Tech IT Easy » Review

State of the iPhone Apps

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:42:38 +0000

I’m writing a mail to some people about what apps I like on the iPhone these days & why, so it might as well get published here also. You’re going to have to search for these apps yourself, as iTunes app-linking is tedious work.

In no particular order:

Sleep Cycle App: This is supposed to be an alarm that wakes you up when your sleeping is lightest, but I use it mainly to analyse my sleeping behaviour. It’s interesting for me to know that after a good workout, my sleep is very deep, while stressful days result in very light sleep. It’s the essence of a self-help app for me, one that has a physical impact on my life.

Articles: There are times when you want to be a smart*ss to your friends, or when your friends are smart*sses to you, you want to reach their level of … excellence(?). Articles provides a nice interface for Wikipedia on the iPhone and also allows you to read select number of pages offline, useful for when you’re on a trip and don’t want to roam.

WikiHow: This site is completely amazing and the fact that the app is free is even more amazing. Basically, anything from sleeping better to picking a lock is contained within it.

Dictionary: I shouldn’t talk to much about games here (I’ve become a little addicted to some), but Dictionary, also a free app, feeds completely into my addiction to Scrabble / Words with Friends. It does need an internet connection, which sucks.

Instapaper: I once said that I have no idea whether I’ll ever read all the articles I save in Instapaper, but it’s nice that there is an app where all my informational interests are contained and more. 50% of the value of the app is the ability to discover curated content in the Long Reads or Editor’s Picks section.

iBooks: Formerly a Stanza fan, I’ve become a complete nut for iBooks ever since getting the iPhone 4 with the Retina screen. I’ve read over 10,000 iPhone-sized pages so far (translates to a third of that in real pages) and I just can’t stop. Two significant caveats: the iBooks store outside of the US sucks HARD, so the only way to get good content is to get ePub files (by for instance converting them in Stanza on the Mac/PC) and syncing through iTunes. The second issue is that PDF reading doesn’t nearly provide the same reading experience as eBooks. For that there is…

Goodreader: A PDF-reader that will read anything you throw at it and convert it into a nice readable format as well. A classic.

Reeder: An RSS-reader with a nice feel to it. I used to have issues with battery-life when it is running in the background, but they seem to have solved that.

Soundhound: An alternative to Shazam, it recognises songs via microphone, but also has the advantage of recognising hummed songs. I haven’t used it much, but there are times when it is vital. Offline recording is possible.

Meetup: Not as much into Meetups since I left Luxembourg, but it’s still a nice design, providing relevant local info on what is happening near you.

iFitness: I’ve had some really great workouts through this app, which keeps on getting updated with new ones and has tons of routines for gym & home-use. They seem to really care, and that’s what I appreciate in software. New is a calory-database, but I don’t have the discipline to get into that + most are US —how much is that BiG Mac —centric.

RunKeeper (Pro): This app allows you to track stuff like running & cycling, as well as bunch of other moving-related ones, using GPS. I do have two issues with it: the Pro version is quite expensive, related to other apps & as soon as I bought it, I found out that they also sell an “elite” subscription for stuff that isn’t really that valuable to me (fitness classes, I think), which I think is over-the-top. But ok, for the rest it keeps me fit. I especially like the coaching which you can set to monitoring your average pace and informing you of your slackness.

Calvetica: I had to get used to this app, until a friend informed me of how fast it is to add an appointment. It’s basically a 2 click process, which is amazing and about 1000% more efficient than Apple’s official calendar app. One caveat, which they hacked around: the icon doesn’t show the actual date like the calendar app, because Apple doesn’t allow it, so they allow you to put the date as a badge-notification, which works but isn’t pretty.

SimpleNote & JustNotes (Mac): These have to be mentioned hand-in-hand, because they wouldn’t have any value to me separately. SimpleNote is a free (ad-supported) app that allows you to take … simple notes and syncs them over the web. JustNotes is a Mac-app that syncs up with SimpleNote, ensuring that whatever you write is automatically in both places. JustNotes has become my sole note-taking app on the Mac and it’s also free. Amazing stuff.

That is all. No games, as they are like fly on the walls.

Vincent

A review of the 23andMe genetic profiling service

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:56:32 +0000

People frequently ask me why the $%^# I decided to ‘get my genes done.’ I get the feeling that this is a scary area for many of us and that is part of the reason why I did it, to explore something that has an interesting future possibly. I also thought it would be a good idea to both understand where I’m from, genetically, and what possible risks lie ahead for me. Finally, 23andMe offered a DNA-day special a few weeks back and the price was right for me to do it.

For those that don’t know, 23andMe is a company who’s mission statement it is to develop new methods and technologies that will enable consumers to understand their own genetic information (source: Wikipedia). It has made headlines because Google invested in the company and one of the co-founders of 23andMe is married to one of the co-founders of Google.

In the following review, I want to write about several things: the last mile, which is a concept I discussed in my last blog post; the analysis; and finally, about whether it means anything.

The Last Mile
I previously wrote how crucial this concept is to running a successful business because 99.9999% of customers pay a business to get not only a product, but none of the headaches associated with getting this product—they don’t want to spend time making bank-transfers, physically going to a store to buy it (debatable), physically carrying the product home, reading complicated manuals. They just want to use it! Taking care of the last mile means that you can charge 2x or 10x for a product because the last mile is simply part of the product.

That 23andMe takes care of the last mile was very apparent to me in the context of the discount I received and the fact that live in Europe. If I remembered correctly, they discounted ca. 80% of the price of the product, but the non-discounted shipping costs of getting a ‘spit-vial’ to my home and back again to their labs was more expensive than the price of the product. It made me think twice about doing this, but in the end the result was that I had a pretty perfect service that required nothing from my part except:

paying,
waiting for delivery,
spitting into a vial,
filling out the Fedex papers,
sending it off,
and waiting for the results.

