Author: Joseph Thibault

Athletes and Technology

Gizmodo is running a special section this week entitled “This Cyborg Life“. I love robots and a few people, so naturally I’m enjoying their quips. More so I really enjoyed the article guest-written by Aimee Mullins, who’s one of the fastest women in the world, on artificial legs.

She wrote about the prevalence of technology in advancing athletic feats (from prosthetic limbs, sporting equipment, bio-meds and surgeries) and the inherent stink made about it by those governing the events. A few examples she used was Tiger Wood’s LASIC surgery which vastly improved his ability to see down the fairway (before it was fixed his disadvantage, he says, was making him bleary eyed when on the course), the LZR suits that helped our Olympic swimmers kick a bunch of ass this past summer games, and even the equipment modern climbers use to ascent K2 and Everest. In each case our athletes are smashing previous records and contributing to the upward march of humanity. Progress is progress right?

The full article is available here: http://gizmodo.com/5403322/racing-on-carbon-fiber-legs-how-abled-should-we-be

Aimee’s article makes me think a little bit about pro sports in the US and how we want them to be better and better (to jump higher, run faster, grow bigger, hit harder) but we expect them to by natural means. In reality, augmentation (whether through new gear, surgery or even meds) is their only sure fire means of achieving progress. Face it, we don’t evolve fast enough to grow our sports players the skills we expect. Instead they cork bats, juice and are constantly provided better equipment.

Honestly, I don’t care if athletes do steroids. I think it’s a terrible example to set for our young players, but sports are entertainment and as a fan I want to see them perform seemingly superhuman feats. We expect it every Sunday! On a similar note, I don’t care what athletic advantages they attain through technology (prosthetics for the disabled are fine by me too). Got a better way to sharpen my skates? A better swim suit? A better gulf club? FORE!  If you think about it, even the shoes we wear to run are better than our fore fathers ever had access too.  A foot race between past and present would only show the glaring advantages technology has given us over the years.

Preventing these means from being used will only slow down our progress. The end goal is excellence. We could all use competitive advantage.

I’d only like to add that I’m also all for safety. I still stand behind the fact that football has some serious issues with the head injuries. I know it seems contradictory to be “fine” with athletes using steroids, but that’s a choice that players can make, hitting is an inherent attribute of the game (you don’t get to decide to take a hit for not, unless you’re a QB and slide around the field).

The best customer is a DIYer

If you work in customer service in a web-based company, the best type of customer you can ask for is a “do it yourself-er”, that shares their discoveries.  Why?  For a few reasons:

  1. The best characteristic of a DIYer is that they’re usually tech savvy.  They’re using your site not because they’ve been forced to or because it’s the first thing they found.  They use it because they’ve surveyed other offerings and decided that your’s is either the best, has the potential to be the best, or has some other advantage over a competing service.  (They also tend to know the “lingo”.  So supporting them from page to page over the phone or asking for a URL to the issue tends to be a simple task; not a formidable request.)
  2. another great advantage of a DIYer is that they’ll trouble shoot your site for you.  Whether your using an open source application or building a proprietary platform/application, the DIYer familiarizes themselves with the environment.  They read your FAQs and they engage the tutorials/training materials you’ve created and at that point (and only at that point) if they don’t know how to do something or are finding an insurmountable error they contact you.
  3. by contacting you they point out holes in your support/help foundation (because they know and are familiar with what you have provided and exhaust those resources before contacting you.  If you can identify these individuals early (and keep them) then they’ll be a great resource in deciding your customer support, help documentation, and even the software roadmap to improve usability.

It’s possible that you refer to these types of customers as something else (allies, models, etc.), but I’m sure you’ll agree that these customers are the best to have (even better than customers that are silent even in the face of buggy software of outages).

I bring this up because non-DIYers often take up the most time and are the most costly to appease.  In some cases getting them squared away is near impossible (or perhaps actually impossible, though I reject the notion that there’s a customer issue that cannot be resolved.  I’ll die trying.).

In closing, if you’re trying to build a product for a market that is devoid of non-DIYers (seniors, or 1st time internet users) then be prepared.

A little Internet background history

The LA Times had a great piece about the formation of the Internet (the one Al Gore built, that is, the DARPA funded initiative).  Tomorrow, October 29th, 2009 the Internet turns 40 (my how it’s matured in the last few years).  The article is a quick and easy read about how a few (much younger then) professors and researchers at Stanford and UCLA first sent packets of info from LA to Palo Alto through an “Interface Message Processor”.  One of the protagonists was Leonard Kleinrock (who taught CS at UCLA and still does).

