jaacob.com

• Credit card processing: There’s the small resellers with spammy looking sites you aren’t sure you can trust and the giants that don’t have your best interests at heart—I see a wide open space for somebody to step in and do it right. While the article does a great job of showing you all the ways CC processors are ripping you off and hiding it, the best tip is how to find your real rate; just divide your total fees by your total monthly credit card sales. If it doesn’t match the low, low percentage you were quoted during the sales pitch, then you’ve got a problem.
• the Elevator Pitch for Personal Pediatrics: normally I love the Elevator Pitch, but this one feels off. I think it’s just the benefits the article pushes though—the doctor pays $50k and gets a portable office including a fridge for medicine plus access to a secure website for admin tasks and medical record storage, while the patient pays $1.5k/yr and gets 24-7 phone access to their doctor. Since Personal Pediatrics has little to no brand cachet ($0 revenue in ‘06, one unpaid temp employee), I’d be wondering what I’m getting for my $50k as a doctor, and as a patient, I’d be hard-pressed to believe I’ll get 24-7 phone access to a doctor since past experience has always been so poor in that regard. Since the clientele is basically buying the right to have a doctor (with the annual fee) and clearly desires the high-end experience of in-home treatment, I’d assume the doc’s hourly fees aren’t cheap and with that comes a higher-end customer base that will make it worth becoming a 24-7 phone slave to new parents. Then it’s just a question of signing up already-known pediatricians with strong reputations and riding them to the tipping point of brand recognition. Because otherwise, you’re selling parents on a specific set of doctors that they have no referrals for—and who’s taking their kid to a doctor nobody can vouch for, especially at that price?
• Speed up your sales cycle: good anecdotes on rethinking how and to whom you sell.
• Cyber insurance: I wonder how many web2.0 companies handling sensitive data have it?
• The story of eSys: taking advantage of what each country has to offer around the world to reduce costs to a bare minimum; brilliant, but it sets off “cheater!” alarms in my head. probably out of envy though. it makes the author “uncomfortable”, for reasons like standards of living and governments needing to tax the companies that operate in their bounds. if everybody followed the eSys plan of formation, it could definitely be disruptive on a large scale.
• How I Did It: great first-person account of a guy doing business in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[ April 2007 index archive ]

Derek Powazek + Heather Champ ≠ JPG Magazine

• Derek’s post
• Heather’s post
• Metafilter conversation
• Flickr discussion
• 8020/Paul Cloutier blog post

Like so many on MeFi said, we don’t know the whole story, and I doubt we ever will.

As a paying subscriber to JPG though, I doubt I’ll be renewing my subscription. There’s plenty of other photography communities out there—no need to support one that isn’t true to itself.

My favorite from Michael Bierut’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

10. Because it’s boring.
Tibor Kalman was fascinated with boring typefaces. “No, this one is too clever, this one is too interesting,” he kept saying when showed him the fonts I was proposing for his monograph. Anything but a boring typeface, he felt, got in the way of the ideas. We settled on Trade Gothic.

(Read the rest of the list over at Design Observer.)

• A Google Maps mashup I probably don’t need to know about: Mappy Hour (find the nearest happy hour)
• I really want to try the Glossophobia Sim at Hofstra University—practice public speaking in front of “the rudest audience ever.”
• MobileIris sure sounds nice, but right now I’d settle for my cell just giving me clear calls all the time, ringing everytime someone calls, you know… the basic stuff. (Although the Bluetooth modem did work out nicely at Webvisions when the Convention Center’s internet went down. Average speed, 24k/sec on Cingular EDGE.)
• Sport Beans. Way to find a new niche, Jelly Belly.
• Jayisgames.com—I think I’m the last person to hear about this site.
• To read: Why Beauty is Truth
• The Urban Cactus—holy shit. Although I bet the BoKlok is cheaper.
• Computerized Sewing Machines: I’ve wanted an embroidery machine I could hook up to Illustrator for a few years now, but never had any luck finding the appropriate kit online. Didn’t expect to see a comparison review in Wired!
• Inspired by the story on transparent CEOs, even though I’ve heard the same rhetoric plenty of other places. The Redfin story was a nice example, since real estate is such a black hole of a process to most people. As a small business owner, I know this is one place I need to increase my efforts 100x.
• Shot Spotter—these articles are the reason I read Wired. Triangulate murder scenes based on big brother-esque realtime recordings of the gunshots? Wish I thought of it.
• Remapping / “growing” new senses by plugging them into our existing 5(.5)—fascinating. Seems like just the start though, I wonder what they’ve got that they aren’t showing us.

[index archive for issue]

I’m having trouble seeing the value in Highrise, but maybe I’m just using it “wrong”. I was excited for months prior to launch because I need major help with CRM and tracking business development, but right now my Highrise is basically a glorified email archive that I can segment and group. While the very well-done email parsing stuff is slick, I don’t need another to-do task list, and sending a task via email isn’t near as quick as just adding it to my phone (which syncs with iCal). (Will the email parsing feature move into Basecamp? Pretty please? Messages and To-Dos via email!)

For the $29 a month, I’d rather put that money into a more powerful tool.

Any suggestions or help? Inspiring links on how others are using Highrise to take over the world? Or should I just seriously consider Studiometry? (Or something else?)

no expectations
my predictions were correct
left uninspired

Ok, that’s a bit one-sided and unfair. (Although not off-base.)

• Casual Gaming: Blah. Nothing against Phillip Kerman, he was engaging enough, but the entire topic focused on what he does (to be expected), which was games for MSN Messenger (not what I’m interested in).

• The User is Always Right: Really well executed presentation. Lots of good tips, but mostly just covering the intro level.

• Pescovitz keynote: Totally in awe of the man (Institute for the Future, BoingBoing and Make magazine—applause) but found the keynote lacking in that special boost that makes me want to run out of the convention center and take on the world. Perhaps not the intent, but it felt like it was supposed to be.

• Secrets to Project Management: Entertaining speaker, good slides and the worksheets are much appreciated. I found it hilarious the questions kept coming back to estimating and new business development (since he was talking about proposals/deliverables) but he kept sloughing it off with the vibe that “another department” handles that. Felt like half (at least) the audience was a bit deflated at that point—for a lot of us, we are the business development team. We’re also the designers and the developers and the project managers. Good ideas to incorporate into BePrivy though.

• What Makes Great Indie Media? (roundtable): Interesting enough conversation I guess, but the only thing I took away from it was “the ums are what making you interesting”. Very intro feeling.

• Web App Page Hierarchy: Caught the last 75% of this. Pretty intro stuff but Luke Wroblewski was a great speaker and kept everybody interested. Didn’t really learn anything new, but it was still worth it just to see a different style of presentation.

• Videopodcasting 2.0: Lots of heart and definitely passionate about video and her site, but overall I was pretty disappointed with this one. Way more intro-level than the description said it would be.

• Ask A Ninja keynote: Enjoyed the business talk, spiced with their banter. Was afraid it was going to be the other way around, just a bunch of fluff. (although that would have been entertaining so…)

Overall—the future of the web felt more like intro to the web.

There’s more in-depth reviews of Webvisions07 over at the PDXWI site.