In a meeting with Susan this morning we started talking about what interests me about certain ideas, and how I judge websites to be a success. It’s something I hadn’t explicitly thought about until she asked me, but I’m pretty happy with how I answered.
For years now my friend Jeff and I have been discussing new business ideas. On a daily basis one of us comes up with an idea for a website and the other one instantly tears it apart. It’s a pretty fun game. Most of the ideas I come up with I trash, but there’s always the few that make it though.
All of my ideas that I’ve gone forward with can answer the main question:
What Problem Does This Solve?
I think that’s a good question to ask about any new website, company, or startup. You can have the coolest technology or the most creative domain name, but at the end of the day it all comes down to being useful - solving a problem.
Building something useful though doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve built something successful. After you can answer the problem question there’s still one more question to ask:
What’s the path to revenue?
Now, I measure success in a way that most people don’t. I’d rather see 100,000 users using a product than $100,000 invested in that product. I know this sounds odd seeing that I just talked about revenue, but it’s not. Investment is not revenue. The true measure of success is how well you can make a profit off of your user base. (If you don’t yet have a user base go back to question 1.)
As Dave Thomas once said, “Profit is not a dirty word.” Let’s face it, if you’ve built something useful it’s going to cost you money to run. How can you make a profit off of it?
If you can answer those two questions, then you’ve got yourself a successful company.
August 19th, 2008
Growing up in the suburbs with a 98% Caucasian population we used to joke about the “crime” of DWB, or “Driving While Black.” It’s not that we were racist, but it sure seemed like the local police were.
Luckily those times have changed and our city has grown culturally. Now they profile based on age and music genre – which is at least 2 steps up from skin color.
After 9/11 I started hearing people turn the DWB joke into FWM, for “flying while Muslim.”
As I write this I’m somewhere over the barrens of one of the Dakotas (I think it’s south) on a 747 headed to Seattle. About 3 hours ago I learned first hand that FWM was indeed a harsh reality.
We were pulling away from the gate at Detroit Metro Airport and the stewardess was just finishing up her seatbelt, oxygen mask, seat cushion speech. As she finished she leaned over and tapped a man on the shoulder and said “you need to put on your seatbelt and bring your seatback forward.
Either he’d never been on a plane before, or he was having a bad day because he said “why?” to which she replied “we have rules.” While that should have been the end of it there, he said “well, I didn’t know the rules.”
Deciding that she needed the last word, the flight attendant shot back a rude “I don’t want to hear it.” That’s when he told her that it was her job to hear it. (rude, but isn’t it?)
After a brief discussion with the head flight attendant, I saw them pick up the phone. I knew right away what that meant, and sure enough about 15 minutes later I heard “flight attendants prepare for arrival.”
We’d already left the gate so we had to wait for 20 minutes until somebody could board and remove the passenger. That wouldn’t have been a huge problem but due to fuel restrictions airlines are only putting just enough fuel to get there in the planes. Our 45 minutes of waiting had used too much gas, so we had to refuel. Doesn’t that make you feel safer when flying? If anything unexpected happens, it better not take more than 45 minutes or I guess you just fall out of the sky. Comforting.
Would this have happened if he hadn’t been Muslim? Nobody knows for sure, but I personally doubt it. It all could have been avoided with a little pleasantry on both sides. Simple customer service techniques like asking “can you” instead of saying “you need to” might have been all it took to avoid this situation – and get me to Seattle on time.
Over an hour later, we got in the air. We’re somewhere over Idaho now and instead of already having landed I’m watching Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. I’m not sure if it’s irony or just a tragic coincidence that Harold and Kumar are also removed from a plane as terrorists. Whatever it is, it certainly supports my point about FWM.
What should have been a 4-hour flight just turned into six because of two rude people. I haven’t been trained in airline security, but nobody on the plane actually thought this guy was a threat to our safety. The stewardess was either profiling or just being a vindictive bitch (because he clearly had the better come back) – neither of these behaviors are acceptable though.
I hate to see what he’s going through now. He was probably treated to a routine strip search while his name was being put on the do not fly list and felony charges were brought. Yeah he was a jerk, but he really doesn’t deserve what he’s probably going through. It’s safe to say he’s pretty fucked and probably won’t ever be flying again – at least not on Northwest.
August 18th, 2008
There’s a lot of companies that are failing miserably at human powered search. Venture capitalists are all too eager to throw their cash toward anybody with a good domain name and a plan to be a “google killer.” (note: start a company to cater to this cash)
Then, there’s ChaCha - human powered search that’s currently the best out there in it’s field. ChaCha is a free text message based service that lets you text a question to 242242 (which spells chacha) and receive an answer back in a few minutes.
I tried it out by sending 2 questions. The first was rather simple factual lookup:
“When is olympic womens gymnastics scheduled to shoe on tv?” You’ll notice I put “shoe” instead of “show” because I wanted to test their ability to interpret what I meant (and whether or not it was outsourced to india - it’s not.)
In about 2-3 minutes I got back this reply:
8pm-midnight(NBC) women’s gymnastics team final; simming: men’s 100 freestyle, 200 butterfly.
It also gave me a web URL to my answer: http://chacha.com/u/zokazkyc
The next question I asked was more open ended and political:
“Why did Russia invade Georgia?”
The answer: http://chacha.com/u/hygaz3cu. It’s not a real human answer, but merely a quote from an AP news article with a link to the actual article. Still, the article was pretty useful.
