netactr

I was always good at chemistry.

So, when my laptop ran out of juice again and I lost my work on new Cuesense wireframes, I tinkered with the battery a bit and, voila, got some very, very promising results.

I am talking to some patent attorneys now …

Biznik is a Seattle-based startup that aims to provide “business networking that does not suck”. I admit I was a bit sceptical about another social networking site aiming to compete with LinkedIn, Spoke and the rest, but yesterday I became a convert, after attending a glitzy Oscar’s-themed event at the Fremont Studios organized by Dan McComb, Lara Feltin and Scott Jonas. I watched the Oscar’s ceremony at an awesome private theater with hundreds of appropriately dressed guests and felt that this new startup was really doing a great job demoing how networking could be fun.

There’s a bit of a heated discussion going right now on Techcrunch due to Thwirl missing from the top 20 popular Twitter clients’ list. Technically, the list is correct. Techcrunch put down the selection criteria loud and clear - “popularity, as measured by unique monthly visits”. Unfortunately it’s a bad metric for client applications for Twitter and many other services that use a mixed web/mobile/desktop access strategy. Current measurement vendors (compete, comscore, hitwise) measure HTTP traffic from browsers. If a web service supports additional access protocols (e.g. JSON calls to its API), that traffic does not get credited. I think there’s an opportunity for one of the three major vendors - or a startup - to come in and innovate. comScore has the measurement client installed on a few million machines, so they should be able to “sniff” other protocols, not just HTTP, and Hitwise buys ISP logs - adding other ports and protocols should not be too difficult.

I’ve added the Disqus comments and UserVoice feedback widgets after some research into what’s being curently offered. GetSatisfaction and UserVoice were in the running for the feedback features. I eventually chose UserVoice because of their “AVIS” situation (”we are second, so we work harder”). UserVoice pricing seemed quite appropriate for startups and the like. Disqus had the features I wanted for commenting - integration with other services I find important (FriendFeed), SEO capabilities (i still need to figure out how they make their html seo-friendly; it can’t be javascript, otherwise Google wouldn’t index the comments).

The US stimulus plan includes $19 billion to modernize the healthcare information technology. I spent four years in the healthcare IT area, first designing patient management systems for hospitals in Germany and then working on public health applications in Canada. During this time I learned a few simple truths

• Data interchange costs in healthcare are not really that high relative to expenditures on medical procedures, and
• Most medical professionals prefer spending their time on patients; they want less technology, not more.

In my mind, what we need is more preventive care, e.g. regular checkups for the uninsured. Emergency treatment of acute problems is where the inefficiencies are. Now, if this government program would be used to drive people to have healthier lifestyles (do regular checkups, exercise), I could see how this project would pay for itself. I recently came accross the WalkMe HeatlhVault app which nudges you to walk more. They fully deserve to be the beneficiaries of the planned government spend.

Anil Batra and Loren Bast shared their insights at the STS meetup yesterday.

• Profiles are great for separating traffic from development/testing and production sites. Setup one profile to hold ALL data, in case you make a mistake, and then create a “Production” profile that has a filter on your dev and test machines (IPs, subdomains or folders).
• Someone suggested the Dojo GA wrapper toolkit
• Page Views are not the only things you can track with GA. If you want to track PDF file downloads, video replays, clicks on buttons etc, setup Event Tracking (still in beta, but you can ask to be added to the beta program at this link http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/wiki/EventTrackingRequest ). Then, call _trackEvent() in your javascript code.
• Clicktale.com provides usability research on the cheap. It sounds like they interpret mouse movements and clicks and create a “video” of a user session on your site.

As I am planning our next steps at CueSense, I am heavily relying on Bryan Starbuck’s (CEO of TalentSpring) ideas from his December STS talk and this deck. Bryan’s 10x philosophy has already caused me to sharpen our mission. Although CueSense addresses many user needs, one must find needs urgent enough to make users jump through hoops and give your service a try. The social content flood is real, immediate and rising and CueSense will be the best site to find the gold nuggets in this river of shared tweets, bookmarks and blogs.

Another practical recommendation from his talk is the heavy attention to customer acquisition costs. Viral adoption is still important, but the right mindset is to start with paid-for customers (CAC of $15-20) and figure out if your service’s virality (K-factor) will drive the average CAC down to $5-10. Then, if your users remain with the service for 18-24 months before they move to greener pastures, and your COGS (cost of goods sold aka servers) is reasonable, you can break even on a per-user annual revenue of $5.  Which is doable.

As the tax season approaches, I am starting to look for tax and accounting software for myself and CueSense. I used QuickBooks/TurboTax for my first startup Enmatic, but found Intuit’s pricing very monopolistic, especially for TurboTax. So this season I hoped I would find a better deal for small business software and did a bit of research. Result? Nothing really changed in 5 years since I bought my last copy of QuickBooks. If you want your accounting and tax software to work together, you are left with few choices (just one actually).

SAGE has Peachtree ($260), and there is MYOB ($300) and Microsoft’s Small Business Accounting ($199), but what do I do when I need to transfer my books onto the 1120 form? 

TaxCut from H&R Block has a Personal + Business deal for $80, but it only imports from Quicken and MS Money. TaxAct is even cheaper (Home + Business for $45), but it does not import from any  small business accounting software. Only QuickBooks ($180) and TurboTax ($110 federal business return + $50 for Premier personal … ARGH!) seem to be a viable option. 

Can someone please learn the QuickBooks API and build a bridge to H&R Block’s TaxCut. I’d pay $10 for a working copy.

Yuri Kostenko, the owner of Front Pictures studio, enjoys what he does. And what he does is amazing. I’ve seen and played with Microsoft’s Surface a few times, but Front Picture’s i.m.table (interactive multimedia table) goes beyond it and then some. I met the team at the Kvitnu Fest where they presented the i.m.table to a captivated audience, and then at their offices in Kyiv. My first impression? I felt I were in Menlo Park / Pioneer Square / Insert your favorite valley wannabe - large open-space area, lots of macs/audio/video equipment, devs and artists working late. Besides the i.m.table Front Pictures also offers motion-e-motion (an interactive wall), Touch-Bar and Screenberry.

You don’t. You try, you make your product the best it can be and you let users judge it. All the talk about meeting customer needs is too simplistic - there are dormant, hidden needs which people are just not aware of and that only surface when there is a product / service that awakens them. Someone had to build the first PC to start a revolution. Record the first dnb set. Paint the first Cubist painting. PC Word Canada wrote about Web 2.0’s Most Ridiculous Sites today. I disagree.