Thought of the Day - Brilliant or Crazy?

Yesterday I finally solved my backup quandary, I got 6 free months of the premium version of Dropbox to backup 50Gb of data online. I received this for participating in Tim Ferriss's 'Tweet to Beat' campaign along with 33,000 other people. Running the numbers I realised that even if only 50% of the other participants take up this offer, Dropbox will loose out almost $1 million in revenue over the next 6 months. My initial reaction was; 'they're crazy' but it then dawned on me that they might actually be brilliant instead, taking the 'Freemium' model to the extreme.

Anyone who has used web applications should have experienced the 'freemium' model. There is a limited free version of the WebApp that is available, but as you use it more and more, there are then paid levels to allow you greater functionality. The theory being that you can get used to the service, input a heap of data, then you are tied in and likely to pay because of the amount of time you have invested. A more common model is the '30-Day Free Trial' which is similar, but you have 30 days of free use before you have to start paying.

These models are an excellent idea for both the customer and the seller. The customer gets to decide if the product is worth paying for and the seller can reach a wider audience because people like to 'try before you buy'. The downside is that increasingly customers are wise to tactic and may try to resist it. The seller hopes that in the 30-Days or free period, the customer uses the product so much that they are effectively locked in to paying for it by the end. I suspect more and more, that cynical customers are deliberately not using the full potential of the services to avoid this lock-in. I know my first reaction to a free trial or freemium service are to avoid using it too much for precisely this reason.

So how does this relate to Dropbox? Well i have been considering using an online backup system for a while now and have seen various options ranging from free to really expensive, however i was having a hard time deciding between them. There was no easy way to compare features, prices, security and usability, which resulted in decision paralysis; too many options, so i won't pick any of them. Dropbox is offered on a freemium model.There is a free version where you can store up to 2Gb of data and a premium version for $9.99 per month with 50Gb of storage. Unfortunately i suspect this model doesn't work very well in this situation. The full version is really designed for backing up all (or most) of your documents, which is a very different market from the free version, which is so small it is really just for temporary online storage of documents. Due to the fact they are targeted at different markets, I suspect the conversion rate from free to premium is fairly low, this is further exacerbated by the fact that 2Gb isn't much of a lock-in. The alternative would be to offer a 30-Day trial of the premium version, but as i mentioned above, people are wise to that tactic. Few people would bother uploading 50Gb of data to a service if they might not like it or want to move.

On the other hand, how about offering 6 months free? Well that's a different story, 6 months is long enough that it doesn't feel like a lock-in and well even if it is, you're getting $60 of service for free! In reality the lock-in is very high, even higher than the other models above. Once you've setup a system for backups, used it for 6 months and are familiar with the system, there is very little chance you will move when the free period ends. The customer wins; they get some 'free' service and the company wins because they have excellent differentiation in the market and superb retention after the free period ends.

So why doesn't everyone do it? Firstly the company will still have to pay for the storage space, the bandwidth and other overheads that are going to be there. Furthermore they have deferred a large portion of their income for 6 months which is a bit of a cash flow no-no. Also if you offered it to everyone, 6 months is long enough that unscrupulous people would find it worth exploiting. Effectively you are betting the farm that having extremely high retention will benefit the business in the long run.

So is this deal genius or madness? Only time will tell, though after thinking about it i am now a little worried that cashflow might put the company (and all my data) under ...

Thought of the Day - Online To Do List Roundup

A while back i blogged about my love of To Do Lists and at the time i was enamoured with Ta-da Lists by 37 Signals. While it is beautifully simple and totally fulfils their vision of; "competing with a Post-It note", i started to yearn for something with more control and flexibility. So over the last couple of months i have been moving between various webapps for capturing To Do's. I don't think i have yet found the ideal webapp (and it might not exist) but i thought i would share my experience with each of the sites so hopefully other people can find the perfect To Do List for them.

