A Path to Success

Hong Zhao runs Beaches Living Guide

Hong Zhao came out to NewPath in 2003 and wanted to get some help starting her publication and web site. Look where she is now. Hong distributes the Beaches Living Guide, a bi-annual publication, to the businesses and residences of the Beach in Toronto, Ontario.

This stretch of Queen Street East is a popular summer destination. Hong does an amazing job to let people know about the variety of small businesses that are in the area. She also publishes details about the history of the Beach. Many Toronto residents I have talked to have never been east of the DVP and Hong's publication invites them with open arms. Hong tells me that the webside traffic on a long weekend triples! And the publication recently was awarded a 2007 APEX Award of Excellence in the category of Magazines and Journals (see page 13 of the PDF for Hong's name).

The publication is distributed to 50,000 households with beautiful illustrations. Emmanuel Lopez, a previous speaker at NewPath, illustrates the front cover. This is one reason why I started NewPath -- to help people like Hong. She is looking for a savvy business person to take her business to the next level. Please contact Hong if you or someone you know is interested in the community publishing business.

Excellent Webinars from WebEx

Have you seen how WebEx has been marketing their product online recently? Free education for the masses in just about any topic. Some of the content is downright surprising for a tech company? Wine Tasting 102?

But this is a terrific example of awesome marketing -- they are effectively allowing another company/association to plug their brand inside WebEx, thus showing off the online presentation tool. Really great!

A fun way to spook people out...

Sign from  danasoft.com

Strategy #19 From the Trenches - Don't overlook small markets that can grow

Even if your market is large companies don’t discount the small ones as they could grow into large ones.

For proof of how the world is changing, every day and every year check out Hans Gosling's talk on emerging countries...

Strategy #18 From the Trenches - Strategy vs Tactics

What is a strategy and what is a tactic? My son, Aaron, explained it to me so easily on a subway ride recently.

In Monopoly he clued in that buying railroads is a good way to make money. As the owner of all 4 railroads, you get at least $800 on one trip around the board where someone lands on each railroad at least once. Aaron likes that.

 

So,

A tactic is buying a railroad for $200.

A strategy is knowing that 4 railroads have a high chance of people landing on them and the return on 4 is as good as many properties with hotels. That is, the return on investment for $800 worth of railroads is as good if not better than any other property on the board.

That's the difference between strategy and a tactic.

By the way some strategies on winning Monopoly. Just one includes railroads though. B&O Railroad, Illinios and the GO space are the 3 most commonly landed on spaces, who knew? I dunno about not having all 4 railroads as a great idea -- the cash flow from railroads seems constant with very little investment. I guess you depend on winning with JUST having railroads.

Agile Workshop with Ken Schwaber in Ottawa on October 22 2007

This just crossed my desk -- Ken Schwaber will be talking in Ottawa on October 22 on Agile Methodologies.

Download the Agile Workshop (PDF) agenda and registration details

Formal website announcement will be is now available shortly from OCRI.

Strange problem with Sympatico Security Manager and Gmail

Do you use the Sympatico Security Manager with Gmail? Have your send, delete, archive buttons in Gmail just stopped working? You click them but nothing happens? Weird huh?

Your problem has to do with one of the buried features of the Sympatico Security Manager "ad blocking" software. Make sure you turn off ad blocker part of the Popup Blocker, and clear your cache and cookies too just to make sure.

Skype - an example of good customer service

Is it expected that you get something free when you experience a service disruption? Looks like some companies are setting the gold standard here - Skype is an example. According to some this had to do with Microsoft Update patches, no less.

Here's an email I received from them - a short 4 days after the outage. Note how it is written -- like a friend would write you after you had a bad argument and they want to apologize. Well done, don't you think? Have you had an experience when you could have done something like this, but didn't? Or have you had an experience where you did offer something like this to your client?

Hello asirota,

You may or may not know but last week Skype wasn't available for a
couple of days.  There were a number of reasons for this and I am
delighted to say that the problem is now well and truly sorted and
everything is back to normal.  For those of you who tried to use Skype
during that time but couldn't, we're very sorry. For those of you who
didn't try to use Skype - well thankfully you were not affected but we
want to reassure everyone that Skype is now working happily and the
problem is fixed.

We know we have many faithful users out there who give us feedback
(good and bad) on what we're doing as a company.  The Skype community
makes us what we are.  Without you, our users, we simply wouldn't
exist.  We've helped people stay in touch with their friends and
family over the past four years without any massive hitch and we want
it to stay that way.