So, how can this company make money? It looks like their current plan is to have a desktop version with ads, and to include ads in the text messages. There seems to be a smaller revenue opportunity in going the personal assistant route. For example if somebody is searching for a price on something, offer to buy it for them. If they’re searching for a flight, book it.
Will chacha be the next Google killer? No, but it’s still a pretty neat service for settling bar bets.
Why won’t it be the next Google killer? WIFI. As more and more phones become WIFI enabled and businesses start offering WIFI there won’t be a need to text message my question to somebody else. I can just Google it - which is why these services won’t beat Google.
Still, it’s a pretty neat free service.
August 9th, 2008
A while ago I did a blog post asking < href="http://www.dotcult.com/where-are-the-fail-pictures-coming-from">where are all the fail pictures coming from?. 8 months later I still didn’t find what I was looking for in a fail pictures site. Luckily, I had the foresight to register the domain failpictures.com. The next step came natural, do what I always do when I can’t find a site that does what I want: I created one.
Over the last month or so I’ve spent a few minutes every day actually creating what I wanted in a fail pictures site, and today I’m proud to announce the beta launch of
Fail Pictures - a site dedicated to hosting, displaying, and rating fail pictures.
I’ve tried to populate it with as many of my favorites as possible, and I’ve asked a few people to upload images before launch.
It’s not just a site for browsing images though, as I hope I can turn it into a place for serving them as well. Every image is embeddable via simple HTML, and it even has a javascript fail pictures widget that will show a random image every time. It’s resizeable too! Check it out:
When I was scouring the web I noticed that many sites out there re-branded the images with their domain name on them. I don’t think it’s right to put my brand name on something that I didn’t create, so all of the pictures shown on failpictures.com will be URL free - they won’t have mine, or anybody else’s on them. If I didn’t create the image, I shouldn’t be able to tell you what to do with it, so please go ahead and download or re-use any pictures you want to.
I know this could cause some copyright trouble, as it’s almost impossible to police any user submitted content. If you see an image up there that’s yours (and you can make a good case that it is) just let me know and I’ll gladly remove it for you.
So go on over and check out fail pictures. Please rate the pictures and upload some of your own. Also, let me know of any features you’d like to see on the site. I’m working on a couple more widgets right now as well as the ability to create your own images and captions but I couldn’t wait to get the site out there.
Enjoy.
August 7th, 2008
Blatant stealing and copying of information is something we all have to live with in the internet age. Sadly, many people just aren’t aware of copyright or intellectual property laws; they think that since something was on the internet they can freely use it.
Because of this thinking, it’s sometimes necessary to put “traps” into many web applications. You’ll notice that Google Maps uses something called trap streets to catch other map applications that are copying from them. Basically, a trap street is a street that exists on the map but doesn’t exist in real life. This way, Google can see if somebody just copied their information.
Print dictionaries have words misspelled on purpose, and online dictionaries have “trap words.”
On NoSlang.com - my internet slang dictionary I have several trap words as well, and it’s quite fun to find people just outright copying my dictionary.
Anyway, I came across this site that stole a pretty large list of my words. They even included my favorite trap word: istwfn which they define as “I stole this word from noslang.com.”
here’s a screenshot:
This is a pretty common occurrence since I don’t believe in making my dictionary any less accessible (if you’re looking something up it should be easy to copy and paste, right?)
What irks me is that today’s word thief didn’t just steal from me, they credited my word list to Netlingo.com at the top of the page. Now, I know netlingo.com’s admin and she doesn’t steal from me (as I don’t steal from her.) We each run our own separate databases. If we have some of the same words it’s most likely because somebody submitted it to both places.
“istwfn” doesn’t exist in netlingo, so they clearly copied this list from noslang.com. So why does netlingo get the credit?
As a copyright thief, SACS consulting fails. As a consulting company, I can only imagine what good advice you’d get from them if they’ve stolen most of their web page content.
Yes, I could have sent them a COD letter (and I will,) but I think it’s more fun to point out their failure here. Don’t you?
August 5th, 2008
Bruce Schneier reports about another stolen laptop containing the information of 33,000 people enrolled in the Clear program. For those unfamiliar, the “Clear Program” is simply a $100 fee to avoid airport security.
Schneier is correct that nothing at the airport is actual security, but there’s a deeper question:
WHY THE FUCK IS EVERYBODY’S INFO LYING AROUND ON LAPTOPS?
There’s simply no need whatsoever for any of my information to be on anybody’s laptop. There’s no reason that law enforcement, government, retail executives, TSA, or any other employees need to take my information home with them at night. It doesn’t need to be on a laptop at all.
What if they need to access it at home you say? That’s what VPN is for. My work computer is over 3,000 miles away from me and I still log in daily to access files - files that never leave my office. It’s not an issue.
I usually hate any type of common sense legislation, but I think it’s time we make a new law prohibiting credit card and social security numbers from being stored on portable devices. Not a day goes by where I don’t read about a laptop being stolen containing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other personal information.
It’s ridiculous how often these laptops full of data are stolen and it’s not hard to avoid: Don’t store it on laptops, thumb drives, portable hard drives, cell phones, or ipods. There’s no reason to.
August 5th, 2008
While sitting at Friday’s for dinner a few days ago, Adam, Chad, and I noticed a news program about a proposed ban on text messaging while walking. Now, I understand the dangers of texting and driving and I usually yell at other motorists who do so. But walking?
It turns out it’s just another omg reaction law. Some kid was hit by a train while texting. So do we really need a law? How about a better law: Don’t walk into a train. It seems the kid was just an idiot. We can’t legislate stupidity - no matter how hard we try.
August 1st, 2008
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