2014 Apr 17

ReCAPTCHA, the TSA of the Web

ReCAPTCHA is one of those parts of the Internet that we love and hate at the same time. A Captcha is a distorted letter/word/number picture that we need to fill in when we first sign up for a service; ReCAPTCHA is Google's version, developed by several computer scientists and acquired by Google in September 2009. It looks something like this: We hate it because it gets in the way of our doing what we want to on the Web.

2014 Apr 16

Want A Good Candidate? Ask Them To Do The Job

HR departments, hiring managers, college admissions officers... all of them spend inordinate amounts of time looking for better and more effective ways of determining if a candidate will be a good fit for the job. In essence, the problems usually boil down to two: Will they successfully do the job? Will the fit in with the people? Number two, in many ways, is the hardest, because it cannot be measured.

2014 Apr 14

Heartbleed and Open Hearts

The Internet is agog with the discovery of the critical bug in OpenSSL's heartbeat, nicknamed "Heartbleed." Bruce Schneier called it "catastrophic... On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11." What is heartbleed? I will leave it to other sites to explain; just Google it. Suffice it to say that it can accidentally expose in-system memory of SSL-secured servers. In that memory could be garbage, or it might be a user's password, bank transaction info, or even the private key of the site (which would allow any site to spoof it).

2014 Apr 10

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid, and Hire Grown-Ups

I - along with just about everyone else involved in business or technology - have written about BetterPlace before, although I have done so entirely from the outside. I have had no privileged inside look or access, and have had no time as a consultant - and not a professional reporter - to go and interview people involved. FastCompany, however, pays its people to do exactly that. To their credit, they have written a fascinating in-depth look at the rise and fall of BetterPlace, and how it managed to squander nearly $1BN in investment capital with, essentially, nothing to show for it.

2014 Apr 9

Tipping Rears Its Ugly Head... Again

I have written about my issues with tipping before, nearly a year ago. This week, the New Republic is taking a different approach on the issue: how to game the system (for the tippee, if such a word exists, not the tipper). Apparently, blondes get higher tips than brunettes, drawing a smiley face on the bill (for women only), crouching next to the table, among other things, all helps get bigger tips.

2014 Apr 4

Amazing: Ad Platform Company Discovers that Users Prefer Free Games With Ads!

It is surprising, amazing, I cannot believe it! Gaming and now ad platform company WildTangent commissioned a survey from IHS Technology, and discovered that 71% of gamers prefer free games with ads over paid games. Next dairy companies will discover that users prefer milk, and Apple will discover that users prefer iPhones. Even without the vaunted expertise of IHS, I think any of us could have predicted that users prefer free games with ads over paid ones, provided the number of ads is unobtrusive relative to the cost of the paid games.

2014 Apr 2

Fight Competitors on Their Business Model, Not their Regulatory Model

When companies bring new products and services to market, they are addressing some unmet need. It might be an unserved or underserved market; it might be significantly lower costs - and therefore price to customer at the same margins - for a similar product; it might be a lighter and simpler product for a lower price; it might be one of myriad different ways that your company wants to differentiate itself.

2014 Apr 1

Product Development is Like a Game of Chess

It is a truism that engineers see the world rationally... too rationally. Everything has one or more defined answers, all you need is to find the right set of solutions. Because of that rationalist (using the term loosely) view, many engineers who have succeeded at product engineering, building the product, have failed at product development, designing and successfully marketing the product. The problem with product development, and especially new product development, is that you never really know if your market is ready for your solution, and even if they are ready, if they will accept the product/solution, if they will like and adopt the design, if they can and will pay a profitable price, if the packaging and channels are right.

2014 Mar 27

Eat Your Own Lunch

I love some of the old technology deployment phrases. According to legend, most of these - eat your own lunch, boil the ocean, etc. - came out of the heyday of IBM. As an example, I know of one company that moved from customer support software to customer support software as a service (SaaS)... and their first customer was their own customer support department. While I like some things about how this company and runs its SaaS business and disagree with others, their willingness to take the plunge themselves has two benefits:

2014 Mar 25

Stores Are Dead, Long Live Stores

Are physical (a.k.a. brick-and-mortar) stores dead? Or are they the future? On the one hand, the total dollar amount of e-commerce far outpaces physical retail growth. In the 4th quarter of 2013, total US retail sales were $1,148 BN, up 3.8% from the year before, while e-commerce sales were $69 BN, up 16.0% from the year before. Sure, as a percentage of total sales, e-commerce was only 6.0% of total sales, but the shift is dramatic, from 5.