Ken Nelson

90% of the U.S. population doesn’t know about Ctrl-F.

What is “ctrl-f” ?

Let’s say you are in a web browser, say Internet Explorer. If you push these two keys at the same time:

You will get a seach box that searchs in the document you are reading.  So, for instance, if you want to search a Google search results for the query “help desk” for a link from Wikipedia. You would do the search and then hit “ctrl-f wiki”  and you would find it!

Note… on the Mac it is the “Alt-f” key sequence. Unless, of course, you are running a Windows app in an emulator on your Mac. Then it’s “ctrl-f”.

Simple! 

Via Instapundit

Via WiseStartupBlog.com

A recent study shows that most businesses that try Groupon will not do it again:

http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-survey-results-2011-7

About 60% of businesses considered their Groupon experience a success, but more than half of customers do NOT want to run another Groupon. Almost 40% of Groupon customers, meanwhile, thought their experience failed.

How viable can a business model where 40% of the customers view the experience as “failed” be?   I’m sure it will settle out somewhere. But long term those bad experiences will permeate out as those involved start new businesses, or manage other businesses.

I’d be interested in polls about the experience of consumers using the Groupon offerings. I watch the offerings come in on my smart phone, but I’ve never “bit” on any.

What are new customers worth?  What are loyal, repeat, customers worth?  These are the questions cogently raised by Rocky Agrawal’s dissection of the Groupon Business Model.

I’ve either built, or played a key role in building, three successful business ventures. And I’m in the process of making another one.    I learned early on that a customer I already have is worth WAY more than one I don’t. have yet.  An easy reminder of that is the $7K just sent me via electronic purchase order by a long time customer.  By my rough gauge that is 1 of 5 orders given me today from folks I’ve done business with for years.  Combined with a couple orders from new customers it was a good day.  And  just another pleasant reminder that that hard work we did for them 5 years ago is still paying off.

Bootstrapping a startup that lacks loyal customers is hard, frustrating and thirsty work.   In the beginning, all customers are new (and expensive to acquire).    My approach is to find strategic customers and make them partners.  I give them a great deal, free in most cases, in exchange for feedback and their assistance and referrals.  Will it work? Time will tell.  If it were easy, everybody would do it!

One thing I won’t be doing is randomly letting price focused customers exploit my offerings without a loyalty / feedback relationship.  That’s what Groupon provides.  Groupon customers remind me of the folks who visit yard sales before the stated opening times. They want bargains but it is better to wait the day out and work with those who arrive when you are packing it in, or to give a great deal on an item that isn’t selling to somebody who just bought your big screen TV and agreed to haul it off for you.

This lack of loyalty is also why I delayed and delayed and regretted putting in a Yellow Page ad for a successful photo business I had through much of the last decade. It was a part-time venture, but it ended up being among the largest (and likely most profitable) photo businesses in my region. Why?   I spent time pleasing customers and making money, not answering phone calls from people asking about pricing.  90% of my business was referral based from customers who would think of using no other photographer for their family, wedding, or business.

That’s why when I decided to start a mobile software company my concept focused around customer loyalty apps.  I wanted to provide a way to help businesses foster, keep, and expand a reciprocal relationship with customers that are loyal to them. Oh… and keep to my other simple formula – value, value, value, and the best support they have ever received ever period. Simple!

We are 5 months into the project, and perhaps a month or so off from the launch of about 20 apps for companies I’m loyal to, or that I think are strategic for feedback, market exposure, and yes… more feedback!

I wish Groupon the best. But I’m pretty sure it will fade as folks realize that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence, and that they really should be nice to the girl that accompanied them to the dance.

http://pleasurehunt.mymagnum.com/

Try it, if just for the interesting nature of the game.

The absolute best thing invented in the 2000′s.

Amazon released its Cyber-Monday stats, and they are impressive:

Amazon this morning announced that on its peak day for this year, November 29, customers ordered more than 13.7 million items worldwide across all product categories, which translates to a – self-proclaimed – record-breaking 158 items per second.

Oddly… I wasn’t one of them, I’d done most of my shopping well before Cyber-Monday.  I did order some odds an ends all the way up to the last day for Amazon Prime to get it to me in time.

BTW: My personal Amazon record is 3 items in one minute.

It starts small, and reasonable sounding, “hey, lets make sure Internet providers treat everybody the same”.  This keeps Comcast, for instance, from blocking Netflix – a potential video on demand competitor.

But this is the Government. So it may start simple, like the 1% tax on zillionaires, but it will NEVER stay simple.

Best to keep them out.

If I don’t like the way my Internet service provider is behaving, I’ll just switch them. I, and most Americans,  have 5 or 6 to choose from. In some places, even more.

I don’t think it is an accident that 3 Democrats voted for this, and 2 Republican’s against. Democrats LOVE to start small little things that grow into big pains in the ass.

The only role the government should play is ensuring competition.

Facebook intern mapped Friend connections by locations. The resulting graph is above.

Click here to see it bigger.

Source: Mashable

If you are like me, and zillions of others, your life now revolves around e-mail.  When I used Outlook I had an easy way to tag a reminder on to an e-mail, but for some unknown reason, Google Mail doesn’t have that feature.  Never fear… Followup.CC to the rescue.

http://www.followup.cc/

Here is how it works… sign up for a free account at the link above. They don’t spam you. In fact, I’ve no idea how they make money to pay for this.

Now, let’s say you want to remind yourself of something. Just forward an e-mail to followup.cc with when as the prefix of the address. So, for instance,

3weeks@followup.cc
tomorrow@followup.cc
4pm@followup.cc
30Feb@followup.cc

Simple. And don’t have to forward an existing message, you could, for instance just send a note “remind me to check pool water” to 30days@followup.cc and it will e-mail you to check the pool water in 30 days.

