Our favorite privacy violator has updated Hangouts to include SMS (text) integration. According to a fierce debate, Google opted not to include SMS backups to their cloud in fear of user privacy concerns.
Google is already all over my privacy so uploading my sms’ to their cloud doesn’t bother me. The stuff they got on me through my use of Gmail and Youtube and Chrome and Search and Android and Google Docs and Google Keep and Google Plus and Google Drive does bother me.
Google Keep is cool because it has search. However, they should let you share cards so that individual cards can become visible to several people. A Public checklist for example, or instructions to give someone. They should be editable by participants or locked but visible. I think it could work and it teaches Google what type of topics or interests similar groups of people share and consequently lets Google build a better relationship map in their database. Gotta make sure Google gets their share too.
Lady Gaga isn’t a marketing genius. She is a weirdo. Richard Branson isn’t a marketing genius. He’s a weirdo. All successful people are originals (weirdos) and the rest strive to copy them. Be weird. Be original. Maybe you’ll be successful at what you do. But WEIRDNESS is a must.
Software piracy is bad in most cases, especially when it involves frivolously indulging in all kinds of loot found on The Pirate Bay for the sake of simple entertainment. But what about the first-time entrepreneur who self-teaches a pirated copy of Photoshop to make a logo for her first website? Or the YouTube poster who tries his hands on professional video editing software to make his videos look better? These people might also be pirates but their impact on the organizations they pirate from is negligible at worst and beneficial at best.
The software put out by giants like Adobe is made for a professional crowd and priced thereafter. Their customers rely on their software to make a living; buying it is an investment rather than an expense. What Adobe isn’t relying on is selling a few extra copies of its software to curious teenagers or people looking for an alternative to Windows Paint. Software piracy is only a problem if it hurts sales. Everything else is just free marketing. If {insert big company} wasn’t expecting you to buy their product (because you aren’t their customer and can’t afford it in the first place) it doesn’t hurt them. If you are using Adobe Illustrator to make squiggly graphics on your spare time you aren’t hurting Adobe’s bottom line because you would have never been a paying customer.
Having people all over the world using your software without hurting your bottom line sounds like an ideal marketing campaign, and it is. Droves of people start learning your software, their peers will take up interest and you receive free brand awareness. All this knowledge and goodwill towards your company will be paid back when these people become professionals and purchase your software for their business needs. Don’t look at it as piracy, look at it as early adoption. Or even freemium.
People who grow up around renowned pirated software products tend to stick with them in the future as well. A skilled teenage Photoshop hobbyist might turn into a graphic designer after a few years who subsequently starts a company. Companies can’t afford to risk it with pirated software and will invest in the real deal. Plus, paying for software that actually lets you earn revenue doesn’t feel like a waste of money. It feels like (and is) an investment.
Legal piracy already exists. It’s called freemium. This model builds on everything explained above and lets the professionals pay for premium services, lets the noobs play around without risking fines or imprisonment and most importantly lets the fledgling entrepreneurs start out with minimal investment and grow with the software.
If anything, piracy is the result of incompatible world views and freemium has addressed that. Rather than making software one-size-fits-all it can now be handed out in bite-sized portions. Sample, eat one item or order the whole menu. Its fair, its modern and its here to stay.
The race is long and, in the end, it is only with yourself.
– Baz Luhrmann
Jira, the project management and bug tracking software from Atlassian SUCKS BIG TIME. It sucks so much that I had to log into my website and write this rant even though I have a thousand other more pressing things to do. Jira and it’s lack of brilliance is the most irritating piece of software I have had the misfortune of experiencing and almost not using at all since Windows 98.
I just received another pre-alpha release of my app from my developer and as you would expect from such an early-stage release it was buggy. When something is buggy you write down the bugs so they can be fixed. And this is what Jira fails so hard at doing. By the time I logged into their slow sluggish hosted solution and clicked my way through their grotesque old-world menu system and finally found that little miniscule button for reporting a bug – I had already forgotten what it was. Safe to say I resorted to the most logical thing to do at that point – I opened a Google Docs text editor and added all the bugs as bullet points with the app version number as the title (even better, I shared that doc with my developer so he gets instant updates whenever I add something. Even better again, I can add bugs from anywhere now including my phone with the Google Drive App). And that is where all my bugs will go from now on.
This is the first time I am put in front of what the industry apparently thinks is a great, useful, brilliant and overall easy-to-use “behind-the-scenes” software and boy are they wrong. If this is as good as it gets my next piece of software will be a project management and bug-tracking app that makes Jira look like the crippled mouth-breathing relic that it is.
If Jira was free this rant wouldn’t be fair. But Jira is a subscription-based $10/month extortion where you pony up the cash because you are one of the unfortunate souls that have invested in all-things 90’s such as subversion.