Their goal was to login remotely from one computer to the other.  Even in failure was their first success:

What happened in that big moment? All we wanted to do was log in to the second host computer at SRI, 400 miles to the north, to see if one machine could talk to another. You have to type “L-O-G” and then the remote machine types “I-N.” We typed the L and [called SRI and] said, did you get the L? Yep, got the L. Get the O? Yep, got the O. Typed the G and craaaaash. But the message couldn’t have been shorter or more prophetic: LO, lo and behold. You can’t beat that. (LA Times, “Net worker”)

He also recounts the first time he and his crew ever came across spam.  Their response to the culprit? “You can’t do that.  Bad. Stop. Horrible”.  Then they sent so much email back to the spammer that it marked the first denial of service and crashed their networks.

So much changes just to stay the same.

Here’s to you, Internet.  May you grow and grow but never become self-aware.

Swearing is Caring

You might not have ever heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, but he’s one bad ass entrepreneur.  Proprietor of Wine Library and WineLibrary TV, and a new wine-focused social network (corkd.com).  Not to mention this new book (Crush It).

In the world of online entrepreneurs, he’s been hitting the speaking circuit and getting plenty of press on TV.  Recently he spoke at FOWA (Future of Web Apps) in London.

WARNING: his talk contains explicit language.  Like construction worker explicit.  Though, his message is on point (customer service is paramount and is best shown by actually caring about your customers) and he is hilarious.  He’s just as funny in his WineLibraryTV stuff.  I particularly liked his review of Charles Shaw (aka two buck chuck).  If you want to save the 20 minutes, he recommends the Shiraz and Sauvignon Blanc but panned the rest.

So, as far his talk at FOWA goes, here are the great points/quotes I gleaned from it (note that some is going to be paraphrased to nix the cursing).

  • “subscribing to cable…is like going into McDonald’s and ordering a burger and fries.  And then the cashier says, “that’s fine, asshole.  But you’re gonna have to pay for the whole menu.”  I’ve long wanted just to pay for HBO, Current and ESPN (and maybe the NFL redzone…).
  • “Don’t be a dickface. Because people will figure you out.”  My highest value is integrity.  I really love working with my clients and don’t take them for granted, when I say something I do it.  And when I say I really value their business I mean it.  It makes me happy beyond belief to hear that my reputation is unsullied and that people respect me (despite what they may think of a colleague or my employer).
  • “Customer service is not putting a feedback tab on the left side of your web page.  Customer service is answering every single email personally, meaning what you put in them and making your customers genuinely like you.”

His message about customer service and interaction is spot on.  It’s pretty refreshing to hear someone so honest and forthright get on the stage at the type of event that often degrades into the constant back-patting of speaker/millionaires.

Enjoy.

Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Too small to fail

It irks me that our government copped out of ditching a bunch of crap business by claiming they “were too big to fail.”  Bull crap.

Honestly I think the administration should have forced Ford (the only solvent US car maker) to buy GM and Chrysler.  Ford would have gotten a great deal and would be poised to totally drive American car manufacturing for the next decade at least (until the likes of Tesla or GEM caught up).  I’ve been a GM supported all my life, but that doesn’t mean I believe they “can’t” be allowed to fail.  In real life (at least what I thought was real life), if you make bad decisions continuously, you can/will fail.  Then you own up the the mistakes and regroup.  This is as opposed to unreal life, where we currently reside, where you can drive your company down the tubes, get a huge government bailout and then claim a profit.

He's not that chubby anymore.
He's not that chubby anymore.

That’s why I love the idea and process of launching web-based applications.  As a full-time employee and a work at home dad (I have a 8 year old wiener dog) I have the freedom to invest my spare time (what little there may be) into… well, whatever.

I have a business registered in Vermont.  We’re just getting started, there are two of us as partners.  But we have revenue.  In a sense we made something ($) out of nothing.  Our skills applied created a monthly cash flow that covers, among other things, the cost of this blog and enough for some good business related books and perhaps a breakfast/lunch at our favorite spot in Burlington when I’m in town.

Luckily it’s addicting.  I’m not satisfied with a few bucks a month and I believe I have the skills and connections to get that boosted (and hopefully high enough one day to be my full-time).  My partner has the same expectations.  Of course, it’s great that we have the luxury of spare time and other income to float us (don’t get me wrong).

