I noticed a small menu called “Search Shortcuts” in Yahoo Mail a couple of days ago. This is a great example of a simple feature addition that has a huge payoff.
People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. If you click on the link, you’re presented with a thumbnail view of the photos in your email which you can sort/slice etc. In addition, in the left nav you get a list of filters that allow you to narrow the list by person, by file type or by time. You can select multiple images and save them all to disk, or you can forward photos with one click.
I think this is absolutely awesome. They could have achieved the same thing with just the ?My Attachments” link, but instead, they thought about the primary use case and made it easily accessible. Features don’t always have to be complicated to deliver a lot of value.
I’m a big fan of Google Alerts and with the latest one I received it may have rocketed to the top of my list of cool features.
I normally delete these after reading them, but this one may be a keeper.
Andy has a post up on his blog about the decision to scale back operations at Judy’s Book.
Today was a tough day. For the second time in my life I had to tell a great team of people that the idea they’d worked so hard on was going away. After 3+ years, our management team and board of directors has decided to scale back our operations at Judy’s Book and seek a strategic acquiror.
As a CEO, I know this is the right thing to do for our investors. But as an entrepreneur it’s disappointing to stop chasing an idea just when it’s beginning to take root in the popular consciousness.
It’s been a crazy day but Andy’s done an amazing job helping the company deal with a difficult situation.
Dick Costolo has another great post up on his blog called Too Many Chiefs or Too Many Indians. The post is about hiring at early stage startups and whether to hire experience or youthful enthusiasm first. Dick favors experience initially and has some good arguments backing it up.
First of all, in the first year to eighteen months of the business, everybody is generally heads down and go, go, go. By bringing in experienced people who understand the industry, their roles, and what needs to get done, you as entrepreneur are less likely to have to play grown-up and deal with the management issues that can frequently pop-up among a largely junior staff. It’s critical in the first 12-18 months to run as fast as possible, and by bringing in experienced players that can hit the ground running, you give yourself an opportunity to get a lot accomplished quickly. Secondly, as the organization grows from 4 to 20, if your first few people are senior, you can be confident that the future leaders of your organization are do-ers, people who rolled up their sleeves in the early life of the business and know how things operate ‘under the hood’.
Ask the Wizard should be in your subscriptions list if it isn’t already.
There’s a great interview of Jeff Bezos in the October 2007 issue of HBR. I think Amazon is making some great moves lately with their web services initiatives, their foray into movies and music and after reading this article I came away even more impressed than I was before.
It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now…
…For our business, most of them turn out to be customer insights. Look at what’s important to the customers in our consumer-facing business. They want selection, low prices, and fast delivery. This can be different from business to business: There are companies serving other customers who wouldn’t put price, for example, in that set. But having found out what those things are for our customers, I can’t imagine that ten years from now they are going to say, “I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.” And they’re not going to, ten years from now, say, “I really love Amazon, but I wish their prices were a little higher.”
It’s a great piece and while it’s long, it’s well worth it.
I was in Leavenworth, WA last weekend with a group of friends. I was meant to run the Oktoberfest Marathon/Half-Marathon with Dave, Matt & Jeff but a knee injury kept me out of it. Nevertheless, I was able to participate fully in the Oktoberfest activities - beer and brat consumption. Two highlights of the experience:
The first was a light switch near our table at Gustav’s:
All the wall lights were mounted on reindeer antlers. Yup, I agree, that rocks. The town, a model Bavarian village, is a monument to knick-knacks. The antlers are not that surprising after you’ve spent 10 minutes there.
The second thing was the abundance of people in full Oktoberfest regalia. I was impressed. I’m guessing the costumes will be recycled for Halloween, but hey…I’d do the same thing.
All told, it was an amazing weekend. Good friends, great weather and a spectacular setting.
“What could possibly go wrong?”
I consistently get “Nudges” from Erin over IM and since I use Pidgin (freeware multi-platform IM client that is lighting fast to load/connect), I’m never able to nudge her back. In case you’re not aware, nudges are like sounding a gong in your IM window, complete with vibration-conveying visual effects. Great stuff.
After getting three of these nudges in a 31 second interval, I decided to download and install the actual messenger client so I could retaliate. I downloaded the installer, double-clicked on it and got this helpful screen.
Here I thought I was just downloading and IM client, but instead I could get all these cool things at once. Lucky me. I understand some of the business thinking that led to the decision to include these elements but to have them opted in by default is crappy. Needless to say, they were all unchecked and after nudging my colleague back a few times, I un-installed Messenger as quickly as possible. I have no doubt that their strategy drives installs, but I’m not sure that doing it at the expense of user goodwill is sensible in the long term.
I’ve been a huge fan of Dilbert as long as I can remember but for some reason had never read Scott Adams’ blog. Marc Andreessen’s second post on career planning & advice quoted Scott and made me a subscriber.
This post on economics and the mild super powers it confers will always have a special place in my heart. Not for its position on Economics (which I agree with) but mainly for its advice on when to speed. Not that I would ever do that mind you, it just seems like useful information.
When you have a working knowledge of economics, it’s like having a mild super power. For example, I use my knowledge of economics to avoid speeding tickets. I assume the local law enforcement agencies have limited funding and can’t be everywhere at the same time. That tells me, fairly reliably, when I can speed without detection and when I can’t.
Awesome. Simply awesome.
I’m in San Francisco for the weekend, staying at the Hotel Kabuki (formerly Hotel Miyako) in Japantown. It’s a newly renovated Joie de Vivre hotel (modern boutiques at decent prices.) I woke up this morning to the amazing view below.
The hotel’s located at the corner of Post & Laguna and the view is facing south. Just spectacular.
UPDATE: I seem to get a reasonable amount of traffic to this post so I thought I’d provide some more details on the my experience at the hotel.
Pros:
- Cool, spacious, modern interior
- Friendly staff
- Reasonable rates (<$200 night)
- Great location near Japantown mall - think great sushi, good late night dining options
- Location was also fairly central - easy to get anywhere in the city
- Fairly easy to catch a cab (important in SF)
- Great views
Cons:
- Hotel was still being renovated so there were some rough edges
- Street parking can be tricky
