Doing Words

iPad power tip: working with formatted text in Mail

// October 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Other news

The iPad’s email client bugs me: it supports rich text formatting, but it doesn’t give you any control over formatting while writing an email. Copy a paragraph of text from, say, a web page, paste it into an email, and all the formatting comes over too, whether it looks bizarre or not. And there’s no way to change or remove it.

How to clear up the formatting? Cut or copy the text into (and then back out of) another text app that doesn’t support rich text. Apple thoughtfully ships just such an app with every iPad: the Notes app.

Cut or copy your sentences from Mail into notes, then copy and paste it back into the email, and SHAZAM! No more pesky text formatting.

But wait, you ask, how do you add formatting to text in a Mail email? Again the answer lies in copying and pasting, but this time you’ll need an app that supports rich text and let’s you mess with it.

Apple doesn’t include anything that’ll do this for free, but if you’ve already bought the Pages app from iWork for iPad, that’ll work nicely. I wasn’t able to find any other iPad apps for document editing that included rich text formatting, but let me know if you know of one.

(I made this image using the SketchMe iPad app, which makes images look hand-drawn in pencil or crayon. I started with a screen dump of the Notes app on my iPad. Like the iPhone, you can take a screen dump on your iPad by pressing the Home and Power buttons simultaneously. Your screen dump will be saved to your Saved Photos album in Photos. Note that screen dumps taken while in landscape mode will be sideways and will need to be rotated).

Why I don’t sign NDAs

// September 29th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, people, Startup

Not my lawyer, but a dead-ringer.

I don’t do NDAs, for a few reasons:

• I’ve learned not to sign things without my lawyer reading it first. He’s a great lawyer, so he’s not cheap. Spending a couple of hundred dollars before I’m able to have a coffee with someone isn’t a viable operating model.
• I work with too many businesses every year to be able to manage and abide by the aggregate terms of an archive of NDAs.
• You may be trying to protect the wrong thing. If your idea’s awesome, it’s probably not unique. The value is not in your idea, it’s in your execution.
• If I couldn’t be trusted with your ideas, a quick web search would make that clear, since I’ve been doing this since 1995.
• A big part of the value I bring is my communication skills and the network of people I know. When the time is right, you need me to be able to talk about this.

I have signed NDAs in the past, and I wish I hadn’t, because I have no idea where my copy is now. I take comfort in the knowledge that the other party has almost certainly mislaid their copy too. Making the whole exercise expensive and pointless. Who wants to do expensive and pointless?

Corporates and big brands, that’s who — they specialise in expensive and pointless, many of them devoting whole departments of people to making things more expensive and pointless. I will sign NDAs when I work for corporates and big brands because they will pay me good money and I know I’ll get paid.

Whereas you with the great idea, the back of a napkin and a sharpie pen? I want to like you, and you want to like me. Don’t ask me to sign something that can best be summarised as “we don’t trust you” before we even get to know each other.

I will, however, abide by the terms of a FriendDA.

Do you have what it takes to be a Micro-Venture Capitalist?

// September 24th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, Startup

Think it takes millions of dollars, an MBA and a few board seats to become a VC? You’d be wrong to think so. I’ll tell you why, but first, answer this question: what is a startup?

We’d probably agree that startups are lean, cash-poor, energy-rich adventures, that startup founders are mavericks, dreamers and misfits, driven by the belief that there must be A Better Way. But do startups have to involve new technology or new business models? Do they have to be built on the hope of massive profits at some future date? Can we scale the whole model down and still be talking startups?

I bet the husband and wife who decide to leave their corporate careers to start the bed-and-breakfast they’ve dreamed about feel like they’re on a lean, cash-poor adventure, doing something they’ve never done before. In my book they’re startup entrepreneurs just as much as, say, the pair of software engineers with a new web platform.

The sums invested might be smaller but the financial risk is likely to be huge. The business plan will seem just as unfamiliar and full of holes. And they’re doing it because they have a passion for something. They feel like misfits, renegades and dreamers.

So it doesn’t take the promise of $50 million to make it a startup, and it doesn’t require some new gizmo. We’ve proven a B&B can be a startup. Can we scale it down further?

(more…)

Apple: awesome hardware but terrible at eCRM

// September 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, Music

I sell the odd bit of music on iTunes through my hobby record label Littoral Records and I’m frequently amazed at how poorly Apple manages its online relationships with music labels.

The team at iTunes Connect frequently send out emails announcing new features or changes, and the email includes not a single link that might give you one-click access to that feature, not one trackable URL that give the Connect team some idea of who’s responding to their email relationship management.

Wow.

An email update from iTunes Connect. And no link to click on.