Ta-da Lists
Despite my quest to find the perfect mix of features, i still use this on a fairly regular basis, its great for short ad hoc lists and capturing things to be done quickly. I even sometimes transfer To Do's from other sites into this for the satisfaction of ticking them. Superb for short ad hoc lists, not so good for more complicated projects.
Pro's: Beautifully simple, replaces Post It notes, quick and intuitive to use, satisfying animation when tasks are complete.
Con's: Can't arrange your high level lists, no support for rearranging tasks between lists, not hierarchical, does not support; tagging, reminders, due dates, searching.

Remember The Milk
So from Ta-da Lists i briefly moved on to Remember The Milk after reading a great article on how to use RTM with Getting Things Done. It has support for tagging, reminders, multiple categories of lists and even setting locations with google maps. I think in principle it could be great but i find there are some interfaces niggles that annoy me.
Pro's: Very clean looking interface, works offline with google gears, support for; tagging, reminders, due dates, prioritisation and reordering of tasks, physical locations for tasks.
Con's: Can't reorder your high level lists, not hierarchical, interface doesn't quite work for me (rollovers don't stick), clicking anywhere on a task marks it as complete, slightly silly name.

Treedolist
I had a few annoyances with the user interface of RTM and it didn't offer what i really wanted; a hierarchical task list. I worked in project management for a bit so i like the idea of having subtasks that all contribute to a high level task and i hadn't found that in any of the other webapps. While it is possible to do this in Ta-da and RTM it is only to one level i.e. you have a list composed of tasks, but you can't have subtasks within each task. A google search for "hierarchical to do list" lead me Treedolist which is specifically designed to be hierarchical (like a tree).
Pro's: Hierarchical, intelligent search bar, support for; notes, links, due dates, virtual tagging (if combined with search), changing font sizes.
Con's: Visually it is rather ugly, the interface is quite clunky (old fashioned and unintuitive), you can't reorder tasks other than to the top of the list or to become subtasks, there are some inconsistencies with keyboard shortcuts and actions (sometimes they work sometimes they don't).

Backpack
I had looked at Backpack a while back but i dismissed it as some sorta weird replacement for a company intranet, but after reading Getting Real (great book - notes to follow) it seemed like it might do what i wanted too. Overall there are a raft of features that i have no need for (newsroom, writeboard, journal etc) but the Pages (and if i paid for it, the Calendar too) are excellent. The Pages in particular are really flexible, not only can you have multiple lists on each page, you can split them with dividers, add notes sections and even writeboards. Alas you are limited to 5 pages on the free account which is workable but not ideal.
Pro's: Great interface, easy to move tasks between pages/lists, best visual layout method i've seen (lists, dividers, notes, writeboards etc), the same satisfying animation as TaDa Lists when you complete a task.
Con's: Can't reorder pages (only alphabetically), very limited number of pages on free account, no support for; due dates, task level tagging, assigning notes/links to individual tasks.

Todoist
I literally just stumbled on this tool while writing this post during random googling for links and it seems to be just what i'm looking for. If it works out i will do a longer review of it later, but here are some initial observations.
Pro's: Great interface, hierarchical tasks AND projects, ability to reorder tasks and projects, due dates, multiple projects, easy to move tasks within lists and between projects, prioritisation/reordering of projects.
Con's: Slightly strange query system (it might search?), the page is too wide for my 7" EEE, i haven't used it in anger yet.

Some other resources:
Top 10 Web To Do Lists
LifeHacker Poll Of Top 10 Web To Do Lists
LifeHacker To Do List Tips
Information on the 'Getting Things Done' System

I should start a new trend; Blogging As A Problem Solving Tool, by researching and writing about your problem you may find a solution to it. Alas i have been here before, i think all of the above To Do Lists have seemed like the answer to my prayers at one stage or another and after extended use i have found little annoying niggles with them. So hopefully Todoist will work as well as it seems to, but time will tell.

