Entries Tagged 'Cool News, Links & Reviews' ↓

While on paternity leave this week I read seven books. I haven’t had that much spare time, but I’ve been following my “if I’m not taking notes, toss it” methodology, and wound up skimming through the better part of five of them.

Never Eat Alone was not one of the skimmers.

The author has walked the walk – he has a network of over 5,000 people whom he has used throughout his career to achieve some pretty hefty accomplishments, including becoming the CMO of Deloitte Consulting, and CEO of YaYa Media. While his use of examples from his experience gets tiring (I did skim those parts), it’s obvious by the first chapter that he knows his stuff.

I have a list of around 20 bullet points I took away from this book, which is a solid task list for me to mull over in the coming months. The gyst of the book is to network, but to be genuine about it, to build relationships before you need them, and the biggest takeaway: try to help others without expecting anything in return.

While none of this is groundbreaking, the author’s examples help lend perspective to what he means specifically by “help people” (mostly it’s about connecting two people within  your network who can help each other).

He also provides something of a process for maintaining your network. Not trite advice like “Everyone enjoys the sound of their own name,” but things like “Make a list of all the people you know and want to know, organize them into categories, and ping those in category 1 once a month, category 2 once a quarter, etc…”

It sounds rigid, but this is the kind of process I need to put in place or else I find myself never lifting my fingers from the keyboard to have lunch with someone.

Frankly, Never Eat Alone delivered on the promise of How to Win Friends and Influence People; a book I’ve attempted to read three times and have never made it past the first chapter. It’s painfully bad.

So while Never Eat Alone is not revolutionary, it is an expert’s take on how to network in a way that allows you to keep your self-respect. I recommend it.

The early bird registration discount for this year’s Business of Software in Boston expires on Friday. If you are planning to go, sign up now to save $400 off the full price.

In addition to speakers like Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Dharmesh Shah and Eric Sink, there are excellent networking opportunities with the other 300 attendees (a lot of self-funded software companies in the audience). I’ll also have the pleasure of connecting with you, as I’m honored to be one of the speakers this year.

I hope to see you in Boston in October.

I was a judge at last night’s 59 days of code startup competition here in Fresno. Teams had 59 days to create a killer app. One that solves a problem, is marketable, and demos well.

Overall it was an impressive showing of local talent. You can view a list of contestants here.

The Categories
There were two categories: zero-code and in progress. Zero-code meant you had to start with…um, zero code on day 1. In progress meant you could have a partial or complete product, but it needs polish and customers.

We judged based on a number of criteria, which can be seen at the bottom of this page, but they include things like usefulness, demo, UI, and differentiation. Frankly, the ability for a team to describe their idea well had a huge impact on how you perceived their app.

The Winners
The winners received a couple of pretty cool prize packages: an iPad, a chunk of money ($2800 for in-progress and $7200 for zero-code), a lifetime membership to the Micropreneur Academy, a Balsamiq Mock-ups license, and a bunch of other stuff worth around $17k.

• The winner of the zero-code category was PostEcho, an analytics package for social media
• The winner of the in-progress category was MyNetworkFactory, an online tool for sharing referrals within referral networks

Congratulations to both winners, and a tip of the hat to all who focused their energy for 59 days. Thanks to Travis, Irma and CVBI for putting everything together.

See you in 2011.

I recently finished the book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). It’s a fascinating look at how we perceive pricing, mis-perceive pricing, and are easily fooled by small changes in packaging, presentation and marketing.

Though the book starts slowly with more than hundred pages of background on the study of pricing psychology, if you skip ahead to parts 3 and 4 you get to the meat of the book; the key takeaways that marketers use and abuse everyday in our supermarket, casinos and dollar stores.

More than anything, this book made me realize there are “black hat” tactics in many disciplines. Some of the tactics the author discusses made me want to shower, such as cell phone bills made complex on purpose so people can’t compare apples to apples with the competition.

On the flip side, the idea of ending a price with .99 seems so commonplace that I don’t question it these days. It doesn’t feel black hat to me, but perhaps it should.

An unintended benefit was walking away with a list of things to watch out for as a consumer (e.g., new packaging always means less product). I also walked away with a few pricing ideas to test on my products.

In the end, Priceless is a unique and well-constructed look at the psychology of pricing.

Late Stage Co-Founder Wanted – [Filled] I’ve been contacted by a colleague who has been working on a SaaS application in a fairly large market. The SaaS (Ruby on Rails) app i complete and needs marketing enhancements in order to launch. You need reasonable graphic design skills, the ability to shoot and edit a screencast, respond to customer feedback, and work on the messaging/marketing. If you are interested drop me a line at rob@softwarebyrob.com and I will send you additional information. No obligation; the current founder will not know who you are unless you decide to contact him.