Slick!

First with Iraq and Afghanistan war dumps, and now with State Department cable traffic, WikiLeaks keeps agitating. For what purpose? It seems clear they want to harm America. I don’t know why a guy from Sweden would hate America so, but he does.

If WikiLeaks would do more to expose world secrets – like its coverage of Keyna massacres in 2008 – then it would be a better tool. But its diversion into American derangement syndrome basically makes it a weapon of the socialist / progressive left.

What should we do about WikiLeaks?  Well… we should kill it. They aren’t terrorists, but like terrorists, they have declared a one sided war against us.  We should respond as in war.  Destroy it and its operators. War is war, after all.

Not pleasant?  A strike against free speech?  Well, WikiLeaks is free to be a pox on everybody’s house, but in choosing to focus on harming the US, it gives us no choice but to act in our national interest.

Is Obama capable of doing this?  Yes, but only if WikiLeaks goes specifically after him.  Hurting the US won’t prompt him to act, after all, that is his main purpose as well.  Should WikiLeaks dump something bad about him, thus harming his narcissistic self-love, well…watch out.

It is a shame, WikiLeaks had such potential.   Their move away from user provided content, towards published, editor chosen, material makes it biased and dangerous to America.

If we kill it, will others arise?  Maybe. And if they aim at America, we should aim right back. Eventually, they will get the message.

Google interview in progress…

Interview questions from Google – sample below:

I guess this is useful. It can find logical, clever, informed people – which is probably a good base of people to hire from.

Checkj out this interesting infographic:

What jumped out at me…. 542 eHarmony.com members get married every day.  And… Spark.com has a very high ratio of employees to performance (155 employees, 17,577 ranking on Alexa.com).   PlentyofFish.com seems to have the best racket… one employee, very high Alexa ranking and $10 million in revenue a year.  And why does Chemistry.com need 3200 employees?  That is an astounding amount of people.

After a decade of using Microsoft Outlook for my professional e-mail, and about 5 years of using Thunderbird for my personal e-mail, I’ve switched both over to Gmail.

Because I have a variety of web lives, work, blogging, Android mobile,  I have a three gmail accounts.  Switching in the web browser can be a bit of a pain, but I’ve found a better way.  A tool called “Prism”  (prism.mozilla.org) will make a web application out of any website – including gmail.

I’ve blurred the contents out for privacy (not that there is anything important in there).  Basically, it is Gmail running in its own window, and I can have as many of them running, with separate profiles for accounts, as I want.  Slick!

I’d also note that Gmail is rather efficient when you use keyboard shortcuts (which must be enabled).  I can read quicker than I could with Outlook.  Amazingly, the keyboard short cuts largely emulate the ELM mail reader from Linux that I used prior to Outlook. My muscles still remember the key sequences, so I’m feeling right at home and quite productive.

What’s cool is that I can do this on my laptop as well, or my phone.  I’ll still need Logmein for some things, but this releases me from the tether to the office even farther than before.  Yippee!

 
36K                                                                                 46K
can you tell a difference?

Google is promoting a new graphics exchange format called “webP”. It compresses still images tighter than JPG, with visual losses unnoticeable to the human eye. Savings are in the 40% range – which would mean a lot to mobile and other burdened networks.

The challenge… how to get their use.

For instance, I’ve got hundreds of thousands of JPG images in my libraries. I’m not particularly interested in converting them to another format. I don’t mind, however, if they are converted when I publish, say a Pic of the Day.

The easiest way for that to happen is for the web server to do it. So, if Apache, for instance had a module that would deliver webP format images when encountering a JPG or other, that would “just work”, at the cost of a little CPU time. 

That would work in a relatively low volume site like mine, but not in higher traffic ones. But we don’t need to worry about them. They have enough incentive to reduce bandwidth expenses (and bottlenecks) that they will likely convert over using automatic tools.

Patrick Leahy (Dangerous-VT)

A lot of Civil Libertarians lay awake at night worrying that some religion is going to force themselves on them. When, of course, there is only one religion interested in that, and it is the one they seem to care the least about!   Most (all?) Judeo-Christian based religions embrace free choice.  This is but one example of how silly, and bass-ackwards most civil libertarians are. They hide their animosity towards faith in the skirts of fake concern over a Constitution they shred elsewhere.

I’ve made the case repeatedly that Civil Libertarians need to watch out for LIBERALS not RELIGIOUS people. After all, government has guns, and the right of force, and liberals are all about making government more powerful.

Take, (please!), Patrick Leahy, undistinguished Senator from a state I escaped from. He has no problem reaching out and forcing private companies to block access to internet sites the government disagrees with.

You can be assured that democrat.org and communist.org won’t be on the list…

Liberals, like Leahy, lie when they claim they represent freedom. They represent and advance tyranny with each breath.

I check Facebook maybe once a week.  Or less. I went all of July without checking it.

Invariably when I check in there is some moron with political viewpoints trying to turn it into a blog. They they post a bunch of crap, sometimes I agree with, sometimes I don’t. They friend me thinking I’ll be their audience.  They are wrong.

I used to just block their posts, but unfriending is so much more decisive!

I’ve decided that if anybody that I don’t know personally posts something stupid, or too often, I’m unfriending them. If I haven’t met you, shot with you, ate with you, or went to school with you… I JUST DON’T CARE.  And even then it isn’t’ a given (-:

FB, to me, is for major life decisions, pictures of vacations/kids, movie reviews, blegs (look it up), and sharing odds and ends of your life – like you would with a friend. It isn’t for pushing your politics. I post like I would talk to a group of friends. And yes, in election season, I might let them know who I support, but not on every picayune topic and issue.

I’ve unfriended two people on this policy so far. It’s fun.   I recommend it.