Thought of the Day - Missed Day

Curses, yesterday was my first missed day in quite a while. My pre-preparation of posts has been working quite well however i encountered a new problem; no internet connection :-(

I arrived at my hotel last night to find out that the wifi was down and that an engineer had to be sent out ... the following morning. So not only had i paid the ridiculous amount for hotel wifi the day before for a shoddy service, now there was no service at all.

So how do i handle the possible lack of internet connection, should i buffer the pre-prepared posts and have them automatically post if i don't change it? Then the problem becomes remembering which posts are automatic and cancelling them if i post something else. Also how long in advance should i have this automated buffer? I suppose the real question is how long could i be incommunicado from the internet, one day? a week? I suspect this needs more thought ...

Thought of the Day - Ready, Fire, Aim

Sometimes a theory or and idea keeps coming up over and over again and in those situations it is hard to ignore. Recently i kept reading about the benefits of the "Ready, Fire, Aim" approach, it was in books, on websites and in podcasts and it made sense.

Most people use the "Ready, Aim, Fire" approach. Only it normally turns into "Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim ... maybe Fire", too much planning and not enough action. On the other hand "Read, Fire, Aim" relies on action straight away, the results of which can be used to improve your accuracy. It is like firing a gun for the first time, you don't know whether the sights are set correctly or if the barrel is straight, therefore until you fire the aiming might not matter at all.


Something i have been meaning to take action on for a long time (like since 2004) is updating my WebCV into the modern age. It was originally built like a site from 1996; a pain to update, not very modern looking and rubbish for search engine optimisation, frankly it was an embarrassment. At various times since then i have bought and read books about web design, i have felt guilty for not updating it and once or twice i have even started to put something together. But it never quite got done, i spent too long planning and worrying about how difficult it would be and how long it would take to get it perfect. Even the most recent time i made a start in March i had a big elaborate plan, it was gantt charted out over 3 or 4 months but of course after a week i lost interest and nothing ever came of it.

On Friday evening i was listening to a podcast from SXSW where various entrepreneurs who were renowned for being 'fast' were speaking on the topic. These were people who had built the likes of Twitter, Blogger etc which are rather complicated pieces of software and the timescales they were talking about from picking a concept to first release were ridiculously short, months if not weeks. At this stage i began to feel rather embarrassed, my WebCV really isn't that complicated, i have most of the skills to update it, so how come they can launch huge brands in a few months and i can't even build a website?

The answer is simple; they set a short timescale to get something out there, it may not be complete, it may not be perfect, but it is something that they can then build on going forward. Programmers call this "release early, release often". It is better to get something out and get real customer feedback about what needs changed than it is to spend years building what you think customers want only to find it isn't actually what they want or the opportunity has passed.


With this in mind i decided that 12 hours was a reasonable amount of time to build a website. I set key tasks that had to be done and decided if something was taking too long that i would accept something that was ok, rather than taking longer and getting something that was perfect. It was difficult, first off it is the weekend so it was hard to avoid distractions and secondly i had forgotten most of the CSS i used to know. But after 11 hours of work i updated my WebCV and uploaded to the site.

I would be grateful if anyone who reads this could go and have a look at my WebCV and provide any feedback they can think of through the contact link. So far my list of things to do includes:

• Validate the xHTML and CSS against the W3C standards
• Improve consistency across browsers (IE7 and Firefox 3 are ok but i suspect it needs work on IE6, Firefox 2 and IE8)
  
• Sort out the padding and margins to get the spacing between the headings and text right
• Make a better header (the current one will do but its not great)
• Make the navigation tabs a bit less bland and angular
• Think of some ways to make it more visually appealing without being tacky

At least i have something out there, a base to build on. It is a much less daunting task to make lots of small improvements than it is to come up with something brand new and perfect first time. So remember; if you are procrastinating, if a project seems to big to know where to start, set a tight timescale and "Ready, Fire, Aim".


