Our desks are side by side. Chad has his headphones on and all I can hear is the faint, nagging sound of Montreal from my laptop speakers.

Chad turns to me to discuss the latest findings on his facebook app.

Chad: You’re right.
Me: Right about what? (I knew this was going to be good)
Chad: We have a little more than 900 users today.
Me: Oh?
Chad: You predicted 950.
Me: That high?
Chad: You know what made our traffic spike?
Me: You mean that free TV didn’t do it?
Chad: No. It was SPAM! Isn’t that crazy?
Me: You mean those notifications that showed up once daily?
Chad: Yeah. It made our traffic spike.

Funny. It was the complete opposite reaction I was expecting. Unlike the typical user, I usually delete any application that spams me more than a couple times.

I wonder who these patient people are.

—

[updated @ 11:03pm]

In related news, Google Adsense algorithm will be changed in an attempt to increase quality. You can read about it on their blogspot.  Another future headache?

Last year, I was surprised that the TechCruch50 award went to Mint.com — there’s nothing too technologically novel about a glorified yodlee, but I thought their marketing was a lot better.  This year, same patterns have repeated themselves — Yammer, a twitter for the enterprise, took home the gold. I’m usually a cheerleader for enterprise software, especially in Enterprise 2.0 world, but this one is just a slap in the face. A tech conference that was supposed to showcase our most novel and original ideas decided Enterprised Twitter is the winner? Perhaps I’m too passionate to just shrug this one off.

What happened?

From Drama20, (disclaimer: brilliantly outrageous content) this was quoted:

According to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, Yammer’s business model is “brilliant.” And it’s simple: companies that want to claim their “users” and gain access to administrative controls have to pay Yammer

Brilliant? Is this a joke? By this time you should be wondering whether these guys are best friends. (which it may seem by now that they may be):

Yammer isn’t even a “real” startup. It was an internal tool built by Geni, a company founded by PayPal’s former COO that has already raised 8-figures worth of venture capital funding.

At the end of the day though, Yammer’s going to be crushed. Don’t call me crazy and let me tell you why. First of all it’s easy to build, it’s scalable, and there’s already a market leader doing exactly the same thing. The likely outcome is that Twitter will be implemented into an existing enterprise software giant and reclaim the gold. For good.

But there is one brilliant outcome that may come out of this — it’s that Yammer may show Twitter the way to the world of Enterprise 2.0 sooner than anticipated.

Many of us fail to recognize that the best person to solicit suggests from is our customers. Having used our products/services as such, they are (often times) one of the few who can give us an unbiased suggestion or opinion. So why not make it easier for them to reach us? With the web at our tips, there are some very simple ways for such an implementation without all the hassles. Here are just a few:

1. Provide a way for customers to design their own products. You can even go so far as to let your customer sell their designs through your website. Here are just a few examples:

• CafePress: Cafe press lets you upload your own designs or logos onto various items, screen presses, and delivers them to you. An online store is provided if you decide to sell your designs.
• StyleShake: Style Shake lets customers design their own dresses using different styles and fabrics via a fun, interactive tool. They also have a photoalbum to show off their customers’ work.
• Ning: Allows customers to build their own social networks and join others for a cause, for free!

2. Hold contests that allows customers to submit designs, and give prizes and/or recognition to the customer with the best design:

• Threadless.com, an online t-shirt company, holds contests for t-shirt designs.
• Fluevog.com, an online shoe store, still design their own shoes, but occassionally take ideas from their customers and make them a reality.

3. Try Ideascale — It lets users discuss ideas and widgets they would like your software/business to have with. Customers submit ideas, and other customers can vote and comment on them. Check out an implementation for it here: http://ideas.opensports.com/

4. ContestMachine.com is a simple way to solicit suggestions from your customers on your website by bribing them with a promotion. It only takes a couple minutes to sign up and set up, minus all the hassles of email promotions such as start/end dates, filtering addresses, tracking trends, and managing winners. It’s fully customizable too. Click here for a few examples.