The total process took ca. 6 weeks, and while I’m not a particularly big fan of the shipping process in general, it was pretty comfortable on a whole.

Once the lab-analysis is done, you receive a mail notifying you that you’re results are ready, which you can access on the 23andMe website. Nothing wrong with that, except I hope that they use the dynamic nature of the web to keep updating info about my genes as their understanding of genetics improves. As I find it unlikely that people will do this analysis very frequently, I consider me not having to retake the test to get a marginal improvement in results a ‘last mile’ service as well. But we’ll see…

The Analysis
It’s important to state that ‘while you wait,’ there’s plenty to do on the site other than seeing your results, which frankly requires some (4-6 weeks after sending) patience to arrive. There are endless surveys you can take, forum-discussions, and articles. The whole thing feels like a Wikipedia for genetics, written in a clear format that even dumbos like me can understand. It does require time and interest in the matter.

The actual data that you get from the analysis is split into health results and ancestry results. Of these two, I found the ancestry part the least useful, even though I consider my personal ancestral history to be quite mixed and thus, for some, fascinating. Things you can do there is find out your maternal and paternal ancestry, find relatives (so far, completely useless, probably because most 23andMe users are American), and see visual representations of your geographic ancestry. I appear to be 100% European and resemble Northern Europeans the most, but the site also writes that “all humans are more than 99% similar to each other genetically,” so I’m not sure how significant or interesting this is.

The health results are much more interesting and for obvious reasons I will not go into great depth about my own results. The results are split into five categories, ‘Disease Risk,’ ‘Carrier Status,’ ‘Drug Response,’ ‘Traits,’ as well as a category, called ‘Health Labs,’ which goes into more experimental data. For some results, specifically carrier status and drug response, I feel like it’s a list I need to discuss with a doctor, as a lot of terms are quite scientific and it would require considerable time to understand what is relevant and what isn’t.

Most interesting to me is ‘Disease Risk,’ as it identifies areas to watch out for in the future and areas that are of less concern, and ‘Traits,’ which tells me stuff about lactose intolerance, muscle type, etc., all of which are handy to know in everyday life. Regarding Disease Risk, I like that they hide more serious conditions, until you specifically give permission to see these results. I was a little nervous about finding out exactly about those conditions, so I was happy the site allowed me some time to prepare myself mentally before seeing “the truth” (as far as that can be determined through such an analysis).

Does it mean anything?
Will you be able to live life without knowing these results? Clearly, we have survived for a long time without knowing much/anything about our genes and plenty of people today live on just fine in ignorant bliss. I have also lived my life in relative ignorance so far, though through years of playing around with exercise and diet, I realise that healthy living certainly benefits my current life and hopefully leads to a longer one (the analysis incidentally also shows your odds of living a certain age).

While frightening to find out whether you have an elevated chance of dying from things like cancer or getting Parkinson disease, I was relieved to find out about my chances, good or bad. Information means that you can prepare yourself, whether it’s just the idea that we are all mortal in some ways or that you have a checklist to visit your doctor with. I think my family will also be interested in finding out what my ancestry information reveals, though I didn’t think that part was particularly detailed.

Finally, while I’m a believer that no matter how well we understand ourselves, the chances of humanity as a species destroying itself or our planet destroying us are much more significant, I still think that we have for some years been on the threshold of a genetic revolution, one that will very likely result in things like a much longer and healthier life, though not without some significant societal consequences such as how to support an ageing population.

Just like the Apple iPad could potentially revolutionise computing and it’s good a reason for buying one, I consider the ‘plug-and-play’ 23andMe service to be a worthwhile purchase to gain a better understanding of where we stand in terms of the revolution in medicine.

Marks out of 10 – Service: 7/10 (points taken off for the time it took to find out the results); Analysis & presentation: 8/10 (points taken off for ancestry & complexity of certain health information); Overall Usefulness: 6/10 (you can live without it, not sure how doctors will react to this, more targeted at US than elsewhere); Overall grade: 7/10.

On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:12:39 +0000

I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair.

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

Single Purpose Browsing & Why Tabbed Browsing Makes for a Pretty BAD User Experience

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:35 +0000

When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

CeBit 2010: On 3D technology and its commercial potential

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:21:54 +0000

This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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Thoughts on the (iTablet) iPad – connectivity, apps, multitasking, integrating with Macs

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:54:10 +0000

The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

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FarmVille is a role playing game

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:52:34 +0000

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:20:54 +0000

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

Avatar – a review of its technologies and message

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:21:58 +0000

This movie was one I anticipated for some time. I’m a Sci-Fi geek, a movie freak, and a Cameron disciple (ever since Terminator 2). Most important to me today however: seeing whether the world of cinema was about to change forever… or not. My review will *not* be about the story, but about a number of themes it addresses, namely the 3D experience, motion capture, and (some spoilers) it’s environmental message.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

One reason I don’t like Google Chrome on the Mac

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:38:21 +0000

In my continuous drive to “pimp” my Mac experience, I use this application switcher called “LiteSwitch.” It hasn’t been updated in years, but it still works and amongst some other cool features, it allows me to see (and manipulate) all running processes, including the hidden ones (which I choose to hide on a case-by-case basis).

Here’s what the Google Chrome Browser shows me.

Every time I open multiple tabs, it shows me a process, called Google Chrome Helper. With half a dozen tabs open, I soon have these processes filling up my whole tab-switcher.

I realise that Chrome is in alpha, beta, or whatever disclaimer they use these days, but I just think it’s really messy. Ironically, it is the fastest browser on my system and I really do lean towards it when quickly wanting to browse the net. Even though the average user will not see these aesthetic little bugs, I sincerely hope that they clean it up a.s.a.p.. Even Chromium, its seemingly more mature brother, displays the same behaviour.

Stop being so beta, Google!