Idea from: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-art-of-speed-conversations-with-monster-makers/#more-362

Thought of the Day - RSS Feeds

For supposedly being a tech-savy guy i can't believe i haven't made use of RSS Feeds properly until now.

I say properly because i have used them before, i played with Firefox's RSS reader and Google Reader a while back but it never really stuck. I think it was because i was subscribing to feeds that had a stupid number of updates a day (unfiltered news sites etc) so i was just getting overwhelmed with junk. I guess i assumed that all RSS feeds were like that until this morning when i realised that a lot of the sites i have open in Firefox and refresh on a regular basis are sporadically updated. I was just going through checking for updates, not finding any and thought "surely there is a better way" and then i noticed a pattern ... lots and lots of little orange buttons. So i fired up Google Reader, deleted all of the high volume feeds i was subscribed to (but never looked at) and added all of the blogs and other sites with sporadically updated content. So now not only have i saved on memory footprint in Firefox, i only have to refresh one page to get updates, everything is in a nice chronological order and i don't have to worry about missing anything.

In all honesty it hasn't cut down my number of Firefox tabs that much (maybe lost 10 tabs overall) but combined with moving the tabs i keep open 'for reference' to Google Bookmarks and i should get down to one window.

Thought of the Day - UK Hotel Wifi

I'm staying at the Travel Inn (not Lodge) at Manchester Airport and it is damn near perfect; clean room, minimalist, flat screen TV, comfy bed, quiet and bliss of bliss it even has aircon.

But the one thing that kills it all is the woefully slow wifi ... it can't even save this blog post as i go along and my Tada Lists (the simplest web pages known to man) are taking >10 minutes to open. What i want to know is how on earth can this be the case? If it was free (as is the case in most of north america) i could live with it but i'm paying £10 a day for the privilege, if i was charged this rate at home i'd have a dedicated fibre line right to my flat. I'm not even going to be able to use it for the whole 24 hours; arrive 4pm leave 7am and 8 hours sleep inbetween leaves a maximum of 7 hours surfing. Worse still i'm not even doing heavy web browsing (downloading attachments or uploading anything), i'm loading some text based web pages and it is taking forever.

To anyone who runs a hotel in the UK; either stop gouging your customers for the slowest internet connection since 33.6kbps dial-up or provide a decent service for the exorbitant fee you charge.

Thought of the Day - To Do Lists

First off i will admit i love To Do Lists, normally on Post Its or on paper at home but at work if Outlook didn't remind me to do tasks they would surely be forgotten. I have a memory like a sieve so if i don't write down something i need to do then i am almost guaranteed to forget to do it.

One of the problems i had was coordinating tasks between home and work. At work i have Outlook and at home i have bits of paper, but frequently i think of something i need to do at home when i'm at work and vice versa. Previously i used the To Do List function in Basecamp (project management web-app) to manage a web-to-do-list, but it was overkill, i always forgot the web address to access it and there was too much complexity to get to the To Do List. Fortunately i recently discovered that the people who made Basecamp (37 Signals) have also made a really simple To Do List application.

Its called Tada and it is perfect! Very basic To Do List functionality, but so simple and effective you can't fault it. It is web based so you can access it from anywhere, you can create multiple lists (To Do At Work, To Do At Home etc) and prioritise the tasks within them. Sure there is no support for setting completion dates and reminders or creating sub-lists but if you wanted that you could use Basecamp, overall a superb little web-application that i would highly recommend.

Thought of the Day - Reliance On Google

I am starting to get a bit worried about how much i rely on Google:

Search - Just about every search i do is through Google, i don't remember the last time i did a search on a competitors site and the only regular time i don't search in Google is when i know what i'm looking for will be in Wikipedia and i start there.
Gmail - for the last 5 years all my personal e-mail has been through Gmail, in one way it is great because i have a great search tool to sift through so much information, in another way Google has a lot of personal information and what happens if i ever lose access to it.
Gchat - Chat from within Gmail with my friends with Gmail accounts.
iGoogle - Customized homepage that aggregates mail notifications, various news sites and various links i use frequently.
Blogger - Hosts this blog.
Google Analytics - Used to track traffic through various websites (including this blog).
Google Checkout - Used instead of paypal on some occasions.