5. Use Facebook as a means of contest/promotions. Take Draftmix, for example. Their facebook application lets users play an ongoing game of survivor pool football, and winner gets a 50″ plasma HD TV. Refer a friend who wins, and you also win a TV. Play it here: Draftmix Survivor Football. This is definitely not as simple to implement as ContestMachine, but they did go from 0 to 500+ users in just a few days.

6. Pligg is essentially a make-your-own digg site. Although most websites do not need digg-like features on their site, there are many cases where it has enhanced user experience within it. Check out some of the great implementations here:

• Environmental: http://www.hugg.com/
• Coupons and Deals: http://www.dealigg.com/
• Sports: http://scoreguru.com/

7. AddThis and Mixx are simple, one click social bookmarking button that lets users quickly share, subscribe, or add your article to an existing social website. For example, Add This lets your users easily share your post on sites such as reddit, facebook, and digg. I’ve added my button below:

Imagine you’re James Bond trying to escape a laser-secured vault. There’s music playing in the background and if you break the laser beam, the music will stop playing and a signal will alert someone of prescence.  That’s essentially what the UC Davis optics team have made. Here’s a quick review I’ve written for them:

The Components:

• CD player
• along-range low power laser diode with modulator
• a series of reflective mirrors
• adjustable mirror mounts (preferably tripods)
• a detector
• regular music speakers
• Optics Club House Mix CD

The Science

Simply put, the laser maze is more like an obstacle course than a maze.

The CD player sends a digital signal to the laser diode through a standard audio cable. The music is then converted to a modulated AM signal with a modulator custom made by UCD students. Once the signal is converted, it is integrated into the beam and dispersed across the room.

The beam is reflected off a series of mirrors that are strategically placed at different locations and heights on both sides of a marked off corridor around the room. The corridor is for volunteers to walk, crawl, or roll through with the goal of making it to the end without getting in the way of any of the reflected beams. The last mirror in the series sends the light into a converging lens that focuses the beam onto a photo-detector that converts the AM signal into analog. The converted signal is then sent to a set of speakers with another audio cable. If a volunteer steps in the way of the beam, the signal to the photo-diode will be broken and the music will stop playing.

To aid the volunteers with their goal, a fog machine is used to refract a small part of the beam and make it slightly easier to get around.

Where to see it:

Laser maze always draws huge crowds every year at Picnic Day (UCD’s open house) and just recently we have started bringing a scaled-down version to our Outreach events to demonstrate to students fun and inventive ways of using optics. Please feel free to contact the UC Davis Optics Club to bring the setup to your school.

Schematic and pictures coming soon. Or visit our crude website here.

I suppose it’s silly that I’m unafraid to publish these ideas on my blog. Maybe I’ll get in trouble, or maybe I’ll get fired. Maybe no one will even stumble upon this page and it’ll get lost in the black void that is the internets. Who knows. The point is, I think these are important lessons that I’m learning from exposure and hope that you’ll find it useful as well.

1.) Conduct a customer survey. This doesn’t mean you send them a standard survey with 50 fill-in-the-blanks to fill out. On the contrary, this may simply mean what you believe the customers needs are via an initial dialog with the customer or even by speculation. The purpose is to make the appropriate parties in your organization have easy access to the most critical information during the day of your demo or product presentation so the right questions will be asked later on. It can be as simple as answers about key value proposition, competitors, and concerns of budget, scalability, etc.

2.) Have Effective Communication. Like many of my peers, I can only work in an environment which is not an entity of it’s own. Thus, the reason why I am strategically placed in a position between marketing and applications support. One thing I have noticed is that everybody is keen of your work — from directors, to sales managers, to engineers. Everyone has a different opinion as to what is best, but ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what is best for the customer, and the customer alone. It’s important to clearly relay this information to the customer, and in turn, clearly relay this back to the product team so they understand your decisions. For ultimate collaboration, I highly recommend wiki-type setups, file-sharing portals such as dropbox , and *gasp* instant messenger services. This will save you a lot of unnecessary meetings, phone calls, and emails.