When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who
stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us.  I want to thank
everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype
community.  And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last
week - I want to especially thank you as well.

As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited,
SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven
days to your current subscription, free of charge. <emphasis mine> And even if you
didn't miss out on using Skype last week - you can still have a week
free on Skype, on the house!

So please enjoy it, call your loved ones, friends, family and
colleagues and thanks again.


Talk soon,
The people at Skype

Strategy #17 From the Trenches - Respect, Confidence, Pride, Strategy and Design

Create respect, confidence and pride with strategy and design in your business. This approach will give you measured results.

Respect  - respect your customers and clients, return calls and get back to them on progress

Confidence - build confidence in your abilities to estimate and deliver

Pride - be proud of what you have accomplished and write about it, tell others, toot your own horn

Strategy - build a long term plan that includes a credo for your business. NewPath's credo is simple:

MEET | GREET | SHARE

That is our strategy and we build around it and it will never change. Organizations that are built to last have that as a common ideal - a never changing credo.

Design - this last one is the hardest to get for many because it takes thought, iteration and of course an investment of time and money.

Think about the last time you had a good interaction with a product or company. How did it make you feel? I bet it made it you remember the experience and you were willing to go back again for more. At a recent shopping trip in the US I went to the Apple Store for the first time in a while to check out the iPhone. You should have seen how many teens and tweens were in the store. The iPhones were activated, so you could make a call from the store to anywhere you wanted. When's the last time you could do that in an average cell phone store? That's design - true try before you buy.

I'm not suggesting that your company compare themselves against the Apple experience, but think about what you can do to improve the design of your product and/or service delivery.

So, (R+C+P) X S X D = Results

Captain Kirk, "Your privacy is an illusion."

Your privacy online, in the age of Web 2.0 is really an illusion. With the age of open APIs, data flowing back and forth between applications, it seems that the notion of Privacy, with a capital P, has gone by the wayside.

Spock is a search engine for people and facts. It is an automatic Wikipedia, it seems. The insight the folks at Spock had was "Let's collect the existing online profiles on people and tag them implicitly based on the content of the profiles. Then let's link up all the findings by their name". What you get as a result is a wickedly accurate search engine on people AND attributes about them. Spock collects where you have profiles, extracts data and lets you claim your profile so that you can help them maintain it. The search algorithm is secret, as is the ordering of the results. As if.

Who may be Christian? Who may be Jewish?  Republican? Democrat? Libertarian? Sexy <careful with this one>? Ugly? Who may be a pedophile? Who may be a midget? Get the picture?

Here is Spock's dynamic collection of people tagged with University of Michigan. You can see that most are public personalities, but some are clearly not. You don't have to sign up to use the service. You don't need to supply any information at all. You don't need to pass a security test of any kind. This data has been laboriously collected from many, many websites by Spock and delivered in an easy to use Google-like interface. Just think how this for example compares to the police database. Better or worse? What about people labeled with tags, maliciously or rightfully. Who do you apply to to clear up libelous statements?

No need to sort through many pages when researching a potential date. If they have shared anything about them online, Spock will tell you as much as it knows WITHOUT their consent. There is something inherently scary about this, isn't there? My usual thought process when posting personal info online goes something like this:

1. I posted my details on the site for others in the website. Others have to register to see similar details.

2. I would imagine Google would find personal home pages for me, but one would have to sort through a reasonable amount of detail. It's privacy by obfuscation. Google usually doesn't show password protected sites unless they are publically posted, like LinkedIn's public profile page. I rely on the disconnected-ness of many websites to hide my complete online profile.

3. I agree to all sorts of Terms of Use policies, but read very little of their obtuse jargon. Somewhere, somehow there must be details about sharing not only my name/email address but the whole profile I have filled in online.

It appears with Spock, as long as organizations are open to sharing the data through their APIs, one can build a very, very thorough dossier on just about anyone. To delete a Spock account, you have to pretty much clean up all your profiles and then beg Spock to remove it. Whoa. Can't they just remove me? And I thought the telephone book was bad.

It's time that there was more disclosure about exactly how websites like Facebook share details with other websites, programmatically. I see this as the next privacy debate of the 21st century. The implications are mind-blowing.

Thank you Spock, for not yet tapping into Facebook. When you do, I will be the first to cancel my Facebook account.

The old joke went "On the Internet, noone knows you're a dog." Now they very well may.

A challenge: Please try to prove Spock wrong by claiming my profile and then letting me know about it. Talk about taking over someone's identity.