/Vincent

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A short guide for surviving Windows [aimed at Mac-users]

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:49:16 +0000

Let me just start with that I don’t hate Windows, far from it! I like that I can run most applications on it and, let’s face it, it is still a Windows-centric world, so knowing your way around the operating system is a fairly important skill.

As the latest update to Mac OSX Leopard, 10.5.7, has caused some mayhem on my company’s server (something to do with DHCP constantly refreshing my IP, if you can help buzz me), I am now booting into Windows XP via Bootcamp. Additionally, my boss also ordered me a new Dell PC to persuade me to “be like the rest of ‘em” (my own words), but really more to do with security: we work in a Financial Trust, which means that we deal with highly sensitive data that shouldn’t be stored on any laptop, really!

OK, so how do you, as a Mac-user, survive that Windows experience (slash “Trauma”)? Here’s what I did:

I love Quicksilver (a launch-utility that allows me to circumvent the mouse and explorer interface and launch apps with a few keys), and I am currently using Slickrun as a fairly effective replacement. OK, you won’t exactly be able to program triggers or append text to files, but it works.
Expose is another “interface aid” I use instead of alt-tab. DExposE2 is a Windows replacement that works fairly similarly.
Marsedit is my favourite blogging application on the Mac ever (you all know, how frequently I write..) and Windows Live Writer is a surprisingly good replacement for it.
GDI++ is an interesting font-rendering app for Windows XP users. It took some getting used to, but I find it works well when Cleartype is turned on.
Textexpander has made writing a slightly more efficient task on the Mac, certainly a less error-prone one. It basically allows you to create abbreviations or add frequently misspelled words and the program then replaces it with the word you intended. On Windows: check out Texter.

As you might have noticed, the “Mac Experience,” to me at least, is not about Application support, it’s about productivity, i.e. doing stuff quicker, which the Mac excels at. Everything else, from Microsoft Office to Mozilla Firefox essentially works the same and, in several cases better, on Windows, so no survival guide needed there.

While I will never enjoy the Windows experience as much as the Mac one, these few things have made my life a little more bearable. If you have some nifty tricks to share that have made your Windows experience better, please share them in the comments!

Vincent

P.S. One thing I would still love to have is a system-wide spell-checker like in OS X.

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What "The Mailroom" makes me think about

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:09:24 +0000

At the moment of writing, I’m on page XXII, what some of you may recognise as the introductory pages of the book. Not nearly enough to write a review. But I discovered the title in the FT weekend edition and reading a few pages it already feels alive with the buzz of making it big from the bottom up to the most powerful circles of Hollywood. For that is the topic of the book, tales of those people that started in the mailroom and now rule the woods of holly.

What the mailroom made me think about was IBM. I read the autobiography (I think it’s this one) of the founding of IBM around 15 years ago while lounging on the beaches of Cuba. It made a strong impression on me because it was raw. The book was also badly bound, falling apart bit by bit, which no doubt added to the memory. But what made the IBM story so compelling is that it wasn’t about the “consulting biz” it is now, having gotten rid of 95% of its hardware business, but it was about going from typing machines, to calculators, to huge room-filling computers, to the personal computer. Like the Mailroom, the story is maybe a little dated, but both are about dreaming big and thinking about and experiencing the radical steps that life, business, an industry, society can make. As such, still being on page XXII of the Mailroom, I can still say that it is an inspiring read.

The other thing the Mailroom reminded me of is my love for post-1900 history. Nothing like Word War I, II, of the Cold War, I’m not very interested in humanities continuous attempts to destroy themselves. More about the chaos that made lots of adventures possible. Business opportunities like the ones that Ray Croc discovered in plastic cups and McDonalds, crime in the early 20s and 30s which was really entrepreneurism, the development of cinema as discussed in my Hitchcock / Truffaut pieces. The Mailroom, IBM.

When I look at today, (P.S. I’m just lounging in the garden in the burning sun, reading the book and pounding away at this post), it all seems rather dull in comparison. The real opportunities, which often come from unplanned chaos, seem to be more located in emerging economies like China and India, than in European countries like France where when you get fired you get a (scandalous) 50,000 euro “bonus.” Even the Internet, which has attracted a lot of free spirits in the past and present, seems to continue to get more consolidated, structured, encumbered by taxation and the personal interests of national organisations operating in a nationless environment. OK, I’m drifting…

Read the Mailroom! I predict it’s a good read, particularly during the hopefully more chilled out summer days.

Vincent

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7 reasons why I'm stopping using Last.fm for music & 4 reasons why I'm starting to use Drop.io + Facebook Connect

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:10:00 +0000

My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.

Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)

Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).

Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song

One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.

A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.

The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.

I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).

It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.

Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

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Good podcast month for entrepreneurial lessons

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:26:33 +0000

If you want to hear some interesting perspectives on the hardware and software business and/or starting businesses in general, check out the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leader lectures held by Jeff Hawking, co-founder of Palm, and Steve Balmer, employee no. 30 & current CEO at Microsoft.

Jeff Hawking is also the author of “On Intelligence,” and describes his development-path of creating neuro-scientific solutions towards interfacing with technologies (which is, I think, the right perspective towards interface-design). He’s doing some pretty interesting things in the field, also through his foundation called Numenta, but I expect also through future hardware coming out (I’m not sure if he’s involved in the Palm Pre, but he was in the Foleo). He describes some crisis-moments in Palm’s past, including how to compete with Microsoft (the irony!). Very worth checking out and I love the title: “Inside the mind of a reluctant entrepreneur.”

Steve Balmer, what a character! I found him to be thoughtful and concise, whilst never forgetting to pimp the universe that is Microsoft and how that is important for startups… He shares a bunch of stories, like why he decided to drop out of Stanford and join Microsoft as employee no. 30, the current economy and its opportunities, the future of computing, and even makes a few jokes about (not mentioning) Vista.