More recently i have started using:
Google Bookmarks - Currently i have dozens of tabs open in 3 Firefox windows, most of which i don't look at on anything approaching a regular basis but don't want to close incase i lose or forget them. I also have various bookmark and favourites lists on different computers none of which are linked. I also have various backups of my bookmarks that never quite made it between computer upgrades.
Google Web History - Cataloguing all of my web viewing activity at home, useful if i forget to bookmark something or wonder how much time i waste online.


So what happens if Google ever; become evil, start charging for some of the products, disappear, are hacked, withdraw certain services etc etc? Frankly i'm kinda screwed. In one way it is great to have everything aggregated in one place, but in terms of risk mitigation it does feel like i have all of my eggs in one basket.

Thought of the Day - Technical Support

How do normal people cope when technology doesn't work?

Further to my previous post on technology not working i have to wonder what less technically savy people than myself do when their technology doesn't work? In my family's case they call me, i suspect most people (or at least i hope most people) have someone they know that helps them with tech stuff. While it can be very frustrating to have to deal with (i understand how hard it must be to work in a call centre), if there weren't people like that in society technological advances would grind to a halt. Imagine if everyone had to call tech support, how much would that add to the cost of consumer electronics, more to the point i wonder how much it adds now.

I suppose alternatively if that was the case it might force manufacturers to make products easier to use, you could almost say that experts are a crutch allowing companies to sell half-baked devices knowing that someone else will sort them out.

Thought of the Day - TV and Social Surplus

I read an article today which argued that television represents 'social surplus', an abundance of time that people don't know what to do with. It suggests that it is like a security blanket that we need to hold on to because of the pace of change in society. Lastly it argues that this security blanket is needed only for a generation, then uses are found for the surplus and society as a whole reaps the benefits. I have a few questions: Of most global importance; is TV too addictive for people to give up and put the time to better use? This would result in a brain-dead society as is portrayed so vividly in Mike Judges excellent Idiocracy. Of most relevance to me, as i watch more TV than anyone else i know; what could i be doing instead of watching TV?

According to www.myepisodes.com in the last 3 years i have wasted; 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 9 hours and 45 minutes watching TV shows. I should note that is only counting the TV i care enough about to track, the real number is probably a good bit higher. As a comparison, that is probably round about the amount of overtime i have worked in various jobs in the same time period, but still it is not an inconsequential amount of time. We're talking about 1 month per year (~9%), including sleeping (~42%) and working (~23%). That means that 75% of my time is spent doing things that aren't really that exciting. I wish i could say i filled the remaining 25% with bungee jumping and dog sledding across Alaska but in reality most of it is probably filled looking at random stuff on the internet.

I initially went into this post wondering what i should replace my television watching with, but in reality i could keep it more or less constant and still have an abundance of time to be doing other things. The question from a paragraph above still remains though; what could i be doing instead? Something that adds value to me (learning, travelling, working out), adds value to the community (voluntary work) or adds value to the world (creating something new).

I don't have a shortage of things that i could be doing (improving my web design skills, learning a foreign language, selling my excess possessions on e-bay etc etc), i just can't think of something that i have enough motivation to do properly. I suppose the first step in any change is an awareness that you want to make the change, now i just need to work out what to change too.

Idea From: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Thought of the Day - Limitations and Local Optima In Life

The strength of the human race is that we have adapted to survive, but now that survival is not really an issue for a lot of people, should we be questioning whether the adaptations are really the optimum?