3.) Keep it Simple. Lists are simple, customer surveys are simple, collaboration should be simple, and so should your demo. The best demos are the ones who seem to have an even balance of marketing and technical information of the product — something that will wet the appetites of both managers and engineers in the room. In otherwords, a little bit of something for everyone. Moreover, make sure things run smoothly before you demonstrate your product, your screen and surrounding area is uncluttered, and make it look easy. Hey, Steve Jobs practices every step of his presentation days in advance. Maybe we should too.

I suppose I’m just perplexed as to why these things are constantly being ignored.

I was admittedly sick for the first portion of the event, but attempted to watch it from my bed on justin tv. However, bing completely miserable, tired, and between the sheets, it was quite difficult to let anything sink in. Until DHH came on. (Here are the minutes to his speech )

Couple of things have really resonated with me.

1) Starting a business isn’t rocket science, as long as you don’t aim at somehow getting a lot of users and cashing out to retire. Most entrepreneurs he talks to today has focused too heavily on that.

2) Focus on solving your own problems. Your problems, like mine, are probably not unique. In the Fortune 5million world, it’s not out of touch to get 0.01% of that market. Do the math. Heck, maybe I should take my own advice sometimes.

3) Above all, don’t waste time — shorten your work days. This pushes you to be productive with whatever time you do have, and at the same time, you don’t have to waste your day. This brings bad bad memories of a summer quarter in which I took about 2.5 times the full-time units in one quarter. Least to say, I do not recommend this as I did a lot of work on the pooper, hauled a 15 pound backpack around all day, and ate all my meals in classrooms. This also reminds me of what the four hour work week had to say about productivity.

4) Bringing up Zappos as a business who has started out by making customers first.

Very traditional business values.

—–

Other awesome entries:

Mentioned at the talk was Fooled by Randomness .

Young man vs old man’s business models , insight on our different takes on the business world as structured by one’s life experiences.  A damn good read!

How working for the big corporation is becoming increasingly more like a trap. NYtimes . With a good comparison of wages & situations of today vs about a decade ago. (but, you know, this is nothing new.)

In more interesting news, it seems like Advertisement is the new porn now.  Although, I’m not convinced the market is saturated just yet.

For the longest time, Chad and I have had numerous discussions about the number one problem in developing countries: Clean water. Aids, nutrition, and GDP followed close, however, the diseases these people can get from drinking dirty water can not only kill instantly, but can kill a large population at a time. Thanks to PlayPumps this problem is being solved in a most novel way –by harnessing the power of play.

Enjoy!

For more information, visit playpumps.org .

—

other sustainable solutions to Africa’s problems: http://www.winnietong.net/jacqueline-novograts-on-investing-in-africas-future/

Tech Crunch had a very good post about how the Silicon Valley could use a downturn at this moment. Is that a terrible thing to say? Maybe slightly. But when everyone, from my 16 year old sister to my 50 year old mother, is aware of the VC frenzy, I think it’s about high time to slow it down a bit. When acquires from google have a price tag of, say, $1.65 billion, it’s almost like you’re asking our bright minds to get lost in the fame and fortune of others. Innovation gets lost in this frenzy and people begin to fight over the web’s attention. As Michael wrote:

The press side of things is equally nuts. I wasn’t writing a blog in the first bubble so I can’t compare now to then. But entrepreneurs are no longer talking to us just to get our opinion and hope for a blog post and a little discussion. These guys need press to stand out from the scores of startups just like them. Saying no to them isn’t really an option. They show up at our front door with a bottle of wine or flowers. They instruct their PR firms to do anything necessary to get a story. More than once I’ve had a CEO break down and cry on the phone when we said we weren’t covering them. And more than once, I folded and wrote about them after those conversations.

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