The rules are simple, you have the choice between invisibility or flight. He uses the question to great success as an icebreaker, and talks about the process that most people go through while answering the question. If you do not listen to This American Life I heartily recommend it, it’s very high quality and family friendly.
And here we are in the 4th Quarter of 2010. I really hate the 3rd Quarter. It’s always the same, the whole world is on vacation so nothing gets done in July or August and then it’s a mad dash to close business in September. Many times I think it might be better just to take all of August off.
It’s also time to look at the goals I set myself for this year. I was pleasantly surprised that things are going well, with 74% completed. The key takeaways – things are going well on the Family front but I have not been able to visit my brother and his family yet this year. Unfortunately changing jobs means I have no vacation in Q4 so I may have to do a red-eye for a weekend if I want to make that goal.
Personal is going well having run the Falmouth Road Race and losing 20 lbs year to date. I need to get a gym membership going because soon it will be too cold to run outside for me. I had a hard time coming up with a “fun” goal for myself, but I did upgrade all of my media equipment so I’ll take that as completed.
Financial Goals are a bit behind, we’ve been burning through a lot of cash with the baby here and Carin working few hours. The good news is that the ReFi happens tomorrow and with my new job there’s a good chance we can up the savings for year end. An interesting thing here is how sometimes you are painted into a corner with these things – Carin can’t work more hours because if we had to use daycare that would eat a huge chunk of the income and I’d rather she take care of our son. I also have a goal for Charitable Donations, but now that becomes a classic numbers game – do I get closer to the goal by giving it to charity or hitting my savings goal? Both the numbers game and my heart are leaning towards charity so I guess you could say the goals are properly aligned.
On the Professional front landing the new job accomplishes most of what I wanted to do this year. I’ve been doing 4-5 year stints so I should be set here for a while. The only question mark here is what should happen next with Marketing Over Coffee. I don’t have the time to do more with it so I may look at outsourcing some stuff via a virtual assistant.
Also new this quarter has been motivation from The Ultimate Warrior. Yes, the man who hoisted a belt at Wrestlemania Ultimate Warrior. A co-worker of mine sent me a link to his blog, Warrior’s Machete, about a year ago and I have been hooked. This is a whole post in itself, which I promise I will put out there eventually. I was just glad to trade email with him, and he ended up sending me a lot of great advice. If you are looking for motivation you should sign up for his email list.
A couple of months ago Mike Proulx from Hill Holliday asked if I’d like to be on a panel talking about the future of marketing. Since it was an evening session when my family was out of town it was a great excuse to get into Boston and talk with people about what’s coming next. It was great to be part of the event and it went off really well thanks to Mike (and I think D.J. Capobianco and his team were very busy behind the scenes).
There are two pieces of good news about this – one is that Steve Garfield was streaming the event so I’ve got the video here (nice to get a break from writing now and then). The other is that it had 7 views before I told my family about it, so that’s a big deal.
The other panelists were great, I’ll post those segments when I need an excuse not to write…
More years ago than I care to count I bought a PalmPilot 1000. It rocked. I was so excited just for the fact that I would now no longer have to get a new calendar book every year and copy all of the birthdays and important dates across to the new one. Ahhh, the first spark of fire in the dark ages.
The Palm hooked me on the idea of a stylus instead of my KFC grease coated finger for touching the screen. It’s more precise and the one that I use in my smartphone has a pen in it so I’m never without a writing implement.
When I picked up an iPad I noticed that the guy working at the store used a pogo Sketch so I decided to pick one up. It fit well into the bottom of my Dodo Case (which now comes in green and I want a new one) and all was good for about 3 months. Then the clip broke off and when I looked on Amazon to replace it there were now more options. None of them were that expensive so I decided to order a bunch of them so I could do my own shootout and see what worked best.
The Contenders:
Amazon showed Griffin with one coming out soon so that prompted an email to Dave Delaney, who has hooked Marketing Over Coffee up with stuff in the past. Here’s the required link from them saying they give out stuff for people to try and to blog about. Please also note that the links below are affiliate links so if you could use them I can send my son to college.
I also tested one sold by a company called Acase, which was exactly the same as the Griffin. With the exception of the Griffin logo, it looks like they came from the same factory, the Acase cost me $2.94 more than the price of the Griffin, so I’m only linking to the less expensive one.
The elago is also very similar to the two above, same tip a bit lighter with a different style clip.
The BoxWave is also in this family, again same tip and similar look and clip, but it’s about $10 more and heavier because it has a cap and a real pen that is pretty good.