Startmate: Australia gets a new kind of startup capital

// August 19th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, My work, Startup

I’m part of a new technology venture launching today at Sydney’s Tech23 conference. I’m one of many startup founders who’ve bemoaned the lack of Y-Combinator-style investment in Australia, so when Niki Scevak asked if I’d like to get involved in something similar (with tweaks for the local market) and told me how he’d already done the bulk of the difficult strategic thinking, I was keen to get on-board.

Startmate wants to help technically-focused founders get started, with a small amount of capital, advice and a mission to Silicon Valley.

Startmate is a pool of funds and a roster of mentors who’ve all built hands-on successful web startups that began in Australia. We’ve been where you’re going and most of us are still on the journey, so we think we bring some useful perspective and experience to the challenges of getting an Australian tech startup up-and-running.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Startmate is a bit different because:

On cancer and chemotherapy

// August 12th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Me, My life

I try to keep my personal writing separate from my work, but sometimes when I’ve written something I’m proud of I’ll link to it from here, since writing is writing. This piece got a lot of response on Twitter and Facebook when it appeared on Bigyahu.com earlier today. Hope you get something from it too.

My wife feels like cancer has taken her body hostage

She’s got two more weekly chemotherapy treatments to go, but that doesn’t make it any easier when she feels as crappy as she does today. She says it was easier, sort of, when she was sicker, because back then she was able to sleep through some of the day. Now she’s not sick enough to sleep that much, she’s left with no energy to do the things that might take her mind off how bad she feels.

She says for her, it’s been like a hostage crisis. The cancer has taken her body hostage, and her body is no longer something she can take for granted, something that is just part of who she is. (Read more…)

Social media can bring you uncomfortably close to your customers

// August 6th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Other news

Don't ask customers for their opinion without paying attention to their answers.

It’s a great idea to show consumers considering your brand what other consumers think about it. But it’s really important to listen closely and pay attention to that stream and participate in the discussion.

This angry and ignored Malvern Star customer hasn’t just been ignored in store and on the phone, he’s also being ignored when he takes his complaint to the brand’s website.

This page could look so much better with a conciliatory comment from Malvern Star customer service, with an offer to resolve the problem on the phone or via email. It might even become a net positive result for the brand if handled well.

Interviewed on E-Marketing Insights podcast

// August 2nd, 2010 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Content, Industry, My work, platform, Social Media

This week I was interviewed by Owen of the E-Marketing Insights Podcast. Listen in for a little background history of Doing Words, as well as my perspective on what happened in the early days internet content publishing, how the Web 1.0 bubble grew and burst, why social media has changed the content publishing industry irrevocably, the continuing democratisation of content, and which brands I believe are best-equipped to succeed in future content markets.

Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.

You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.

Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.

Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.

Some thoughts on product management

// July 18th, 2010 // 0 Comments // My work, Products

Just realised I never shared this presentation I gave at product management consultancy Brainmates. It was a while ago but many of the points I made are as valid (or invalid) now as they were then, including:

• Product management is mostly about translation
• Managing product development teams is easier if you can rephrase business requirements as interesting, challenging puzzles
• Good product managers are top-level guys, but with a detailed subfloor

Hmmm… some of that may make more sense if you view the presentation below. Let me know what you think…

Twitter and Facebook: millions of tiny broadcast audiences

// July 2nd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Social Media

They’re showing how little they understand when they say they want to add a follow button to the order confirmation page in their shopping cart. Look, knock yourself out, it can’t hurt, but i would expect a 0.0001% clickthru rate on that. It’s not like many of us start following companies we buy from at most once a year, especially when it’s just a retailer of products made by other companies.

Offering useful advice, however, in a friendly, conversational tone — that might well get you some followers. Can you find a way to advise customers on using the product or service they’re considering buying? Can you offer advice on the decisions made before purchase or even on the industry as a whole?

Besides, in 12mths time average Australian Twitter users will probably have 500+ people they follow on average, so for brands, being followed by a customer won’t mean that customer’s seen your message. Lifestream marketing messages are ephemeral things. There’s no way for the marketer to determine an equivalent to impressions/month. It’s like radio or TV — broadcast. Without panel research or clickthru data to show it’s been acted on, we have no idea whether it’s been seen.

Think of Facebook, Twitter and anything that displays a stream of updates as a form of broadcast media, but an unusually fractured kind. On TV, every audience member’s viewing habits are different; on lifestream media, it’s not just their viewing habits but the programming that is different, according to the number and nature of things they follow.

People ask me how I keep up to date with all the tweets I get from the 1,000+ people and brands I follow. I tell them I don’t — but that’s not the point — by following 1,000+ people I ensure that there’s always something interesting to read whenever I have time for Twitter.

(This post was my first from an iPad. Another device further dividing attention into smaller chunks. I’ll tidy it up later, promise!)