
Today at #LeanCoffeeKL we had a great discussion about how to acquire customers when your target market is the Enterprise, rather than the general public like a more traditional startup. During the discussion I came up with three models that I would like to propose for discussion:
1. Traditional B2C startup: You make your product, and distribute directly to Users, some or all of which are paying. This direct-to-market model is quite new due to the internet as the ultimate software distribution mechanism.
2. Traditional B2B: The people who will use your software are not necessarily the ones doing the purchasing. Adoption of software in the enterprise is traditionally top down, decreed by a complex interaction between various internal stakeholders like IT departments, management, purchasing, etc. It is up to the developer to suss out the right person(s) to talk to in order to even get their software in the hands of Users. Furthermore, this inhibits Lean methodologies for incremental innovation based on an MVP.
3. Consumerization of Enterprise: This is a recent trend in enterprise, a bottom up model where workers on the front lines discover and use their own solutions. Users then convince the hierarchy above them to adopt a technology either by asking their managers and IT depts for it, or by those upper levels noticing the improvement of efficiency. This is another kind of adoption first strategy.
Off the shelf technology is becoming more prevalent in the enterprise, and forward-thinking organizations are taking advantage of this. Depending on what kind of company your B2B startup is trying to sell to, doing an end run around traditional organizational barriers to gain internal adoption might be a good (if long term) strategy. The next question is: how do we achieve this end run?
If you like thinking about this kind of stuff and are in the Okanagan area, I highly recommend checking out the #LeanCoffee group in Kelowna.
The Japanese Friendship Gate （友情の門） in Salmon Arm.
On our cruise around the Shuswap region today we spotted this Japanese-style gate from the road and had to take some pictures. It is located in MacGuire Park in Salmon Arm, BC and was built in 1997, the year I went to Japan. Here are a few more pics on Flickr.
Replacing Flickr
Chad on www.flickr.com
Yahoo’s lack of innovation is one thing, but what really drives me bonkers about Flickr is the terrible video support. Maybe 1 in 10 of my video uploads are successful. I take a lot of short vids on my iPhone and even on my 60D I think they should be viewed within context, alongside the still photos that were taken at the same time. Isn’t that the whole point of having video capability on your digital camera? To enhance the still photo viewing experience with sound and motion? The video problem became so frustrating that I have begun the hunt for a Flickr replacement.
Tawara-ya: Famous ryokan in Kyoto.
As it was our last day in Japan, we spent the day running around town. My wife got a massage at a place right near Tawara-ya, the ryokan that Steve used to stay at as mentioned in the Isaacson biography. I had a few minutes and a camera so I thought I would do a bit of light stalking. Can’t believe it took til my last day to stop by this place.
Family complete #achievementunlocked
This is where it all started. Above is my completed family of four, standing in front of the college dorm where I met my wife in 1999. As we only have a couple days left in Japan, we decided to take a photo. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate and it was pouring down, so we weren’t exactly able to pose a bunch and take lots of shots. In fact, we only took one. The result is less than perfect, but it is a pretty good representation of family life: haphazard, slap-dash, but smiling the whole time.
In two days the four of us will be boarding three planes and landing in Canada’s Okanagan Valley next Tuesday. My wife and first daughter have been in Japan for six months. I have been here for three months. My second daughter has been with us for two and a half. Needless to say, it has been eventful. Soon new chapter will begin.
Over the past twelve years my wife and I have moved back and forth between Canada and Japan on average once every two years. As we have now completed our family, this next chapter of our lives will be focused on building a foundation. That means trying to stay in the same place, building a community, creating a healthy and loving environment for our kids to grow up in. So, for the next while, it is goodbye to Japan.
I still have a few months left on my paternity leave, and am looking forward to getting a few things done after returning to Canada. For example:
- continuing Lining Things Up
- building some more Rails apps
- rethinking my wardrobe
- improving my career
- getting a vasectomy (・・；)
Helping my wife and daughters re-integrate themselves into a Canadian lifestyle tops the list though. Also, getting healthy. I gained about 10 kilos during this pregnancy and am going to try and lose it by dieting, running and training. I got a Wi-Fi Body Scale for Xmas, and a Nike Fuel Band is in my future. My wife wants to do yoga together, which I am all for.
As always, there is lots to do. But my view on life is different than it was in the past. My new keywords are “long view” and “life-editing”. I know I can’t do everything I want to on a whim. But I am perfectly satisfied with that. Enjoying my time with my family is the cake. Everything else is icing.
Paternity Leave Lessons Learned (in Japanese)
Next month an article of mine will be published in an Osaka-based newsletter. The article is based on a blog post from a few years ago: End of paternity leave and a lesson on negative support. It is all in Japanese (edited by my lovely wife), but for those interested, click on the more link below:
父親育児休業の最も大きな学び
Social Network Audit
After posting my Google+ rant on Google+ I thought more about what kinds of social networking services I use, and how many I have abandoned in the past. I put them all together in the graphic above, separated into three groups (from top to bottom): Currently using (frequency from Left to Right); Infrastructure and Deadpool.
Current
Twitter is my most used network. Tumblr powers my blog. I upload to Flickr often, where I share private photos & vids of my babies with friends and family. I use Zite for social news (I used Summify before it got acquired, Percolate and News.Me never worked out). I keep up with a lot of stuff through Twitter or podcasts. The next set of SNSs are for tracking: books, movies, music, bookmarks and locations/food/meetings (Path). Then there are a couple for pure entertainment. Finally, there are the functional networks (and Google+).
Infrastructure
These are basically the services that I use without really knowing it. Flavors powers my site. I do upload the occasional video to Vimeo, but mostly it is used for viewing vids that people share to me. YouTube is exclusively for watching. IMDB is now used just for reference (I log all the films I watch with Letterboxd). Gravatar and Disqus are useful social utilities.
Deadpool
Some of these I tried and disliked, some lost out to competitors higher up in the graphic, and the rest are great but I trimmed to simplify my social networking life. As you can see, a number of services have fallen by the wayside.
Believe it or not, I have been trying to cut down on my digital attention deficit disorder. I have been pretty successful with iPhone apps. One obvious way to cut down on the number of SNSs I use is to use Facebook with a number of apps. But… still too creepy for me.
Two networks on which I have accounts but remain undecided are 500px and Diaspora. I have flirted with the former simply out of frustration with Yahoo’s lack of vision for Flickr; the latter I joined during the whole Facebook revolution of 2010. I shelved it when Google+ came out, but I am thinking about taking a look at it again. It looks like they have come a long way.
It is a valuable exercise to periodically audit different aspects of your life, and simplify where you can. Obviously “simplification” is a relative term, but it is something we can all strive for, and can lead to more happiness. To make this blog post even more pretentious, I will end with a video from an inspiring TED talk entitled Less stuff, more happiness.
There’s birth there’s maturity there’s independence there’s success there’s empire and then after that there’s decline and then there’s death. You want to jump off that bus at the point of empire.
What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.
Anil Dash in a conversation about How do blogs need to evolve?.
This is such as great analogy for — ahem — certain free Internet services.
A stream of text, photos, quotes, links, audio and video usually about the 