The Screencasting Handbook – Newly released, this ebook is written by an expert on the subject and is aimed at anyone who is making screencasts. I own it; it’s top notch.

Triumph of the Nerds on DVD – An awesome tech documentary, and I recently discovered it’s on DVD.

What My User Survey Taught Me – Insights from Patrick McKenzie. My favorite quote: “Incidentally, I don’t feel any rancor at folks who believe that everything should be free on the Internet.  I just will not accommodate your preferences.  You’re welcome to use my free competitors if they better fit your needs.”

ABtests.com – Learn more about A/B testing by examining other peoples’ A/B tests, including their take on why one out-performed the other. Many 100%+ improvements.

Ummm…What am I Signing up For? - Seriously, I still can’t figure out the purpose of this site.

I know this is going to seem like a random post, but I found a killer service and I wanted to mention it here.

I used iMemories last Christmas to transfer a dozen VHS tapes to DVD as gifts for my in-laws and the results were awesome. I also converted about a dozen VHS tapes from my high school and college track and football days. (on

I had intended for years to buy one of those USB VCRs that allows you to convert VHS to digital format, but the setup, time to convert, time to create DVD menus and burn…just never made it on my priority list.

iMemories offers hassle-free conversion of pretty much any analog medium you have (even those old slide wheels and 8mm film) to DVD, and the DVD includes chapters every few minutes, plus a color cover with frames from the video.

You ship the VHS tapes to them, and within a few weeks your video is available through an online portal where you can choose which snippets to include on the finished DVDs. The site uses a custom Flash UI that allows you to navigate and select clips to include.

I realize this is a bit off topic from the typical fare of this blog, but I was so pleased with the service I wanted to help spread the word. If you have VHS tapes in need of a good DVD home, check out iMemories.

Surely you’ve heard the news by now. Joel Spolsky is going to wrap-up his blog on its 10-year anniversary, just a few days from now.

The memories I have of Joel on Software, especially from 2001-2004, run deep. These were my formative years as a developer, and Joel published some of his best work during this time. Though his blog has been pretty quiet for a few years now, I can still remember the bolts of insight I experienced as I read those early articles; always within minutes of receiving his email announcing it had been published.

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Concept Feedback – Free feedback for marketers, designers and Micropreneurs. Share your website and get quick feedback. Excellent resource for fast, free site reviews.

lehan. paper. design. – Need an elegant “Thank You” card for a client? Or a custom card with your logo and message? Professional and elegant designs from a paper craftsman.

HotNameList – If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, HotNameList is like having a metal detector. It finds good domains that are available to register right now. I’ve picked up 6 keyword-heavy domain names from this site in the past two months.

ABtests.com – Quick, informative A/B tests and how they’ve turned out. An awesome resource.

Working Longer Hours Is Not A Competitively Defensible Advantage – Patrick McKenzie, a brilliant Micropreneur, is on target with this post about monetizing your time, outsourcing, automation and elimination.

Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For – “If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.”

Smart People Should Do Stupid Stuff – It’s usually the simple ideas that work.

The Two iPhone App Stores – An insightful post about the two app stores – the “simple shallow” store and the “deeper, more expensive” store. The press loves to cover the “simple, shallow” store but the “deeper” store encompasses most of the apps.

Lessons from a “Pay What You Want” Software Sale – A key takeaway: “Few people chose their price based on the perceived value of the game.  How much the person feels they can afford seems to play a much larger role in the decision than how much the game is worth.”

Lessons of Failure Blog -A well-written blog about software development and project management. Relatively new but insightful and fun to read.

Finding Great Ideas for Your Startup – Good comic series.

Download the Audiobook of Chris Anderson’s Free – For…um…free.

Free Online Audio Editor – Myna allows you to edit audio in your browser for free. We are indeed moving to the cloud. I’m amazed at the power of this tool.

I’m really into saving time, and one way I’ve found to do that is to skim books, or listen to them as abridged audiobooks when I’m on the road.

In line with this, about a year ago I found an awesome collection of summaries of the best marketing books ever (in the opinion of the book’s editor).

These are books I would never take the time to read, but I have gleaned wisdom and entertainment from the summaries. While there is no substitute for the real thing, digesting 5-10 pages is much more palatable for me than thinking of 50 or 100 books at 200+ pages each.

I’ve since had two similar books recommended to me bringing my time saving to a grand total of…a lot of time:

• The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
• The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
• The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You’ll Never Have Time to Read