The iClooly was the unique one of the pack, unlike the others.
I also got some cheapos at $3.95 for a 3-pack that I thought might compare to the pogo sketch.
The Results
L to R:Griffin, Acase, BoxWave, elago, pogo, iClooly, & el Cheapos
After a week of use I’ve found that I like the Griffin ($13.04) best. It has a rubber tip that’s sort of like a mushy racquetball. A similar tip is on the BoxWave, Acase and elago.
In second place would be the BoxWave which is almost the same, on the plus side it also has a pen, the cost of that is that it’s more expensive ($24.95 was the price when I bought mine) and a bit heavier. Update : after about 2 months use the tip on the BoxWave did not write a smoothly as the Griffin or the Acase, I tried cleaning it and that made no difference.
The elago is in third ($14.99), very similar to the ones above except for two things – it has their brand and the phrase “Design is Improvement” on it. This is a bit odd to me because the whole Apple thing is not to print anything on an object that’s not required. Ever look at the bottom of a Macbook versus a Dell? Also the clip on mine is slightly loose and rattles a tiny bit. Rattling doesn’t fit well with the Apple design thing either. Otherwise it’s about the same as the previous two.
For Fourth I would replace the pogo ($10.73). The tip is like a tiny peice of shag carpet and it’s thinner and lighter than all of the above. A good choice but for the plastic clip.
The iClooly was less expensive (only $9.99) but very well made. It has a unique tip which is like a very short paintbrush. It’s retractable so you have to click it like a ball point pen. That’s the reason I don’t use this one, it’s two extra steps to take off the cap and click it open. The brush cap is closer to the barrel and pulls straight off, the cap has a second tip in it that you unscrew to access with a plastic point for a resistive touch screen (as opposed to capacitive on the iPhone, iPad family). It’s nice but I found the tips on all the other ones work on both types of touchscreen.
It should be noted that all of the above performed the same. I tested them all on Note Taker HD and they all worked fine. You may have a preference of rubber tip vs. cloth vs. brush for feel, but they all work. I thought the rubber was very similar to cloth, the brush didn’t seem to give as much resistance. If you like the feedback the rubber and cloth work best, if you like it to be frictionless the brush is better.
The only fail in the test was the 3 pack of cheapies ($3.92, but no link because you don’t want them). The rubber tip on the better ones have a matte finish, the cheapos have a glossy rubber tip that sticks to the screen making them unusable. When you want to slide panels on the screen it literally gets stuck to the screen. For uber-geeks out there, I did try using the dremel tool to grind the glossy finish off, it does work better, but still not as well as the ones above. I roughed it up with about a 75 grit sandpaper and could try other stuff but at about $15 for the good ones it’s not worth the time.
That’s the wrap up, enjoy your clean screen!
Update: I’ve been sent a Stylus Socks Pro to review and played with it for a couple of days. Ivo has done something interesting with a different approach – the handle is like a paintbrush with a soft tip and about half of it has a sock made of a capacitive fabric. It’s very smooth and has a unique weighting so it’s a nice alternative. My wife enjoys this one, I stopped using it when I realized I have a habit of holding the stylus as far as possible from the tip. For this model if you are not touching the fabric it will not work. What was more interesting to me in his store were styluses for people with disabilities – there’s a mouthstick for anyone that does not have use of their arms, and the Steady Stylus that has a full hand grip that would be useful for anyone that has difficulty with fine motor control. I’ve never seen these before and was quite impressed.
On Saturday I will be running the Race for the Cure here in Boston. It’s a huge event with thousands of runners and a flat course around the Seaport district. I’ve offered to pay registration fees for any regular readers that want to run.
After that it’s over to Microsoft NERD for Podcamp Boston 5, I’ll be doing a session at 11am with Christopher S. Penn. If you are hitting any of these events please say hello!
Longtime readers know of my love for music and audio, and regardless of the quality of my marketing thoughts here the linkbait of my headphone review trumps everything else at this site.
So what’s new? I also mentioned the Nike earphones that I use for running, they died a couple of weeks ago at the Falmouth Road Race. After at least 3 years of sweating and pouring water over my head in hot weather I can say they are a superior product and served me well at the price.
I have replaced them with the Sennheiser PMX80 running earphones, which I had considered when I bought the Nike set. They are also great but it comes down to sound quality vs. comfort and isolation. The Sennheisers sound much better but they are a tiny bit heavier and they fight much tighter in my ear, this results in a much better sound, but I’m not able to hear what is going on around me as well. It comes down to much better music, or hearing what’s going on around you with out as much in your ear. For now, I’m liking the music, we’ll see how the hold up.