Enterprise software is a funny world because things like Jira and Bugzilla can exist. But that’s also a huge opportunity. Let me give you a hint: mobile software development is still a huge booming gold rush in its infancy. It is expected to be worth $25 billion dollars in 2015. More entrepreneurs than ever before will enter this booming market with limited coding ability and they will need something other than Jira. If you can create a project management and bug tracking software that is tailored for mobile app development, resides in the cloud, is accessible from anything with a screen and an internet connection, is just as easy and straight forward to use as Gmail and its related services, costs $5.99 a month and let’s a cross-functional team spend more time fixing bugs than documenting them, you might have a winner. Please put me in the credits if you do.
Use Trello. It has all the features I listed above, it is free, it works on any device, it is hosted in the cloud and it is very easy to use for a smaller team.
Your marketing should do the barking and your product do the talking.
– Karl
Unless you are a multi-level marketing company of course. Click to read more about product value vs marketing hype.
Marketing is considered important by most people. If you are an entrepreneur chances are that you spend a serious chunk of time on it. But can really great marketing fill the gaps of a lackluster product? It depends on if you are selling value or if you are selling hype.
If you have a real product or service that could benefit users in some way, you are selling value. Your repeat business will happen because your product or service is what drives sales and your marketing is only there to support it. Your products do the talking and your marketing prompts customers to listen to what they have to say. In other words, a successful company involved in selling widgets doesn’t make money because it has such nice ads, but because its widgets result in repeat and new purchases and the ads remind people of that.
Most big names in products and services are big because what they sell creates value for their customers. Examples are IKEA, Apple, Toyota, Samsung, Microsoft(?), Oracle, [insert big company here], you get the point. They all have fantastic marketing but it’s their products and services that do the talking and drive people to come back for more.
There are a few good examples of products being sold thanks to marketing despite being good in any way at all. Those things usually come out of multi-level marketing pyramid schemes, get rich quick schemes and other deceptive marketing channels such as TV Shop. Yes, these products sell but they are not the cash cows of most of these business models. Multi-level marketing makes money on its membership fees, TV Shop actually makes money on their products thanks to their audience who are watching TV when most of us are working (read into that however you want) and get rich quick schemes make money on selling you expectations rather than results/tangible products.
So you can make money if you focus on marketing and hype, but you better be one of the business models above. If you are a business who believes in improving the life of your customer, selling something that doesn’t result in buyer’s remorse, and generally deliver an extraordinary experience, put marketing aside for a second.
If you are in the startup trenches, don’t waste your time and money on marketing before perfecting what you are actually trying to sell. Make sure your friends and family like your product or service. Test it out. Narrow down its functions to its core value proposition. Is it a good concept? Will people like it? When it’s ready, launch small and gauge reactions and feedback. If you have a winner, then full speed ahead into marketing and promotion. But remember, if your product doesn’t live up to your marketing, you create hype, buyer’s remorse and ultimately failure. It’s better to let your marketing do the introduction and your product do the talking.
Protons can sporadically appear and disappear. They are subatomic and infinitely small and of almost no mass.
The universe could also have been created in a similar fashion, and will disappear in a similar fashion. But becausue of its mass, there is more inertia and time distorts and gets slower.
For a proton to instantaneously appear and then disappear almost immediately later seems really fast to us. It can happen because of its close-to-nothing mass and almost no inertia.
Measuring the age of a human in proton years makes it seem really long. Measuring the age of the earth in human years makes it seem very long. Measuring the age of our galaxy in earth years makes it seem really really long because of its mass. And measuring the age of the universe in galaxy years makes it seem really really (really) long. What happens if we measure the age of whatever the universe is part of in universe years? Probably long to the point where time stops completely, just like before the big bang.
Each step involves more mass, more mass involves more inertia and more inertia means slower time or a slower cycle. So, the universe could be just like the proton that appears from nowhere and disappears as quick, but on a universally grander and slower scale.
We are so small and live such a small fragment of this entire process that it seems eternal to us.
Watch and behold, a sunset on Mars. At first it struck me as “another” interplanetary video, but come to think about it, it is pretty amazing.
Out there, one year away from our own planet a little robot landed and shot HD video — and it all looks like Arizona. It’s crazy how a place that far away can look so familiar. Imagine going on a hike into the wild, spending a whole day trekking through hills and slopes. You climb a small mountain and finally arrive at an outlook. You probably feel completely at one with nature; small, fragile, an observer of something greater.
Now, keep that concept in mind but imagine that you travel upwards in a one-man space shuttle through deep space. After one year you arrive at the location below, totally alone on Mars. Everything looks familiar but you are one year away from anything you would remotely call home.
The universe is full of these places, there are billions of them. And most of them are incredibly vast and incredibly empty. We are truly small and insignificant in the eye of the universe. I wonder what other kinds of species might be dwelling out there somewhere in space, seemingly all alone in a vast empty void just like us. The next time you are moved by a sunset, remember the video below. Every day there are billions of sunsets but most of them will go unseen forever.