I thoroughly enjoyed both lectures and think you will too.
Vincent

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The iPhone's hardware and software capabilities are misaligned

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:06:44 +0000

I spent quite a lot of time evaluating smart-phones this last week, including having hands-on time with the Nokia E71, the Blackberry 8900, the iPhone & iPod Touch, with a firm eye on their capabilities as a mobile computer, more so than a mobile phone or a mobile entertainment device.

My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

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An (informal) Entrepreneurial Brainstorming Session No. 1: Book summaries that are stories

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:10:47 +0000

I know I wrote about rebooting the entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. I kind of prefer an informal style of ‘idea generation’ though… Today, the subject is literature, of which there arguably is way too much. Sometimes it’s nice to read a ‘thin book,’ like The One Minute Manager or even The Alchemist.

What those books have in common is that they give you lessons in a very compressed space. But it works, because rather than doing a dry, point-by-point summary of the content published in much longer books, they do so in story-format. The One Minute Manager is about a man trying to learn about management and he goes on a kind of exploratory adventure to uncover the secrets. According to the book there’s only really three elements to effective one-to-one management [there's another book in the series, I'm reading now, on one-to-many management also], but I won’t bore you with them. The only thing to note is that I REMEMBER the lessons in the book perfectly!

The Alchemist is not a management book, it’s a self-help book about finding happiness and the meaning to your life. It’s again about an adventure and you follow this kid across the desert. Very simple principles, clothed in the format of an entertaining and exciting story.

No wonder these two books are best-sellers!

These last decades have seen a tremendous rise on various fronts involving the mass-education of mankind. From MBAs, to millions of published books, to billions of informational websites, it’s understandably overwhelming. As a result, you now get books teaching you (supposedly) “MBAs in a nutshell”, you get websites that sell you books in audio-format. And you also get websites that sell you book summaries for the busy executive.

Having read several of these, I have to say that I’m not impressed. Sure, I can read Crossing the Chasm in 5 pages, but what have I actually learned? How do the lessons that I read in bullet-point format translate into a language that my brain understands and remembers?

The answer is, if you ask me, to start a business that translates (boring / long) books into shorter books and doing so in story-form. Nothing is as exciting to business-folk like me, than reading a Harvard Business Review case-study. Because, it’s a (nearly) living example. I place myself into the antagonist’s point of view and learn about the challenges he/she has to face!

So this is my first “entrepreneurial brainstorming” topic: start a business that translates longer books into shorter entertaining stories and sells them to executives!

What do you think?

Vincent

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My biggest nightmare if I ran a startup, and what I would probably do about it

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:12:14 +0000

“The strategy and tactics of pricing” is the toughest book I’ve ever read. Not tough as in boring, what most books regarding finance, accounting, law, programming, and other subjects I’m bad at end up being. But tough like Chess, you have think more than a few moves ahead. The fun part about chess is that it’s a game and you can fail without much pain, but with Pricing… it’s better not to make too many mistakes.

Picture this nightmare scenario, an example I just read about in the book [paraphrased]:

A large building products manufacturer is operating in a commoditised market, but has continuously been profitable due to banking on perceived technical excellence and exceptional customer service. Still, market share has been going down due to aggressive price cutting by competitors.

How would you address this problem? Well, this is what the new management of the company did:

Whenever an account was seriously threatened, sales manager were authorised to negotiate “special deals,” that would retain the business at lower, but still profitable prices. It seemed successful, and market share increased by a few points over the next few quarters.

But what happened in the long-term?

The company tried to minimise damage, by not making this a public policy. But still, customers eventually ended up talking and found out that other customers got the same quality and service for less. Worse, those customers that negotiated by threatening to go to the competition, were the ones that got the lowest prices!

Long term effects were that customers decided to no longer get “taken” by the company. Whatever previous loyalty existed, eroded, and customers opened up their doors to competitors, which had previously been closed. The company had ended up creating a financial incentive for its buyers to become more informed and less loyal, and customers responded.

Something that seemed like a smart move in the short-term, had turned into a nightmare over the long term.

Now the book goes on to say that any strategic move you make, pricing wise, must be one that weighs the short-term vs. the long-term consequences. The difficulty is that pricing is an area often dominated by sales people, who use the sport-analogy in doing business: “there can only be one winner, and it must be me!” Pricing, as the example above shows, isn’t just about winning in the short-term however, it’s about operating in a triangular fashion, respecting your bottom-line, understanding what your customer needs, and dealing with the competition. In the words of the book, it requires a “diplomat,” rather than a general to manage this area of strategy.

Reading this book would probably take 1 month full time. It would take ca. 3 months total to understand what is being said. And it would probably take another 3 months to try and implement it in your business. No sane CEO / startup founder would have time learn this stuff! They’re busy enough managing other aspects of the business, such as cash flow and people. So what I would do, if I were the founder of a startup and wanted to master pricing strategy [and you really should], I would hire an intern and make that his job: take 1 month to read the book, take another 5 to develop a pricing strategy for our business.. Then, if successful, hire the kid as the pricing strategist for your company. I’m 100% sure that it will pay itself back and now consider pricing as one of the corner-stones of any company’s strategy.

This was just a brain-dump. Love to hear your thoughts on this.
Vincent

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Hitchcock / Truffaut on the perversion of new mediums

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:23:19 +0000

No great point to this post; I occasionally grab this book and read a few pages, as I’m an avid film-fan and interested how they are made. This piece, where Alfred Hitchcock talks about silent films and what was lost after sound was introduced, reminded me a little of the experimentation that has been happening on the web and whether or not that is a good or bad thing. I think that those that were masters of the previous mediums, in this case print and all kinds of analog media, will certainly have a strong opinion about what is happening today, just like Hitchcock did, after silent pictures, which he started with, were displaced by the more noisy kind.