The reason i bring this up is that i read an article on the benefits of 'barefoot' walking (see link at bottom), which blamed the 'features' of current shoes for various foot, ankle, leg and back issues. You can understand that in the past having a covering on your foot would be beneficial; less cuts, less chance of infection and a bit of protection. It then became even more critical as we moved to colder climates and didn't want our feet to freeze and fall off. Shoes allowed us to cope with conditions.

Of course it then became important that the sole of the shoe was durable and strong to prevent puncturing, which meant that stiffer, thicker materials had to be used. To make these stiff, thick soles more comfortable we added arch support, padding in the heel and rockered the sole to try to make the gait more natural but all we were doing was accommodating a limitation. Related to my notes on Beyond the Goal [coming soon] it seems that these local optima rules (padding, shaping etc) to accommodate the limitation were made so long ago that people no longer notice the rules or the limitation. With new advanced materials, a puncture-proof durable sole can be much thinner and more flexible, so why aren't they? One simple reason; people are used to what we have at the moment. Most people associate soft foam soles and thick padding with comfort, heightened heels are ubiquitous and hey if they are good enough for Olympic athletes they must be good enough for us, right?

Wrong. There is growing research which indicates that rather than making our feet more comfortable and protecting our joints from damage, that most current shoes actually cause these problems. So what is the solution? As with all good ideas it is very simple; use the millions of years of evolution in the human foot and interfere with it as little as possible. Provide protection without hindering the natural movement of the foot.


Recently i have had similar thoughts about a vegan/raw diet. That humans added cooked foods, dairy and meat so that we could overcome the limitation of seasonal fruits and vegetables. The only way to survive was to get calories any way we could and we adapted. But that adaptation is relatively recent and given that in the modern age we can get fresh fruit and vegetables year round is that adaptation the best decision or is it based on a local optima rule that helped us to survive in the past.


I am no Luddite, i love technology but i think we need to question the rules and assumptions of society to ensure that our choices are the optimum based on the current situation.


Idea from: http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Thought of the Day - IT Departments are the new Typing Pools

Something i have been saying since i joined the world of work almost 4 years ago is that in the near future IT Departments are going to become as much of an anachronism as the Typing Pool. I don't think we are there yet but three things are converging that are accelerating the process: 1) The IT skill level is increasing exponentially as the 'millennial' generation join the workforce, these people will be able to support older users and should be much more used to solving their own problems. 2) Increased automation of IT processes make the system administration simpler. 3) Increased outsourcing of high level IT infrastructure, if you don't need people to support servers and bespoke programs it isn't really worth keeping them around to support stupid user issues.

They are surprisingly similar to the things that caused the demise of the typing pool. 1) Most employees were using computers and became used to typing (people). 2) Printing technology meant you could type something once but producesubtly different versions with minimal effort (technology). 3) It was possible to retain secretaries for specific people for whom typing was not the best use of their time (outsourcing high level tasks).

Idea From: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/02/14FE-user-managed-pc_1.html

Thought of the Day - Autocracy is the new Empowerment?

In the last century there has been a shift from Autocracy to Empowerment in management styles and it could be argued that some companies are reaching the extreme end of employee empowerment (Semco [Maverick], St Lukes [Open Minds] and WL Gore) so where do we go from here?

Is the future the logical conclusion of empowerment and what Charles Handy predicts, where people will primarily be self-employed and come together to work on projects? Everyone becomes their own boss.

Or as with technology, will Apple lead the way full circle back to Autocracy again? One leader of the company controls all through fear and intimidation. If a company as creative as Apple can work and thrive under autocratic management then surely others can too.

Idea from:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple?currentPage=1

Thought of the Day - Computer Woes

Why do computer parts never work as easily as they should? Even with apple things don't always work right out of the box. Its not like I'm dumb and am not doing it right but its a little frustrating. Maybe it is because when something works right out of the box you don't notice, you just get on with it but when it doesn't work it is a major pain in the ass.