2014 Sep 30

Can Your Smartphone Replace your Eye Doctor?

For most of the history of mankind, we have built specialized machines to do work: plows to attach to oxen, hoes to till the field, screwdrivers to turn screws, eye examination appartuses (I have no idea what they are actually called) for optometrists to, well, examine our eyes. Over time, as these machines have become more sophisticated, we have found that they could work better if some of the manual tasks were performed by computer.

2014 Sep 29

Do Toy Companies Need Female CEOs?

The other day, my wife forwarded me an article arguing that toy companies need more women at the top. Simply, toy companies have stagnated and reflect the mindsets of those who run them. It is hard to argue this isn't true... about any company. Companies always reflect some combination of the personalities of those who founded them and those who run them. When a founder runs a company for a long time, the cultural assumptions tend to be dominant.

2014 Sep 23

Standards Are Better for Most, but Bad for Niche Players

Over time, all technologies migrate towards standardization. Sometimes this can be a boon for the first-to-market or owner of the standard that "wins"; most of the time, it forces them to find new grounds to differentiate and compete as suddenly everyone is using the same technology interfaces that they are. As shown brilliantly by Simon Wardley's mapping, all services start out as highly customized, and eventually move to standardized commodities.

2014 Sep 11

Does Apple Pay Get Security Right?

So we have yet another attempt to succeed at mobile payments, courtesy of Apple Pay. However, Apple has a very long history of taking inventions and putting them together in just the right way that they finally are usable, and take off. As Tim Cook said on Tuesday, "every other attempt looked at it from the perspective of the business model, rather than the user experience." Given the many high-profile security breaches over the last several years, I would like to take a look at the security implications.

2014 Sep 10

Apple Goes for Shiny and New, but What About the Basics?

Apple, arguably, had its most important launch event in years yesterday. Beyond putting its smartphones back in play with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, competing on specs with LG and Samsung, not to mention Motorola (Motorola? When did they come back from the dead?), it launched in 2 new categories: Apple Pay - mobile payments, for which a follow-up article will be launched this week Apple Watch - a more convenient extension to your phone on your wrist Apple Pay has enormous potential, but depends entirely upon Apple's iPhone business.

2014 Sep 9

Facebook Advertising and Sloppy Pricing

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a poor experience attempting to pay Facebook for services I agreed to purchase. It wasn't the acquiring process that was messed up... it was the actual payment. This is the absolute worst place to make things fall apart - when you want a customer's money. I did, however, discover one other serious mistake on Facebook's part: sloppy pricing. Let's go back to my sample advertising campaign.

2014 Sep 8

Why I Won't Advertise on Facebook

If there is one rule that is more important than any other in business, it is this: make it easy for your customers to pay. Sure, "cash is king," and "know your numbers," and "the customer comes first," and all of that. But all of those are just ways to get people to become and remain your customer, or to keep your business afloat. Much as the purpose of their being your customer is to service them, to deliver great value, if you are in business, then all of that is to get paid.

2014 Sep 4

Real High-Tech is Vacuum Packs

I love technology. I had an Apple II as a kid, did engineering projects in high school, and have worked in and out of the tech sector for years. But as cool as the technology is, it is the impact on a business, and organization, a society that matters. This is a lesson many engineers forget, focusing on the solution rather than the problem, but it is the reason any of these advances have value.

2014 Sep 3

X-rays and smartphones and Figure1

A few weeks back, Fred Wilson wrote about his investment in Figure1, a social site for doctors to share radiology images - X-rays, MRIs, CTs. The hypothesis behind Figure1 is that doctors can share images "en masse" across the network, leveraging the knowledge of many doctors to analyze, and benefitting every doctor who submits an image for others to read, or can compare existing images to the one that s/he is looking at this very moment.

2014 Sep 2

Beer, Jelly Beans, Ice Cream

Over the course of my travels, I had several interesting connections with beer. First of all, I saw several interesting micro-breweries in the Rockies and in Vancouver. More interestingly, at breakfast in the Vancouver hotel, I saw a man wearing a "Yuengling Ice Cream" hat. Yuengling Ice Cream? Isn't Yuengling beer? Apparently, it is both. During Prohibition in the 1920s, when manufacture of most alcohol was banned, the Yuengling family turned to running a dairy to support the family.