Here goes:

Alfred Hitchcock: The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was the simple natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

François Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers—in fact, almost the whole production—had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

Alfred Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to first to tell a story in the cinematic way, though a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
……
In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you may choose to stage the action, you main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention.
Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

While I’m on this wavelength, this piece also reminds me of another essay, I read recently, this time on making solid investment decisions. The piece, by Andy Kessler, was on the concept of elasticity, which is not only used in evaluating customer decision making under different conditions, but is also relevant when shifts in technology occur, allowing for drastic development on that new platform. From semiconductors, to phones-that-are-computers, each allowed for explosive innovation to happen, displacing the masters of the previous era. But there is still a place for masterdom, I feel, as the example of Hitchcock, a director that will likely never be forgotten, clearly illustrates.

Taking opportunity of opening markets makes a lot of sense; becoming the master of your medium, gives meaning to what you do.
Vincent

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Hitchcock / Truffaut and experimentation

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:19:24 +0000

This week a Dutch commission on the banking recession to came to an end. Their conclusion: banks should be more customer-focussed (translated article). Wow… If there’s anything this crisis has shown us is that during times of crises, creativity takes a dive out the window. Because I’m pretty sure that people were talking about more customer-focus back when the Lehman brothers went out of business.

Just briefly, before I go on to a more pleasurable topic. Wired Magazine last month had an article on what they identified as the cause this whole crisis: the gaussian copula function (depicted above), invented by a man named David X. Li, which made it possible to model risk down to a simple number, allowing for any idiot out there to label an investment as an affordable risk. As the article states, Mr. Li won’t be getting a Nobel anytime soon, but it only serves to illustrate a simple point: money makes the world go round, and more specifically, money makes the world of finance go round. Banks, until recently, had a nice little formula that allowed them to make money. Now they don’t. Will that formula be found in increased customer-focus, I don’t know. But I do think that we need a better understanding of the complex variables that play a part in our globalised economy, and customer focus alone won’t do the trick.

OK, rant over. My stance for this recession remains: work harder and smarter… and don’t watch the news.

In Hitchcock / Truffaut, Hitchcock tells the story of One-Round Jack, a character in an early film of his, The Ring (1927). Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

A.H. In those days we were very keen on the little visual touches, sometimes so subtle that they weren’t even noticed by the public. You remember that picture started on the fairgrounds. There was a fighter, played by Carl Brisson, and he was called One-Round Jack.

F.T. Because he knocked out his opponents in the first round?

A.H. That’s right. And in the crowd, watching the barker, there was an Australian, played by Ian Hunter. As the barker in front of the tent urged the crowd to go in, he had a little flap and could look back over his shoulders to see how the match was progressing. He used a sign to indicate the round number to the people standing outside. We showed volunteer fighters going into the tent and then coming out holding their jaw. Until Ian Hunter goes in. The seconds were sort of laughing at him and they didn’t even bother to hang up his coat. They just held it, thinking that he would never last more than one round. The match started and I showed the expressions of the seconds changing. Then we showed the barker looking in at the match. And at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two. It was brand-new! One-Round Jack was so good that they’d never got around to using it before! I think this touch was lost on the audience.

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock went on to become a great filmmaker, but even he started small, experimenting with different effects, like the glass ceiling I wrote of last, until he understood the effectiveness of his medium. It’s an attitude that I greatly respect, and try to implement both in blogging and my work. You can’t achieve great things without breaking a few eggs.

There’s a pretty entertaining TED video here with the stereotypical mad scientist, Cliffort Stoll, in which he says:

“The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. The third time, you’re a technician. I’m a scientist, once I’ve done something, I do something else.”

That’s a philosophy I can also respect.

Back to banking. I think that what is customer focus has changed much over the generations. According to my father, customer focus is having a bank outlet + friendly smile in every neighbourhood. More deeply, back in his day, a bank would contribute more significantly to buying a house, funding well over 50% of the purchase price. I’m not sure how the latter has changed now, but I do now that what is called “customer service” has simply moved online. I haven’t seen the inside of a bank in months and I don’t miss it. To me, customer service is having more payment options, much more innovation, as well as for all transactions, no matter how small or large, to be free, instantaneous, and unencumbered by national borders or currency. I want to see the day where all transactions go via a single device in our pocket. I’d also like to see more funding for things like housing and startups, of course, but I know that a certain measure of reality needs to be in place for that, i.e. how credit worthy is your customer.

I think that won’t be able to count on banks much until they replace the faulty mechanism that was either the gaussian copula function or another one, allowing for banks to regain their profitability. I think that this will entail making mistakes and that room needs to be allowed for that. That banks are supposed to be customer friendly, goes without saying, but that banks are businesses that need a solid balance sheet, goes without saying too.

Went a little overboard there on the text. Sorry about that. Hope it’s readable / entertaining.

Vincent

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Hitchcock / Truffaut and the future of the moving picture

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:01:11 +0000

If you look at the world of video now, there are a number of trends that reign:

The shift from TV to web (Youtube, Hulu, iTunes Video, etc.)
The shift towards gaming, aka interactive video
The shift towards 3D cinema
The unabated reign of piracy, which means that content-producers have to look beyond traditional media.
The relative affordability of the home cinema.
The rise of televised serials on par with movies in terms of budgets, screenplay, acting, and other qualities
Something else? Please let me know in the comments!

It kind of makes you wonder whether cinema as we’ve known it is ending. Is cinema, in its constant drive to innovate, losing those things that made it great in the past? It took me something like reading “Hitchcock / Truffaut” to come to the conclusion that that is not the case. As the web2.0 boys like to write, “Shift happens!”

Case in point: when Hitchcock started making movies in the 1930s, they were silent. To give the effect of the sound of a man walking back and forth in the room upstairs in “The Lodger,” he used a glass ceiling. That’s right, you could actually look through the ceiling and see the feet of the man. Today, even a decade or two later, that effect would’ve been completely unnecessary.

