Rand Wacker

Das Keyboard - The Blank Keyboard for Demanding Users.

I was using one of these over at a friend’s house last night and the clickity-click was as comforting as an old IBM PS/2 tank keyboard. I also liked the black color and NO LABELS on the keys.

Unfortunately thought they are still holding onto the old num-pad layout, which I’ve ditched in favor of getting the mouse closer to the right side using one of these.

If I was still using X as my primary environment and was using the num-pad to replace the mouse for getting around it would be great, but I guess I’ll have to wait until they come out with Das Kompact Keyboard.

I don’t spend a ton of time listening to podcasts, so for me they have to be short, entertaining, and of high-value. I recently decided on about five individual subscriptions, which are diverse enough to keep me interested (you can find these all on iTunes):

• BusinessWeek - Cover Stories
• Ebert & Roeper
• Endgadget
• NBC News - Meet the Press
• NPR: Story of the Day

And a recent subscription: 43 Folders Podcast.

I started my career as an Engineer, as from an earliest age I was always driven by building things. Through a few convoluted steps, I eventually dabbled my toes in “the dark side” * of Marketing (Product Management to be exact). Having been on the Eng side of the table has helped me immensely as a PM (and sometimes been a problem, but old habits are hard to break). I know very well the innate distrust of Marketeers by anyone who does technical work for a living, and I try every day to keep that in mind.

I think one of the most important clarifications to make when describing what marketing does is to clear up the misconception that “marketing is just about telling people what to buy.” That may have been the old approach for companies like Coke, but in my line (Enterprise Software), you can’t just build something cool and then tell people to buy it, you actually have to build something they want.

“Marketing” is most importantly understanding the customer. Market research, customer interaction, etc. If I ever have to explain very quickly to someone what it is I do I sum it up as, “Work with the customer to understand what they want (to do), work with development to get it built, work with Marcom to communicate that value.” I think the fact that “Marketing” is mostly associated with the last item is our biggest problem, maybe we need a new name for all of this which isn’t so loaded with preconceived notions (or maybe its just that most people only see part C, so that’s all they associate with Marketing).

Anyways, it is definitely true though that there are a lot of bad marketers out there who encourage the stereotypes and re-enforce the distrust. I’ve been following a number of good blogs these days that talk about the importance of sincerity and clarity in outbound communication: Seth Godin, Joel Splosky, and perhaps a new guy John Dodds.

It was the latter that had a post which inspired me to write something: Geek Marketing 101. His top points that really resonated with me include:

1) Marketing is not a department. (Exactly what I said above)

2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don’t speak geek. (One of the reasons I think I’m good at this)

7) Technical Support is marketing. (I would expand this to say that every single person who touches the customer is marketing, and you want feedback from them all)

* - After spending enough time in Marketing I started to realize that the real dark side is Sales…somewhere that I hope to dabble a bit in the future just so I can better communicate with the other side of the table in my day-to-day dealings.

Update Dec 3, 2007: I have recently switched over to OmniFocus for managing all of my projects and actions. It actually took me a couple of tries to get into the groove, and at first there were things that infuriated me. Now, I use OF for the majority of my day-to-day actions, but I still maintain a freakish amount of checklists and other notes in my old OmniOutliner file. I still definitely hold to my recommendation below that you begin GTD in a tool-agnostic way and use something simple to start for you: text files, OmniOutliner, OneNote, whatever…but maintain the flexibility to customize your system so that when you decide to switch whole-hog into a “professional” tool you’ll have a good idea of what features you really need, and don’t end up tweaking your system to match the tool.

GTD has been a tremendous boon to me in managing the insane number of responsibilities I’ve been juggling between work, school, and home over the past six months. Only now during the relative calm of summer break have I sat back to look at the major change its had for even those non-panic’d times of my life. I’ve recommended the book to a number of people, and while some have dabbled, its sometimes hard for them to take some of the first steps. One of the most helpful things to really get me started was some pointers by my friend Mark as well as him letting me poke around in his personal organization system so that I could get an idea of what a “real-world” solution that works for someone looks like. When Mark later came to me and asked about the system I developed and said that was helpful to him, I realized it was time to get around to acting on one of my deferred actions and put together this article.

Read more »

I can’t believe how painful it is to use this crap.

Our IT department at work recently decided to switch from Webex to Raindance for our online conferencing needs. Raindance looks pretty sweet, so I’m happy to make the switch. The only problem though is that they don’t have a presentation tool for the Mac. I’m not sure if IT planned this out, but the timing was such that they were able to quickly come up with the workaround, “We’ll give all the presentation users Macbook Pros.” OK, cool, new hardware for me (except for the fact that its a first gen Apple laptop, and those always have problems…this one has been no exception).

So now I’ve proven that Windows and Raindance will work successfully under Parallels on the Mac, I’m trying to get Windows “activated” so the whole thing doesn’t shut down in 4 days. This is perhaps the most ludicrously complicated process there is, and MSoft’s support personnel are not only clueless, but their phone systems seem broken. I’ve been sent on circular goose chases between three different departments, hung-up on while transferring several different times, and still not a single person has gotten me any closer to resolving this issue.

The amount of time I’ve wasted on this is criminal (for my company). All of the business media I read these days whines that “American’s must get more productive in order to compete in the global market!” Here’s a first idea, ditch Windows.

Raindance is a good product. They obviously care (somewhat) for user experience. I’m surprised they don’t have a Mac version.

About Us, Learn More about Farecast - Farecast

Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. We help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait?

Doodle: Scheduling meetings

Doodle helps scheduling meetings – it’s simple, quick, and free.

I came across* this company the other day and was pretty impressed with their vision. Guy Kawasaki (an advisor of theirs) sums up the idea as follows:

Coghead provides a web-based application that allows tech-savvy businesspeople (that is, non-programmers) to create and deliver their own web-based applications…Coghead’s website is both an application authoring tool and an application delivery service. At Coghead’s website people can create an application using simple-to-learn methods (or pick a pre-built app from Coghead’s application gallery) and then invite co-workers to use the application.

This is a fantastic idea, and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Imagine if you could take the power that Wiki has had on corporate data sharing and then put structure behind the data and add logic for processing. Very powerful.

As I’ve moved away from programming into more business-oriented functions in my company, I’ve identified many latent needs for quick-and-easy web applications to fill a variety of purposes inside a corp. Now since I’m an ex-coder I can (and sometimes have) put together a few simple systems to meet these needs, but its always kind of a hack and there’s always the ongoing issue of support through IT. What’s worse, 90+% of the other people I work with aren’t programmers at all, so we resort to using the wrong tools (Excel), crappy tools (Intuit QuickBase), or no tools at all (ack!).

The real power of Web 2.0 (or Office 2.0, or whatever 2.0) is putting creative power into the hands of everyone. We saw the first explosion of this with blogging, which lowered the barrier of entry so everyone could start posting. I think Coghead could be a material step forward in making the web (and not just computers) an incredibly productive tool for everyone.

* - OK, so I first read about them in Business 2.0, so its not like I’m the first on the block to see this, but the fact they got glossy print even before launching the Beta is a good sign that the people in charge of the company has clue about running a business outside of building technology (which, by the way, they haven’t proven yet).

Google Maps Mobile

You have to try this. The interface is very smooth and totally useful.

Perian - A swiss-army knife for QuickTime

Perian is a free plugin that enables QuickTime to play almost every popular video format.

Works great with Front Row.