The best part though, is that we’re too small to fail.  We’ve developed and deployed 1 web app already and are working on an additional while we cultivate the first project.  The total cost to do this?  About 100 bucks a month hosting, 50 bucks a year in domain registration fees and 125 dollars in business registration fees.  Are the apps high risk?  Of course, our time and effort is worth a lot (especially when we’re not paying ourselves), but the cost of keeping going is so low that we can chase whatever projects we want to.  When one fails completely, it just frees up room on the server and time in the schedule.  It’s nice to know that a part of our business could fail and we can keep on trucking.  We just need 1 stock in our portfolio to do well.  In the meantime I’ll keep advancing each.  Stay tuned.

the Killer Craigslist

Not to be confused with the alleged Craigslist Killer.  About 2 months ago CL actually took a step to highlight just why they hold all the power in the huge universal focus job boards: http://www.craigslist.org/about/job_boards_compared

They focus on a few points (though some of the data is a bit old, 2000?  Really, Craigslist?):

  1. Daily site page views as a % of total web traffic (they are 10x Monster and CareerBuilder)
  2. # of applicants per job (CL ranked #2)
  3. Cost of postings (CL is $25 in select cities while their competition is between $275 and $475)
  4. Effectiveness (this is that 2000 stat from the WSJ); CL scored the highest with 4.25 out of 5 (5 is the highest/best)

I’ve written about Craigslist before and I think it’s a great service.  Its genius is a product of its simplicity.  Before now though, they hardly ever brought attention to the fact that they were a leader in job boards and better than, or superior to their job board competitors.  I would certainly say they are.

I don't hate Tim Tebow

From FantasyCollegeBlitz.com
From FantasyCollegeBlitz.com

I’ve often said I hated Tim Tebow.  I really don’t. It’s just that he’s too good.  When he took that hit against Kentucky I was initially happy (not that he was suffering from a concussion) that he might not be the only person college football analysts talked about the following week.  But, I’m wrong.

I think they got over the severe concussion a little too fast.  I mean, the guy was puking his brains out and had to be rushed off the field.  If that had happened to me “on the job”, I still might not be at work (I certainly wouldn’t be having much fun reading a bright computer screen all day).  It seemed that most people just were hoping that the two weeks off were enough time for him to get back on his feet and back to “Superman” status (honestly, there was a headline in FL after the LSU game that read “Superman Returns”).

This past weekend I watched a bunch of football games, in all of them there were nasty collisions that encouraged cheers from the crowd and celebrations by the players.  In a couple of games it was obvious that a player had been knocked out (as they lay prone on the ground, sometimes still clutching the ball or holding their limbs out, as if they were frozen).  Don’t get me wrong, I love football.  I find it fascinating to watch and enjoyable to talk about.  But the number of injuries and the increasing reports of head trauma reported by former players really makes me uneasy about the sport.  In a recent New Yorker magazine article, Malcolm Gladwell goes to far as to draw an analogy between dog fighting and football: he says that players are hand picked for their ability to put the team and the team’s goals above their own personal well-being (loyalty to the team = desire to win = ability to sacrifice personal health).

Taking or delivering a great hit is part of the game (one of Gladwell’s strongest critiques of the sport).  But the level at which these collisions occurs is insane.  For example, hits on the football field (at the college level) can equate to a 45 mile an hour car collision!  But it’s not as if the players are getting in one collision a game, in fact, they’re in dozens of collisions every practice.

…In an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage. (Gladwell, “Offensive Play” The New Yorker 2009 p.5)

And what do these collisions and concussions cause?  Dementia and other memory loss afflictions.

I am part of a family dealing with the hardship that dementia and Alzheimer’s can cause.  I can tell you only one thing: if it’s preventable, do whatever you can to stave it off.

Quote – Jamie Oliver (the Naked Chef)

I have to agree…but it certainly makes for harder assessment’s in the traditional sense:

“Look, I think the brilliant and beautiful thing in life is that anyone can do anything,” he said. “When I used to go to special needs, we got laughed at, but we’re not supposed to all be academic. What is education? A bunch of stuff that people think we should know. Ultimately if you can put a wall up, if you can paint, if you can work with other people and, most important, if you find out what you are good at, that’s the key. Kids can do detailed, technical things, and they can do them well. Have you seen them on skateboards and surfing? It doesn’t have to be a BMX, it can be a pot and a pan and a knife, but we wrap them up in cotton wool and treat them like babies and they’re not.”  (Putting America’s Diet on a Diet, NYTimes.com)

Really a great read if you have the time.