Same as today camera rigs are becoming affordable to you and me, changes in technology can and will affect how we give visual meaning to a story. Because that’s what it’s all about, story telling, and the medium is simply the one that is the most effective for that.

There is perhaps a risk of focussing on form over substance. Many have predicted that in order for the status of proprietary cinema to be safeguarded, there would need to be a 3rd and maybe even a 4th dimension. My last IMAX-experience having been the two year old “Superman Returns” movie, I’m no expert, but I found it entirely unconvincing. 2009 is the year of 3D cinema, so I’ll leave it up to the more recent IMAX-visitors to decide whether 3D is as yet ready to replace 2D. I’ve heard critics say that “the screen just points at you,” which I don’t find particularly encouraging. At the same time, as equipment becomes cheaper and people experiment more, I’m sure a way to settle into the new medium will be found.

4D, which is the time-dimension, and in which you can find interactive media like games, and media spread across a longer period of time, such as TV-series, also holds much promise, perhaps more so than 3D. As a story-teller, imagine the potential of having the viewer co-create the story, or of having 50 hours of film to tell a story in. Amazing!

“Hitchcock / Truffaut” is a fascinating study of Hitchcock films, in the form of one long interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and I encourage anyone interested in classic cinema to give it a read. It’s also about finding visual elements to tell a story and gives an insight into how cinema has evolved over the years. 4 Thumbs up!

Vincent

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RFID in a human context

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:24:59 +0000

Recently, the city of Rotterdam introduced a mandatory way of paying for public transport, using RFID-cards, called OV-chipkaart. This system will eventually be deployed across the Netherlands. This blog post describes my experience with it.

First you have to be aware that, much like in any city, public transport is an umbrella-term that describes busses, trams, trains, and metros (or subways). The RFID cards don’t yet work on trains, you have to check and uncheck yourself for any of the other options. You cannot get into or out of the subway station without doing that, while that is not the case on busses and trams, where you do have to check yourself in, but nobody prevents you from not checking out. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

When you check yourself in, the machine automatically takes of 4 euro from your card. When you check yourself out, the amount that you haven’t used is deposited back. So if you forget… you just lost a few euro, because most trips don’t exceed the 1.50 euro mark. You can’t forget this in the subway, as you can’t enter without checking in, and you can’t leave without checking out—there are human height gates that prevent this (see pic). And the system works fine. On busses and trams, on the other hand, you have to check yourself in, and you have to remember to check yourself out, as there is no one to stop you from leaving without doing so. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

I’m not sure why this system was put in place in such a way:

one reason might be practicality: instead of giving a destination at the beginning, the check-out machine decides what your destination ends up being. That way, there’s no confusion and no long queue at the beginning of people entering their destination into a machine.
a second reason might be technical / a privacy issue: it would be optimal if I got on a bus and, without touching the machine, the money would be taken from my card, and vice versa when I leave the bus. It’s more than likely a privacy concern as RFID-chips can have a maximum range of ca. 320 feet (=100 m).
a third reason might be that subways are the no. 1 way to travel in Rotterdam: I don’t believe this is the case, especially since this system will be rolled out to cities where there aren’t any subways.

I very much dig the idea of RFID, as I like its efficiency, both from a user and a supply chain perspective. The flaw in this system is contextual design. While it works perfectly in subways due to the gate system (as well as in trains, where they are installing similar gates), there is too great a chance of forgetting to check out on other means of public transport. Last night at 11 pm in Amsterdam, the tram was filled with people that where “on something,” and how many of those are very likely to forget to check out? A 4 euro a pop, you’re entering London tube tariffs, which, everyone agrees, are astronomical, especially if you have to pay for that every day.

The only practical solution I see for this problem, is for there to be gates installed in busses and trams, so that people don’t forget to check out. So far, this has not happened and it comes at the expense of travellers who, while being trained to be stupid (don’t worry, the card takes care of everything), now have to be aware of their actions at the beginning and at the end of the journey. And believe me, when this system is rolled out across the Netherlands and perhaps even your country, there’s going to be an exponential increase in complaints, as tons of people will have forgotten to check out and will have lost 3 euros in the process. Good for the government’s short-term cashflow, but definitely creating more overhead in terms of support-costs.

Build those damn gates!

Vincent

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Join me on Blellow!

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:42:04 +0000

After reading this Techcrunch intro, I just joined Blellow today. While I’m not much of a bandwagon guy, as far as social networks are concerned, there are a couple of reasons, which I vocalised on this blog, why I dig the idea of this social network.

A short history of my adoption of social networks

When I started coming on Twitter, I was excited about creating a Hive Mind. What attracts me about the internet, blogging on Tech IT Easy, and social networking, is that it can be similar to forming neural connections between smart nodes, much like in your head. Twitter didn’t deliver much on that promise so far, however, because, even though there are a heck of a lot of smart people on the service, it’s very difficult to manage that data, let alone make it useful.

Friendfeed is another service I use and have written about. Two things that attract me about it: Friendlists, which allow me to segment my interests and social circles. For instance, I have a Tech IT Easy friendlist where I just see all the Tech IT Easy bloggers and their twitter-updates—many of you probably didn’t know that—allowing me to keep up to date, at a glance, on what these smart guys are up to in their lives.

What I also like about FriendFeed is their rooms, which allow me to focus on specific content like apps, and ask questions to an audience interested in that same content. The downside: there is no real working index for rooms, you just have to do a dedicated site-search on Google , I guess.

Let’s get to Blellow!