Shure Update – I got an email notice that Shure is refreshing the line of products. The big thing I noticed is that the cables are now removable. After a couple of years of heavy use the cord on mine broke because of the way they twist over my ear (and it should be mentioned that they repaired them for free). These are still getting heavy use and sounding great, although I haven’t tried anything new lately.
In other gear updates I got a Sony NEX-5 and will be posting some pics on Flickr soon.
Thanks to everyone that got in touch with me after the last post, your concern is truly appreciated. I had written that at a point where I was tired and waiting for things to move. This is why I know I am better than marketing than sales, I like the long term view, and the quick hit of response rates. The sales guys that grind out the large deals one at a time deserve to get the best cash comp in the organization.
Part of writing that was the fact that I know that when it was all done, I wouldn’t really feel like writing, but I wanted to have something in the pipeline for when it was done. The weekend is finally here and I have a chance to clean up a bit. I just finished my first week at Boston Software Systems, a company that takes the paperwork and data entry out of healthcare. Hospitals often have multiple IS systems (and worse yet there are many groups of hospitals that share data between the multiple hospitals with multiple IS systems), and Boston Workstation can automate the data entry across systems. It’s simple to use and powerful because it is flexible enough to automate almost any task.
I’m excited to be working with a couple of guys that I have worked with before, Mark mentioned I was like the Blues Brothers getting the band together again. Now that my evenings are mine again I’ll be able to get back to more reading, which will result in more to talk about. Thanks for checking in with me here, I’m off to enjoy the weekend.
For me, this is a sad post to write, but the good news is that if I ever hit the publish button, then I am probably enjoying an adult beverage and watching the sunset with a smile on my face.
How did I get to this point? Writing a post as digital therapy in July, knowing that it will sit in the draft bin for who knows how long. There have been two things this month that led me to this confession: I had touched base with Greg Verdino about his new book and he said “Man, where have you been?”. The other was Chris Brogan saying he was glad to see some blog posts out of me. Seth Godin said something to the effect that a good measure of your work is if people notice if you are missing. Given the busy schedules of Greg and Chris, that makes me feel pretty good.
So, where the hell have I been? Let’s rewind the clock to October 2009 for half the story – at Newton Wellesley after being awake for more hours in a row than I ever have before, our son arrived. That has been a wonderful adventure, taking up most of our lives but worth every minute. But the other half… that’s why this sits in the draft bin.
In December 2009 I did my annual review of how the year went. The dead week between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time to take a look at the bigger picture. The elephant in the back of my mind was that it would be my 5th anniversary at work. In June I vested in the last of my options, and in the startup world this makes you start thinking about the next big thing. If everything goes perfectly (I know maybe 4 people that have scored that lottery ticket), the startup you are at goes public or gets acquired and you tough out the days until you get all your shares. There are many tales of people throwing the vesting day party and then riding off into the sunset for a tour of Europe, writing a book, start a Daddyblog, taking up Yak farming, whatever…
Although we haven’t hit an event, everything is going very well. The company has grown 6x in my time there and it’s been great to watch the business grow and see customers like the Auto company that Monty hangs with arrive, and the first monster deal (and the monsters got bigger every other year or so).
After many discussions, coffees, lunches with friends asking about what I should be looking at next, the nuclear winter of the current economy was confirmed. In April I decided that there was no point in starting search with the summer coming on, and decided to stick with working only one job (a job search is always a full time job), and setting up the summer vacation.
This was the impetus for the end of the M Show, giving it a proper finish, silencing the nagging voice in the background that asked when the next show would go out. This freed time up for Marketing Over Coffee, which has continued it’s run this year and has been a fantastic source of networking for me.
As usual, the universe has no regard for my plans and has its way of telling me so. From the silence of the summer I was contacted by some folks that I used to work with and started talking to them.
And here I sit in a random coffee shop. As I write this draft, I really can’t talk to anybody about anything. I’m not writing anything, not getting myself into situations where I have to talk about anything on the horizon. I’m all set with phone calls at weird hours so that I can respect the day with my co-workers. The only laugh I had was from John T., we were talking about catching up over lunch so I could give him his Marketing Over Coffee Award, and he joked that we could try to eat lunch at the Newton Marriott but that they probably wouldn’t let us in since it wasn’t a job interview (sorry for the local 128 humor).