The service isn’t on the same maturity level as Twitter of Friendfeed yet, which is also partially why I’m asking you to join me. For instance, I cannot yet search for friends whose email-address I have (and I also hope they add searching for Twitter-contacts, like FriendFeed has). Following is a short commercial, which you will have also have seen on Techcrunch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTV6fCo92xI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

What Bellow does is the following:

Instead of joining a stream of content, which grows exponentially with more users, you can just focus on groups that specialise on content like SXSW 2009, Apple, B2B marketing, Photoshop, etc., etc., you get the idea.
You can create private streams between a select group of people, sort of a private IRC channel, if you will.
When you create your profile, you have to add a lot of info about yourself, hypothetically allowing people to search for keywords and finding a kindred soul. The video shows a freelance flash developer searching for other developers on Bellow and getting the advice she needs.
Other things it also allows, but which are underdeveloped, is search for jobs and projects. Sort of like e-lance, with the added benefit that you get to see what people say before you hire them.
Meetups are another feature, but are, as usual, focussed on the US only, leaving us “old-country” Europeans in the dark.

That’s it! A short review of the first 30 min., I spent there. But hopefully I get to see some familiar faces soon!

Vincent

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Thoughts on pricing (yourself, products, and services)

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 10:27:43 +0000

Just finished a project, which gives me a few days to reflect, work on my personal business-plan, aka career philosophy, and write blog posts about pricing and stuff. A few months ago, I purchased the second edition of the book “The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing.” It’s a really good read, though also a complex one—I’m on page 80 of 450, and I started reading in December! That said, having been exposed to setting my own prices for the services I provide, also taught me a thing or two already.

Understanding pricing really means two things: understanding the numbers and understanding the psychology behind why people are willing to charge or pay x amount for something. The difficulty is mainly that information is incomplete. I can’t judge 100% what contextual factor made a customer decide to go the other way, or why the competition charges 3 x less than my product. At the same time, this fuzziness also means that pricing is not just a matter for the “finance guys,” it’s a matter of doing your homework, experimenting, and some instinct.

Pricing itself is a subject that is actually relevant to everyone [I'm excluding millionaires here, though they may consider the price of their yachts and Rolls Royce's sometime]. It’s something that matters when pricing yourself (what is a fair wage or fee for people to pay you?); when pricing products and services; and when considering paying for products and services (why does a certain price seem to high or like a good buy?).

Pricing yourself

According to my nice bible on consulting, there are three main ways that I can set my own prices. I can work on an hourly / weekly / monthly / etc. fee, I can charge a single fee for the whole project, and I can be paid for reserved time [aka, I set aside x amount of days per month for client y]. Consultants typically charge a lot and that is not for arrogance reasons. Rather, one factor is the amount of risk that you incur. By committing to one client, who may only need you for an undetermined amount of time, you risk forgoing other income. Hence you charge more per project. Something like reserved time over a longer period of time would be less risky, hence you can charge less for that.

Of course, it’s also a matter of what value you bring to the table, which is really a two-edged sword: is the value that you bring, the skill-sets that you have acquired (and which cost you money to acquire)? Or is it the value that your client attributes to it? It is always the latter, though if that value is lower than what it costs to produce it, you’re making a loss and should rethink your business.

Similarly, it should optimally be so that when you apply for a job, you have an estimate of the financial value that you bring to the company. This isn’t always made clear, often you have a salary-indication showing what you are worth to them, but your value-contribution may very likely be higher (or lower) than what is expected. Negotiating in such a situation requires sufficient knowledge about that value—yours and theirs.

Pricing products and services

The mechanics of pricing here is much the same, though perhaps simpler to understand. At least, from a cost-perspective, which should be just a matter of adding up the ingredients and the (wo)man-hours. But cost in itself does not tell you enough. For one, there are economies of scope and scale. Second, there are avoidable costs. And third, we live in a era where the cost of (re)production can often be minimal [I should note at this point, that the edition of the book that I bought is from 199X; a 4th edition came out in 2005, which, I imagine, approaches the digital economy more].

And of course there is also the matter of the competition (cost-based pricing only works well in monopolistic situations—”it costs what it costs, what are you going to do about it, punk?”) and, again, the value that the customer places on your product. But this kind of interplay can be really complex and is exactly why I decided to read this book.

A note on the avoidable costs part. Recently, I was looking for a laptop-bag and came across what I thought was a great deal. Everywhere I looked the bag cost €40. But one place had it for €25. Without thinking I added it into my basket [this is e-commerce] and wanted to order it. Until I saw that sending it would cost €20 [other's charged €5], bringing it to the same sum. This was actually a coincidence, as they charged €20 for sending other products as well. Why does one company charge much more than others for sending materials, but less for the materials itself? My acquired wisdom taught me that this is because it encourages people to buy lots of products at once. Because people buy a lot, the store has to store less inventory over time, which represents a saving that it can translate into the cost of its products.

The inventory cost is an avoidable cost that you, as a store, can tweak up, down, or away. Just like you can outsource certain parts of your operation, etc. etc., you can make decisions on an organisational level which will have an effect on your costs. And because your costs don’t matter to your customer, the value that he attributes to your product does, you have to change your costs and margins to match that picture. Did that make sense? I had to re-read that part of the book a few times to get it myself, sort of.

The price that you and I are willing to pay

While marketeers would like you to think that this is all a psychology game, it is in fact still a psychology + numbers game at this stage. When my income is low, making a purchase that consumes a large percentage of it, will make me very price-sensitive and vice versa. If I use an app that saves me x amount of time [allowing me to earn more money], then that app has a certain value to me relative to that.

But there are psychological aspects as well. My Mac, for example: I know it saves me time to do what I do (=financial value). But I also feel good about being on a Mac (=psychological value). Or the digital SLR I am planning to buy. I briefly browsed the second-hand market, but abandoned the idea because I value the security of buying a new product. My expertise in cameras is too low to place my faith in a second-hand camera, even if it is half price. Had the new Mac not come out recently, I would’ve probably bought a second-hand one, because I know about 10 different tests to make sure that it’s ok. The product’s reputation is a factor, but so is the customer’s expertise.

Setting a price is a matter of what value it has for a customer—real and imagined—and good marketeers can position their products wisely to convince customers of that.

Final thoughts

Don’t worry! Tech it Easy won’t become a pricing-orientated blog anytime soon. As interesting as it can be, it doesn’t quite hit that mainstream nerve, I don’t think. For me, it is just another puzzle to solve on the big canvas that is life. And perhaps, I made you curious about it also? If so, give me a buzz in the comments or send me a mail. As I’m here to learn, I’d love to discuss any questions you may have about this!

Vincent

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A review of "Consulting For Dummies" 2nd Edition, part 1/2

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:56:41 +0000

Briefly, my approach to book-reviews: I generally prefer reviewing part of a book instead of the whole thing, because, when you try to summarise a whole book in 500 words or less + give an opinion on it, I think it takes a lot away from its value (reviewing midway also helps with processing the reading better). The downside is that a. I might give away too much of a book, discouraging you from buying it (I try not to), or that I draw the wrong conclusions (something that happened for “Positioning,” for instance).

Today, I aim to review “Consulting For Dummies,” the 2nd edition. Now, I don’t often pick up anything from the For Dummies series, but in this case, I heard the book was quite good and a number of improvements were made for the 2nd edition (one of the authors even commented about that on their Amazon page). The book is split into two parts, at least the way I segment it. The first part is focussed on coming up with the idea behind the consultancy and designing your services, the second deals with selling your services and growing the business.

I decided to read this book because for the last few months, I’ve essentially been consulting and wanted to learn more about this type of work. I consider myself strong in terms of product and process (in other words, in inventing things and structuring processes), and less so in sales, so the first part of the book (until chapter 11) definitely made a lot of sense to me. I’ll review the second part as soon as I get to it, which may be a few months/books down the line.

Book-summary (the first half only)

The book is well-written, uses a number of examples, and makes you work to get to the next chapter. As common in the For Dummies series, many tips are given in point-format, and examples, in this case interviews with practitioners, are given in grey boxes. The work consisted of a number of questions that you had to answer, starting with a “consultancy-test,” which asked questions like:

do you enjoy solving problems?
do you have faith in your capabilities of completing a job?
do you enjoy working with people?

All three, problem solving, know-how, and the social side of things, are important components to the consulting process. I don’t remember my exact score, but I scored in the top-quartile for this test, which makes me “a born consultant.”

The second chapter expanded on that, asking you about what you enjoy doing, what you’re good and not good at, and how to connect the two (they don’t always go hand in hand). It also asks you:

whether there’s really a need for your services,
who your customers are,
whether you’re the right (wo)man for the job,
and whether the time is right.

All hard, but good questions, which make you think about whether you’re in it for the right reasons.

The next few chapters are about setting up an office, setting up your company, a code of conduct (important!), and how to set your rates (a chapter I found very relevant to my own needs). These chapters (3 to 6) are probably the most dry of the book, depending on what you find dry, of course. They serve as an intro, but practice and talking to practitioners will be needed to come up with fixed solutions to these problems.

The next few chapters, 7 to 11, are about actual consulting, which starts with

the initial contact,
identifying the problem,
writing a proposal,
collecting data about your customer,
identifying solutions,
presenting them,
and implementing them.

Depending on where you’re at, you may not find all chapters equally useful. I liked the proposal chapter, as it offered a number of templates, but already knew much about the analytical and presentation advice offered. Nevertheless, it served as a good refresher as well to help me focus on what was essential. Chapter 11 on implementation is the most crucial (for some consultants…), as it’s about turning theoretical solutions into practical ones.

Conclusion

I really liked this book, but, as with all books like this, it’s only as valuable as the work you put in yourself. The business plan I’m writing for my consultancy certainly takes plenty of practical tips from the book, but the content is derived from my own experiences and knowledge. The exercises in the book (sadly, confined to the first few chapters mainly), do help you narrow down on what you want to do.

What it has offered me most is perhaps a new-found understanding of the practice of consulting, which I’ve never particularly respected in the past, seeing it more as ‘selling air,’ than anything else. It is not the kind of practice that I want to have and I’m glad that the book offers enough ‘scientific’ advice to be able to avoid that pitfall.

If you’re interested of getting into the consulting business or are currently “winging it” as one, I recommend this book. It is generic enough to work for any type of consulting, from strategic to whatever.

Vincent

Endnote: I bought the Dutch version of this book, as I’ve learned the hard way that many For Dummies business books work better when focussing on the country you’re operating in. This doesn’t apply to anything like software development or learning to play an instrument, though maybe cooking. The Dutch component of this book was fairly limited; some sections were dedicated to setting up a business in the Netherlands, but you could essentially get the same info from the local chamber of commerce.

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My fav. book for "managing the numbers"

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:22:26 +0000

One of the things I’m always looking for are tools that teach me stuff in a language that I understand. I have several books on finance, some of which are great in describing the general picture, but lacking in the details; others of which are (probably) great in describing the details, but suck at the general picture.

“Managing the numbers,” by Richard Stutely, is a book that does both well. It basically takes you through the process of:

dealing with financial problems;
of putting it in the greater context of the organisation;
of splitting it smartly across sections;
and, most importantly, keeping that continuity by using one company as an example, which, if you put it all together, form one great excel-sheet.

In other words, if you’re “fearful of finance,” like me, but absolutely need to know it, like me, it’s the perfect book.

Things I like most are actually the pictures, which give you an overview of how everything fits together. No, perhaps not this one:

…but this one, which essentially shows you who allocates the budget, who spends the money, who makes the money, and who manages profit (and loss)…

…and this one, which is all about calculating return on an investment.

(appologies for the funky layout and colouring, they were taken from a phone).

It is a book written for people that don’t want to spend too much time on things like this (90% of the planet), but know that they need to keep track of it for the good of their organisation. If this fits your situation, then I warmly recommend it.

I have to warn you though: if you’re just a tourist/beginner in this area, then this book is definitely not for you.

Vincent

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