One day I soon will hit the publish button. I’ll have plenty of stories in the backlog, but I’m sure that by then I’m going to be spending all my time on the next big thing, and will be more than ready to stop staring at the horizon and itching to get down to work.
So after this gets posted I’ll be pretty busy with other stuff, but at least you’ll know where I’ve been.
Some random stuff today that I wanted to put out on my first day back. I completed our first Griswold-style road vacation, logging 2,000 miles in less than 2 weeks driving from Boston to Torch Lake, Michigan.
Aside from some podcast editing I was able to get by with only my iPad for the entire trip. It does everything I needed, and it was great to spend the half hour in a line of cars trying to get through customs watching Ricky Gervais in Extras.
The iPad is fantastic for managing photos. I was able to plug in 3 different digital cameras, review photos and delete the ones I didn’t want. What was normally at least an hour going through photos after a trip was eliminated, and everybody got to see photos real time.
I was issued a new Dell at work today, it was sort of stuck between off and on, the keyboard and power button were lit, but I couldn’t get it to wake up without doing a 10-second hold of the power button. It’s disappointing when the first experience with a tool is “Geez, is something wrong with this thing?”
While getting to the podcast backlog this morning during my commute, I picked an episode of Manager Tools randomly out of the pile, and was surprised to be mentioned in the show. That was very cool, I’ve never heard these guys give out a plug and they have an blue chip brand that is doing very well.
Bill Green mentionsUpdate: I had this all wrong, the term “Auto-Downloading” for podcasts was created by Bob Knorpp, host of the BeanCast. This is the most profound thing ever said about podcasting in its history. The fact that it took 5 years for someone to connect the dots and come up with this shows why marketing is so difficult, and by extension, why Bill Bob could be the best marketing guy on the planet. Addendum: So I wasn’t clear on this – It’s nothing big, but hugely profound. Bob has shown his ability as a gold standard copy writer when he coined “Auto-Download”. For five years podcasters have been saying “Subscribe to Podcasts” which has no intuitive meaning. “Sign up for Auto-Download” is intuitive (Zyman refers to this as “Cup of Soup” Marketing, a triumph of usability where the name tells you everything you need to know).
Travelling with a baby is not really a vacation.
Ok, I still have a lot of stuff to clean up, I hope you’ve had a shot at a summer vacation this year. I’m going to be running the Falmouth Road Race this weekend, please DM me if you are doing the race.
I worked for 5 years in the insurance industry and one of the important points in the theory of insurance is that you should not insure anything if you can afford to withstand a total loss.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a financial professional. If you take any of my advice just assume that you’ll be sued, you’ll lose all your money, end up in prison, your house will burn down and you’ll probably get a really mean case of athlete’s foot.
Now that we’ve weeded out all but the fearless, and those not afraid of itchy feet, read on…
A common insurance mistake illustrates the principle – many people have comprehensive and/or collision coverage on their cars. This is a good idea for the first five years you own the car, and if you have a car loan it’s required. The mistake many people make is not reviewing this coverage when the value of the car falls below $5,000. If you look up the blue book value of your car and it’s worth $2,100 because it’s 8 years old and has almost 200k miles on it maybe you shouldn’t be paying $200 a year to protect that $2,100. Now yes, it is possible that a tree will crush your car and your insurance company will give you the $2,100, but the odds are you’re going to do that for 3 years, and pay over $500 for peace of mind that your car was protected if it had been crushed. At this point, rather than feel content, you should picture yourself content and short $500, while your other self could risk the car and be enjoying a weekend at the beach with cash to spare.
The easy way out of this is Self-Insurance. You, as an individual, can use the same strategy used by many large corporations to avoid paying insurance premiums. Every time you get offered insurance coverage at check out (say from that store with the gadgets and the guys in the blue shirts), if you actually consider it, refuse it and put that money aside in a savings account. You can do it on a whiteboard if you want to see it in action, but it’s more fun to actually have the cash sitting in an account. What you’ll find is that just like a casino, over time you will win big. A co-worker of mine has been keeping track and by the time he got to his second big screen TV he had a pool of a couple thousand dollars ready for repairs.
You’ll get to a point where you have more in the fund than most stuff costs, with the exception of your car and house – the things you do need to insure. Everything else is giving it up to the casino.
I would now no longer have to get a new calendar book every year and copy all of the birthdays and important dates across to the new one. Ahhh, the first spark of fire in the dark ages.